The 2020s have been good to Hungarian intellectuals. In 2023, Katalin Karikó and Ferenc Krausz collected Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine and Physics, respectively. David Szalay was recently shortlisted for a Booker. Now, László Krasznahorkai has won a Nobel Prize in Literature for a body of work that stretches back to the late Soviet era. 

Karikó, Krausz, and Szalay all moved abroad, but Krasznahorkai still lives in a small Hungarian village, a reminder that our sharpest observers are often drawn from the periphery. Situated in the hinterlands of the old Soviet Empire and its NATO and European Union successors, Krasznahorkai is very far indeed from Moscow, Brussels, and New York. 

Just what has Krasznahorkai picked up on from the fringes of the Western world? Admiring peers and laudatory reviewers often use the word “apocalyptic” to describe his books. Susan Sontag, an early booster, said Krasznahorkai was a “master of the apocalypse,” a phrase highlighted by the Nobel Committee in its survey of his career. A 2012 New York Times review of the English translation of Kraznahorkai’s first novel, Satantango, also mentions that word. The critical consensus suggests Krasznahorkai is a sort of literary........

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