László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails
Every year, at the Nobel Prize banquet, in Stockholm, each laureate gives a brief, formal speech; typically, they thank the Swedish Academy and express some hope for the future of humanity. The 2025 Laureate in Literature, the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, made no mention of humanity’s future. He gave his thanks, instead, to its past: to the artists of classical Greece; to the Italian Renaissance; to the city of Kyoto; to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Faulkner, and Johann Sebastian Bach, “for the Divine.” He thanked his friends, many of whom were “no longer among the ranks of the living,” for their more personal influences on him. “I give thanks to my friend Jóska Pálnik, who told me, on the second stair of the water-slide pool in 1960, how babies are made, and under the grievous weight of this revelation, I wanted to die.”
The speech will not surprise anyone who has read Krasznahorkai’s novels. His themes are learned; his settings numerous and far-flung; his imagination apocalyptic, but very, very funny. His characters are mad men or visionaries—it can be hard to tell the difference—addled by their belief in a sacred perception of beauty, of transcendence, in a cruel and withholding world. Each novel has found its ideal English-language translator. Krasznahorkai’s earliest novels (“Satantango,” “The Melancholy of Resistance,” “War and War”) owe their bleak grandeur to the British Hungarian poet George Szirtes, while the novellas (“Chasing Homer,” “Spadework for a Palace,” “Herman”), compressed thrillers, gain their air of paranoia from the short-story writer John Batki. Most recently, the fluid and colloquial style of Ottilie Mulzet has animated “Seiobo There Below,” “A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East,” “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” and “Herscht 07769.” They mark a shift in Krasznahorkai’s later writing, toward what he called an “explosive confession” that mimics how he speaks and defies tidy syntax.
In March, I interviewed Krasznahorkai at the Athens International Literature Festival. The night before, we had dinner at a restaurant below the Acropolis, then, the next morning, attended a reception in Krasznahorkai’s honor at City Hall, where he was greeted by the mayor, the mayor’s father (his copy of “Herscht 07769” in hand), a troop of bureaucrats, and, eventually, the mayor’s excitable puppy, Pericles. It reminded me of “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” in which the residents of a dilapidated Hungarian town await the return of their local aristocrat, a longed-for savior, whom they greet with awkward and exaggerated pomp. But where the Baron is timid and bumbling, Krasznahorkai is expansive, charming, and courtly. Throughout the weekend, we spoke about Kafka’s love affairs, Hungarian composers, the sound of the oud, Japanese temples, and cigar shops in New England. Before we walked onstage, he saw a white speck on my black pants and, turning to the man next to me—“Thomas, with your permission”—knelt to clean the hem.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Krasznahorkai’s answers, which were delivered in Hungarian, have been translated by Mulzet.
I was moved by your Nobel Prize banquet speech, especially by your mention of your older brother. You thanked him for always lifting you onto his shoulders when you were children, because he taught you “that there could be another way of looking at the world.” What did you see up there?
At first, nothing. My older brother got angry at me, because up there, on his shoulders, something frequently happened in my little trousers. It was not so pleasant for my brother. He would shake me in his anger, and then I couldn’t see too much of the world. Now that we’re both very old, I asked how awful it was for him. He said, “I still feel it.”
I did see from there that the world was moving around a lot. Ever since, I have tried to maintain this velocity in everything I do. This velocity determined how I composed music when I was younger, and later on, how I wrote my sentences. Perhaps, with this explanation, I have become a little serious.
Your sentences have great velocity. They are long, complex, patterned by interesting repetitions, and can sprawl across a whole novel, like in “Herscht 07769.” But they weren’t always like that. Your technique has changed: first and most dramatically, between “The Melancholy of Resistance” and “War and War,” in which each short chapter was structured by a single sentence, often limited to one event, setting, or character’s point of view; then again, between “War and War” and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” which is divided into lengthier episodes, each formed by a single sentence that sweeps up many events and many points of view, and moves freely across time and space. How did your sense of velocity affect how you composed your sentences?
I think this can be attributed to how I am getting ever closer to the spoken language. When somebody wants to say something really important, let’s say a man wants to say to a woman, or woman wants to say to a man, “I’ve been in love with you for seventeen years, and I can’t bear it any longer, I have to tell you, because things can’t go on like this anymore,” comma, comma, comma—it is not possible to chop up an explosive confession like this, from living speech, into neat little sentences. This kind of problem has really determined my relationship to velocity.
For me, the correctly chosen velocity is what determines the character of a prose work. Of course, I don’t mean velocity in the physical sense of the word but in a strongly figurative sense, although it can also be connected to the physical concept of velocity. It is undeniable that in my first two or three books, I did not really feel this obligation to use the living language of these confession-like statements. For me, the situation became more serious, because I was ever less satisfied with the books I was publishing. Maybe it sounds funny, but I consider practically all of my books to have been failures, and if this sequence of failures had not occurred, I would have finished my career after my first book. There was no sequel to the Bible, was there?
Then, when I became middle-aged, while I was working on “Seiobo There Below,” I really wanted to try to say something important. I wanted to say something important about how I could not say anything important, because I was having a lot of problems with the idea of importance, and even with the idea of articulation. But I had no problems with this confessional speech. I would catch a thread from the things that were occurring in the background of my own life, it would suddenly burst into my brain, and I would set off from this thread. At first, the sentences were only in my head, and I would pace around and around whatever room I happened to be living in at that time, and then, suddenly, there were about fifteen or twenty pages, on the old A4-size paper, and I had corrected all the errors in the rhythms, melodies, and tempo, as if I were a fanatic dreamer like [Friedrich] Hölderlin or [Heinrich von] Kleist. During these times, it was not good to live with me, because I could never concentrate on anything else.
My goal was for the figures in my books, figures that did not yet exist—my goal was to write them into reality in such a way that they would remain there. For example, Prince Myshkin is, today, no longer the hero of one of Dostoyevsky’s novels. He is part and parcel of our reality. Dostoyevsky wrote him with such terrible strength that now Prince Myshkin is a part of reality as we perceive it. I, too, was aiming for something like this.
You said you were dissatisfied because everything you wrote was a failure. How did you come to that judgment? What did you feel you had not perfected?
I am not a reader of my own books. I would never voluntarily reread any of them. But I had a friend, Béla Tarr, who made films using my work as a source of inspiration. We worked on these films together. I had to read my own texts aloud, to write a screenplay for Béla, which was very, very difficult for me, because I was very afraid that the same thing would happen, and it did happen, always—I would begin reading, and suddenly I would see a shocking error of rhythm, of melody, of content, a flaw in form, and well, I had inevitably made a mistake, but it’s not only a single mistake to me, it ruins the entire thing. It vexes me so much that I try to remedy this in the following book. My entire life is just such an attempt at recompense. I am not doing too well.
Although perhaps this perfectionism isn’t even perfectionism, because I otherwise like mistakes, apart from the ones that I made when working for Béla. For example, there is Japanese art. Those who appreciate Japanese art can never praise it enough for its perfectionism, and yet, Japanese art is not perfectionist, because it loves asymmetrical situations. When places are being set for dinner, or in a stone garden in a Buddhist monastery, there is no governing principle of central symmetry or proportional order. There is a love for the mistake. In Japanese ceramic arts, say, from the early Meiji Era, there is enormous value in an object that bears a decisive flaw, because it makes it more particular. And I am this way, too, with everything else, with the exception of my own books.
So, each novel has emerged from this obsession with perfecting your own prose. Your characters are also obsessives. They are men who seek sacred encounters with rare and beautiful objects: a manuscript, a garden, a whale skeleton, the music of Bach, the books in the New York Public Library, the Acropolis. Almost no one understands or sympathizes with these men. Often, they are destroyed. Some are mutilated. Some die once they realize that, as one character says, “The higher realm had disappeared from the human world.” What is the cost of being obsessed with beauty in the human world, a world of barbarism, where nothing is sacred?
Everything that is beautiful—whether natural or created by human beings, whether created by God or by life itself—exists in an inviolable domain, which never changes. Only we change, only our relationship to this domain changes, our chances of connecting to it change. In the Renaissance, our chances improved, and now in our modern age they have been ruined, our chances of making this perfect beauty appear, of stepping into relation to it, for it to hold our souls.
In my own books, this began to be one of the most important themes for me. I placed this dilemma onto my characters, so that I could tell the story of how they were doing in this question, and how they ended up failing. There is a single personal characteristic to my books: I place my own failures onto this or that character appearing in my novels, so that he is the one to suffer, because I don’t want to suffer anymore.
Are we at an especially low point in our relationship to beauty and an especially high point in our suffering?
There were several ages in human history, and now I’m only speaking of European civilization. From the European cultural point of view there was, here in the Mediterranean, a pragmatic culture which regarded the divine presence as self-evident. To perform a sacrifice in front of a temple so as to influence a god or goddess was not seen as any kind of problem. This kind of relationship made the lives of people living in ancient times unproblematic in terms of the dichotomy between the transcendent and the space of reality. Then, in European culture, Christianity appeared, a religion which made an astonishing discovery, namely, that the primary cause for everything—humans, animals, nature, fertility, the inanimate world, the universe, the cosmos—could be concentrated into one single point. This made everyone calm down, and immediately step into a space where there was no longer any border between the divine and the human real. With regards to human nature, the main question became how this recognition could be distributed throughout a given society, whether in Europe or in the Near East.
Of course, it was never ideal, and it didn’t mean that, as in a fairy tale, everyone could step into some kind of unproblematic relationship with the divine whenever they wanted. God provided a surface for the instance of beauty. This surface was the outward appearance of something, its given form. It was, to express it in very general terms, an entity that could be designated. And then the Renaissance came along, which was also strongly pragmatic, and there were many more possibilities for a so-called educated person, stepping away slightly from the mystical or transcendent relation, to reach a purely human beauty, a beauty created by human means. After the Baroque is when the problems continuously begin to occur. A world divested not of God but of the divine, this was certainly problematic for humankind. You could enjoy it, because the world exists even without God, and we human beings are capable of building whatever we want. Because, well, where are we now?
We’re in a disenchanted technical civilization.
Yet this current technical civilization is astonishingly genial, even with all of its enormous problems, because it appears to be almost unlimited. And since the human being is dangerous, therefore the technical civilization that he has created is also dangerous. But the relation to this border has fundamentally changed. Ever since the Enlightenment, let’s say, the modern human being does not require this relation to the border. Michelangelo is a fridge magnet now. He is a photograph I take as I stand in front of a statue by him. But he is still good. Other things are still good. The “Mona Lisa” is good, that magnificent temple so close to where we’re sitting is good. Everything is good; the main thing is that I can’t experience it.
If we were to ask—how many people are on the planet now, maybe eight billion?—if we were to ask five billion tourists if they knew something about the Acropolis, I think everybody in this room would be very sad. The answer would be, Yes, I saw the Acropolis, it was very beautiful, but let’s say that the sun was shining a lot that day, and I hardly saw anything of the Acropolis, because I didn’t bring my sunglasses. We can call this deterioration, but we could also describe it as something else: that the demands of the modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern person have changed. This person demands a life in which pleasure is granted the primary role. This is a very comfortable attitude for such a creature as man.
It can be imagined that this is not a negative process. The important thing is the beauty that Michelangelo created, or the beauty that was constructed by the genius or geniuses who made the Acropolis. But it is likely that there will be ever fewer of us who feel this way. Our relationship to the past has radically changed. A good half of it is misunderstood. Culture today, during this flowering of European populism, is nothing more than a kind of ridiculous right-wing or extreme-right-wing ideology of tradition, in which culture is noble, and makes me noble, and anyone unwilling to accept this becomes my enemy. A kind of emotional relation comes into being, but it is an absolutely negative emotional relation.
I’m very happy that I’m as old as I am, because I truly feel sorry for the ones who are young. I can lament a cultural age. Perhaps this isn’t even an age in that sense of the term, not in the sense that the Baroque or the Roman or the ancient Greek culture represented an age but, rather, the entire occurrence of human civilization to date represents one single epoch, and that is over. If it is really over, I’m very happy to lament over it.
Maybe you shouldn’t feel sorry for young people, because your fiction enacts a different relation to beauty and to history. The scenario you just described, of a man who visits the Acropolis on a hot, clear day but cannot see it because he has forgotten his sunglasses, is from “Seiobo Down Below.” In it, the man stumbles around, blinded by the sun, surrounded by insensible tourists. The joke, I think, is that the experience of the Acropolis has been so thoroughly commodified that it hardly matters whether the man sees it or not. Still, his failure to be in relation to beauty reminds us of its opposite: a culture that once experienced beauty as transcendent. Reading “Seiobo Down Below” made me feel very melancholy. But I also felt some suspicion, or perhaps just a hope, that a new relation to art could be possible.
That melancholy was discovered by the Romantics, and, in its coarser variation, was equivalent to despair. It was the Romantic era that brought us that expressive form, which I greatly suffer from. It is a very important signal indicating that we’re in a lot of trouble in terms of that relation to art which earlier had been self-evident: a relation through God, or through a divinity, or perhaps through the magnificence of human creation. This is truly an essential difference.
It’s possible that this is really the new state of the world, and that we are more or less at the beginning of it, as opposed to being at the end of the previous one. Perhaps it would be more fitting not to compel the younger generations to weep with us over what a fantastic poet Dante was, or what a fantastic, eccentric author Euripides was. They will have to put up with us as we lament that there will be no more Michelangelo, no more Bach, no more Dante, there will be no one to write works like this and that, and woe, woe, woe is us.
To me, this is unacceptable. The first movement of despair, when a person is uncertain, when they feel frail, is to start looking for a form that will free them from this uncertainty, and then these political ideologies start coming very easily, without any kind of serious philosophical background, or even without any philosophical background whatsoever. When a human being loses his sense of identity, there will be a need for so-called national identity and similarly idiotic ideas. Traditionalism, or clinging to it, is already a political category. Let it remain so, or, better yet, let it not play any role in the political sphere whatsoever, if only because it can only lead to enormous problems.
When I was young, when I thought about the future, I naturally concluded that the world was unacceptable. The only possible solution was to rebel against it. There is a saying which I would like to slightly modify, or add my own interpretation to: The young person who does not rebel has no heart. And the old person who rebels is ridiculous. Although I do not consider the viewpoint that I am espousing ridiculous, it does mean that one has to rebel for the sake of the clarity of ideas. Somehow, we have to get back the definitions of what is what. We have to once again decide what evolution means, what is God, and so on.
If we do not look at these concepts anew and from a different perspective, then we don’t really have much of a chance, because wherever we end up we will simply be moving while standing in place, and only moving as much as the Earth moves with us. Velocity begins when we make even one tiny movement, because even with that one tiny movement, we have gained more velocity than the Earth, if we set off in the right direction. If we do, then we will be able to clarify these concepts once again. Perhaps this won’t be a very happy or peaceful period of time in human thought, because we might reach certain conclusions that won’t be helpful in trying to make our own reality more comprehensible. But let’s not tell young people, “If you are not with me in this, then you’re a lout.” Let’s wait a bit, let’s be patient.
Your Nobel Prize lecture, “Enough About Angels,” ends with a similar call to rebellion and the role that a new concept of angels might play in bringing it about. In the lecture, you say that you are not going to talk about the angels of old, the messengers from heaven that have been glorified by Michelangelo and Giotto, because now the heavens have been colonized by men like Elon Musk. You will speak only about new angels who walk among us, and who have no message to give and none to receive. They offer only an occasion for us to witness the world’s injustice, its cruelty, its mercilessness toward defenseless people. You imagine that the encounter with these new angels might one day spur some kind of rebellion, which you call a rebellion “in relation to the whole.” What is a rebellion in relation to the whole? How does it differ from a rebellion in relation to the part?
The angels of old were always bringing a message—they gave their angelic greeting to Mary—but the people of today no longer have any kind of need for these angels. This is why they perished, and that is why these new angels are still here among us, but in a completely different form and so with completely different purpose, although they look like us.
Any of you could bump into one of them, whether here in Athens or anywhere else. If someone stands in front of you, a man, woman, child, elderly, middle-aged, or in any form, if a person stands in front of you who, it seems, really wants to say something, but just stands there, and you think that this person might have bad intentions, or is crazy, or I don’t even know, this being is simply waiting for you to send him a message. This person needs the message now, and they await it from us, although I think that they will wait in vain.
It is clear what rebellion in relation to the part means. In an unbearable situation, it becomes impossible to further withstand a certain state of affairs. Here we are speaking of some concrete matter, a given oppression, layoffs in a factory, a bad pension system, and so on. However, rebellion that relates to the whole gives birth to despair. Human existence senses that something impedes it from subsisting. This is like when a person is in complete darkness, and they see nothing, and they are afraid, they tremble, and they flail around. You must imagine an enormous darkness, where a person is searching for some kind of light, because this person is simply attempting to rebel against the darkness by trying to remedy their own state of despair, and this is the rebellion of the person’s whole mind, namely, it is when a person can no longer withstand their own self, and considers not only human life in a given situation to be unacceptable but also the entire world, the entirety of human civilization, the human condition, and attempts to somehow box themselves out of it. I do not wish any of you to experience this. I do not wish it for you, or for myself. ♦
(Translated, from the Hungarian, by Ottilie Mulzet.)