The fictional village in Mark Twain’s posthumous novella “The Mysterious Stranger” is Eseldorf.
Eseldorf is the setting of “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” the first substantial version of Twain’s unfinished work. The story follows three boys—Theodor, Seppi, and Nikolaus—and the supernatural visitor Satan in an Austrian village in 1590. The name is German for “Assville” or “Donkeytown,” an intentionally comic detail.
The title can cause confusion because Twain wrote several versions between 1897 and 1908. One early fragment uses the fictional town of St. Petersburg, while “Schoolhouse Hill” is set in the United States. The 1916 posthumous edition was largely assembled from “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” making Eseldorf the standard answer associated with the published novella.
The book’s publication history is unusual: editors combined unfinished manuscripts after Twain’s death, and later scholars discovered that the resulting text did not represent a clean, author-approved final novel.