reappear", notes the critic Samuel Rogers, "they do not step out of nowhere; they emerge from the privacy of their own lives which, for an interval, we have not been allowed to see." Although the complexity of these characters' lives inevitably led Balzac to make errors of chronology and consistency, the mistakes are considered minor in the overall scope of the project. Readers are more often troubled by the sheer number of people in Balzac's world, and feel deprived of important context for the characters. Detective novelist Arthur Conan Doyle said that he never tried to read Balzac, because he "did not know where to begin". Influence Balzac's novel was adapted for the libretto of Giselher Klebe's 1959 opera Die tödlichen Wünsche (The Deadly Wishes). 1977–1978 the German composer Fritz Geißler composed Das Chagrinleder after a libretto by Günther Deicke. In 1989–1990 the Russian composer Yuri Khanon wrote the ballet L’Os de chagrin (The Shagreen Bone), based on Balzac's text, which included an opera-interlude of the same name. In 1992 a biographic pseudo-documentary in the form of an opera-film based on his opera L'os de Chagrin («Chagrenevaia Kost»,ru) was released. The novel has also been cited as a possible influence on Oscar Wilde for his 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, although this hypothesis is rejected by most scholars. The protagonist, Dorian Gray, acquires a magical portrait that ages while he remains forever youthful. Russian literature specialist Priscilla Meyer maintains in her book How the Russians Read the French, that both La Peau de Chagrin and Pere Goriot were extensively paralleled, subverted and inverted, by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. The story was first adapted into a 1909 French silent film entitled The Wild Ass's Skin, directed by Albert Capellani, written by Michel Carre and starring Henri Desfontaines, which, despite its brief 19-minute running time, was formatted into three acts. In 1915, American director Richard Ridgely made a film adaptation of Balzac's novel entitled The Magic Skin for Thomas A. Edison, Inc. The 50-minute film starred Mabel Trunnelle, Bigelow Cooper, and Everett Butterfield, and diluted the supernatural aspects of the story by revealing it all to be a dream. In 1920, it was adapted again as a 54-minute British silent film called Desire (aka The Magic Skin), written and directed by George Edwardes-Hall, and starring Dennis Neilson-Terry, Yvonne Arnaud and Christine Maitland. George D. Baker directed yet another version