László Krasznahorkai Interview: I Didn't Want to Be a Writer

A castle and solitary knights in the mist. Sounds like the scene of a fairy tale, doesn’t it? In fact, this is a small town on the Romanian-Hungarian border in which the lauded Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai grew up. Watch him share his engaging story, which includes a job as a night watchman for a dairy farm.
“I see Gyula as being sort of like a book of legends where basically nothing is real although it could be.” Krasznahorkai recalls the extraordinary characters that inhabited his childhood town - from solitary knights in the mist to a man who would come out of his house once a year, on the day of the Hungarian 1848 Revolution, wearing clothes from that year. Returning to Gyula - which Krasznahorkai ran away from at the age of 18 - everything was different from what he remembered: “I know that those people were there, but no one believes me now. I don’t try to tell them.”
After a brutal military training, Krasznahorkai broke all ties with his family and his “wandering years” began. To avoid serving more time in the army, he moved from one county to another every three or six months, doing different types of work - from being a miner to being a Cultural Director for six villages at age 19: “You have to imagine something very poor and very bleak. It had nothing to do with being a manager.” During this period he taught the Roma children to read, and as a consequence, the local Hungarians set the House of Culture on fire to make him leave town. Krasznahorkai then became a night watchman for a dairy farm: “That was the nicest job I’ve ever had in my life.” With no possibility of sitting down at a desk to write, he acquired the ability to “write” in his head: “Once I accumulate an amount of text I can keep it in my head, some 15-20 pages, or it used to be more, then I write it down.” Even after writing his debut novel, ‘Satantango’ (1985), Krasznahorkai didn’t want to be a writer, and the latter was only published thanks to his friend, the writer Péter Eszterházy. It was only a later dissatisfaction with the book, that made him start writing ‘The Melancholy of Resistance’ (1989): “I wanted to try again, maybe this time it would work. And this is how it went on, and on. I couldn’t stop.”
László Krasznahorkai (b. 1954) is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter. Among his works are ‘Satantango’ (1985), ‘The Melancholy of Resistance’ (1989), ‘War and War’ (1999), and ‘Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming’ (2016). He has had a long-running collaboration with Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, with whom he has adapted several of his novels into films. Krasznahorkai has been honoured with numerous literary prizes, including the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature, and the highest award of the Hungarian state, the Kossuth Prize. Writer and admirer Susan Sontag described Krasznahorkai as the “contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville.” For more see: www.krasznahork...
László Krasznahorkai was interviewed by Johan Lose in August 2019 in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark.
Camera: Klaus Elmer
Translator: Peter Eszterhás
Edited by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen
Produced by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen and Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2020
Supported by Nordea-fonden
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[@attilagaborcsur]

At 5:40 he says that compulsory military service had an exhausting effect on him, but he does not claim that it was brutal (though, the two doesn't contradict each other). When he refers to Dostoevsky ('oppressed and miserable' in the subtitle), he literally quotes the title of the novel 'Humiliated and Insulted' in Hungarian translation. At 10:20 he says that the Roma ghetto had to be eliminated (not counted). At 11:20 the number of cows is 309, not 390 (not so important, after all). At 16:30 he refers to himself as a 'helpless' (gyámoltalan) not 'cowardly' (gyáva) boy. At 17:25 he applies a slightly different idiom for 'I couldn't stop' (literally: there was no turning back on the slope). At 20:10 he doesn't say 'comedy' (vígjáték), but 'endgame' (végjáték)! Some of these seem to be significant details.

[@s.lazarus]

Thank you for these corrections!

[@convolution223]

Laszlo Krasznahorkai says paradoxically that his books aren't about giving up hope, but they show an absurdity in all the hopeful characters. And, too, an absurdity with the fearful ones. Maybe fear is the other side of the absurd coin. And you can be either hopeful or fearful or nothing at all.

[@clumsydad7158]

cool story, great movies, and lit

[@ryanand154]

Louisiana is a Cajun jam.

[@a_deniz_temiz]

The heroes are also at the mercy of all they do to avoid the Human Comedy that a vulgar audience expects. To deprive those heroes of the buffer they erect between themselves and the vulgar laughter of the audience, is not art. Even if it is Honore de Balzac who does it. It is not done by artists. It shouldn't be done by anyone, unless they are, like Honore de Balzac, not artists but politicians. Or better, evildoers taken for politicians.

[@ryanand154]

You are a soft romantic.

[@noisenik]

Apocalyptic, strictly, and significantly, speaking is an ancient gnre, and would be an appalling anachronism if that were what the Krasz. is about... his engagement with hope is something quite else, if itself a lucid response to the withdrawl of the applicability, the appeal to or of, the emotional economy of said apocalyptic. I stood at dawn on Waterloo Br. with XR, having spent the night reading Calasso's The Unnameable Present, and as the breeze came up the Thames from the sea, like the fingers of a thieving hand into the unusually still city, i was most forcibly struck by the inevitable extinction that we face, some day, somehow, in a mortal fluction of the physical universe in which we might conceivably run but never hise, and i thought then of the Kras. when considering the implicit uncoupling of the fate of the individual, the species, the World and the Whole... these are the thoughts and feelings no-one has so sharpened, cut themselves upon before, whereas mortality per se, well what will ever better Gilgamesh, Homer etc? Lovely to hear him tyalk so quietly, and with such peaceful venom....

[@noisenik]

he's only told you what you already knew... (our embarresment is that inheritd wisdom is "not a good sales' pitch"....) To tell the same forever... it takes invention....

[@jenschristopher6261]

Louisiana channel?! I had no idea there was any interest in a rather oblique, intellectually challenging Hungarian writer in Louisiana. Just goes to show my prejudice, I suppose.

[@bebopdestroyer4641]

...

[@mtache4652]

the channel belongs to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark

[@habeebee]

@@mtache4652 Which I guess makes more sense, although the brief moment I, too, thought this was from maybe a Louisiana public broadcaster or the like was a very satisfying one. That would have been kind of amazing.
Lovely interview, in any case - he tells such interesting stories here too, in a way that's informative, entertaining and poetic at the same time.