László Krasznahorkai: Despair, Endurance, and Hidden Hope

Introduction by László Krasznahorkai 

When we speak of sentences that stretch without end, when we confront novels that circle collapse without escape, it is not because I sought to exhaust the reader but because the world itself exhausts us. Reality, if we are honest, does not pause neatly. It flows on, merciless and indifferent, like rain that has forgotten to stop. My writing only follows this truth: to refuse the illusion of completion, to mirror the endlessness of despair and the relentlessness of history.

Yet there are small illuminations hidden in the flood. A manuscript page, smudged and trembling in the reader’s hands. A whale’s eye, pale and unblinking, returning our gaze with something older than speech. A sentence, though unbroken, carrying within its weight the possibility of endurance. We gather here not to resolve or to simplify, but to look steadily into the abyss that has already overtaken us. In doing so, we discover that the act of attention itself — of reading, of witnessing — becomes a form of survival.

(Note: This is an imaginary conversation, a creative exploration of an idea, and not a real speech or event.)

Topic 1: The Sentence as Destiny: Can Language Survive the End?

László Krasznahorkai (Moderator)

When I write, I do not hear sentences as ornaments, but as the last scaffolding left before silence swallows everything. If every sentence resists silence, do we create life by speaking, or merely postpone the void?

George Szirtes
As a translator, I often felt that to carry one of your sentences across languages was to carry a burning coal in my hands. It is not that the sentence creates life, but it insists upon continuity. The void waits, of course, but the sentence slows its triumph. To postpone the void is, for a brief moment, to live.

Susan Sontag
Language does not conquer the void; it confronts it. Each sentence that refuses to end is not a denial of death, but a radical act of presence. We do not postpone silence, we expose it, trace its contours, and show that in naming despair, we already resist it.

Colm Tóibín
I think of it as breath. The sentence inhales the chaos of life, holds it unbearably long, then exhales. It cannot escape the void, but it demonstrates that existence is not nothing. The breath of language is itself life, even if fleeting.

Béla Tarr
In film, there are no words, only time. A shot that lasts eight minutes may not create life, but it makes us endure time as it really is. Your sentences do the same. They do not save us, but they force us to inhabit the slow collapse, which is a kind of authenticity.

Ottilie Mulzet
When translating, I often felt the sentence was less about meaning than about momentum. The very act of carrying on—phrase after phrase—makes language a gesture of survival. The void may be inevitable, but while the sentence runs, so do we.

László Krasznahorkai

If the sentence runs like time, then perhaps it resembles history itself. But whose history? Some say my sentences belong to Hungary’s particular fate; others say they speak for humanity at large. Tell me: does the endless sentence mirror only my nation’s chaos, or does it give shape to what would otherwise vanish everywhere?

György Dragomán
As a Hungarian, I recognize the silence of censorship, the despair of the provinces, the absurdity of collapse. Yet when I read you, I also hear echoes of Syria, of South Africa, of anywhere where time has broken. Your sentences are Hungarian in birth but universal in resonance.

John Banville
The syntax itself is metaphysical. It is not bound by soil but by the condition of being human: to struggle endlessly with no resolution. This is not Hungary’s alone. It is the fate of everyone who wrestles with time and death.

Péter Esterházy
Hungary has always lived in paradox, between East and West, tragedy and comedy. That tension runs in your sentences. But paradox is not national; it is cosmic. The world reads you because in your Hungary, it sees its own decline reflected.

Katie Kitamura
To me, your sentences capture the modern condition: no closure, no real ending, only continuation. That feels less like Hungarian history than the global experience of scrolling endlessly through a world that never resolves.

James Wood
Yes, rooted in Hungary, but form itself is never provincial. The endless sentence is like Dostoevsky’s dialogic form or Kafka’s logic of despair: it transcends. The Hungarian catastrophe is the spark; the universal human condition is the fire.

László Krasznahorkai

But tell me one final thing. If my sentences are apocalyptic, do they reveal only despair, or is there a hidden redemption inside their refusal to end? When the world collapses, is literature nothing but ruin—or can the act of endurance itself become hope?

Colm Tóibín
The refusal to stop is itself redemption. Despair would be silence, but you keep breathing words into the dark. That is hope disguised as despair.

George Szirtes
I agree. Translation taught me this paradox: in despairing of carrying your sentences across, I still carried them. The act of trying was hope.

Susan Sontag
Radical attention is never despair. To stare at the abyss, sentence after sentence, is to dignify it with consciousness. That consciousness is itself a form of salvation.

Béla Tarr
On screen, when the rain falls for six hours, people ask: where is the hope? But the hope is in the rain itself, in the fact that we are still watching, still enduring. Your sentences do the same.

Ottilie Mulzet
Yes, every sentence is a pilgrimage. It does not promise a destination, but the journey itself—breath by breath, clause by clause—is a testament. Hope is not in arrival but in continuation.

László Krasznahorkai (closing)

So it seems the sentence survives not by conquering despair, but by enduring it. To speak is not to vanquish the void, but to walk with it, step by step, until silence swallows us both. And perhaps that is what literature is: not redemption, not escape, but persistence.

Topic 2: Parables of Collapse — What Do Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance Teach Us?

László Krasznahorkai (Moderator)

In Satantango, a village decays into ruin; in The Melancholy of Resistance, a town is undone by a circus with a stuffed whale. Collapse is everywhere. Let me ask you first: When communities disintegrate, do stories reveal their truth, or do they merely replay their failure endlessly?

George Szirtes
When I worked on Satantango, I felt as though the text itself was decomposing while I translated it. The sentences rotted with the fields, yet in that rot, truth appeared. Stories do not replay failure; they enact it so vividly that we can no longer deny it.

Susan Sontag
Stories, when written as yours are, do not simply mirror failure. They transform it into a form of recognition. In collapse, you reveal the mechanisms of power, despair, and illusion. It is not replay, it is exposure.

Béla Tarr
When I made Satantango, I wanted people to feel the mud under their feet, the endless rain, the hopeless repetition. The story is not about escape. It’s about honesty. Collapse is not metaphorical. It’s mud, it’s rain, it’s reality.

Colm Tóibín
But I think there’s another truth: the failure becomes communal memory. When a story is told, it fixes failure into history, making it part of identity. Collapse in fiction is not only despair — it is also an act of remembrance.

Ottilie Mulzet
I would add that in translation, collapse becomes rhythm. The despair doesn’t just replay; it reverberates. It becomes a pulse, echoing across languages, showing that decay is not isolated but connective.

László Krasznahorkai

And yet, perhaps collapse is not a metaphor at all. Perhaps it is the natural state of societies. Let me ask: Is collapse inevitable — the destiny of human communities — or is it a uniquely modern catastrophe?

György Dragomán
Growing up in Hungary under dictatorship, collapse felt inevitable. The state collapsed, the lies collapsed, then silence collapsed. But history shows this is not only modern. Empires, dynasties, villages — all fall. Modernity only speeds the process.

John Banville
Yes, collapse is eternal. But in your works, it feels different: modern collapse is not dramatic, but slow, decaying, stagnant. The tragedy is not fire but rot. That, I think, is modern — collapse without catharsis.

Péter Esterházy
I like to think collapse is our national sport. But it is also universal. The joke is that everyone thinks their collapse is unique. Literature proves otherwise: each generation discovers it anew and calls it modern.

Katie Kitamura
What strikes me is how relevant your collapses feel to the 21st century. We see communities eroding through disinformation, environmental disaster, endless distraction. Your novels predicted that collapse could be not sudden, but ambient.

James Wood
What fascinates me is that in your fiction, collapse does not lead to resolution. It simply continues. That endlessness is both modern and universal. Perhaps collapse is less an event than a condition of being human.

László Krasznahorkai

So, if collapse is both eternal and particular, then it must whisper about us. Tell me, then: What do these parables of ruin say about the future of our own fragile civilizations?

Susan Sontag
They warn us that collapse is not cinematic. It is not sudden explosions, but slow corrosion. That is the truth modern civilization must face: we will not fall in drama, but in monotony.

George Szirtes
They also warn us that collapse is communal. No one collapses alone; it happens in groups, in towns, in nations. Your novels show the danger of forgetting that we are bound together in ruin.

Béla Tarr
The future is already here. People still wait for something better, while the rain keeps falling. The lesson is: do not expect salvation. Expect more rain.

Colm Tóibín
But there is a subtler hope. The very act of narrating collapse means we remain conscious of it. That consciousness is fragile but powerful. Civilization may collapse, but literature records the truth of it, which is itself survival.

Ottilie Mulzet
And translation ensures that survival spreads. Your Hungarian collapse becomes a mirror in English, German, Japanese. The parables are warnings passed from one language to another. That chain of transmission is the most fragile hope of all.

László Krasznahorkai (closing)

So collapse is both our inheritance and our destiny. My villages and towns are no different from your cities and nations. In each crumbling wall, you may see the future of your own home. Stories do not prevent collapse. But they ensure that when it comes, it will not pass without witness.

Topic 3: Art Amid Ruin: Can Beauty Redeem Despair?

László Krasznahorkai (Moderator)

In War and War, a man entrusts a manuscript to the future; in Seiobo There Below, divine beauty flickers in unexpected places. I ask you first: When the world falls apart, is art a refuge, or is it a cruel reminder of what we have lost?

George Szirtes
In translating War and War, I often felt the manuscript within the story was a mirror of my own task: to preserve against erasure. Art is a refuge precisely because it hurts. Its cruelty is its honesty — it reminds us of loss so that loss is not forgotten.

Susan Sontag
Art is never refuge alone; it is confrontation. It exposes us to beauty, yes, but that beauty cuts, because it shows what the world could be and is not. Yet in that exposure is a strange dignity.

Béla Tarr
For me, art is neither refuge nor cruelty. It is necessity. When I filmed your novels, I didn’t want comfort, I wanted truth. If the truth is cruel, so be it. Art is not to save us but to show us what we are.

Colm Tóibín
I think of art as both sanctuary and wound. It shelters us by preserving what matters, but in its perfection it also reminds us how imperfectly we live. That double edge is why it endures.

Ottilie Mulzet
Translating Seiobo There Below, I found art’s cruelty in its transience. Beauty appears, then vanishes. But the very act of chasing it across languages was a refuge for me. The pursuit itself redeems the pain.

László Krasznahorkai

Yes, beauty vanishes. Yet some cling to it as eternal. Let me ask you this: In my works, does art endure because it truly is eternal, or only because we desperately want it to be?

György Dragomán
In Hungary, we learned that nothing is eternal: governments collapse, borders shift, even language can fracture. But when I read War and War, I felt that manuscripts endure not because they are eternal, but because people refuse to let them vanish. Endurance is an act of will, not of nature.

John Banville
I would argue differently. Great art has a kind of eternity. Not eternal in the divine sense, but in its capacity to reappear generation after generation, speaking in new tongues, new forms. It is eternal not because we want it, but because it insists.

Péter Esterházy
But isn’t eternity itself a joke? We Hungarians laugh at eternity because we know collapse too well. Art endures not as eternal but as stubborn. It survives like a weed, not like a monument.

Katie Kitamura
For me, art feels eternal because it continues to surprise. Seiobo There Below shows how Japanese temples or Greek sculptures carry meaning centuries later. But that endurance is fragile — it depends on constant rediscovery.

James Wood
Yes, eternal in effect, but not in substance. A manuscript can burn. A painting can fade. But every time art is encountered anew, it begins again. Eternity lies in repetition, not permanence.

László Krasznahorkai

So art survives as will, as repetition, as stubbornness. But I must ask one final thing: Can the act of creating or beholding beauty be considered a form of survival, perhaps even redemption? Or is it only a momentary illusion against despair?

Susan Sontag
To attend deeply to beauty is not illusion. It is survival of consciousness itself. Attention is life. To behold beauty, even in ruin, is to assert our humanity.

George Szirtes
I agree. Translation itself is survival. Each sentence I carried across was an act of stubbornness against oblivion. Beauty redeems because it gives us reason to keep speaking.

Béla Tarr
For me, beauty is not redemption. But yes, it is survival. The long takes in my films are not beautiful in the conventional sense, but they force us to endure time, and that endurance is life.

Colm Tóibín
I see redemption in the smallest gestures: the manuscript preserved, the temple restored, the sentence that refuses to die. To create beauty, however fragile, is already an act of defiance.

Ottilie Mulzet
Yes — survival is in the repetition of the attempt. Each translation is doomed to imperfection, yet I return to it again and again. That persistence is redemption. The act itself redeems, not the result.

László Krasznahorkai (closing)

So beauty is no illusion. It is not refuge, not eternity, but endurance. Art does not rescue us from ruin, but it allows us to continue through ruin. Each creation, each act of attention, each translation, is a fragile gesture of survival. And perhaps survival, however small, is the only redemption we can know.

Topic 4: Hungary or Humanity: Whose Story Am I Telling?

László Krasznahorkai (Moderator)

I was born in Hungary, wrote in Hungarian, and many say my novels are soaked with the mud of its villages and the silence of its history. But tell me: Do my novels belong only to Hungary’s fate, or do they carry the burden of the entire human condition?

George Szirtes
Your villages are unmistakably Hungarian — the rhythm of speech, the bleak humor, the silence after oppression. But when I translated your sentences, I discovered they also speak for anyone who has lived through collapse. They are Hungarian in detail but universal in weight.

John Banville
I see them as global. The syntax itself has nothing provincial about it. It is metaphysical, existential. Yes, Hungary is the soil, but the roots break into the sky. You are writing the human condition in Hungarian, not merely Hungary in human language.

Susan Sontag
I think the particular and the universal cannot be separated. You write with Hungary in your blood, yet what flows out is a diagnosis of modern despair. The best literature is always both: a wound from a place, but a mirror for the world.

Katie Kitamura
For me, as a reader outside Hungary, your works felt like maps of my own disintegration. They are not bound by nation. The endlessness of your sentences felt like the endlessness of digital time, global unrest, and modern exile.

György Dragomán
Still, I must insist: the flavor of Hungarian collapse is unique. The silence after dictatorship, the cynicism after betrayal — those are ours. But when translated, they resonate abroad because everyone has their own silence, their own betrayal. That is how your Hungary becomes the world.

László Krasznahorkai

If the novels travel beyond their soil, then let me ask: How much of literature is shaped by the soil, the language, the nation — and how much transcends all borders?

Péter Esterházy
We Hungarians often joke that our language is a prison and a freedom at once. It shapes us absolutely, but it also makes us untranslatable. Yet literature, when it escapes, becomes something else. It transcends by betraying its soil.

James Wood
Every great work emerges from soil, yet in form it transcends. Kafka is Prague and also the cosmos. Joyce is Dublin and also humanity. You are Hungary, yes, but your sentences are about time, despair, endurance — concepts with no borders.

Ottilie Mulzet
Translation is the key here. Soil and nation define the seed, but translation lets it grow elsewhere. I often felt your Hungarian roots tightening around me, but by carrying them into English, I saw them become everyone’s inheritance.

Colm Tóibín
I would say soil is the crucible, but not the limit. My own Ireland taught me that exile is often the true birthplace of universality. Your novels carry Hungarian mud on their boots, but they walk into the world’s cities.

Béla Tarr
In film, I could not erase the Hungarian soil — the rain, the mud, the decay. But when people abroad watched Satantango, they told me: “That is our village too.” Soil is particular, but despair is borderless.

László Krasznahorkai

So if despair is borderless, then I must ask one final question: Can despair in one small Hungarian town speak for despair everywhere? Or is this presumption itself a danger?

Susan Sontag
Despair speaks universally because it is the most democratic of conditions. No one escapes it. A small Hungarian town becomes the world because despair shrinks distances.

George Szirtes
I agree, though cautiously. Yes, despair is everywhere, but it must be spoken from somewhere. Your towns matter because they are not abstract — they are muddy, real, fragile. Universality emerges from the particular, never from generalization.

John Banville
Yes, despair anywhere is despair everywhere. But what makes yours powerful is not the despair itself, but the beauty of its rendering. Without that, it would not travel.

Katie Kitamura
I would add: despair resonates differently across contexts. A Hungarian village and an American suburb are not the same, but the feeling of waiting, of collapse without end, translates. That is how your fiction moves across borders.

György Dragomán
And perhaps despair is not the only thing. In those towns there are also stubbornness, laughter, absurdity. Those too travel. They show that even in despair, humanity insists. That insistence makes your Hungarian towns global.

László Krasznahorkai (closing)

So perhaps my novels are both Hungary and humanity. The mud, the rain, the silence — they belong to my soil. But in each translation, in each reader’s despair, they become the world’s. To speak from a village is not to diminish humanity; it is to show that humanity is always born in a village, always local, always fragile — and yet endlessly shared.

Topic 5: Visionary Despair vs. Hidden Hope: What Remains After the Sentence Ends?

László Krasznahorkai (Moderator)

I have been told that my novels are filled with despair, that my sentences drag readers to the edge of collapse. Yet, in the act of continuation, some whisper there is hope. So I ask: If despair is unending, what purpose does literature serve in continuing to speak it aloud?

George Szirtes
Literature is the act of recording despair so that it cannot vanish unnoticed. If despair is unending, then literature is its archive. Its purpose is not to heal, but to testify — to leave behind a trace of endurance.

Susan Sontag
The act of naming despair is already resistance. Silence allows despair to triumph invisibly. Literature does not conquer despair, but it unmasks it, and in that exposure lies dignity, perhaps even justice.

Colm Tóibín
Yes, despair is endless, but literature shapes it. A novel transforms the raw chaos of despair into a form, a rhythm. That shaping is purpose itself. It gives us a way to inhabit despair without being destroyed by it.

Béla Tarr
When I film the rain falling for hours, I do not do it to show despair as spectacle. I do it so people will endure time as it is. Literature does the same: it forces endurance. Its purpose is not escape, but truth.

Ottilie Mulzet
In translating your sentences, I often felt despair in the impossibility of carrying them fully. Yet that attempt gave me purpose. Literature is not about succeeding against despair, but about refusing to give up the attempt.

László Krasznahorkai

So literature continues not to save us but to insist upon endurance. Yet tell me: Does the act of endurance itself — sentence after sentence, page after page — create hope where none was intended? Or is it only the illusion of hope?

György Dragomán
I think it does create hope. In a country where collapse is constant, the stubborn act of continuing, of going on, becomes a quiet rebellion. Endurance is hope disguised as persistence.

John Banville
I am less certain. Endurance is not necessarily hope. But in art, endurance often produces beauty, and beauty inspires. Even if unintended, hope sneaks in through the cracks of form.

Péter Esterházy
Endurance itself is the joke of existence. But even jokes carry hope — the laughter that follows is proof of survival. To endure is to live long enough to laugh, even in despair.

Katie Kitamura
I believe endurance itself is a kind of hope. To keep reading through your long sentences, to keep translating, to keep watching — that continuation generates a fragile optimism, even if the content itself is despair.

James Wood
Yes, the act of form is always hopeful. A sentence that refuses to die embodies the refusal of silence. It cannot help but be hopeful, even if it never intended to be.

László Krasznahorkai

But then what remains when all sentences finally end? When the last page is turned, the last word spoken — what remains: silence, or the faint echo of redemption?

Susan Sontag
What remains is attention. The silence after the last word is filled with the memory of having looked deeply. That memory is redemption enough.

George Szirtes
I think it is echo. A sentence ends, but it reverberates inside the reader. That reverberation is not silence, but persistence. In that persistence lies a form of redemption.

Béla Tarr
For me, it is silence — but silence charged with weight. When the screen goes black, the audience still feels the rain. That lingering weight is redemption, not the silence itself.

Colm Tóibín
What remains is the possibility of continuation elsewhere — in another sentence, another book, another life. Redemption is not final; it is the continuation of echoes.

Ottilie Mulzet
I would say both remain: silence, yes, but silence transformed. Translation has taught me that endings are never complete. Each ending is the beginning of another attempt. Redemption lies in that cycle.

László Krasznahorkai (closing)

So perhaps despair is unending, but so is endurance. Literature does not abolish silence, but it changes its quality. After the final sentence, there is silence, yes — but also an echo, a vibration, a continuation. And perhaps that echo, fragile as it is, is all the redemption we will ever know.

Final Thoughts by László Krasznahorkai

At the end of these conversations, as at the end of my novels, nothing is concluded. The village still waits, the whale still drifts, the rain still falls. But this endlessness is not without meaning. It reminds us that collapse is not an event that passes, but a condition we inhabit, like weather. And even as everything dissolves — language, memory, community — we find ourselves carrying fragments: a line, an image, a silence that refuses to be forgotten.

If hope exists, it does not come as resolution or redemption, but as persistence. It lies in Evelyn pressing blurred pages flat upon her table, in Mark stumbling barefoot through floodwater with his manuscript, in Lila whispering an endless sentence that will not stop. These gestures, fragile and nearly invisible, are what endure when nothing else can. To remember, to witness, to keep the sentence moving forward — this is the only salvation literature offers, and perhaps the only salvation life itself allows. And if that is all, it must be enough.

Short Bios:

László Krasznahorkai

Hungarian novelist and 2025 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, known for his apocalyptic vision and famously unbroken sentences. His works, including Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, and Seiobo There Below, explore collapse, endurance, and the persistence of art in a ruined world.

Béla Tarr

Renowned Hungarian filmmaker who adapted Krasznahorkai’s Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance (Werckmeister Harmonies) into monumental, slow-cinema masterpieces. His stark visual style mirrors the unrelenting bleakness of Krasznahorkai’s prose.

George Szirtes

Poet and translator of Satantango, who brought Krasznahorkai’s winding, unbroken sentences into English with both precision and lyricism. His translations helped introduce Krasznahorkai to an international readership.

Ottilie Mulzet

Award-winning translator of Krasznahorkai’s later works, including Seiobo There Below and War and War. Known for her ability to render Krasznahorkai’s long, complex sentences into English without losing their rhythm or spiritual weight.

Péter Esterházy

Influential Hungarian postmodern writer, whose experimental prose and playful dismantling of narrative tradition stand in counterpoint to Krasznahorkai’s visionary despair. Both are central voices of late 20th-century Hungarian literature.

György Dragomán

Contemporary Hungarian novelist, author of The White King and The Bone Fire, whose work, like Krasznahorkai’s, often depicts lives marked by totalitarian collapse and generational trauma.

Franz Kafka

Austrian-Czech writer and precursor to Central European modernism. His works of existential dread and bureaucratic absurdity profoundly influenced Krasznahorkai’s sense of despair, dislocation, and endurance.

Seiobo (Mythic Figure)

The Japanese goddess of immortality referenced in Seiobo There Below, embodying beauty, divinity, and the fleeting nature of transcendence. Serves as a symbolic counterweight to Krasznahorkai’s human despair.

Korim (Character in War and War)

The protagonist of War and War, an archivist obsessed with preserving a mysterious manuscript. His tragic, obsessive devotion reflects Krasznahorkai’s meditation on art’s survival beyond human collapse.

Esther (Character in The Melancholy of Resistance)

A central figure in The Melancholy of Resistance, embodying endurance and clarity within a community unraveling under spectacle, rumor, and collapse. She reflects the novel’s fragile human core.