Krasznahorkai, Tarr, Bulgakov

In a time and world dominated by algorithms and the pathological desire to accumulate money, a time that generates a word as frightening as monetizeThe awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai has pleased those who still want—we still want—to believe in literature as a place of resistance. Resistance against what or whom, you might ask? Well, resistance against charlatans and charlatans. Against cynics, impostors, opportunists. Of course, against authoritarians and champions of false freedoms.

Krasznahorkai is an author who doesn't write to sell a lot of books, or to be funny, or to be on TV, or to flatter his ego. Nor does he write to save his homeland or the Hungarian language: a language that has fourteen million speakers and therefore occupies a position as marginal and powerless in the world as Catalan. Krasznahorkai's literature is rough, harsh, ironic (that is to say: the exact opposite of a crap joke), with which the reader can laugh if they are capable of mocking their own ailments, both personal and collective. He writes prose that is as splendid in Catalan as the translation of the novel. Satanic Tango, directed by Carles Dachs and published by Edicions del Cràter. Krasznahorkai has also frequently worked as a screenwriter with filmmaker Béla Tarr. Both have directed important films in recent European cinema, such as The sentence, The man from London, the overflowing one Satanic Tango –which is inspired by the novel of the same title– or The Turin Horse. These films are available on Filmin and are highly recommended viewing.

So is going to the Teatre Lliure to see the adaptation ofThe Master and Margarita directed by Àlex Rigola. The Master and Margarita It's a magnum opus by Mikhail Bulgakov, one of the great works of 20th-century Russian and European literature. Its starting point is the arrival of the Devil himself (or himself, and in the form of a cat too) in 1930s Moscow, in the midst of Stalin's dictatorship. Bulgakov may be more playful than Krasznahorkai, but they both write about the Devil and they both have the same idea of literature. Susan Sontag said that Krasznahorkai made her think of Gogol, who is also one of Bulgakov's influences. In any case, the theatrical adaptation that Rigola has made for its return to the Lliure is vibrant, powerful, and cheerful, and will be on until the 25th of this month: wow.

Confrontational theater, like the one proposed and defended by this version ofThe Master and Margarita, non-obvious cinema like Tarr's, non-aligned writing like that of Krasznahorkai and Bulgakov (or like that of Sontag and Gogol) are the kinds of responses that art and culture can give to the abuses of power. For poets in times of misery, is the oft-quoted question that Hölderlin raised. It has many possible answers, and none acceptable: a plausible one might be, precisely, to unmask misery.