OneLászló Krasznahorkai visited Delhi many winters ago. I was then stationed in Chhattisgarh, tracing the Maoist insurgency and travelling through the Red Corridor. I learnt from my friend Rahul Soni that Krasznahorkai was to attend a programme of the journal Almost Island. I went awol from my station, boarded a train and arrived in Delhi on the morning of December 20, 2013.His ‘Meet the Author’ session was scheduled for half past ten. It was a freezing morning, barely a dozen or 15 people gathered in the conference room of the India International Centre – ostensibly to partake in the silence of the novelist. A writer of some stature was in India, and yet there had been no promotional efforts and no media interviews. I took copious notes in my diary and could easily have published an article. The newspaper I worked at then, The Indian Express, was a platform that was available to me. But I did not. A writer who believed that “to be mystic is the greatest good fortune” deserved his solitude. When he received the Man Booker International Prize two years later, in 2015, I finally found a ‘reason’ to write about him.When he had come to Delhi in 2013, Krasznahorkai was not as major a laureate as he would become in the next decade. But those of us who were listening to him in that room knew, with quiet certainty, that we were in the presence of a master.He sat folded into himself, shy and hesitant, speaking in a slow and almost vanishing voice – his words almost reluctant to reach us. We, in turn, had to undertake a patient journey toward his sentences. Often he would pause, forget a word, and fall silent – his gaze drifting toward the wall or into thin air. Then he would turn to his wife, Dóra Kopcsányi, seated beside him, and look at her with all the vulnerability in the world. She would gently offer him the lost word, and the thread of his thought would resume.He spoke for a long time about literature and his writing. Someone asked him how he recorded thoughts or images that occurred to him while travelling. His answer was, “I can carry about 15 A4 pages inside me.”The novel is written within him. At his desk, he merely inscribes it.Nobel Prize winner for Literature, 2025, László Krasznahorkai. Miklós Déri, via Wikimedia CommonsHe gave an extraordinary example of greatness at the meet. During his college years, Krasznahorkai’s literature professor would arrive in the class with a book in hand and begin reading passages aloud in Hungarian. For 45 minutes he would read, and then leave the classroom in silence. Krasznahorkai caught a glimpse of the book’s cover. Ulysses. The author was a certain Joyce. Years later, Krasznahorkai learnt that the novel had not yet been translated into Hungarian. His professor had been reading and translating it simultaneously, in real time.Many years later, when I came across the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche’s penetrating words, “Concentration is the natural piety of the soul,” I was reminded of Krasznahorkai and his teacher.TwoThe country László Krasznahorkai belongs to, Hungary, lies at the heart of Central Europe. Together with the Czech Republic (also known as Czechia), Slovakia, and Poland, it forms the Visegrád Four, an alliance established to safeguard their shared interests and assert a kind of autonomy in contrast to the wealthy nations of Western Europe.Over the years, the internal politics of these nations have shifted. Hungary’s rulers today appear closer to Russia. Even so, several intellectuals from these countries continue to speak of a shared Central European sensibility. The Czech writer Milan Kundera, though he settled in France, left his heart in Central Europe, in Prague. The writer Krasznahorkai most reveres, Franz Kafka, is another native of Prague.This citizen of Central Europe seeks to protect his culture both from the great Eastern empire, Russia, and the mighty West. The shadow of the apocalypse that haunts Krasznahorkai’s fiction begins here. ThreeEver since Krasznahorkai was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, his novels have found renewed attention. His long, breathless sentences stretch across dozens of pages, suspended in an endless sky. His metaphors render dark landscapes in uncanny detail: the circus troupe in The Melancholy of Resistance arrives to exhibit a gigantic stuffed whale, a moral crisis hangs in the air, foretelling an approaching cataclysm.Long sentences, I wrote in the 2015 article, are epistemological tools that he uses to assert that the “moment is an immediate experience of the universe”. The result is asphyxiating. Composed by an unbearable gravitational pull among alphabets, his fiction is a matrix of an impending horror about things his characters can perceive but cannot completely identify. He, thus, carries the legacy of European writers grappling with a civilisation they woke up to find tattered. It should also be noted that the European novel has long nurtured a tradition of unending sentences. One may see it as a rebellion against the tyranny of punctuations and decorum of grammar. But the writer might as well find such artificial interventions insufficient or irrelevant, as he believes that the ‘full stop is a custom that doesn’t belong to the life,’ and, thus, lives in search of a worthy pause.FourIf one aspect of László Krasznahorkai’s creative gift lies in his novels, the other, and less discussed, is his cinema. Until that December morning of 2013, I had read only two of his novels: Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance. I should note that I had arrived at them through the films that Béla Tarr made from them – Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies.The poster of Satantango.Krasznahorkai had not merely written these films; he had been involved in their making, ensuring that each frame remained true to his novelistic vision. Together, he and Béla Tarr created several other masterpieces – each in black and white.Those were the years when I was possessed by a delirious dream of making films. Stationed in Chhattisgarh, I had written two scripts and was now searching for actors. A dear friend of those years, Tushar Waghela, had already made a few short films; both of us now longed to submit ourselves to a cinematic work of epic vision. Dr Parivesh Mishra, a member of the royal family of Sarangarh, had graciously offered us his family palace. One of my scripts was set in that forested estate – an old king witnessing the decay of his kingdom, a young writer who had left the capital to live in the jungle, and the shadow of Maoism hovering over the estate. We even shot a few scenes in the palace. Around the time, I had also sneaked out to visit the Gundecha brothers in Bhopal, stayed overnight at their gurukul and narrated to them the script. Result: They readily agreed to compose the music for the movie.In those fevered days of cinema, I believed that Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr represented the finest jugalbandi between a filmmaker and a novelist – an opinion I still hold. There are a few other such pairings: Peter Handke, another Nobel laureate, co-wrote the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s greatest film, Wings of Desire, and collaborated on some others. But Krasznahorkai and Béla Tarr worked together over many years that their work, in a way, can be read as a joint creative arc.I took the train to Delhi to meet the writer who had, on the shimmering slopes of cinema, scaled the artistic summits I had only begun to dream of climbing.The opening scene of The Turin Horse lingers on a massive horse trudging forward, panting and trembling. The camera rests on the animal for a long time before the old rider comes into view. Now, the man and the horse move through the frame, yoked to a big but crumbling cart. The entire film unfolds around the poor old man, his daughter, and the weakening horse – and on the minute details of their existence, on their days sustained by boiled potatoes. There is almost no dialogue: only script, camera, and performance.The opening of Werckmeister Harmonies should rank among the most luminous beginnings in the history of cinema. A young man, bearing an unnamed melancholy, enters a tavern somewhere in Central Europe. It is closing time. The owner is shoving out the last of the old drunkards when one of them makes a plea with the young man. And then the young man stages, with the help of these drunkards, a cosmic pantomime of the solar and lunar eclipse – sun, earth, and moon moving through their tragic choreography. The scene – half drama, half revelation – is creation reaching its most visionary pitch.A still from ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’.Watching this art, you realise the difference between poverty and misery. The former is not devoid of culture, and can be very rich in it. Lars Rudolph enacting a solar eclipse with alcoholics in a worn-out tavern is a great feat of cinema.Their greatest work remains the seven-hour Satantango. Over the years, I have invited several friends home to watch it; twice I even hosted ‘private screenings’ in Europe. The story is remarkably simple: a small, squalid settlement is mired in corruption and decay. A young girl, unable to bear the filth, kills herself along with her cat.There are only a few times in cinema where a girl child’s suicide has been depicted with the attention and purity it demands – Robert Bresson’s Mouchette, Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly, and Satantango. In each of these, a child’s dry and unfathomable eyes have held the moral famine of an entire society.In Satantango, the girl first beats her beloved cat, then poisons it. Holding its body, she walks through the rain-soaked village path for what feels like an eternity – the camera resting on her for nearly five minutes. Her face, wet and trembling, carries desolation, disgust, and irony. She keeps walking. The viewer, terrified, asks: is she leaving the village? Or does she want to take revenge on her family, her neighbours and those who abandoned her to the dark lane where love and compassion have long departed? We do not yet know that she will consume the same poison she gave to her cat.A still from ‘The Turin Horse.’Between Satantango and The Turin Horse lies a span of over 15 years. The girl who played the child in Satantango, Erika Bók, later becomes the daughter in The Turin Horse, helping her crippled father move gently toward his end.Krasznahorkai’s art offers, in this way, an assurance, and a sense of an ending. However debased or tragic life may become, the possibility of a dignified exit still remains. One may have been denied any rest in one’s entire life, and yet, at the end, one may still choose grace.