The Melancholy of Resistance

The novel has been translated into 16 languages. In 2000, the famous master of auteur cinema Béla Tarr made a film “Werckmeister Harmonies” based on it, which entered the BBC’s list of the 100 best feature films of the 21st century. This astonishing dystopia—famous for its stylistic virtuosity—was written in 1989 by the outstanding Hungarian prose writer, the winner of the 2015 International Booker Prize László Krasznahorkai. A strange circus, the highlight of which is the stuffed giant whale, arrives in a small town. From that moment on, chaos bursts into the lives of ordinary people, and one after another mysterious events occur, prompting reflections on the “eternal questions” of great literature: the nature of good and evil, rebellion and obedience, the impossibility of harmony in the world, and the fundamental, principled mystery of the foundations of being. In Russia, the writer became known after the release of the novel “Satantango,” for which in 2019 he was included among the nominees for the literary prize “Yasnaya Polyana” in the category “Foreign Literature.”