László Krasznahorkai

 

László Krasznahorkai
Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature 2025




László Krasznahorkai wrote in 2021 his sixth book translated into Greek in 2023, “HERSCHT 07769: The Bach Story of Florian Herscht.”
Before this, his published books in Greek were “Seiobo There Below” and the informal tetralogy in which the author depicts the political situation and its social ramifications in Hungary over recent decades. In this new novel, Krasznahorkai revisits many of the thematic axes that have preoccupied him in his previous works—especially in the tetralogy.
In the first book of the tetralogy, “Sátántangó,” the central motifs are the Devil, Judgment Day, and the long-awaited Messiah.
Cannibalism, deceit, and moral decay—especially among children and siblings—embody evil devouring human souls.
Divine providence and fate, on one side, and human will and freedom of choice, on the other.
Imagination versus sensory perception.
Our understanding of the world is geometric, shaped by our senses and perceptual capacity, whereas metaphysical inquiries and interpretations belong to imagination—the creative realm of the mind.
In “The Melancholy of Resistance,” the scene shifts to the foothills of the Carpathians, in a small Hungarian town whose inhabitants—resigned to their fate, enslaved by superstition, and paralyzed by fear of impending change—experience the threat of chaos.
Among them are the timid bourgeois Mrs. Pflaum; the innocent, dreamy Valuska, a visionary chasing chimeras in a Platonic world of celestial shadows; Professor Eszter, who seeks to interpret the world through music; and Mrs. Eszter, his ambitious wife, secretly manipulating events to seize power.
A circus arrives in town, exhibiting a gigantic whale—a symbol of awe before nature’s grandeur and of fear before death. A mysterious prince, a dark, unapproachable figure capable of stirring crowds and unleashing evil and chaos, appears.
Here too, Krasznahorkai offers a critique of Soviet Hungary—and, more broadly, of every form of state-imposed social control.
From the Pythagorean music of the spheres to chaos theory and Darwinian evolution, the human condition, cosmological harmony, systems of belief, violence, and the struggle to resist destruction all converge on a single hope for salvation: the acceptance of mortality, inevitability, and human frailty—and the embrace of the present moment.
While the first two parts of the tetralogy are deeply marked by messianic undertones within the decaying Hungarian countryside, “War and War” turns toward revelation. Set far from Hungary—in the cradle of civilization, the so-called “center of the world”—the novel underscores the centrality of war in human life. It depicts the creation of the banking system by a group seeking control, and speaks of the world’s rulers.
Philosophical reflections, references to Christian and Jewish thought, and a presentation of history in its teleological, apocalyptic transformation all merge into a grand vision.
The final part of Krasznahorkai’s tetralogy, “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” returns to the Hungarian provinces.
An illegitimate daughter seeks social condemnation of her father and the restitution of what she is owed; a world-renowned professor renounces the material world, retreating into an empty wilderness for spiritual exercises; a bankrupt baron comes back to his birthplace in search of his youthful love, hoping to live out his final years in peace.
Once again, Krasznahorkai, with biting irony and biblical allusions, portrays society and human nature, emphasizing the need for faith in a redeemer and the lurking inevitability of annihilation. The messianic element of the earlier novels gives way to an unrelenting drive toward destruction. Only through the ashes of the present can a purified tomorrow emerge.
“…because where there are correlations, there lies the explanation…”
In “HERSCHT 07769,” the author sets his story in contemporary eastern Germany. In the small town of Kahla, Thuringia (postal code 07769), lives Florian Herscht.
Florian, a young man past his twenties, lives under the informal guardianship of Bossi—a neo-Nazi anti-Semite, owner of a wall-cleaning company, obsessed with Johann Sebastian Bach, and conductor of “The Kahla Symphony,” an orchestra dedicated to Bach’s works.
Florian dreams of becoming a baker, but Bossi, feeling responsible for him, keeps him employed cleaning walls. For the past two years, Florian has been taking lessons from Mr. Köller, who introduces him to the wondrous world of elementary particles—a world that fascinates him deeply.
Mr. Köller, once a student of quantum physics, has since turned to meteorology and maintains his own amateur weather station.
“…within the nothingness born of nothingness…”
When Mr. Köller explains to his pupil the balance between matter and antimatter, Florian concludes that since there was a Big Bang, a primordial explosion, nothing can stop the world’s course toward another cataclysmic error that will annihilate existence itself.
Thus, Florian decides to write a letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel, confiding in her his conviction that humanity faces imminent extinction.
While he is absorbed in his fears, Thuringia witnesses the rise of neo-Nazism: a hundred years after their disappearance, wolves return; Bach monuments are defaced with graffiti; an explosion heightens the region’s already tense atmosphere.
On September 30, 2019, the Kremnitz Trial begins. Members of a small neo-Nazi group stand accused of organizing attacks in Berlin on the anniversary of German Reunification (October 3).
On October 9, 2019, in Halle, a 27-year-old far-right Holocaust denier storms a synagogue and murders two people in an attempt to commit a massacre.
The rise of Nazism in Germany and the global resurgence of the far right deeply trouble Krasznahorkai in this work. Within this historical framework, he revisits his perennial concerns:
the approaching Apocalypse, the search for a Messiah in the figure of Merkel—who is called upon to save the world through science—the rebellion of nature against humankind, the policing of society under the guise of security amid unrest, the limits of human perception in grasping reality, the origins of the universe and science constrained by our finite faculties, divine intervention versus free will, chaos versus order.
In the midst of cosmic disorder and everyday turmoil, the harmony and structure of Bach’s music become vessels of a causal system in which determinism collides with randomness—with the probabilistic vision of the universe.
The perfect relationships of tones and themes, the firm architecture of Bach’s compositions, and the utter absence of evil—where nothing is accidental and nothing threatens to destroy—symbolize the antithesis of the universe itself.
The protagonist, Florian Herscht, is an “androboy”—a term used by Ben Lerner in “The Topeka School” for his character Darren. He shares traits with Valuska, the hero of Krasznahorkai’s “The Melancholy of Resistance.”
Literature has long portrayed characters who today might be described as belonging to the autism spectrum:
the giant Lenny in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” Benjy Compson in William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” and Franz in Michel Tournier’s “The Meteors.”
Thomas Mann, in his monumental “Doctor Faustus,” writes:
“Characteristic of this archaic subterranean neurosis and hidden psychic disposition of cities are the curious, eccentric, and innocently half-mad figures who live within their walls and, like old buildings, form part of the city’s image.”
Herscht perceives and interprets the world and science in his own enclosed, autistic way. Confronted with the expected end and manifest evil, he takes action: he returns to nature, withdraws from society, isolates himself, and regresses to a primordial state. The Apocalypse thus becomes a personal matter.
As the author himself has stated, his works usually feature a character reminiscent of Prince Myshkin from Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot”—an innocent, selfless figure seeking to redeem the sinful.
In the case of Herscht, however, this angel is not only a messenger but also the executor of judgment for humanity’s sins.

Soon his novel "Zsömle odavan" (Zsomle is waiting), written in 2024, will be available to readers in Greek.


At the center of the story stands 91-year-old Józsi Kada, a retired electrician who wants nothing more than to vanish from the world. But, like so many Krasznahorkai protagonists, his attempts to escape are futile. Kada’s life, built on secrecy and silence, unravels when his self-appointed followers discover him in an unnamed Hungarian village. To them, he is not merely an old man — he is the hidden heir to the Hungarian throne, a descendant of both Béla IV and Genghis Khan, a monarch-in-waiting who could restore a mythical order to the decaying nation.
Krasznahorkai turns this premise into a dark carnival of obsession and delusion. Kada’s disciples — a zealous monarchist and a paramilitary dreamer — embody Hungary’s festering political absurdities, their fevered plans to “reclaim” the capital serving as a grotesque echo of history’s endless repetitions. As the farce deepens, Zsömle is Waiting becomes a portrait of a country trapped between nostalgia and madness, unable to distinguish redemption from ruin.
Stylistically, Krasznahorkai is in fine form. His sentences spill across pages in rhythmic cascades, at once claustrophobic and hypnotic, pulling readers into the dizzying logic of paranoia and prophecy. The unnamed village becomes a microcosm of contemporary Hungary — part rural fable, part madhouse, part kingdom of shadows.
And then there is Zsömle, the faithful yet mysterious dog whose presence lingers like a ghostly refrain. Is he merely a pet, a symbol of loyalty, or something more ominous — a silent witness to human folly? In the end, the question of whether Zsömle “stays with us forever” feels like a quiet, unsettling riddle that extends beyond the book itself.
With Zsömle is Waiting, Krasznahorkai delivers a grotesque comedy of national identity and human delusion. It is a novel about the impossibility of disappearance — from history, from madness, from ourselves. Beneath the laughter and the absurdity, one senses the author’s enduring melancholy: that even when we try to vanish, the world, absurd and persistent, always finds us. A darkly comic, brilliant return to form — part fable, part farce, wholly Krasznahorkai.