''Limestone'' (original German title: ''Kalkstein''
) is a novella by
Adalbert Stifter, included in his collection
Colourful Stones, (original title: ''Bunte Steine'').
The story
The story reports the apparently authentic encounter between the narrator and a poor
priest. The narrator settles as a
land surveyor
Surveying or land surveying is the technique, profession, art, and science of determining the terrestrial two-dimensional or three-dimensional positions of points and the distances and angles between them. A land surveying professional is ca ...
in a poor area where the priest leads his existence. Amongst the local people, he has the reputation of a kind but miserly individual until it is found out, after his death, that his humble life only served the purpose of saving money to invest in the construction of a school that would make the long and dangerous path to school from an isolated village easier and safer for their children.
Background
In accordance with his style, Stifter constructs a complex
frame story
A frame is often a structural system that supports other components of a physical construction and/or steel frame that limits the construction's extent.
Frame and FRAME may also refer to:
Physical objects
In building construction
*Framing (con ...
around the narrated event. There is a moral to this story, in fact in the first edition the title of the novella was "The poor benefactor" (German: "Der arme Wohltäter"), but Stifter uses it primarily to give a place to numerous descriptions of nature, people and living beings, for example we can read an unmistakably Stifterian description of a storm. It can be assumed that, for Stifter, the story about the poor priest who is appreciated by the other people only after his death, serves as a vehicle to demonstrate his zeal for descriptive scenery. Not without reason does this often remind us of
Thomas Bernhard
Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard (; 9 February 1931 – 12 February 1989) was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet who explored death, social injustice, and human misery in controversial literature that was deeply pessimistic about modern civilizati ...
's novellas, and also of Kafka's land surveyor, K., in
The Castle, who could be a kinsman of the ''Limestone'' protagonist. Stifter's sense of the comic can be called into question, but it does not change anything about the grotesqueness of the character of the poor priest, which the author depicts brilliantly, alongside the hopeless venture to which he sacrificed his existence.
References
Bibliography
* Adalbert Stifter: ''Werke und Briefe Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe.'' Band 2.1, Stuttgart 1982, {{ISBN, 3-17-007112-2
* Adalbert Stifter: ''Bunte Steine.'' Ditzingen 1994.
Novellas by Adalbert Stifter
German-language books
19th-century Austrian novels