Winter 1911. Trieste. Three of the giants of literary modernism are living within a few miles of each other, each battling with his own particular brand of writer's block. The Austro-German, Prague-born poet Rainer Maria Rilke is long-term guest of the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis in her castle at Duino struggling with the early poems of what would become his great Duineser Elegien cycle when they were published a decade later in 1923 (her family – the inventors of the European postal service – appear among the shadows in a Joyce notebook as ‘Thurn und Taxis’ (vi.b.16: 49) and later, in Finnegans Wake itself in a section on Shaun the post, as the ‘tournintaxes’ (FW 5.32). Italo Svevo (the Italian Swabian) is living in the Veneziani family villa in Servola, a suburb of Trieste, plying his business trade under his real name of Ettore Schmitz and quietly nursing his creative vocation which had been so damaged by the popular and critical failure of his early novels, Una vita (1892), Senilità (1898), and slowly building towards the writing of his great novel, La Coscienza di Zeno, which will finally be published in 1923 and successfully promoted by Joyce in Paris. Joyce's own situation is more dramatic.