The Biedermeier testimony to a plague – "Granite" by Adalbert Stifter

Abstract

The paper is an introduction to the Polish translation of a short story entitled Granite by the Austrian prose writer, Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868). It presents an explanation of the political and cultural context of the origin of the work, its poetics as well as its philosophical and ethical message. The short story and the collection entitled Colourful Stones (1853) in which it was included became a canonical aesthetic and ideological manifesto of the Austrian Biedermeier style as an illustration of the so-called “gentle law” (das sanfte Gesetz), i.e. a harmonious life and unspectacular daily practising of humanism in the personal, family and social space. In Stifter's work it refers also to the extraordinary situation of an existential catastrophe. Based on a folk story, the account of the plague which struck the quiet areas of the Bohemian Forest in the 18th century is a pretext for the presentation of various challenges which both the grown-ups and children have to meet facing the illness. The plot, based on Biblical, philosophical, scientific and legendary references, has two clear messages: survival is paradoxical and illogical; only those who could behave with dignity and devotedly could survive. The motif of the plague as a real event but also as a universal figure of catastrophe, a test or dark initiation into the merciless laws of history and nature is elaborately presented on several narration planes and several structure, plot and symbolical levels of the text (in each of them the leitmotif of “granite”, a mineral connected with a volcanic catastrophe, appears). Adalbert Stifter’s Granite still remains an intriguingly ambiguous text today - an illustration of a Biedermeier idyll, a testimony of the writer's personal world view, a document of the time of plague in Boccaccio’s style, a parable of humanity at a critical time, and an example of a masterpiece short story as well.