Short answers, pulled from the story.
Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague, the capital of Bohemia, on the 4th of December 1875. His mother Sophie Entz treated him as a substitute for an infant daughter who had died just one week after being born.
Rilke attended a military academy at Sankt Pölten from 1886 until 1891 but left due to illness before entering a trade school in Linz. He returned to Prague in May 1892 to prepare for university entrance exams which he passed in 1895 and later moved to Munich in 1896 to study literature art history and philosophy.
During his stay in Paris starting in the summer of 1902 Rilke acted as Auguste Rodin's secretary and developed a new objective observation technique that transformed his poetry into the New Poems. This period also saw him become deeply involved with the sculpture of Rodin and the work of Paul Cézanne while writing The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
Rilke began the poem cycle called the Duino Elegies between October 1911 and May 1912 at Castle Duino near Trieste home of Princess Marie of Thurn und Taxis. He completed the elegies in several weeks during February 1922 after finding permanent residence in the Château de Muzot in Veyras close to Sierre in Valais.
The correspondence between Rainer Maria Rilke and Franz Xaver Kappus spans from 1902 to 1908 when Kappus was a nineteen-year-old officer cadet studying at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt. These ten letters offer insight into Rilke's ideas on how a poet should feel love and seek truth while appearing as a key period of his early artistic development following the publication of Das Stunden-Buch and Das Buch der Bilder.