{"id":4390,"date":"2022-09-07T22:19:23","date_gmt":"2022-09-07T21:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/?p=4390"},"modified":"2026-09-18T08:10:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T07:10:22","slug":"%d0%bb%d0%b0%d1%81%d0%bb%d0%be-%d0%ba%d1%80%d0%b0%d1%81%d0%bd%d0%b0%d1%85%d0%be%d1%80%d0%ba%d0%b0%d0%b8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/2022\/participants-2022\/%d0%bb%d0%b0%d1%81%d0%bb%d0%be-%d0%ba%d1%80%d0%b0%d1%81%d0%bd%d0%b0%d1%85%d0%be%d1%80%d0%ba%d0%b0%d0%b8\/","title":{"rendered":"L\u00c1SZL\u00d3 KRASZNAHORKAI"},"content":{"rendered":"

L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai<\/strong> is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter known for demanding novels with dystopian and melancholic themes. Several of his works have been adapted into feature films by Hungarian filmmaker B\u00e9la Tarr.<\/p>\n

L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, on 5 January 1954. Since completing his university studies, Krasznahorkai has worked as an independent writer. In 1985, his debut novel Satantango achieved immediate success and brought him to the forefront of Hungarian literary life. It is a dystopian novel set in his native Hungary and is considered his best-known work. Beginning in 1985, renowned director and close friend of the author B\u00e9la Tarr made films almost exclusively based on Krasznahorkai\u2019s works.<\/p>\n

Krasznahorkai has received international critical acclaim. Susan Sontag described him as a contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse, comparing him to Gogol and Melville. W. G. Sebald noted that the universality of Krasznahorkai\u2019s vision rivals that of Gogol\u2019s Dead Souls and far surpasses the lesser concerns of contemporary writing. In 2015, he received the International Booker Prize, becoming the first Hungarian author to win the award.<\/p>\n

He has published the following novels: Satantango (1985), The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), The Prisoner of Urga (1992), War & War (1999), Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens (2004), Seiobo There Below (2008), Baron Wenckheim\u2019s Homecoming (2016), and Herscht 07769 (2021); novellas: The World Goes On? [Note: the Serbian source lists Mountain to the North, Lake to the South, Roads to the West, River to the East (2003), The Last Wolf (2009), Apr\u00f3munka egy palota\u00e9rt (2018), and Mindig Hom\u00e9rosznak (2019)]; and collections of short stories: Relations of Grace (1986) and The World Goes On (2013). He wrote the screenplays for B\u00e9la Tarr\u2019s films Damnation (1988), The Last Boat (1989), Satantango (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (1997\u20132001), The Man from London (2007), and The Turin Horse (2011).<\/p>\n

Krasznahorkai has received numerous literary awards, including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2021), the Literature.gr Phrase of the Year Prize (2020), the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the United States for Baron Wenckheim\u2019s Homecoming (2019), the Aegon Art Award for Baron Wenckheim\u2019s Homecoming (2017), the International Booker Prize (2015), the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers fellowship at the New York Public Library (2015), the Vilenica Prize (2014), the Best Translated Book Award for Ottilie Mulzet\u2019s translation of Seiobo There Below (2014), the America Award for Lifetime Contribution to International Writing (2014), the Best Translated Book Award for George Szirtes\u2019s translation of Satantango (2013), the Prima Primissima Prize (2012), the Br\u00fccke-Berlin Prize (Germany, 2010) for Seiobo There Below, the Spycher Prize (Switzerland, 2010) for his body of work, particularly the novella The World Goes On? [as listed in the source], the Hungarian Writers\u2019 Association Award (2009), the Hungarian Heritage Award (2008), the Kossuth Prize (2004), the Soros Foundation Award (2003), the Laureate of the Republic of Hungary (2002), the S\u00e1ndor M\u00e1rai Award (1998), the Gyula Kr\u00fady Award (1993), the Bestenliste Award (Germany, 1993) for The Melancholy of Resistance, the Tibor D\u00e9ry Award (1992), a DAAD Fellowship (West Berlin, 1987\/1988), the Attila J\u00f3zsef Prize (1987), and the Mikes Kelemen K\u00f6r Award (Netherlands, 1987).<\/p>\n

About the novel Satantango<\/h2>\n

L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai\u2019s inexhaustible, claustrophobic prose, with its long, meandering yet precise sentences, presents an absurd and visceral saga stretched between banality and apocalypse, placing him in the distinguished company of European writers such as Kafka, Beckett and Bernhard.<\/p>\n

Satantango is a \u201cnovel of waiting\u201d about an unnamed Hungarian village and its impoverished, grotesque inhabitants, trapped by their own inability to leave their stagnant backwater and search for a better future. Taking place over three rainy days, the plot culminates in a central scene of dancing with the devil in the local tavern, while the novel\u2019s circular structure reinforces the sense of being unable to escape the cycle in which this infernal dance takes place. The work seems to follow the steps of a tango as the bleak reality, portrayed through the psychological states of the villagers, slowly but inevitably collapses. A great tragedy will occur, and the false prophet Irimi\u00e1s will emerge as the central figure in this inexorable disintegration. It is a simple story, written in a complex yet impeccably precise style, filled with disturbing details and narrative \u201cloops\u201d that force the reader to question the foundations of their own reality.<\/p>\n

Satantango, a masterpiece of contemporary European and Hungarian literature, on which B\u00e9la Tarr based his cult classic of almost eight hours in length, offers yet another confirmation of the old idea that the devil always has the best time. He delights in the infidelities, intrigues, unfulfilled hopes and brutally interrupted dreams of the remaining villagers, embittered by malice and unable to free themselves from the quicksand of everyday life. Their world exists somewhere between the cosmic and the tragic, in the most insignificant corner of the universe, where everyone knows, with absolute certainty, the steps of the great dance of death.<\/p>\n

About the novel The Melancholy of Resistance<\/h2>\n

The Melancholy of Resistance, Krasznahorkai\u2019s second novel, tells an unusual story set in a small town in the Hungarian Great Plain, where a circus arrives with an enormous stuffed whale. It soon becomes clear, however, that both the circus and the whale are merely a fa\u00e7ade and an excuse for the Prince, a terrifying \u201ccreature from the shadows,\u201d to incite a mob that begins destroying everything in its path in the name of some supposed \u201crestoration of the Whole.\u201d The general atmosphere of panic and confusion is exploited by the robust and ambitious Mrs Eszter, who seizes the levers of political power in the town. This novel by L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai takes the reader into the dark depths of a world devastated in every sense, where everyday logic no longer applies and all conventional notions of life are ruthlessly dismantled.<\/p>\n

About the short-story collection The World Goes On<\/h2>\n

The stories collected in this book take place in various parts of the world, with their settings ranging from the present day to the very recent past. The protagonists are people with great expectations and desires who constantly dream of leaving and escaping their everyday lives, yet ultimately lack the courage to change anything about their trivial existences and remain where they are, while the world moves on, as the title itself implicitly suggests.<\/p>\n

ANDREW CRUMEY<\/h2>\n

Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics. He was director of West London Nightline and a caregiver at Westminster Mencap. He moved to Newcastle in 1992 and began working as a mathematics teacher in secondary schools. However, in 1996, he began writing book reviews. He has also written for The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Financial Times and other newspapers. He regularly participates in literary and scientific conferences.<\/p>\n

As a writer, he has long been recognized as a distinctive voice in Scottish literature. He is the author of eight novels, which have been translated into fifteen languages. He has received two prestigious literary awards, the Saltire Award and the Northern Rock Foundation Writer\u2019s Award. For several years, he worked as an editor for Scotland on Sunday and as a research fellow at the Durham Institute for Advanced Studies. He currently teaches creative writing at Northumbria University in Newcastle and regularly reviews books for the Wall Street Journal and other publications.<\/p>\n

Philosophy, history, science and music are among the themes that preoccupy Andrew Crumey\u2019s fiction. Finding the term \u201cnovel of ideas\u201d too constricting, he prefers the expression \u201csomewhat philosophical novel.\u201d Crumey\u2019s first book, Music in a Foreign Language, was published in 1994. He soon published two more books: Pfitz (1995) and D\u2019Alembert\u2019s Principle (1996). Pfitz was a New York Times Notable Book, while D\u2019Alembert\u2019s Principle was nominated for the Booker Prize. In 2000, he published the novel Mr Mee, followed by M\u00f6bius Dick in 2004. Crumey won the \u00a360,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writer\u2019s Award, the largest literary prize in the United Kingdom, for his novel Sputnik Caledonia, published in 2008. The only Crumey novel to date translated into Serbian, Secret Knowledge, was published in 2013. His eighth book, The Great Chain of Unbeing, was published in 2018.<\/p>\n

About the novel Secret Knowledge<\/h2>\n

\u201cThe basic concept of the novel is an idea that Crumey has explored several times: quantum suicide, a concept that combines the metaphor of Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat with the idea of the multiverse, that is, multiple interconnected universes branching off from the smallest changes in the course of history and subsequently diverging to an ever greater degree. The idea of quantum suicide is based on the premise that, in every life-threatening situation, several parallel universes come into existence, and that in at least one of them the person in danger must survive. Secret Knowledge examines precisely such a case: in 1913, the young composer Pierre Klauer kills himself for seemingly incomprehensible reasons, immediately after proposing to the woman he loves. Several decades later, David Conroy, an unsuccessful concert pianist and piano teacher, while attempting to come to terms with the decline of his career and the collapse of a long-term relationship, comes across the manuscript of Klauer\u2019s work Secret Knowledge and discovers the possibility that Klauer survived. [\u2026] \u2018\u2026the book is about a musician completely opposed to false prestige, the shallow taste of the masses and conventional opinion; a person who lives for art in a world that recognizes only commercial value, which is why he is considered mad.\u2019 In this brief, unspoken reply, Crumey manages to touch upon several themes at once: to establish a connection with the novel M\u00f6bius Dick, in which he explores Schumann\u2019s composition inspired by Hoffmann\u2019s work; to succinctly convey Conroy\u2019s perception of himself; and to implicitly evoke Hoffmann\u2019s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, in which, with similar compositional daring, the contrasting biographies of Murr and Kreisler alternate and intertwine. In this multilayered counterpoint, everything that makes Secret Knowledge worth reading comes together.\u201d (Tijana Tropin)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter known for demanding novels with dystopian and melancholic themes. Several of his works have been adapted into feature films by Hungarian filmmaker B\u00e9la Tarr. L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, on 5 January 1954. Since completing his university studies, Krasznahorkai has worked as an independent writer. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4395,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-participants-2022"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4390"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5115,"href":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4390\/revisions\/5115"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prosefest.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}