Satantango by 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Laszlo Krasznahorkai depicts the post-totalitarian order in a decrepit Hungarian village descending into moral decay and despair in the aftermath of socialism
In the opening chapter of Satantango, the debut novel by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a crippled man Futaki wakes to the sound of bells. They seem close, “swept along by the wind,” but he knows there are no bells within hearing distance. The nearby chapel “had no bell, the tower had collapsed during the war.” But the clangour persists.
The sound is neither real nor unreal; it exists in the book’s peculiar register of unease, in which perception and delusion, sensation and hallucination are barely separable: “there was nothing to hear however hard he listened but the dull beating of his own heart, as if the whole thing had been merely a kind of game or ghostly half-dream.” The novel begins in confusion, and that confusion is the only certainty it maintains.
Satantango, first published in Hungary in 1985 and translated by George Szirtes in 2012 (New Directions), takes place on an unnamed, derelict collective farm somewhere in rural Hungary that lies under “mercilessly long autumn rains” that turn “the cracked and saline soil” into “a stinking yellow sea of mud.” The rain has begun and will not stop: “Later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach.” Time seems suspended in this unending drizzle.
Krasznahorkai writes in enormous, coiling sentences, each one dragging the next into motion. The reader proceeds through a continuous present tense of decay where “anything might happen” but nothing does. Early in the novel, a long, winding sentence — composed of multiple clauses, strung together with commas, conjunctions, and ellipses; it captures the overwhelming rush of a revelation or existential crisis — begins with a quiet, melancholic observation and escalates into a crescendo of metaphysical insight and despair, culminating in a brutal vision of death and betrayal:
“He (Futaki) gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity . . . and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away, only, eventually, to deliver himself — utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials — into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had marked the cards and who would, in the end, strip him even of his last means of defense, of that hope of someday finding his way back home.”
Afterlife of socialism
The novel’s cast of characters is small but symphonic in despair. They live in the afterlife of the socialist experiment, absorbed in their visions of the faraway, waiting for something that might give shape to their degeneration. The ideological project that once animated their world has decomposed, leaving only habit and hunger.
Futaki, the lame drifter, is our first witness, an observer whose suspicions mask dependence. He shares a bed and secret with Mrs Schmidt, whose “sour smell” and anxious dreams point to the domestic rot of the estate. Her husband, Mr Schmidt, is a petty schemer, forever demanding his “share,” bullying and pleading in the same breath. The Kráners — quarrelsome, broke, their home “stifling hot”— mirror the Schmidts’ moral exhaustion. Mrs Halics, muttering over her Bible, and her husband, the drunk, form another pair of shadows.
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Above them all hovers the Doctor, an obese voyeur who spies on his neighbours through a slit in the curtain, filling notebooks with observations: “Thank God, it’s raining without interruption. It’s the perfect defense.” His watchfulness is both scientific and insane, the parody of reason at the end of history. Into this stasis arrive Irimiás and Petrina, two men who have been thought dead for 18 months, but are now returning from the city. To the villagers, they are saviours; to the reader, conmen. “Irimiás is a great magician,” Futaki says admiringly, “He could turn a pile of cow shit into a mansion if he wanted to.”
When Irimiás finally appears, the villagers greet him as a prophet. Krasznahorkai renders him with the moral ambiguity of an administrator or a small-town messiah. He speaks the language of renewal — order, reconstruction, “the beginning of a new life” — but his eloquence is parasitic. He survives on their hunger for meaning. His plan, which involves reorganising the villagers under his authority and seizing their remaining money, is both absurd and bureaucratically plausible. “We shall rise again,” he says, but what rises is only the machinery of control. He manipulates the gullible with rhetoric the way totalitarian states manipulate hope: by turning belief itself into submission.
The rhythm of futility
The 12 chapters of Satantango unfold through multiple voices and shifts of perception. The title refers to a tango: six chapters forward, six backward in time, creating a disorienting, recursive rhythm that mirrors the characters’ psychological and existential inanition. The novel’s genius lies in how it performs the conjuring trick itself: the illusion of progress through the choreography of repetition. Its formal symmetry, its geometry is the image of its world; a choreography of futility, endlessly returning to the same point.
Irimiás’s speech to the gathered crowd leads only to dissolution, dispersal, and silence. Even the brief episode of Esti, the child who poisons a cat and herself, reads like a private apocalypse: innocence and corruption made indistinguishable. By the novel’s end, time itself has folded back. The Doctor, alone again in his house, believes he can control reality through language — “I find I can control the flow of events around me using nothing more than words” — and begins to write the very opening lines of the book we have just finished reading. The circle closes, and with it Krasznahorkai’s bleak, hypnotic demonstration of how people continue to move — to conspire, desire, and dream — long after meaning has drained from the world.
The relationship between Futaki and Mrs Schmidt, which opens the novel, encapsulates the logic of dependence and futility. They are not bound by affection but by conspiracy. He wakes beside her “soundless as a cat,” peers through the “mousehole-sized window,” and feels both claustrophobia and lust. She, in turn, recounts her nightmares of intruders and broken locks. Their intimacy is functional: the pooling of despair into routine. Their conspiracy against Schmidt is only the rehearsal of another defeat. The novel’s most haunting sequence belongs to Esti, a young girl who poisons a cat, then herself. Esti’s death marks the moral nadir of the village.
The circular authorship
That closing gesture — the self-engulfing loop — is not a metafictional trick so much as the logical consequence of the book’s method. From the start, Krasznahorkai has treated narrative not as representation but as contagion. Perception breeds description; description breeds belief. Each consciousness in Satantango is trapped inside its own syntax of dread. The doctor’s notebooks merely formalize what the novel has been doing all along.
The world of Satantango is governed by grammar. The long sentences, with their recursive clauses and sliding modulations of tense, create a system that can’t stop describing itself. The novel’s apocalypse is linguistic: a universe in which every observation is both accurate and futile. “He thought it was death,” we read, “but death, he felt, was only a kind of warning rather than a desperate and permanent end.” Even extinction is an observation to be recorded.
If Irimiás’s false resurrection offers a parody of salvation, the Doctor’s final revelation offers a parody of creation. He begins to believe he can control reality through writing. “I find I can control the flow of events around me using nothing more than words,” he notes, trembling. He begins to dictate what the others are doing —“He is sitting with his back to the window, his body casting a pale shadow on the floor”— and convinces himself that his sentences shape their fates.
But his “mesmerizing power” collapses in farce: he mistakes the sound of a madman ringing a chapel bell for “the Great Bells of Heaven.” Returning home, he nails his door shut, mixes another drink, and begins again: “One morning near the end of October…” The first line of the novel becomes its last. The doctor has become its author. The circle closes.
This act of circular authorship reveals Krasznahorkai’s true design. The Doctor is both participant and creator, a grotesque demiurge whose delusion mirrors the novelist’s craft. His notebooks are the novel itself. In his drunken repetition lies the structure’s logic: endless observation, endless rewriting, endless return. “Unless the nails rotted in the door,” he muses, “no one would disturb him.” The nails, of course, are language, the only defense against decay.
The dance of the damned
The atmosphere of Satantango is unmistakable: perpetual rain, crumbling walls, “stinking yellow mud”. Krasznahorkai’s Hungary is a landscape emptied of ideology but not of suffering. The collective farm has failed; the Party is absent; only habit remains. The mud is both literal and metaphysical, the residue of a system that promised movement and delivered only chimeras. “They’re dead, all of them,” the Doctor writes, “Or they’re sitting at the kitchen table leaning on their elbows.” The novel’s realism is so precise it becomes hallucinatory; the more detailed the world, the less it seems to exist.
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Krasznahorkai’s philosophical reach is wide but unshowy. His world evokes Kafka’s bureaucracy, Beckett’s waiting, and Dostoevsky’s moral vertigo, but it belongs to no tradition but his own. What distinguishes Satantango is its tone of relentless exactitude, the conviction that despair must be recorded with the same care as faith. Even its title mocks transcendence: the tango with Satan is not a pact but a pattern, a movement endlessly rehearsed. Time itself is the antagonist. As Irimiás tells the villagers, “Everything will begin again, just as before, only better,” a line that captures both his deceit and Krasznahorkai’s irony. Nothing begins again; only the words do.
Béla Tarr’s seven-hour film adaptation (1994) translates this logic into pure duration. His camera moves with the same inexorable patience as Krasznahorkai’s prose. Scenes of rain, footsteps, or wind extend beyond narrative into ritual. The film’s famous long take of drunken villagers dancing in the bar is both grotesque and transcendent, a literal satantango, the dance of the damned. Tarr’s black-and-white images, accompanied by Mihály Víg’s droning score, capture the novel’s rhythm of exhaustion turned to form.
A book about the failure of belief
Satantango is not a novel about events but about the conditions that make events meaningless. It is a study in the entropy of human systems: political, moral, linguistic. Its chapters form a loop of cause and effect that cancels itself; its sentences chronicle the movements of thought before collapse. To read it is to inhabit stasis, to feel time thickening around one’s own breath.
Krasznahorkai’s reputation as the “master of the apocalypse” — Susan Sontag’s phrase — is misleading if taken literally. His worlds do not end; they persist beyond meaning. The apocalypse is not an event but a state of attention. The book’s tempo, its unbroken sentences and circular form, reflect that endurance. Catastrophe, here, is what happens when nothing changes.
Krasznahorkai’s universe is not moral in any ordinary sense. It offers no redemption, no punishment, but only the persistence of description. To continue seeing is to resist disappearance. That is why the novel must loop back on itself: to sustain the act of noticing. In the paragraph quoted in the beginning of this piece, Futaki “saw.. the whole of time as a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity.”
That vision — time as a brief accident in a larger stillness — is the key to Krasznahorkai’s art. His fiction turns entropy into structure, paralysis into style. Satantango is not a novel about the end of the world; it is the world, continuing after its end, narrated into being by those who can’t stop watching. His characters are anatomies of human inertia. Their small betrayals, their dreams of escape, their paranoid routines — all are the movements of a species that cannot bear stillness and cannot change. Satantango is, in its own way, a sacred text of the secular: a book about the failure of belief written with the fervour of belief itself.
To read Satantango in today’s India, where slogans of “New India” and “Amrit Kaal” drown out dissent is to feel the echo of its slow hypnosis. The novel’s world of endless rain, whispered rumours, and a messiah who makes false promises recalls not a distant European past but a recognisable present. In a sense, Satantango is not just a Hungarian tragedy; it is a parable for every nation that mistakes repetition for renewal and still keeps dancing to the music of its own undoing. In today’s India, where a cult of personality has replaced argument and faith has replaced reason, Satantango reads like a warning; it’s a mirror in which we can still recognise ourselves, if we dare to look.
