The Master of Contemporary Apolyptic Literature

Born on January 5, 1954, into a middle-class family in Gyula, eastern Hungary, László Krasznahorkai was raised in a rural childhood riddled with postwar European anxieties. Despite his humble background, the young Krasznahorkai was always a visionary. At an early age, he developed an interest in writing and even in law. These natural inclinations were cultivated by his family; his father, after all, was a lawyer. Furthermore, the works of Franz Kafka sparked his early interest in these fields. These were not ordinary interests for someone so young, underscoring his intellectual pursuits. Following this path, he began studying law at József Attila University (University of Szeged) before transferring to Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He eventually switched to the study of philology and Hungarian literature. While studying, he began writing and also worked as a documentarian at the Gondolat publishing house.

Krasznahorkai’s foray into literature commenced in 1977 with the publication of the short story Tebenned hittem (I Believed in You) in the Mozgó Világ journal. After university, he worked as a freelance writer while wandering around Hungary and Germany, taking on menial jobs such as working as a miner and as a night watchman guarding cows. He also played piano in a jazz band and worked as an editor. These experiences would eventually form part of many of his novels. The year 1985 proved to be a breakthrough for the young writer, as his first novel, Sátántangó, was published — a literary sensation that immediately elevated him to critical acclaim. The novel’s success established him as a leading figure in Hungarian literature. It was later adapted into a critically acclaimed seven-hour film. The success of Sátántangó set the tone for the rest of Krasznahorkai’s storied literary career, which would earn him several accolades around the world.

Building on this success, the Hungarian writer published his sophomore novel, Az ellenállás melankóliája, in 1989. It was translated into English in 1998 as The Melancholy of Resistance. It was as critically received as his first novel, with several literary critics citing it as his magnum opus. It received the German Bestenliste Prize for the year’s best literary work in 1993. Upon reading the book, American critic Susan Sontag crowned Krasznahorkai contemporary literature’s “master of the apocalypse.” It would also become one of the bases for the Swedish Academy’s decision to award him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the world. The august body, which also lauded The Melancholy of Resistance, awarded Krasznahorkai “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

To be more accurate, it was only a shadow in the mirror, a mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincided though the shadow nevertheless tried to separate them, to separate two things that had from eternity been the same and could not be separated or cut into two, thereby losing the weightless delight of being swept along with it, substituting, he thought as he stepped away from the drawing-room window, a solid eternity purchased with knowledge for the sweet song of participating in eternity, a song so airy it was lighter than a feather.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

Like Krasznahorkai’s debut novel, The Melancholy of Resistance transports readers to an anonymous, run-down Hungarian town. The novel opens on a bleak evening when Mrs. Plauf returns home from a visit, enduring a stressful journey. A delayed train fuels her anxiety, as there is no assurance that one will arrive. Her growing unease is intensified by the darkness enveloping her surroundings. When the train finally arrives, she is relieved — but only slightly. The carriage is overcrowded with unwashed passengers, much to her horror. Although the train ride sets the tone for the rest of the story, the tension does not dissipate. Upon alighting, she wanders the streets of the town, swept by a foreboding sense that something fundamental is amiss. She dreads that an ominous disaster could strike at any time. The streets are barely lit, with doom lurking at every corner. The breakdown of law and order is palpable.

Confused and laden with anxiety, Mrs. Plauf seeks solace in her orderly apartment. However, her sense of harmony does not last. The sudden arrival of the formidable Mrs. Tünde Eszter disrupts the order she craves. Mrs. Eszter is ambitious, full of plans to reform the town. Adept at propaganda, she has recently been appointed president of a new women’s committee. She confides in Mrs. Plauf about her plan to manipulate her estranged husband, György Eszter, through János Valuska, Mrs. Plauf’s son. Mrs. Eszter needs Eszter to serve as a figurehead for her emerging political movement, “A Tidy Yard, An Orderly House,” which aims to revitalize the decaying town. Meanwhile, Valuska is simple-minded and regarded as the village idiot. He has been disowned by his mother, while the locals merely tolerate his presence. Interestingly, the only person who appreciates him is Eszter, a world-weary musician who was once his mentor.

György Eszter’s world-weariness has become so overwhelming that he rarely leaves his house. He rises from his bed only occasionally. When Mrs. Plauf rejects Mrs. Eszter’s proposition, the draconian woman approaches Valuska directly to enlist his help in blackmailing her estranged husband into compliance. She threatens to move back in with Mr. Eszter if he refuses. Meanwhile, the townspeople begin converging in the town square. Their curiosity is piqued by the arrival of a mysterious circus truck. Its provenance is as shrouded in mystery as its sudden appearance. It is no ordinary circus; it advertises the exhibition of the body of an enormous dead whale. Beyond the whale, it offers no other exhibits. It is as strange as it is absurd — an anomaly that distracts a lifeless town slowly descending into doom.

The circus brought with it a motley crew led by The Prince, a member of the circus crew who quietly speaks gibberish, which a factotum translates. Faced with a phenomenon they barely understand, the locals’ immedate respose was, naturally, fear. The same cannot be said about the ambitious Mrs. Eszter. She saw it as an opportunity to further advance her causes. There was an important element missing: discord must be sown. However, it was not a far stretch of imagination that hostilities would start to simmer over the horizon. All over the town, signs of an ensuing chaos were ubiquitous. There was a dreadful sense of the apocalypse. The trains run sporadically. The streets overflowed with rubbish. With the streetlights broken, nervous inhabitants must make their way home cautiously after dark. There was a looming sense of doom. It wasn’t long before pandemonium would ensue.

The only revolutionary feeling he was aware of, or so he considered while standing in the doorway, was pride, his own pride, a pride that did not allow him to understand that there was no qualitative difference between things, a presumptuous over-confidence which condemned him to ultimate disillusion, for to live according to the spirit of qualitative difference requires superhuman qualities.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

As the story unfolds, it is hardly surprising that it culminates in chaos and doom — two primary ingredients of the Hungarian Nobel Laureate’s oeuvre. In typical Krasznahorkai fashion, he escorts his readers and spectators into a world slowly descending into anarchy. The unnamed town he conjures is permeated with decay in its many forms. The most palpable is physical decay. Basic infrastructure collapses. Trains run late, if they run at all. Coal needed to heat one’s home during the debilitating winter is scarce. Telephone lines fail. All of these factors combine to create a claustrophobic atmosphere of anxiety and fear. These seemingly mundane disruptions instigate profound emotional responses. What makes the sense of foreboding even more dreadful is that it stems from ordinary events, such as a delayed train. Krasznahorkai underscores how the familiar can induce anxiety, even though such anxieties are often forgotten once the immediate crisis passes.

The breakdown of basic necessities is compounded by the deterioration of education and bureaucracy. This decay trickles into the collective psyche of the townspeople. Anarchy ensues, and with it comes the erosion of social order. Figures like Mrs. Eszter — ambitious, cunning, and power-hungry — attempt to seize control amid the chaos. Coldly calculating, she has no scruples about using others for personal gain. Her professed goal of revitalizing the town belies her more sinister ambitions. This makes her not only formidable but also memorable. While Mrs. Eszter hides behind a veneer of order, The Prince develops into a harbinger of the apocalypse. A nihilistic figure who never appears directly, his voice nevertheless carries considerable weight. His arguments dismantle the very concept of unity and order. His rhetoric espouses anarchy, inciting the townspeople to destroy their own community. He becomes the final catalyst for the novel’s central upheaval.

In language both vivid and ironically lyrical, Krasznahorkai captures processes of decay and disintegration in startling detail. The pervasive foreboding that seeps across the town remains constant. The circus emerges as both symbol and catalyst. Its arrival is abrupt; its presence, absurdly theatrical in a town already losing vitality. This reinforces the pessimism — a familiar element in Krasznahorkai’s oeuvre — that saturates the narrative. Pessimism is further embodied by Mr. Eszter, who believes the world to be in irreversible decline. His detachment stands in stark contrast to his estranged wife’s fervent ambitions. Meanwhile, the townsfolk grow weary, though their initial concerns are petty. They become subservient to their fears and weaknesses. Searching for meaning, they cling to symbols scattered throughout the town or retreat into the comfort of the familiar. Beneath this fragile surface, however, disaster quietly simmers.

Catalytic, shadowy, near-mythical figures such as The Prince are not uncommon in Krasznahorkai’s oeuvre. In Sátántangó, Irimiás’s arrival at the estate propels the narrative forward. Similarly, in Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, news of the Baron’s return sets into motion a series of events that reshape the town. The arrival of such figures in desolate settings signals the commencement of transformative — often destructive — upheaval. In quaint Hungarian towns, Krasznahorkai portrays societies in states of profound transition. These towns are not merely settings; they function as characters in their own right, evolving into microcosms of a broader European malaise. Through them, Krasznahorkai depicts the chaos permeating postwar Europe. With morale low and morality wavering, these small towns echo the larger anarchy sweeping the continent.

Faith is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different; in the same way, music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the fact of our irredeemable selves and the sorry state of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts: it was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

The Melancholy of Resistance, then, is no mere portrait of provincial life. It is a scathing examination of how authoritarianism can germinate within small communities. The desire for change is weaponized and manipulated to advance oppressive ideologies. Disillusionment becomes fertile ground for extremism — a theme explored by many European writers. Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal’s The Little Town Where Time Stood Still portrays a community poised on the brink of transformation. Similarly, Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, in works such as House of Day, House of Night and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, explores rural landscapes disrupted by uncanny forces. Like them, Krasznahorkai interrogates the fragile boundary between order and chaos. Order proves superficial, easily destabilized by uncertainty.

Resistance emerges as a central theme, with submission as its counterpoint. Ironically, Mrs. Eszter embodies a distorted form of resistance — one rooted in domination and control. Humor, meanwhile, tempers the bleakness. Krasznahorkai’s dry, razor-sharp wit transforms the narrative into potent satire. The circus and its dead whale function not only as harbingers of chaos but also as emblems of absurdity. Valuska stands as a counterforce to the forces unleashed by Mrs. Eszter and The Prince. His innocence and passivity contrast sharply with Mrs. Eszter’s calculated ambition. He harbors a childlike fascination with the cosmos and remains a gentle, bewildered figure misunderstood by his fellow townspeople. In one memorable scene, he orchestrates a reenactment of the celestial dance in a local pub, with drunken patrons assuming the roles of the Sun, Moon, and Earth. He emerges as a symbol of submission — but also of fragile purity.

Yet both Mr. Eszter and Valuska are drawn inexorably into the epicenter of chaos. Their concerns are less about external upheaval than about its psychological reverberations. Existentialism surfaces as a central philosophical thread. The whale’s carcass becomes an absurd yet potent symbol of decay — psychological, social, natural, and even cosmic. It suggests that existence itself is arbitrary and incomprehensible. Withdrawal from life proves futile as a strategy of resistance against the unbridled lust for power. A bourgeois home or a dreamer’s imagination offers only temporary refuge. Such spaces may shield one momentarily from chaos, but they cannot withstand forces determined to dismantle order. The novel ultimately transforms into a philosophical inquiry into escapism and its limitations, exploring its consequences on the characters.

An evocative political allegory. A scathing social commentary. An immersive historical meditation. A propulsive satire. All of these facets underscore the multilayered complexity of The Melancholy of Resistance. Building upon the achievements of his debut novel, Krasznahorkai paints a vivid portrait of a town poised on the brink of physical and moral collapse. Ominous signs abound. The descent into pandemonium feels inevitable. The absurd presses uncomfortably close. A circus. A dead whale. Reclusive intellectuals. A dreamer. A domineering reformer. All converge in a desolate Hungarian town, participating in what feels like a fevered apocalyptic vision. The Melancholy of Resistance stands as a searing critique of humanity’s insatiable desire for power and control. Krasznahorkai masterfully dramatizes the tension between order and chaos, revealing the fragility of human constructs. The Melancholy of Resistance ultimately serves as a testament to his mastery of apocalyptic imagination.

Everything was there, it is simply that there was no clerk capable of making an inventory of all the constituents; but the realm that existed once—once and once only—had disappeared for ever, ground into infinitesimal pieces by the endless momentum of chaos within which crystals of order survived, the chaos that consisted of an indifferent and unstoppable traffic between things. It ground the empire into carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur, it took its delicate fibres and unstitched them till they were dispersed and had ceased to exist, because they had been consumed by the force of some incomprehensibly distant edict, which must also consume this book, here, now, at the full stop, after the last word.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance
Book Specs

Author: László Krasznahorkai
Translator (from Hungarian): George Szirtes
Publisher: New Directions
Publishing Date: 2000 (1989)
Number of Pages: 314
Genre: Historical, Dystopian, Literary

Synopsis

The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai’s magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find – music, cosmology, fascism. The novel’s characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found.

Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enomoursly gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, “is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.” And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, “lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.”

About the Author

To learn more about the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature awardee and multi-awarded writer László Krasznahorkai, click here.

Apple cores, bits of old boots, watch-straps, overcoat buttons, rusted keys, everything, he coolly noted, that man may leave his mark by, was here, though it wasn’t so much this ‘icy museum of pointless existence’ that astonished him (for there was nothing remotely new about the particular range of exhibits), but the way this slippery mass snaking between the houses, like a pale reflection of the sky, illuminated everything with its unearthly, dull, silvery phosphorescence.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance