Dipak Kurmi
At what he calls a “very, very difficult time for earth,” Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2025, honoured “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” At seventy-one, the author, screenwriter, and musician spoke with a rare mixture of melancholy and hope following the announcement. Reflecting on the despair that marks our times—wars, climate collapse, and political fragmentation—he told Jenny Rydén of the Nobel Committee that the world’s “bitterness” might yet inspire writers. “We need much more power in us to survive,” he said, expressing the hope that writers could “give something for the next generation, somehow to survive this time.” That blend of despair and defiance has long defined Krasznahorkai’s work, which imagines chaos but searches, almost stubbornly, for meaning through art.
Born in 1954 in Gyula, Hungary, Krasznahorkai came of age under Soviet rule, writing in an atmosphere of constraint and surveillance. Yet even in those years, his fiction gestured toward a vast, uncontainable world—one where human frailty and cosmic absurdity coexist. His sentences, famously long and winding, mirror the endless flow of consciousness and history. He once remarked in The Paris Review that he had “always wanted to write just one book,” and indeed, his four major novels—Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming—form a single monumental meditation on existence, ruin, and endurance. These works, though distinct in setting and tone, share a common vision: the world is collapsing, but through art, through language, one might still bear witness to its beauty and sorrow.
Krasznahorkai’s debut, Satantango (1985), captured the moral and existential decay of a collective farm in late-Communist Hungary. Set on the eve of the regime’s collapse, it is less a political allegory than a meditation on human futility and faith. The farm’s inhabitants wait, like Beckett’s tramps, for salvation that may never come. The novel’s hypnotic prose and bleak humour resonated so deeply that it became a cult classic, later adapted into a seven-hour film by his long-time collaborator Béla Tarr. When Satantango was translated into English in 2012, Anglophone readers discovered what European critics had known for decades: that Krasznahorkai was among the most original voices of modern literature.
English readers, however, first encountered him through The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), translated by George Szirtes in 1998. The novel opens in a small Hungarian town where a group of weary passengers waits for a train that may never arrive. “None of this really surprised anyone any more,” he writes, “since rail travel, like everything else, was subject to the prevailing conditions of all-consuming chaos.” Into this world of paralysis arrives a circus bearing a whale carcass, an image that evokes both wonder and dread. The townspeople’s reactions—fear, fascination, hysteria—mirror the instability of societies facing disorder. One resident laments, “Who has time for entertainment now, when we’re in a state of anarchy?” Beneath its surreal plot lies an allegory for the fragility of civilisation, a theme that recurs throughout Krasznahorkai’s fiction.
His later novel Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2019), translated by Ottilie Mulzet, continues this exploration of absurdity and decline. The story follows an aging baron returning to his provincial hometown after years abroad, only to find it gripped by corruption and spiritual exhaustion. A reclusive Professor in the novel muses, “The world is nothing more than an event, lunacy, a lunacy of billions and billions of events... and nothing is fixed, nothing is confined, nothing graspable.” It is a philosophical lament, but also a diagnosis of our times—a world where truth itself seems to dissolve in endless motion. Krasznahorkai’s characters, from the defenceless Estike in Satantango to the soft-hearted Valuska in Melancholy, are fragile souls adrift in chaos, each echoing the innocence of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, a character the author deeply admires.
For Krasznahorkai, the act of writing is both discipline and revelation. Without a writing desk, he often composed sentences in his head, letting them evolve until they reached what he called a “natural end.” His prose flows in long, unbroken stretches, as though thought itself were struggling to capture a world perpetually in motion. Influenced by writers like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, Herman Melville, Dante, and Homer, his work defies easy categorisation—part metaphysical novel, part modernist experiment, and part lament for the human condition. “Without fantasy,” he insists, “it’s an absolute different life.” Reading and imagination, for him, are not luxuries but necessities—the means by which humanity endures despair.
The early 2000s marked a new phase in his career, when he began to travel widely in Asia. His journeys to Japan and China inspired contemplative works such as Seiobo There Below and A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West and a River to the East. These novels, steeped in Eastern philosophy and aesthetic reflection, meditate on art, time, and transcendence. In them, Krasznahorkai turned from the decaying towns of Hungary to temples, landscapes, and ancient rituals, yet his central theme remained the same: that life is fleeting and precious, and that beauty—however fragile—redeems existence.
Krasznahorkai’s partnership with Béla Tarr has been equally significant in shaping his legacy. Together they created some of the most haunting films in contemporary cinema, including The Turin Horse and Werckmeister Harmonies. Tarr’s slow, monochrome imagery perfectly mirrors the rhythm of Krasznahorkai’s prose—both seeking to reveal the divine in desolation. Through these collaborations, the Hungarian writer’s vision reached audiences beyond the confines of literature, blurring the boundaries between word and image, philosophy and art.
The Nobel Prize now brings global recognition to a writer long celebrated in literary circles but little known among general readers. His works, demanding yet luminous, challenge readers to confront despair without surrendering to it. In a world increasingly dominated by noise and speed, Krasznahorkai’s slow, meditative prose feels almost radical—a call to pause, reflect, and rediscover the power of imagination. That one of his favourite books is Dostoevsky’s White Nights, now revived by younger audiences on BookTok, is a fitting irony: the solitary dreamer of nineteenth-century Petersburg lives on in the twenty-first century through a Hungarian master who has devoted his life to chronicling loneliness, longing, and the stubborn endurance of hope.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Nobel is not only a recognition of artistic brilliance but also a reminder that literature remains a vital force in dark times. His vision, both apocalyptic and redemptive, tells us that even when the world seems to crumble, art endures as the final act of defiance. To read him is to enter a universe where chaos is infinite, but so too is the possibility of grace—a world in which, as he believes, fantasy and faith may yet help us survive.
(The writer can be reached at dipakkurmiglpltd@gmail.com)
