From the Bright Future of the Nation to the Dark Future of Mankind: Jókai and Karinthy in Hungarian Utopian Tradition

Abstract

After defining utopianism Czigányik gives a brief introduction to Hungarian utopian literature. While he discusses Tariménes utazása [‘The Voyage of Tariménes’], written by György Bessenyei in 1804, the utopian scenes of Imre Madách’s Az ember tragédiája [‘The Tragedy of Man’, 1862] and Frigyes Karinthy’s short utopian piece, Utazás Faremidoba [‘Voyage to Faremido’, 1916], the bulk of the paper deals with Mór Jókai’s monumental novel, A jövő század regénye, [‘The Novel of the Century to Come’, 1872]. Jókai, who had taken an active part in the 1848 uprising, depicts in this novel a future world of an imaginary twentieth century, where Hungary has primacy within the Habsburg empire (with the emperor king being Árpád Habsburg) and the invention of the airplane (by a Hungarian) brings lasting peace, stability and prosperity to the world. Besides introducing the Hungarian utopian tradition, the paper will reflect upon the role of individuals in imagined societies and how an agency-centered narrative overwrites the essentially structuralist view of history, that usually permeates utopias.

Introduction—Special Issue “Dystopian Scenarios in Contemporary Australian Narrative”

“…Broadly speaking, the most useful and all-embracing labels, and thus the ones most used by critics, are antiutopia and critical dystopia, as they can easily comprise all different types. Last but not least, the different perspective that utopias and dystopias on the whole offer should also be taken into consideration (Claeys 2013;Czigányik 2015;Seeger and Davison-Vecchione 2019). In general terms, utopias are mainly concerned with social and political structures rather than individual agency, while dystopias tend to focus on the helplessness of individuals against external forces (Czigányik 2015, pp.…”

National internationalism in late 19th-century utopias by Mór Jókai, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris

“…One of these was The Novel of the Century to Come, an extremely long and eccentric book, even by its author's standards. although generic hybridity is typical of utopian narratives, by attempting to encompass the full range of stock utopian themes jókai's novel ends up with a nearly cacophonic mixture (on jókai's utopianism in the context of Hungarian utopian traditions, see Czigányik 2015). Combining urbanistic utopia with "future history" and science fiction, mixing the sensationalist genres of Zukunftskrieg and financial fiction with the narrative devices of the adventure novel, Century to Come offers an eminent example of what darko Suvin has called the "panoramic sweep" of utopian imagination (2010,(31)(32): it engages with aspects of geography, demography, anthropology, history, religion, ethics, economics, politics, social and ethnic conflicts, warfare, technology, industry, ecology, astronomy, and cosmology.…”