Explores the importance of Russia in shaping Rainer Maria Rilke's aesthetics. Rilke's two trips to Russia at the turn of the century, made in the company of Lou Andreas-Salome, led to connections with Leo Tolstoy, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Maxim Gorky. Tavis uses letters, poems, and fiction to trace Rilke's actual and symbolic encounters with Russian culture and its prose masters between 1898 and 1926.