Robert Walser
Geschichten
"Geschichten" by Robert Walser is a collection of short stories written in the early 20th century. The book offers playful, lyrical vignettes that blend irony, tenderness, and daydream with quick shifts between art, love, nature, and city life. Recurring figures include self-regarding poets, a roving page, stage folk, and flâneurs, all hovering between illusion and the everyday. The opening of the collection moves from six miniature pieces—mocking a poet’s self-importance, personifying memory as a fragile lute, staging a charged piano lesson, and trapping artists inside their own imaginations—to a longer tale in which the shabby mandolin-player Simon becomes page to the alluring Klara and brazenly faces her looming husband. Next come two sharp fables: a threadbare “genius” who reshapes the world only to remain unhelpable, and an upside-down world of social reversal swallowed at last by divine negation. Subsequent sketches pivot between stage and street: a spent clown eclipsed by an angelic boy dancer, a too-perfect “puppet” city dismissed as unreal, a rapturous swim on a small lake, a panoramic account of a forest fire and civic frenzy, a melancholy Sunday park stroll, and an armchair voyage to Moscow that dissolves back into a quiet room. The sequence also includes a harrowing theater conflagration with a stoic rescuer, a sensual Maria Stuart monologue, and a bustling “Lustspielabend” in a playhouse that ends mid-scene.