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The Magic and Mystery of Gogol’s “The Nose”

“The Nose”: Introduction – Not just a Strange Idea

What an odd idea it is to write a story about a man who loses his nose! After all, no one has ever woken up to find theirs has vanished unless I am much mistaken. But this is precisely the starting point for Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Nose”. In this piece I’d like to share a summary and interpretation of Gogol’s story, and my own thoughts on why it’s absolutely worth reading.

A daguerreotype of Gogol, showing his magnificent nose
Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), writer of strange tales of Saint Petersburg, and himself a bearer of a fantastic nose!

“The Nose” does have a strange premise. The completely surreal idea of losing one’s nose reminds me a little bit of the sort of modern art that we foolishly claim our children could have painted. Anybody can come up with a strange idea – that’s ultimately not hard that hard if you’re sleep deprived or have access to drugs – and even writing about such an idea doesn’t take too much doing. The challenge, and the sheer genius of Gogol, lies in taking a strange and simple idea and extending it, through understanding it and its implications fully, into a full story. The spark of genius is not a good metaphor here – rather the spark is the strange idea, and Gogol’s talent is all the wood he is able to gather together for the fire. Though it’s a story about a nose, “The Nose” has a lot of depth and flavour to it.

Translations from the Russian are all my own.

The Story of “The Nose”

Part I: Ivan Yakovlevich

One morning the barber Ivan Yakovlevich wakes up and has his breakfast as usual. However, to his great surprise, he finds that in the middle of the loaf of bread he has just cut there is a nose. “A nose, that was exactly what it was! And what was more, it seemed to belong to someone he knew…” Already the initial strangeness of finding the nose is compounded by the absurd logic of Gogol’s world, where a man can recognise the nose of another with such certainty. (In much the same way, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” begins with a strange event, but the true strangeness comes in the reactions of Gregor Samsa’s relatives).

The nose belongs to a civil servant, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev, whose whiskers Ivan Yakovlevich trims a few times each week. Threatened with the police by his wife, Ivan runs outside and throws the nose in the river, only to be caught anyway by a passing policeman. At this point the narrator intervenes to say: “But at this moment the whole matter was completely covered in fog, and I have absolutely no idea what happened next”. Thus ends the first part of the story.

Part II: Collegiate Assessor Kovalev

Next we wake up with the man with the missing nose, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev. After noticing a small spot on his nose the night before, he now discovers the whole thing is missing. After a brief detour into social status in Imperial Russia, Gogol then takes us and Kovalev out onto the street, where he has to cover his face to avoid being recognised by his acquaintances – since, as we learn, nothing is more embarrassing for a man of society than being seen without his nose either by women or by co-workers. But then he sees on the street ahead none other than his own nose! One thing that must be mentioned here is that we never learn what a walking nose looks like – Gogol only talks about the uniform of the organ. But to Kovalev’s dismay the nose has a higher rank in the civil service than he does.

Still, he needs his nose, so he goes up to “him” inside a cathedral where “he” has gone to pray. Very awkwardly, Kovalev approaches and begins to speak. “It’s awfully strange, my dear sir… but it seems to me… you should know your place. Suddenly I find you here, and where else but a church? You must agree…” In spite of a few pages all about Kovalev’s rank and pride, everything collapses into gibberish in front of a superior. Funnier still, are the puns Gogol sprinkles around the dialogue. “You should know your place” appears to refer to the nose’s place on his face, but it is just what would be said by a superior to an inferior too. The nose, naturally, is unimpressed by Kovalev, and furrows its brows before departing in a hurry. Once again, Gogol plays with our idea of what the nose must look like.

A picture of Kazan Cathdral's interior. In "The Nose" Kovalev meets his missing nose here.
Kazan Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. It is here that Kovalev and his nose have their main encounter. One thing to think about in Gogol’s works is always the role of religion, and especially the devil. What does it mean for “The Nose” that the nose itself is pious?

Kovalev is left alone, and now he tries to find some way of tracking down the nose again. He tries the police, he tries to place an advertisement in a newspaper. This last one is particularly funny, as Kovalev’s pride demands that he cannot let his name go into the paper. Instead, he falls back onto his acquaintances. “Look, a lot of people know me: Chekhtareva, wife of the state councillor; and Palagea Grigorievna Podtochina, wife of staff officer Podtochin. If they find out about this, God help me!” Which leaves the public to identify the nose without even knowing whose it is, and thus what it looks like. Another absurd moment. Kovalev goes home, writes a mad letter to a woman whose daughter he’d been flirting with, accusing her of using witchcraft to remove his nose, though naturally he has no evidence for it.

But just when all hope seems lost, the policeman from Part I arrives to say that the nose has been apprehended. What was the nose doing? It had been trying to flee the city and escape to Riga. As you do. The mad suggestion that the nose would flee Petersburg is first suggested by Kovalev’s addled mind a few pages earlier, and most readers (like me) will probably dismiss it as ridiculous. But this is just further evidence that Gogol’s world does not run on the same logic as yours or mine. The rest of Part II consists of Kovalev trying to reattach his nose, but to no avail.

Part III: Back to Normal?

And then one morning, April 7th to be precise, Collegiate Assessor Kovalev wakes up and his nose is reattached. That’s it. It reattaches itself just as magically as it vanished. Kovalev is overjoyed, and heads out into town, determined to do all of the things his nose’s absence had prevented – flirting and performing his duties as a civil servant.

The story ends with the narrator having a brief commentary on the theme of his own story. “Whatever you may say, such things do take place – not too often, but they do”. Is Gogol having one final laugh at the reader? Absolutely. Almost every story is a little ridiculous, a little unbelievable, a little too reliant on coincidences. But most are at the very least possible. “The Nose” is not, and the veneer of factuality given by its use of dates – because we’re also told at the beginning of Part I, reasonably enough, that the story begins on March 25th – is just teasing. But who are we to say what’s real and not real, possible and impossible?

That’s the story of “The Nose”. Now for a few suggestions as to what this all means – because it has to mean something, right?

Magic, Mystery and Meaning: The Themes of “The Nose”

Clothes and Respectability

For a story that is from its title onwards apparently concerned with our bodies Gogol’s focus in much of “The Nose” is oddly enough not on our skin and blood but on the things we use to cover them up. Clothes are at the centre of social rank in early 19th Century Saint Petersburg, and Gogol satirises that in his story. By dealing so much with clothes, Gogol shows how vapid and superficial people were in their interactions – they don’t care to reach the person beneath the suit. This is played with most in the case of the nose itself. Kovalev encounters his nose, but the only physical description is of what the nose is wearing, not what the thing itself looks like.

The deliberate confusion as to what exactly a nose looks like is further played up when the nose is caught by a short-sighted policeman who only recognises that it is a nose and not a man once he has put is glasses on – otherwise, he says, he would have let him pass out of the city and escape to Riga without a hitch. People are overly willing, in Gogol’s world and perhaps our own, to look no further than the rank and respectability indicated by our clothing when interacting with others. Decorum is an important part of society, but we should be wary of letting it absorb all of our attention, lest we and others become nothing more than the clothing we are wearing.

A picture of an early version of the Table of Ranks. In "The Nose" social class plays a big role
The Russian Table of Ranks created by Peter the Great is indirectly a cause of much woe in Gogol’s stories. In “The Nose” Kovalev’s anxiety about approaching his nose is in part due to the fact that it appears to be of a higher rank than him.

Women and Sex

One of the most infamous works of Gogol criticism is Simon Karlinsky’s The Sexual Labyrinth of Nikolai Gogol, which goes through Gogol’s works and finds that the key to understanding them is his repressed homosexuality. I’m not sure how far I agree with Karlinsky, but I think that thinking of “The Nose” as being about sex can prove fruitful. First of all, consider the object itself. Human noses are generally phallic in shape, and in Russian the word “nos/нос” is a masculine noun. The uses of noses, both smell and taste, are also important parts of sex. Furthermore, it’s also worth mentioning that in his correspondence Gogol regularly notes his awkwardness over the size and shape of his own. The shame that Kovalev feels at having a missing nose is directly connected with a much-reduced desire to flirt and see women. So perhaps it’s not a stretch, after all.

The Narrator and The Reading Public

It’s hard to avoid the narrator in “The Nose”. He’s a cheeky one, always appearing at the most inconvenient times with a wink. When Ivan Yakovlevich heads to the bridge the narrator decides to stop the action and tell us a little about him. The same thing happens, a few pages on, with Kovalev. And then there is the matter of the use of dates in “The Nose”. I think one layer to the story’s meaning is satirising the reading public’s demands for what a story must look like. After all, the public like prose narratives to have an element of factuality to them, in contrast to the more explicitly artistic verse narrative also popular then in Russia.

Gogol provides us with the outward appearance of veracity – clear dating, lots of unnecessary details about characters – while contrasting it with a clearly fantastic and absurd tale. Furthermore, at key moments he reveals the inadequacy of this factual veneer, such as when discussing the nose’s independent life – we learn a lot about what he wears and what rank he has, but as to what the thing actually looks like we are left completely in the dark. Gogol is poking fun at us here, and what we need to think of a story as “real”. Simply representing reality as we see it, “The Nose” seems to say, doesn’t get to the heart of things. We never learn why the nose disappears, no matter how much detail Gogol gives us – some mysteries go deeper.

Body Positivity

What I think is the most convincing overall interpretation of “The Nose”, though, is that it is about making us value our bodies more. A nose is something we can live without, but Gogol is keen to show that that doesn’t mean it is worthless. Throughout the story there are descriptions of food, flowers, and snuff – all of which we know Kovalev is unable to enjoy because of his absent nose. Furthermore, a lot of the language centres around our bodies. For example, the introduction of Kovalev – “Collegiate Assessor Kovalev woke up rather early and made a “brrr…” noise with his lips” – shows that from the moment we wake up our bodies are important to our character. When one of Kovalev’s attempts to track down his nose fails, the rejection is felt “not like a hit in the brow, but one right in the eye”.

We don’t think about our bodies until they begin to fail us, or until one morning we wake up and find a part of them has gone missing. Gogol’s story, at least to me, seems to bear the message that we ought to care about them and be grateful for them the whole time. They do a lot of good things for us.

Conclusion

The magic and mystery of “The Nose” lies in the fact that the story is so strange that, like with Kafka’s tales, it’s very hard to find an interpretation that rules out every other one. The more time we spend thinking about it, the more ideas come into our heads for what exactly the whole thing means. Ultimately though, that’s not a reason to read the story – the best reason is that it’s actually quite funny, and completely absurd. It’s short too. Give it a go.

Here’s a translation of “The Nose”. I might make my own in due course too. For more strangeness, I’ve translated Kafka’s “Before the Law” here.

The Day of Judgement by Salvatore Satta – Old Dreams

Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement is a wonderful book, as warm and pleasant as the hills and valleys of Sardinia it takes as its setting. More than that, it is a classic, without a shadow of a doubt. I enjoyed last week’s Satantango more, but as much as I loved it, it is a book destined for people who read, more than people who live. If I go around the country homes of my friends the books that I find there will not be by Joyce, or Woolf, or Beckett, but rather Austen, Hardy, and Kipling. These latter group are no better or worse than the first, but they bring with them a prose that is simple, clear, and a vehicle for their books’ plots, instead of anything deliberately striving to be more. They are not, in a primary sense, experimenters. And one day, perhaps, they may be joined on their shelves by Salvatore Satta’s The Day of Judgement too.

A Classic, for Better or Worse

Pots and pots of ink have dried up in trying to explain what a literary classic is. With The Day of Judgement I simply had a feeling, as I was reading, of something ineffable, indescribable. It had, I would say, a certain bearing about itself. The book is not long, but it carries itself like an elder statesman. This may be in part because Salvatore Satta started writing it when he was almost seventy, after a long career as a jurist. There is no sense of rushing or urgency about the pages, no matter what the author himself felt as he was writing them. It is a book of anecdotes, of spilling digressions, written by an old man about his home. And – and this is what is so rare in our times, when modernism, modern science, and worst of all the horrors of the Second World War, broke that particularly Victorian self-assurance that let us preach what we believed without self-question – it has the gravitas and casual wisdom of someone who has lived, and wishes to share their experience with others. Whether you like him or not, it reminds me of Steinbeck at his best.

Salvatore Satta
Salvatore Satta (1902-1975) was a jurist of note during his life. When he began writing The Day of Judgement he was almost seventy. It is the fruit of a lifetime’s worth of wisdom and love.

Chronicle of a Town

To call this a novel is wrong. It is more a chronicle than a novel, or perhaps a story in Benjamin’s sense. Its heart is the town of Nuoro, in central Sardinia, and Don Sebastiano Sanna Carboni, a nobleman who lives and works there. For a period of perhaps twenty years his life and the life of his village is followed and recounted by the narrator, an older man trying to remember and record his past. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect, place, or person from among the village’s seven thousand. We meet schoolteachers, priests, swindlers, shepherds, and learn about making wine, or about the potential origins of the village, or the design of the houses. Moments such as electrification of street lamps, or the first arrival of radical political ideas, are recounted with tenderness and honesty. But as the book progresses, and the world itself “progresses”, there come about ever more challenges to this once so isolated mountain village, and its way of life.

A “Truth” to Challenge – the Themes

Through the way that the old man recounts his “truth” The Day of Judgement further gains the regalia of a true classic. Because of its structure, with each chapter detailing a different event, or the struggles of a different man or woman, there is an extraordinary thematic variety within these pages. The conflicts between husbands and wives, between fathers and sons, between nobles and the lower orders, between conservatives and socialists, between individuals and the state, between the church and the common man, between teachers and students, are all described. Each side is given its say, and in such a way that I can already sense that this is one of those books which like a seed grow with time and the experiences of their readers. One day I may well support the fathers, instead of the sons, even if today that is not entirely the case. The “truth” of the narrator doesn’t mean a domineering world view, but rather a series of suggestions and opinions which can be challenged or accepted, but are not meant by any stretch of the imagination to be absolute.

Progress – What Good is it?

Part of this comes from the fundamental tension at the heart of the book – between the desire for progress and the inherent conservatism of humankind. I don’t think Satta himself truly knew where he lay in this battle – and this is part of the book’s greatness. Though the narrator himself at one point says that “there is nothing I detest so much as the past”, the evidence of the book tells a different story. The “Day of Judgement” of the book’s title refers not only to the fate of humankind before God in some strands of Christian theology, but also to the role of the writer here. Satta’s narrator admits that he is reviving the dead of his own past and history, from the early twentieth century and a little before, and making them give an account for themselves before the reader. And we are supposed to judge for ourselves whether these men and women, living in the village, have lived their lives badly or well. The narrator can only show us who they were – the rest is up to us.

Nostalgia for a World now Lost

A plaintive nostalgia pervades the book. A longing for a world which was only Nuoro, or at least a world which ended at the sea. Nuoro is a place, for Don Sebastiano, “where there was room for everyone” and the way that the book goes through each of the characters and professions, the very nature of the book’s ordered structure, formally reflects a stability and certainty about life and one’s place in it. Yet there is also an occasional lyricism too, notably in chapter V’s lavish description of making bread, which has “all the solemnity of a ritual”, and then later on when discussing “the pagan mystery” of the vineyard. Here the prose itself takes on the same magical quality of its subject matter, and it’s hard not to want to be there yourself, hard at work on the fields or kneading dough.

Picture of houses in Nuoro
Nuoro today. Perhaps not that much has changed, after all

Through work there comes a sense of community and continuity. People visit each other, sit and play cards together or simply chat in a way that is alien to much of the modern world with its hustle and bustle. It is from a time before time, before precision. It is a stasis of a positive sort, which is differentiated from the present most strikingly by the hope of parents that their children will live (as Don Sebastiano hopes) just the same life as their parents – that they may be just as lucky in having such a good life, instead of eternally striving after a better one. It ties in with the religious argument in the work – that we should see the blessedness of our own lives, rather than in their potentiality.

The Sympathy of a Great Soul

It is his unbounded sympathy, too, that shows Satta as an earnest writer. He cares for all of his characters, from the grimiest urchins to the nobles like Don Sebastiano. It means that whenever progress seems almost inevitable, he is always willing to show kindness towards those it does not benefit, such as the canons who are forbidden to ring the church bells for the beginning of school by a new arrival from outside of the town. The cessation of the bells is one of the saddest moments of the book, because it represents a huge loss of pride and self-respect for the canons. With the ending of the bells’ song, there is also a hidden but no less important loss for the townsfolk of a part of their identity, and when we are told that “the bell rope hung sadly above Ziu Longu’s bench, like the rope after a hanging”, it’s hard not to think that the image is supposed to call to mind the small death inside their souls too.

What Does Modernity Mean?

What modernity means is a loss of the sanctity of the world, a loss of music, a loss of community. It means problems, for “Problems, of whatever kind, arise when the simple, humble certainties of life begin to fail”. Alongside the loss of the bells, another poignant image of the end of street lighting in the village. Before the introduction of electricity, a man would go around lighting the oil lamps, one by one. Behind him, we are told, would follow the town’s children, playing a game between them of trying to catch as many of the spent matches as possible. It is a stupid, childish game, but what it means is community.

Electrification “was destiny itself” but that hardly stops it from being a force for the destruction of the sacred past. The narrator once again deploys a characteristically reticent phrase for when the lights first turn on all at once: for the town “in some mysterious way felt that it had entered history”. It is up to us, again, to decide whether history means good or ill. But it’s hard to avoid the ominous note that creeps into the prose. “The north wind had risen, and the bulbs hanging in their shades in the Corso began to sway sadly, light and shadow, shadow and light, making the night-time nervous. This had not happened with the oil lamps”.

Tragedy of the Present: the Invention of Politics

With modernity also comes politics. Sardinia, on the periphery of Italy, has never been historically important, and Nuoro, at its centre, even less so. But one day, the narrator says, the younger generation started reading Avanti!, a radical socialist paper, and politics arrived in the village. The old certainties of life – that people stayed in their social positions and jobs, that there was a kind of harmony between all walks of life – suddenly begin to be questioned. People, told of inequality, begin to believe in it, and conflicts that had not even been conceivable a hundred years earlier, now take pride of place. Whether they are rightly motivated or not is less important here than the fact that they undermine the conservative feeling of the world as organised and correct as it is. They suggest change where hitherto it wouldn’t even have been a concept.

Politics is all well and good in theory, but in practice something else happens. The movement is co-opted by a certain Don Ricciotti, a man who feels that Don Sebastiano has done him wrong by buying Riccioti’s father’s house at auction when the latter was dealing with bankruptcy. Using his talent for giving speeches Ricciotti is able to gain a sizable support base in the town, just as elections are coming up. He hopes to use the power of office to force Don Sebastiano to return to him the house that he considers his by right. In these speeches, Don Sebastiano is targeted by name as one of the swindlers who is oppressing the poor, hardworking citizens of Nuoro, though there is no evidence elsewhere in the book that this is the case. The story serves as a grave indictment of the dangers of populism, wherever it may be found, and it is only by luck and hard work that ultimately Ricciotti’s efforts are thwarted. Perhaps what Satta wants to say here is that the world would be better off without politics, and the manipulation and deceit that seemingly has to come with it.

Picture of Landscape by Nuoro
The countryside around Nuoro. Much may be lost, but the landscape so beautifully evoked by Satta still remains almost untouched.

The Problems of the Past I – Woman’s Place

Yet for all this uncertainty, for all this scepticism towards the various changes in his own life, the narrator cannot turn his back on the future, and neither does he blind us to the acute problems of the past. Perhaps the most fully fleshed out character, and the most tragic, of the story is Don Sebastiano’s wife, Donna Vincenza. She is described as intelligent, but the society that she is in massively restricts her freedoms: she’s barely even allowed outside of her own house. The chapters centring on her life are filled with gloom and despair, and she is repeatedly described as “trapped”. The lives of the other women are no better. Those who engage in prostitution, for example, are forced to go to another village to give birth or otherwise deal with illegitimate offspring. The implications reveal a misery and disquiet underlying the apparent peace of the past. It is a man’s peace only.

Problems of the Past II – the Dark Side of Stasis

And it is not only the women who suffer here. The darker side of stasis is sometimes revealed when The Day of Judgement touches upon poverty. The book is not critical of poverty per se, and certainly not overly critical about the rigid social classes found within Nuoro which likely perpetuate it, but there are moments when the beautiful, structured façade of Sardinian life in the book suddenly shows its cracks. The moment that struck me most strongly was one of morbid horror. Near the end of the book the summer’s weather becomes unnaturally violent with strong winds and as a result a plague sets in among the fields of the countryside. The lands of almost everybody are left severely damaged – everybody’s lands except those of Don Sebastiano, that is.

When he goes to inspect his fields he meets the peasants who have been looking after them, and they are eager to explain to him why they are undamaged. But to his dismay and disgust they reveal that it is all due to a crucified dog and left hanging on the door of their hut. Don Sebastiano is left speechless and full of rage. The superstitions which at other times make for proof of the magic of the past are now transformed into something monstrous and unnerving. When the peasants then mention a problem with the peasants of the neighbouring farm, Don Sebastiano tells them to sort it out among themselves. And they do, with an axe in the dead of night. The book reminds us that for all the good things that have undoubtedly been lost with progress and time, much has been gained too. The end to the mindless violence, black superstition, and the rise of modern medicine are all things to be rightly praised.

Conclusion – The Judgement

Salvatore Satta did not finish The Day of Judgement, but the ending is in no way abrupt – instead, it finishes on an elegiac note that ties the whole work together. The chronicler could well have reckoned up every single soul of Nuoro’s then seven thousand, and no doubt would have, had they lived that long, but we should be grateful for all the pages that we have. It is a beautiful, lovely, and kind book that stands to my mind for everything the best literature can be. It is exciting, hopeful, and timeless. Read it again and again. I know I will.

For more about the ambiguous development of modernity in rural communities, have a look at my thoughts on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.

Picture of Salvatore Satta is in the public domain

Picture of Nuoro houses by Max.oppo [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Picture of Landscape around Nuoro also by Max.oppo

Satantango Review – False Hopes and False Prophets

I finished Satantango, by the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai (in George Szirtes’ superb translation), yesterday and am still reeling from the experience. Really, I had been reeling from the first pages onwards. This is the best book, the most exciting book, the most challenging book, that I have read in a long time. The only book by a living author I can compare it to without understating my admiration would be Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Both works are bleak and challenging meditations on apocalypse, on the state of humanity at the very edge of collapse. But even to compare it to Blood Meridian detracts from Satantango’s own unique and demonic magic. I’ve really read nothing like it before. It creates, in form and structure and plot, a completely new world.

So far Satantango is most famous for its 7ish hour film adaptation by Béla Tarr – naturally enough, since the translation was only published in 2012. I myself haven’t seen the film though – I actually came across the book and its author while browsing in Waterstones for something by Kazantzakis (my review of Zorba the Greek is here) and the really nice editions of Krasznahorkai’s works elsewhere in the “K” section caught my eye. From that I drew near enough for my short-sighted self to be able to see the titles, and I was immediately excited by The Melancholy of Resistance, and read the first page since I had time to spare. The prose, with its winding sentences and no paragraph breaks, put me off – especially since the book was already four hundred or so pages long. I put the book back, noted the author’s name, and bought myself Zorba the Greek as I had planned.

Once I had finished that, though, I went to the college library and gave Krasznahorkai a second chance. The only book there was Satantango, so I no longer had a say in the matter. I took it home with me for this Easter break.

Picture of László Krasznahorkai

László Krasznahorkai (b. 1954) has a rather devilishly mysterious look about him, and his Satantango is devilishly good too, even if its world is bleak.

Introduction – An Easter Story

As luck, or fate, or something else entirely would have it, Satantango is something of an Easter work. It begins, at least, with a resurrection. News of the return of two men, Irimiás and his helper Petrina, who were thought dead for over a year, interrupts the bickering over money going on between two men living in the small “Estate” where much of Satantango’s action takes place. These two resurrected men (the second chapter is entitled “We are resurrected”) have a reputation for their skill and adeptness in making money, and the bickerers decide to try to track them down, and in doing so see if they could make themselves some cash for their troubles. The other chapters of the first half of the book flit between the different major characters of the village, from the doctor to the schoolmaster, the local prostitutes to the barman, and detail their own reactions to the news. Gradually, they all converge upon the bar, the central location of the Estate, and there they begin to drink and dance, while they await the arrival of the man, Irimiás, who they all take to be their saviour.

The World and its Inhabitants

Krasznahorkai does an excellent job creating the tense atmosphere of a tiny village. In the first half of the book, characters of each chapter rarely meet those of other chapters, but through a process of endlessly layering more and more references to their names and personalities, Satantango gives the impression of a living, breathing community, so that when we do finally meet a given character, we’ve already heard all the gossip, and meet them as we would an old friend or enemy. There’s Mrs Halics, the most religious of the townsfolk, but a hypocrite at heart; Mrs Schmidt, promiscuous towards half the village but longing most of all for another night with Irimiás; and Futaki, the gloomy, melancholic sceptic with a limp. And many other characters, in both senses of the word, besides.

These people, trapped in an Estate whose owners are nowhere to be found, whose machinery no longer works, and whose business and industry has long-since departed, are in desperate need of some kind of salvation. Hopeless schemes for making money or getting away are made and fail by the second. In the first chapter alone Futaki and another man decide to betray a third, but only because Futaki caught the first man before he could betray him instead. Mrs Schmidt’s infidelity to her husband is only one of the many betrayals of a people who quite literally live in the mud. A recurring image in Satantango is the slaughterhouse, where people are merely meat. The first part of the book is in many ways a catalogue of the seven deadly sins of a fallen people: very few people here have any kind of positivity or goodness about them, for better or worse, which can add to the heaviness and challenge of reading through.

Style – Mud on the Page

But the main challenge when it comes to reading is that like The Melancholy of Resistance, Satantango is written in what I take to be Krasznahorkai’s signature style. There are no paragraph breaks, and sentences are long, intricate things. At first it was hard to read, but then I grew used to it. The whole book has a flowing, heavy quality to it, like mud. The decay and purification of the environment that the characters live in – nobody cleans, and cockroaches and other insects are constantly waging war for new territory – is marked by a similar decay in the prose. We sense that sentiment, expressed by Beckett at the end of The Unnamable, that “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”, in the way that the only thing that seems to be carrying on the prose is the way that the character haven’t died yet and that somewhere, misplaced though it may be, they have their hope.

It is difficult to tell where their hope should be placed, if indeed it should be placed anywhere. The novel has a strange, unnerving, supernatural side to it. It begins with bells, ringing even though there are no churches nearby, and that stop as suddenly as they start. But it is only some characters who seem to be able to hear them, which adds another layer of confusion. Elsewhere, in the bar, invisible spiders cover everything in cobwebs at a miraculous speed. And then, in the second part, Irimiás himself sees something that he cannot possibly explain rationally, try as he might. The novel’s chapter titles only add to the confusion, with part II’s chapter IV being titled “Heavenly Vision? Hallucination?” – nothing is given to us as a certainty.

Irimiás – The prophet the townsfolk need… or the one they deserve?

The character Irimiás, the resurrected one, inevitably forms the centre of any discussion of hope in the novel. It is he who, like a spider, literally brings together all of the major characters into the bar as if stuck in his web, and then disperses them as the novel goes on. He is a strange figure. Many characters see him as their saviour, and there are further parallels with Jesus too. He has two personal followers, Petrina and a boy, Sanyi, who go with him everywhere and do as he says. Petrina even confuses “Evangelical” with “evangelist” when describing himself. Yet if he is a god or even a kind of Christian, he is a strange one. When he speaks, it is rarely to espouse a Christian viewpoint. At the beginning of part II he gives a long speech, exhorting the townsfolk to repent and do better, but their response, privately, is just to assume he is joking. When he encounters the supernatural in part II he dismisses it, and God too, as unreal. His views are more likely a bleak nihilism of the sort he shows when alone with his closest followers, dismissing all hope and everything else: “we are trapped forever. We’re properly doomed. It’s best not to try either, best not believe your eyes.” Indeed, his nihilism is so great that he dismisses his senses rather than believe something. “We think we’re breaking free but all we’re doing is readjusting the locks.” And yet, he leads the townsfolk out into a wilderness; he gives them, all the same, a hope; he helps them. It’s hard to say why that might be. Harder still to know what to think when there are hints, in the background, of him stockpiling arms and munitions. He remains, even after finishing Satantango, an enigma.

Part of the reason that he is not closer to a traditional view of Jesus is that it seems a traditional Jesus is far from what the townsfolk, Mrs Halics excepted, actually want. Ultimately, it seems like almost all of their problems are due to money, or rather its absence. The girls who are forced into prostitution, are after money to pay for their mother, who refuses to work. The early scheming and betrayal of Futaki and Schmidt that takes place in the first chapter all hinges on trying to get enough money to escape. The barman obsesses about money too. And in this vein Irimiás, who is famous at least partially for being able to make money anywhere, also has his place. It is he who is hated by the barman precisely for his past debts (before his “death” Irimiás drank a huge amount without paying). That is to say, of all the characters, Irimiás is immune to money – he alone doesn’t need to pay it. He, indeed, has somehow transcended it.

The Politics of Negligence

There is also a political angle to the work. Published originally in Hungary in 1985, Krasznahorkai himself said that it was a miracle it made it past the censor given the political content of the work . But the politics of the text is not immediately apparent. These people, after all, are locked off in their Estate, and apart from their names there’s little indication that the work takes place in Hungary at all. But politics comes in as soon as we start asking questions. Why has the Estate fallen into decay? Because state support for the machinery needed for local industry has dried up. The cultural centre has also lost its funding and is in a state of disrepair. There is no longer a school for the headmaster to teach at. The depression and desperation of the citizens is an implicit critique on the system that has left them in this state – not of authoritarianism as bad and negligent governance in general. Anywhere where people are left behind, whether it be rural Hungary or my own native North-West Scotland, might see itself reflected in these pages. And in this context, Irimiás’ hints of weapons buying take on a more sinister note. It may well be that what the man is planning is revolution.

The ending of Satantango only complicates matters. I shan’t spoil it here, but it is one of those endings which makes the entirety of the material up to that point take on a new light, but not in a way that cheapens it. I was left sitting there, overpowered by the implications, for long after I’d closed the book at last. It’s rare that an ending does that to me. And I think when I eventually go back and read the book again, there will be a lot of new things for me to discover.

Conclusion

I loved Satantango because for me, it was one of those books that reveal our conceptions of what literature can and can’t do are limited, and show us the way forward. I feel like others must have felt when Kafka first emerged from Prague into the rest of the world and reshaped a world’s literature. Well, maybe Krasznahorkai isn’t that good – after only one novel it’s too early for me to say – but he certainly has already had a real and tangible effect on me. Satantango showed me a way of writing about serious things seriously, in a way that wasn’t preachy or boringly ironical. It may well be bleak, but it is also terribly, awesomely, sincere. And sincerity never hurts the message.

For more doom and gloom, check out my reviews of Andrei Platonov’s Soul and Other Stories, or Varlam Shalamov’s time in the Gulag. If, on the other hand, you’re in need of some cheeriness and affirmation, my review of Zorba the Greek is here.

Photo of László Krasznahorkai by Lenke Szilágyi [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]