In a Nobel Prize lecture that defied conventions, Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai stood before the Swedish Academy and the world on Sunday and declared his reserves of hope exhausted. What followed was not a celebration of literature’s power, but a haunting, circling meditation on mute angels, vanished dignity, and a rebellion that may never come.The Nobel Prize in Literature, traditionally a pinnacle of artistic recognition, often produces speeches of gratitude, reflection on the writer’s journey, or a defense of the poetic imagination. Krasznahorkai, the master of what critics call “the apocalyptic sublime,” offered none of these. Instead, he delivered a stark, labyrinthine performance that was less an acceptance than a metaphysical dispatch from a world he perceives as spiritually terminal.“I originally wished to share my thoughts with you on the subject of hope,” he began, in his characteristically long, spiraling sentences, “but as my stores of hope have definitively come to an end, I will now speak about angels.”Thus commenced a 40-minute lecture, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, that moved through three desolate movements: on angels, on human dignity, and finally, on rebellion. It was a sermon for a secular age, preached from what he described as a cheaply built, unheatable tower room of Norway spruce planks, a space that existed as much in the mind as in reality.The new angels Critics call Krasznahorkai, the master of “the apocalyptic sublime.” (nobelprize.org)Krasznahorkai first dismantled the celestial iconography of Western art, the winged heralds of Botticelli, Leonardo, and Fra Angelico. Those “angels of old,” he argued, were themselves the message, divine utterances in bodily form announcing order, direction, and a vertical cosmos of “above and below.”Also Read | Nobel, Booker and how two Hungarian writers redrew the world’s literary centreOur era, he suggested, is haunted by “new angels.” They walk among us in simple street clothes, wingless and unrecognizable unless they choose otherwise. Their most devastating feature is their muteness.“They just stand there and look at us,” he said. “They are searching for our gaze… so that we ourselves can transmit a message to them. Only that unfortunately, we have no message to give.”Story continues below this adThe writer, pacing in his imagined tower, diagnosed these beings as “sacrifices.” Using the metaphor of a stethoscope placed upon the chest of humanity, he listened and heard “the horrific story… that they are sacrifices, sacrifices: and not for us, but because of us.”They are defenseless, he concluded, against the “cynical mercilessness” of a world at war, where “one single bad word is enough for them to be wounded for all eternity—which I can not remedy with even ten thousand words, because it is beyond all remedy.”The hollow triumph of human dignityHaving dismissed hope and angels, Krasznahorkai then turned, with bitter irony, to “the dignity of humans.” What followed was a breathtaking, condensed history of the species: from the invention of the wheel and fire to space travel and weapons of total annihilation. It was a catalog of achievements recited like a tragic roll call.“You invented such weapons that could blow up the entire Earth many times over,” he intoned, “and then you invented sciences in such a flexible manner thanks to which tomorrow takes precedence over and mortifies what can only be imagined today.”Story continues below this adThe crescendo of human progress, in his telling, leads not to enlightenment but to a flat, muddy plain of spiritual emptiness. “Finally, in accordance with historical progress, you, with complete and utter suddenness, began to believe in nothing at all anymore… and now you are ready to move out onto the flatlands, where your legs will sink down… this mud will swallow you up.”“It was beautiful, your path through evolution was breathtaking, only, unfortunately: it cannot be repeated,” he says.The Eternal 10 MetersThe lecture’s final and most narrative section arrived with a memory from 1990s Berlin. Krasznahorkai recounted witnessing a frail, incontinent clochard urinating on the U-Bahn tracks in a forbidden zone, and a policeman on the opposite platform who sees the transgression.What unfolded was a “horrific competition.” The policeman, representing “the obligatory Good,” must run up stairs, over a bridge, and down again to apprehend the “Wicked” clochard, who flees in agonising, centimeter-by-centimeter increments. They are separated by a trench of tracks, 10 insurmountable meters.Story continues below this adAlso Read | ‘Indian English writing is very inferior…’: Author Jeyamohan on language, Salman Rushdie“My attention stopped,” Krasznahorkai said, “and here it has remained until today… I see that in this competition the Good… will never catch the Wicked, because those ten metres can never be bridged.”In this frozen tableau, he locates his final, bleakest insight: “between Good and Evil there is no hope, none whatsoever.” The expected human rebellion of the oppressed, he suggests, never arrives. The pariahs do not rise up. The train simply moves on, station after lit station gliding by, with no place left to get off.A legacy of uncompromising visionThe lecture was a pure, unadulterated distillation of Krasznahorkai’s literary world, a place of profound alienation, bureaucratic absurdity, and a longing for a transcendence that seems perpetually out of reach. Since his international breakthrough with “Satantango” (1985), his work, often in close collaboration with filmmaker Béla Tarr, has charted the collapse of communities and the slow unraveling of meaning in post-communist Europe and beyond.The Swedish Academy, in awarding him the prize, cited “his haunting portraits of life trapped between disintegration and renewal, and his unique literary style of mesmerising, labyrinthine sentences.” His lecture proved that even at the summit of literary recognition, he remains trapped in, and relentlessly articulating, that very same labyrinth.Story continues below this adHe came to report, in sentences that spiral like angels descending a deserted stairwell, that the message, if there ever was one, has gone silent.