Motley Stones, a collection of short stories by the 19th-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, is one of the strangest books I have ever read. Not strange in form or style — the style is muted, the characters are aggressively normal, and the plots are tame — but in that a strange, subtle darkness is at work in Stifter’s tales. It is a whisper of nature’s vast indifference, a draft that chills the heart.
At a glance, Stifter seems like a typical Romantic writer, preoccupied with pretty scenes and the innocence of children. Indeed, one contemporary critic, Friedrich Hebbel, dismissed Stifter’s style as “beetles and buttercups.” This criticism is, in a sense, accurate. Stifter’s books are short on drama and long on minute descriptions of weather, lichen, and rock formations. He is rightly considered one of the fathers of modern nature writing.
But when he cut his own throat with a razor in 1868 after a battle with liver cirrhosis, he left the world of German literature permanently changed. His first novella, Der Condor (1839), was a sensation, and “Rock Crystal,” the third story in this book, is considered a Christmas classic. He could count among his admirers Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Hannah Arendt, who called him “the greatest landscape-painter in literature.”
So, what made this Austrian bourgeois a writer’s writer? The answer lies buried in the sentences. Stifter does not waste a letter. His words are chosen with a poet’s thrift. His only extravagance is the way he omits commas to modulate rhythm. As you read Stifter, you have the curious sensation that his paragraphs are becoming tangible objects. In the preface to Motley Stones, he writes:
The wafting of the air the trickling of the water the growing of the grain the surging of the sea the budding of the earth the shining of the sky the glimmering of the stars is what I deem great; the thunderstorm that looms in splendor, the lightning that cleaves houses, the storm that drives the breakers, the fire-spewing mountain, the earthquake that buries whole lands, these I do not deem greater than those first phenomena, indeed I deem them smaller, for they are the mere effects of much higher laws.
Stifter champions small things, slight changes, and gradual processes. The people in his stories are correspondingly simple in word and deed. Famously, he wrote, “We seek to glimpse the gentle law that guides the human race.” “Gentle” is one word for it. Most of the human characters are flat. The landscapes are the real characters, enduring the passions of weather and the vicissitudes of time. It is upon rocks and clouds and trees that Stifter lavishes his gifts. Here is how he describes a field of glacial rubble in “Rock Crystal,” a story about two children getting lost in the mountains:
There lay great slabs, covered with snow, but with their walls showing smooth green-hued ice, hills lay there, like foam pushed together, but with a dull inward glimmer and gleam in their sides, like jumbled bars and rods of gemstones, and there lay rounded spheres too, completely cloaked in snow.
“Rock Crystal” is the best story in the collection and probably the most famous thing Stifter ever wrote. Germans read it as a cheerful Christmas story, a wholesome tale of brother and sister sticking together and surviving a freak blizzard. It has a happy ending. But Stifter’s description of the cold, rumbling abyss overshadows the children’s rescue. For pages, Stifter has you convinced the children are going to freeze to death. At one point, looking for a place to sleep, they wander into an ice cave:
The entire cave was blue, as blue as nothing on earth, a blue much deeper and lovelier than the firmament, like sky-blue stained glass with radiance sinking through it. There were arches thick and thin there were hanging spikes needles and tassels, the passage would have reached back still deeper, they knew not how deep, but they went no farther. The cave would have been a fine place, it was warm, no snow fell, but it was so alarmingly blue that the children were afraid, and went back out again.
A void yawns at the heart of this Christmas story. Even after the children are rescued, you are spooked, creeped out, unnerved. What sticks in your memory is the nothingness of the snow and ice. The happy ending is not ironic, but it is undercut by the fact that the story’s main character is not a human being but rather an ice-covered mountain for whom happiness has no meaning. It is in this tension between wholesomeness and existential horror that Stifter’s greatness lies. In “Granite,” the grandfather tells his grandson folk tales that are half lessons about the local landscape, half stories about the futility of trying to survive the bubonic plague. In “Cat-Silver,” a massive hailstorm nearly crushes three little girls. They survive by building a shelter out of brush.
The hailstones were large enough to kill a grown person. They smashed the hazels that stood behind the house, and their falling could be felt on the bundles.
And it came down on the entire hill and on the valleys. Whatever resisted was crushed, whatever was solid was shattered, whatever had life in it was killed. Only soft things withstood, like the earth pounded by the hailstones, and the bundles of brush. In the dark air the ice drove down like white darts to the black earth so that the earth’s things were seen no more.
Isabel Fargo Cole’s translation is deft and sensitive, even beautiful. In the book’s introduction, she writes of Stifter’s “interplay of delicacy and bluntness,” and her translation does justice to that interplay, favoring words with Germanic roots that echo the language of the original. The result is a rock-solid translation that feels true not only to Stifter but also to the rugged Bohemian landscape that was his muse.
One of the pleasures of reading Stifter is remembering that reading a landscape and seeing it are two different things. When shown a picture, you are passive. Whereas a written landscape is supple, dynamic, and three-dimensional. You have to imagine it. If the writer is good, the experience is more satisfying and memorable than any image because you have helped create it. Perhaps it is this collaboration between artist and reader that makes literature irreplaceable. I read “Ice Crystal” over a week ago, and I can still close my eyes and walk into its valley, recognizing familiar trees, wetting my feet in its streams, and point to the high mountain where two children wandered into a cave that nearly killed them, a cave of ice as blue as nothing on Earth.
Forester McClatchey is a poet and critic from Atlanta, Georgia. He holds a master of fine arts from the University of Florida, and his work appears in the Hopkins Review, Slice, and Harvard Review, among other journals.
