How did Rainer Maria Rilke portray Russia in his writing?

For Rainer Maria Rilke, Russia served as a profound "elective homeland" that left a lasting impact on his creative development. Introduced to the country by his companion Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rilke visited Russia in 1899 and 1900, finding there an external reality that mirrored his own inner life.1

In his writing, Rilke portrayed Russia as a place imbued with an amorphous, elemental, and religiously moving quality. He viewed the country as a harmonious and powerful constellation of "God," "human community," and "nature," which he saw as a distillation of the "cosmic" spirit of being.1

This experience was a milestone in his career, evoking a poetic response that he considered the true beginning of his serious work: the three-part cycle of poems titled Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours). In this collection, the poetic "I" adopts the persona of a monk who addresses a god conceived as the incarnation of "life" and the numinous quality of the world's diversity.2