When László Krasznahorkai, winner of the 2025 Nobel prize in literature, first burst onto Hungary’s literary scene in 1985, it was clear he was a unique talent. His first novel, Satantango, soon became a cult classic.
The novel’s Hungarian readers were living in the stifling atmosphere of the dying years of state socialism. They were quick to understand the parallels between the the novel – about an isolated rural community – and their own isolation from the rest of the world.
They were drawn, too, to Satantango’s sense of physical and psychological decay, and the way it recognised the mundanity of their everyday lives. At least, that was my experience when I first read the book in 1985 in Budapest as an undergraduate student of Hungarian literature.
Oppressive atmosphere and stagnation often feature in the work of Central European writers. But, unlike the oeuvre of many earlier authors, Krasznahorkai’s writing also gained immense popularity on the international – or more specifically, German – scene.
To some extent, this was the result of timing. In the 1980s, western readers often still reacted to art portraying the world behind the recently demolished iron curtain with a mixture of amazement and curiosity.
Novels set in “new Europe” appeared in great numbers, exemplified by British novelists Julie Burchill’s No Exit (1993) and Tibor Fischer’s Under the Frog (1992). But Germany was more receptive to Central European authors who wrote in less widely spoken languages. For this reason, it served as a seat of literary consecration for them.
Krasznahorkai’s novels appeared in German from 1990 onward, with Melancholy of Resistance gaining the German best book of the year award in 1993.
Critics in the early 1990s were inclined to read both Satantango and Melancholy of Resistance as reflections of historical cataclysms. Yet, though Krasznahorkai’s fiction is deeply rooted in Hungarian history, Satantango keeps references to the country’s history vague and fairly abstract. The novel’s universe is only dystopian on the surface: tragic-comedic elements abound, leaving the reader simultaneously baffled and entertained.
International recognition
It is usually English-language publications that lead to the popular rise of non-Anglophone fiction – meaning it took a decade for Krasznahorkai to be recognised.
The novel that first drew wider international attention was George Szirtes’ 1998 English translation of Melancholy of Resistance, which follows the journey of a stuffed whale transported by a travelling circus. This success was followed by translations of War and War in 2006. Satantango, while already a cult classic translated into other languages, did not appear in English until 2012.
As his works became better known, critics increasingly understood Krasznahorkai’s writing within a postmodern framework. Critic Jacob Silverman suggested that Satantango’s main concern is “the realisation that knowledge led either to wholesale illusion or to irrational depression”.
Writer David Auerbach, in a similar tone, suggested that Krasznahorkai’s major concern was the process of making meaning in a world where psychology and rationality are no longer serviceable tools of interpretation.
It was the award of the Man Booker international prize in 2015 that cemented Krasznahorkai’s reputation with the English-language reading public. The author’s decision to split the prize between his translator Szirtes, who was responsible for introducing him to the English–speaking world, and Ottilie Mulzet, who produced a stream of translations of his later work, shows that perceptive translators play a key role in international recognition.
Hungarian fiction has never fared better in the international arena than in the 21st century. The process started with the Nobel prize being awarded to Imre Kertész in 2002. Since then, the works of Antal Szerb (Journey by Moonlight, 2016) and Sándor Márai (Embers, 2016), as well as Magda Szabó (The Door, 2020) have garnered considerable critical success and reached a wide audience in English translation.
These immensely different writers have shown that the audience – readers, translators, critics and publishers – need to pay attention to work coming from languages that are not necessarily seen as part of the movements of world literature. Their efforts will be amply awarded.
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Zsuzsanna Varga does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
