By Zsuzsanna Varga
Long considered as one of Europe’s most formidable writers, Krasznahorkai’s winning of the Nobel Prize reveals the long process that writers from East-Central Europe need for recognition. His visionary and unsettling work had an almost cult-like group of readers in Hungary already in the 1980s, but the international recognition arrived slowly. Yet through good translators and change of focus, his world of decay and irony gradually claimed its place in the global literature.
László Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Prize in Literature has rippled waters around the globe. A long-standing candidate for the most prestigious prize in the world of letters, his work has been well –known in Hungary since the years of late communism, with an almost cult-like group of readers following him already in the 1980s. His work became internationally known after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, first in Germany, which was ‘the seat of literary consecration’ for many writers from the small language groups from East Central Europe. Krasznahorkai’s work was translated into German by Hans Skirecki, while English-language translations – leading to popular appeal – appeared only from 1998 onwards, but they followed in quick succession, from the earliest works of Melancholy of resistance and Satantango, to later works like War and War, Seiobo There Below, Herscht 07769 and many others.
Hungarian literature has not fared very well internationally until the gradual opening after 1989.
It was no fault of translators, rather, the works’ relative obscurity was due to the very occasional interest in writers from behind the Iron Curtain. An opening came through the exceptional venture of the German DAAD fellowships awarded to individual writers, which, to many, offered access to international publishing. Krasznahorkai was no exception to that. He was a figure of political and aesthetic dissidence banned from travelling to the West by state authorities for relatively mild political comments. A scholarship year in West-Berlin in 1987-88 offered an opportunity to reflect on the conditions of late communism and enjoy a taste of Western political freedom. Yet it would be an oversimplification to view the lessons of the Berlin sojourn as the beginning of a long-term or uncritical commitment to contemporary Western society. For him, the glorification of consumption represents a serious threat to human autonomy and to the role and vocation of intellectuals in the social fabric.
In the work of this modernist author, who shows an almost visceral pleasure in testing the limits of language and who produces, as his first translator into English, George Szirtes puts it, a ‘slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type,’ easily decipherable social messages are conspicuously absent. Yet in his early fiction, in Satantango (1985) and Melancholy of Resistance (1989), the stifled atmosphere of late communist Hungary, the underlying sense of decay, destruction, the view of rain-sodden landscapes, aimlessness, an unbearable senses of suffocation of hermetically sealed-off communities, filth and a sense of stasis , the lack of agency and any potential of salvation are unmistakeable.
Characters from the outside world – like Irimiás in Satantango –can only arrive with duplicitous intentions.
If the community –‘the estate’- is a site of material depravation; then a saviour figure can only turn out to be a false prophet who brings further destruction.
In an departure from examining East Central Europe through a comparison with Western Europe, his later work focus on cultures from the East Asia. The Prisoner of Urga and Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens also reflect on the East European identity . The Prisoner of Urga stages the discover that communist childhood experiences were shared across the Soviet bloc; and he also comes to the recognition that the writer’s inescapable vocation is to act as a chronicler of intergenerational suffering. Destruction – a documentary novel about a trip to China- interrogates the position of ancient Chinese culture in today’s China. He approaches the role of intellectuals with high expectations: in the West, where decisions are taken on levels inaccessible to reflexive them, intellectuals have already lost their power to influence social processes. He hopes that China’s Confucian mores would be able to offer a different model for the full integration of ethics and aesthetics into everyday life, but his Chinese interlocutors offer no consolation that China could e the utopian venue for the survival of intellectuals’ spiritual authority. The novel also registers fears of a more global kind. With an acute East European sensitivity, the narrator also observes the expansionist character of China’s rising global empire: after centuries of misery, the freedom of buying and selling feels to offer people the joys of secular salvation.
If the close-ups of the social and intellectual stasis in Eastern Europe is the core of the early dystopias, then the reflexive travelogues of the East are nonetheless dystopian for the discovery that Eastern practices offer no alternatives.
For this late modernist writer of prose of ‘extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful,’ as the judges of the Man Booker Prize stated in 2015, taking stark political positions stands in an odd contrast with his claim that ‘artists have no duties whatsoever. Just freedom without borders, the answer to which is despair.’ Yet writers of East Central European origin are rarely able to detach themselves from politics, and Krasznahorkai has been increasingly direct in using fiction for the contemporary audience. His recent novel Herscht 07769 uses Bach to counterpoint with rising German neo-Nazism. His short story ‘An Angel Passed Above us’, set in the trenches of Ukraine, is ruthless in staging the tension between savage and visceral wars and the virtual and unconditional fulfilment offered by technological globalisation: beneath the surface of guaranteed eternal happiness and the relentless improvement of the human condition, a thick layer of savagery exist, ready for erupt at any moment. If we are seduced by our own complacency about our human ability to secure our own salvation, he warns, we only do it at our own peril.
Zsuzsanna Varga teaches Hungarian and Central European Studies at the University of Glasgow. She regularly published about Central European cultural history, including work on literary history and cinematic arts. Her publications include Worlds of Hungarian Writing (2016) and Reflections in the Library: Selected literary essays of Antal Szerb (2017).
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
