According to Yevgeny Pasternak, the writer's son, the manuscript of "The Story of a Counter-Octave" came with a bundle of odd papers his father had asked him to burn for firewood in 1945. This unfinished story was written in 1913, at about the same time as "The Twin in Clouds," and it is a companion piece to the early prose works "The Sign of Apelles" (1915) and "Letters From Tula" (1918). It tells of a church organist, Amadeus Knaur, in a fictional Hessian town of the eighteenth century who became so engrossed in his improvisations on the organ after the Whitsunday service that he never noticed how his little son, who had somehow strayed among the mechanical workings of the instrument, was crushed to death by one of its levers. Years later Knaur came back to the town, possibly by an accident of Divine Providence, and asked to be reinstated in his...