Rock Crystal (1845, German: Bergkristall) is a novella by Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter. It influenced Thomas Mann[1] and others with its "suspenseful, simple, myth-like story and majestic depictions of nature."[2] 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."[3] Poet W. H. Auden called Rock Crystal "a quiet and beautiful parable about the relation of people to places, of man to nature."[4]
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.