Adalbert Stifter is one of those writers who often gets praised and cited as an influence by other writers — famous fans have included Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, W.H. Auden, Ilse Aichinger, Marianne Moore, and W.G. Sebald — but who was never really a popular success, in his own time or since. He didn't publish much, and only a few of his stories have been translated. He was a painter as well as a writer (although the publishers have picked a Caspar David Friedrich for the cover, not one of his), and his writing, which sits somewhere between Romanticism and Realism, tends to be very interested in the way characters interact with landscape, much less in the way they interact with each other. Characters observe each other or tell each other long stories, they don't chat. The political and social context is defined visually, by the landscape. His style is rather individual: the heavyweight sentences aren't always easy to navigate through, but it's usually worth the effort.

This Diogenes paperback contains the stories: Abdias (1842), Brigitta (1843), Zuversicht, Bergkristall (1845), Kalkstein (1848), and Der Kuß von Sentze (1866).

The novella Bergkristall (translated as Rock-crystal) is probably his most famous shorter work: it's a story of two children getting lost in the snow on Christmas Eve whilst crossing a mountain pass between their grandmother's house and the village where their parents live. With its gloriously scary descriptions of the disorienting effect of the weather and the children's battle to stay awake and warm, it's a perfect choice for reading aloud in front of the fire over the holidays. I was struck by the way Stifter carefully makes us familiar with the setting and the way the village relates to the mountain and the pass before we get to the real drama: he takes us back and forth over the pass several times in good weather, pointing out all the relevant landmarks along the way, until it becomes part of our own mental landscape. And of course the context of the story allows Stifter to slip in a lot of reflections about what Christmas really means for children and for a modern village community.

The other three novella-length tales here all focus on outsiders: Abdias tells us the story of a Sephardi refugee from North Africa who settles in an Austrian valley with his infant daughter. We get some splendid desert scenery — which Stifter had presumably never seen himself — as well as the gentle, grassy slopes and blue flax-fields of Abdias's new home. Brigitta is another outsider, an "ugly" woman who reinvents herself as a cross-dressing landowner on the Hungarian Puszta in order to renegotiate marriage on her own terms. Kalkstein takes us into the life of a country priest in the barren limestone country of the Tirol, a man laughed at for his simplicity and self-deception, but who still manages to act effectively to improve the lives of the poor people in his parish. All three stories show a huge amount of sympathy for the prickly, marginalised central character, without necessarily making them attractive.

The final piece, the very late story Der Kuß von Sentze, is hard to place: it's a tale of an aristocratic family with a tradition of resolving internal conflicts by means of a formal kiss of reconciliation between the contending parties. Where these are of opposite sexes, the tradition has been known to result in cousin-marriage. I'm not sure whether we are being shown this as a lesson in Christian tolerance or as a satire on the aristocracy's talent for putting family interest above personal preference. ( )