7.6 /10 1 Votes7.6
Original title Bergkristall Publication date 1845 | 3.8/5 Goodreads Originally published 1845 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Similar Works by Adalbert Stifter, Classical Studies books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rock Crystal (German: Bergkristall; 1845) is a novella by Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, about two missing children on Christmas Eve. It influenced Thomas Mann and others with its "suspenseful, simple, myth-like story and majestic depictions of nature." Mann said Stifter is "one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature." Poet W. H. Auden called Rock Crystal "a quiet and beautiful parable about the relation of people to places, of man to nature."
It was translated to English in 1945 by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, re-issued by Pushkin Press in 2001 and the New York Review of Books in 2008. An earlier translation from 1914 by Lee M. Hollander is in the public domain.
In 1949 (by Harald Reinl) and in 2004 (by Joseph Vilsmaier), it was adapted into German-language films "Bergkristall".