For modern readers, understanding Satantango requires a brief tour through one of the most tumultuous national histories in modern Europe. When László Krasznahorkai published the novel in 1985, Hungary was nearing the end of a century in which it had been repeatedly remade by war, revolution, foreign occupation, and ideological experiment. Each transformation left behind a residue of disillusionment that saturates the book’s desolate estate.

Hungary entered the 20th century as the junior partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a sprawling multi-ethnic monarchy that collapsed in the wake of World War I. The 1920 Treaty of Trianon, signed after the empire’s defeat, stripped Hungary of roughly two-thirds of its territory and more than half its population, a national trauma whose grievance would echo through the rest of the century. The First Hungarian Republic emerged from this context, declared in 1918 under Count Mihály Károlyi. The Republic was led by a fragile, democratically minded government that lasted only a few months before being overwhelmed by economic ruin and territorial losses.

In March 1919, Béla Kun and communist forces seized power and proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the second communist state in history after Russia. The following 133 days saw sweeping nationalizations and revolutionary tribunals, along with a “Red Terror” aimed at political opponents—violence that was soon met and exceeded by the “White Terror” that followed the collapse of the revolutionary government. The regime also plunged Hungary into war with neighboring Romania, which invaded in response to Hungarian attempts to reclaim Transylvania. Romanian forces occupied Budapest by August 1919, ending the Soviet experiment and paving the way for Admiral Miklós Horthy, a right-wing regent who would govern the kingdom—without a king—for the next quarter century.

Horthy’s Hungary, fixated on reversing the Treaty of Trianon and increasingly authoritarian at home, passed some of interwar Europe’s earliest antisemitic laws and drifted willingly into alliance with Nazi Germany, joining the Axis in World War II. The consequences were catastrophic: The Hungarian Second Army was annihilated on the Eastern Front at the Don River in 1943; in 1944, after Horthy attempted to negotiate a separate peace, the Germans occupied the country and installed the fascist Arrow Cross Party, which collaborated enthusiastically—alongside Hungarian gendarmes and civil servants—in the deportation and murder of some 400,000 Hungarian Jews. The Red Army drove the Germans out in a brutal winter campaign that left Budapest in ruins.

Soviet liberation quickly hardened into Soviet domination. By 1949, Hungary was a Stalinist satellite named the Hungarian People’s Republic, under Mátyás Rákosi. Central to the new order was the forced collectivization of agriculture: Peasant landholdings were seized and consolidated into state farms and cooperatives. The stated aims—breaking the power of large landowners; ending chronic rural hunger; mechanizing production; and extending schooling, electrification, and healthcare to remote villages—were real and, in some measure, achieved. Illiteracy and rural destitution did decline sharply, but the human costs were severe, dismantling centuries-old patterns of rural life and often replacing them with underperforming bureaucracies. Repression, show trials, and economic mismanagement bred a fury that exploded in the Hungarian Revolution of October 1956, when students, workers, and even parts of the army rose against the regime and briefly toppled it. Soviet tanks returned in November, crushing the uprising, killing several thousand Hungarians, and driving 200,000 more into exile in the West.

The Soviets installed János Kádár, who, after an initial period of reprisals, softened the regime into what became known as “Goulash Communism.” From the 1960s onward, Kádár’s Hungary allowed modest private enterprise, consumer goods, and limited travel, leading to Hungary being described as “the happiest barrack in the socialist camp” (Applebaum, Ann. “America’s Future Is Hungary.” The Atlantic, 31 Mar. 2025). By the 1980s, however, foreign debt was ballooning, growth had stalled, and the ideological legitimacy of the party was hollowing out. The socialist system would persist until 1989, when the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe brought the People’s Republic to an end and Hungary transitioned—unsteadily—to parliamentary democracy.

Crucially for Satantango, the 1980s also saw the visible collapse of the agricultural communes that had been the countryside’s organizing structure for a generation. Underinvested, overstaffed, and unable to compete, many were quietly shutting down, leaving villages depopulated and rural workers stranded. Krasznahorkai’s novel is set in this moment. The dilapidated estate is a microcosm of the failed socialist project and its characters, unemployed and adrift since “the works had been split up” (10), are trapped in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness. Their desperate faith in the charismatic charlatan Irimiás, whom they hope will lead them to a new, functional community, reflects a broader societal yearning for meaning and escape in the ideological vacuum left by a decaying political system.