Motley Stones

Abstract

Even well-disposed readers need time to relax into the unhurried pace and apparent stasis of Adalbert Stifter’s fiction. The acclaimed composer and writer Ernst Krenek is far from the only reader initially bored by an author he later came to view as a true master of towering adagios in prose, not unlike those of his fellow Upper Austrian Anton Bruckner. Krenek’s reference to a disciplined but slowly unfolding musical tempo helps dispel the persistent view that Stifter was a quiescent or even torpid Biedermeier figure fixated on an idyllic view of impassively peaceful nature and on human community grounded in fixed equilibrium. His stories and novels are almost always judged for what they seem to lack, not for what they contain. Indian Summer (Nachsommer, trans. Wendell W. Frye), a monumental, ruminative Bildungsroman, projects an ideal of equanimity not attainable in this world, and his famous sanfte Gesetz or “gentle law,” formulated in the preface to Motley Stones, proposes that small, inconspicuous objects and minute, everyday routine signify more than alarums and violent upheavals. Stifter’s approach counterbalances the revolutionary mayhem of 1848 and only came to fruition after an early period of turbulent Romantic agony, which he learned to