The future never arrives; it is always awaited

As in every year, this year too there was much speculation surrounding the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among the possible contenders was the Hungarian short story writer and novelist László Krasznahorkai, who is also well known as a screenwriter. Born in 1954, this eminent writer won the Man Booker Prize in 2015. Now, at the age of seventy-one, he has been awarded the Nobel Prize in 2025. His novels may be described as belonging to the dystopian genre. His celebrated novel The Melancholy of Resistance was adapted into a film by the renowned director Béla Tarr.

On Thursday (9 October), while announcing the prize at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, the Nobel Committee praised Krasznahorkai, saying, “At a time when the world is overwhelmed by fear of the ultimate apocalypse, he stands against it with the power of art. It is for his profound and visionary body of work that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature this year.”

For the readers of Views Bangladesh, we present a brief interview with Laszlo Krasznahorkai. The interview was conducted by British writer and journalist Hari Kunzru for The Yale Review, and has been translated into Bangla by Kamrul Ahsan.

HARI KUNZRU: Your story “An Angel Passed Above Us” is set in Ukraine. What does the war in Ukraine mean for you? Your perspective on this conflict—as a European, a Hungarian, someone who has lived for a long time in Germany—would be interesting to hear.

LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI: That the First World War is essentially repeating itself?! What do I think?!

It fills me with horror. Hungary is a neighboring country of Ukraine, and the Orbán regime is taking an unprecedented stance—almost unparalleled in Hungarian history. This is partly because, until now, we were always the ones being attacked and losing, and partly because I could never have imagined that the Hungarian political leadership would talk about so-called neutrality in this matter!

How can a country be neutral when the Russians invade a neighboring country? And haven’t they been killing Ukrainians for nearly three years? What do you mean “This is an internal Slavic affair”?!—as the Hungarian prime minister puts it?! How can it be an internal matter when people are being killed? And it is the leader of a country saying this—a country that has been constantly invaded throughout history. Among others, by the Russians. And these Russians are the same Russians.

This Hungarian regime is a psychiatric case. There is the inhuman calculation behind it: Maybe they have already killed my daughter, but I would rather accept that so that they don’t harm my mother. But they will harm her. They will kill both. Is it so hard to understand?

HARI KUNZRU: “An Angel Passed Above Us” follows two dying men in a dugout, one of whom is telling a kind of fairy tale about the wonders of globalization to the other. The contrast between that fairy tale and the reality for the two dying men is very stark. It seems to undercut the techno-optimistic tone of this tale about the accelerating world. Could you say something more about why you have chosen to place these two elements side by side?

LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI: A dirty, rotten war is unfolding before my eyes. The world is starting to get used to it. I cannot get used to it. I am incapable of accepting that people are killing people. Maybe I’m a psychiatric case. All of this is happening while, in the digital space, there is a vision of the future promising that the terrifyingly rapid advancement of technology will soon bring a beautiful new world. This is complete madness. While a fundamentally twentieth-century war is raging, someone is talking about how we’ll soon be going to Mars. I hope Putin and his sympathizers will be the first passengers.

HARI KUNZRU: Your storyteller insists that “he was not an analyst of the future but rather of trends, data, facts.” He is uncomfortable with the “cosmic” level and the individual “psychological level.” He prefers the level of the social. Is knowledge of “the future” something more spiritual or metaphysical than this kind of empirical, “data-driven” knowledge?

LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI: It’s quite an uncomfortable question. After all, in this piece, the events do not unfold in some general context; rather, one wounded man is trying to keep another, mortally wounded, alive in a trench by talking to him about hope—about a beautiful new world where everything will be different, where everything will be wonderful. A basic human instinct drives him to offer comfort to another. They have no other hope, and even the one telling the story of the digital future knows he is merely stalling for time, hoping their comrades might come back for them—even though he knows, as does the other, that in their current situation, this is impossible. So no, this speech does not have a spiritual or metaphysical dimension; it is, in fact, deeply practical: to keep the more severely wounded man alive through the suggestion of futile hope.

HARI KUNZRU: This setting—the front line of a brutal trench war—is somehow familiar in your writing. I know that Sontag’s description of you as a “master of the apocalypse” follows you around. But if your writing is about the experience of apocalypse, it does not seem to be a sudden event but something slow and grinding. What is our relationship to the future? Are these the end times? Or are we living after some kind of apocalyptic event?

LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI: The apocalypse is not a single event, as the New Testament’s prophecy of the Last Judgment threatens. The apocalypse is a process that has been going on for a very long time and will continue for a very long time. The apocalypse is now. The apocalypse is an ongoing judgment.

We can only delude ourselves with the future; hope always belongs to the future. And the future never arrives. It is always just about to come. Only what is now exists.

We know nothing about the past because what we think of as the past is merely a story about the past. In reality, the present is also just a story. It contains both the story of the past and the future that will never come. But at least what we live as the present exists. And only that exists. Hell and heaven are both on Earth, and they are here now. We do not have to wait for them. Yet we do, comforting ourselves with the score of hope.