Rock Crystal (German: Bergkristall; 1845) is a novella by Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, about two children who become lost in a snowstorm in the Alps on Christmas Eve.

[1] Mann called Stifter "one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature".

[2] Poet W. H. Auden wrote: "To bring off, as Stifter does, a story of this kind, with its breathtaking risks of appalling banalities, is a great feat.

"[3] The story's power, according to author Susan Choi, arises not from danger, but from "catastrophe's quiet avoidance: from the series of small miracles by which the children survive".

[4] Hannah Arendt praised Stifter as a "friend of reality" and "the greatest landscape painter in literature" for his avoidance of generalities and impressions in favor of sensory details.