The Political Power of Timeless Art

László Krasznahorkai, who won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature today, is not the easiest writer to read. His sentences can go on for hundreds of pages; his plots don’t resolve, they dissolve; and his persistent mood is existential dread. But the Hungarian novelist’s central theme is easily parsed and sadly evergreen. Krasznahorkai writes about the stultifying effects of political oppression, but he also writes in defiance of people’s readiness to accept them. As a result, his work is equal parts depressing and invigorating. His landscapes are muddy and void, prone to sudden invasion by disturbing strangers, including the giant whale carcass that arrives on a train at the beginning of his 1989 novel, The Melancholy of Resistance. His never-ending sentences reflect the alienation of his ch