The 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded this year to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, “for his visionary and powerful writing which, amidst the horror of fate, maintains faith in the possibilities of art.”
László Krasznahorkai is currently appearing at Dramaten with The Melancholy of Resistance, adapted and directed by Ulla Kassius. Dramaten.Doc, under the direction of Dmitri Plax, also produced a dramatized reading of Krasznahorkai’s short story An Angel Flew Over Us this fall.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai
A Brief Introduction
A critic of the Hungarian regime, a Nobel Prize nominee, inspired by both Kafka and Bob Dylan, who believes that the final point belongs to God. Meet the author László Krasznahorkai.
Author László Krasznahorkai was born on January 5, 1954, in Gyula, Hungary, to a middle-class family. His father was a lawyer and had Jewish roots, something he kept secret and only revealed when his son was eleven years old. Krasznahorkai studied law and literature at the University of Budapest. After his studies, he worked as an editor and began to seriously develop his fiction. Like many intellectuals of the time, he was under surveillance and therefore unable to travel freely. He made his first trip outside Hungary in 1987, but has since lived in numerous places around the world, including Japan, the United States, Germany, and Greece. He currently divides his time between Trieste, Vienna, and Budapest. His position in Hungary is delicate, as he is openly critical of the current regime.
Krasznahorkai’s work is characterized by a dark worldview, but also by humor and a keen interest in music; he draws inspiration from both Franz Kafka and Bob Dylan. He enjoys a high reputation as a writer (especially among literary experts) and is often mentioned as a possible Nobel Prize winner.
Beauty Exists
His first novel, Satantango, was published in 1985 and caused a sensation in his native country. It is said that he wrote it inspired by a traveler who helped farmers castrate piglets, apparently fascinated by the castrator’s coldness.
The Melancholy of Resistance was published in 1989, consolidating Krasznahorkai’s position as a writer. The novel also served as inspiration for the 2000 film Werckmeister harmóniák, directed by Béla Tarr, who also adapted several of Krasznahorkai’s other works.
Krasznahorkai’s latest novel, Herscht 07769, is set in Thuringia and deals, in a manner that is arguably typical of him, with both Bach and the German neo-Nazis.
In total, he has published a dozen novels, although he has also written short stories, essays, and film scripts.
In an interview with László Krasznahorkai, published in The Yale Review on February 24, 2025, by author and journalist Hari Kunzru, he says:
Art is humanity’s extraordinary response to the sense of loss that awaits us. Beauty exists. It exists beyond a limit, within which we must constantly pause. We cannot reach beyond it to capture or touch beauty; we can only contemplate it from this limit and recognize that yes, there is something there, far away. Beauty is a construction, a complex creation of hope and higher meaning.
The interview revolves around the current political situation, the political climate (both in Hungary, Ukraine, and the rest of the world) and was published simultaneously with Krasznahorkai’s short story, “An Angel Passed Over Us,” set in a trench during the war in Ukraine. The quote says something about this peculiar writer, who has previously stated that the punctuation mark, the period, belongs to God, and whose texts glide in an endless flow, completely without punctuation. He has also said that eternal texts, those that survive through time and space, often have the common person at their center. The final sentence of the interview reads:
“There is only the common, ordinary person, and he is holy.”
Summary and translation of quotes: Anneli Dufva
