Weekend Story: And the Nobel Prize in Literature Goes To…

 When the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy described him as a writer “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” Another note from the Nobel committee called him “a writer who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic and often shatteringly beautiful.”  These are cryptic words at first glance, but within them lies a key to understanding why this award matters, not just to literature, but to our times.

Krasznahorkai’s world is one where despair is never neatly resolved, and pain has no tidy ending. His characters move through chaos and futility, yet amid the ruins, there is always an ember of meaning, not in salvation, but in endurance itself. His art does not redeem life through a single spiritual awakening or moral closure; rather, it accepts the brokenness of the world and finds within it a quiet, trembling beauty.

The apocalypse he speaks of is not a cosmic event but the slow corrosion of meaning in modern existence, and yet, art becomes a fragile but luminous thread that keeps humanity tethered to hope.

To understand this sensibility, one might turn to cinema, and to a film closer home, Raj Kapoor’s Jaagte Raho (1956). The film unfolds over a single night, where a poor, thirsty villager enters a city building in search of water and is mistaken for a thief. As he hides and wanders from one apartment to another, the city’s respectable citizens are revealed to be the real culprits, corrupt, hypocritical, and terrified of exposure. The protagonist says little; his silence mirrors the mute bewilderment of the innocent facing an unforgiving world.

The film’s haunting power lies not only in its narrative but in how it is seen. Shot in stark black and white by Subrata Mitra, the legendary cinematographer known for pioneering the technique of bounce lighting, every frame breathes an independent life. Mitra’s light doesn’t simply illuminate the darkness; it paints it, giving texture to shadow, as if the night itself were alive and complicit in the story. The contrast between light and shade mirrors the moral chiaroscuro of the film, the glimmers of compassion amid the desolation of human greed.

Like Krasznahorkai’s prose, Jaagte Raho does not offer a comforting resolution. The man’s long night ends not with triumph but with a fragile moment of grace, when a woman, played by Nargis, finally gives him water at dawn. It is not redemption in the grand sense, but something humbler, deeper: the persistence of goodness in a corrupt world, the quiet reaffirmation of human dignity.

And yet, amid the despair, there is absurd comedy. Both Kapoor and Krasznahorkai use humour not as relief but as revelation, the laughter that bursts out of darkness, unsettling rather than soothing. Their worlds are tragic and comic at once, where folly and suffering coexist, often inseparable. It is this mingling of irony and empathy that makes their art profoundly human, and truer to life than any tidy moral lesson could be.

Perhaps this is what the Nobel citation means, that art’s power lies not in erasing suffering but in giving it shape, rhythm, and meaning. In Krasznahorkai’s bleak, spiralling sentences, and in Raj Kapoor’s weary yet luminous eyes, we encounter the same truth: even in the heart of darkness, beauty flickers, not to dispel the night, but to make it visible.

In celebrating Krasznahorkai, we also celebrate the artist’s eternal struggle to see light within ruin, that unyielding belief that art, even when it cannot save, can still bear witness.