SOURCE: "Stifter, Abdias (1842)," in Realism and Reality, University of North Carolina Press, 1954, pp. 52-66.

In the following excerpt, Silz discusses the structure and merits of "Abdias. "

One of the modern theorists of narrative literature, Georg Lukács, has evolved a view of the Novelle for which Adalbert Stifter's "Abdias" seems a perfect illustration. The Novelle, says Lukács, is "the embodiment of the isolated remarkableness and dubiousness of life. . . . The strident arbitrariness of Chance, beneficent or destructive, but always striking irrationally, can be balanced only by a clear, purely objective comprehension of it, without comment. The Novelle is the most purely artistic of forms; the ultimate meaning of all artistic creation is expressed by it as mood, as the substantial meaning of form-giving, even though, for that very reason, abstractly expressed. [The writer of the Novelle,] viewing the naked, unembellished senselessness of life, lends to it, by virtue...