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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN UTOPIANISM

Utopia Between
East and West in
Hungarian Literature

Zsolt Czigányik
Palgrave Studies in Utopianism

Series Editor
Gregory Claeys
Department of History
Royal Holloway, University of London
London, UK
Utopianism is an interdisciplinary concept which covers philosophy, soci-
ology, literature, history of ideas, art and architecture, religion, futurology
and other fields. While literary utopianism is usually dated from Thomas
More’s Utopia (1516), communitarian movements and ideologies pro-
posing utopian ends have existed in most societies through history. They
imagine varied ideal beginnings of the species, like golden ages or para-
dises, potential futures akin to the millennium, and also ways of attaining
similar states within real time. Utopianism, in the sense of striving for a
much improved world, is also present in many trends in contemporary
popular movements, and in phenomena as diverse as films, video games,
environmental and medical projections. Increasingly utopia shares the
limelight with dystopia, its negative inversion, and with projections of the
degeneration of humanity and nature alike. This series will aim to publish
the best new scholarship across these varied fields. It will focus on original
studies of interest to a broad readership, including, but not limited to,
historical and theoretical narratives as well as accounts of contemporary
utopian thought, interpretation and action.
 Zsolt Czigányik

Utopia Between East

and West in
Hungarian Literature
Zsolt Czigányik
Eötvös Loránd University
Budapest, Hungary

ISSN 2946-4471     ISSN 2946-448X (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Utopianism
ISBN 978-3-031-09225-1    ISBN 978-3-031-09226-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09226-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2024
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the help of the people I
love and who give me indispensable support. My gratitude goes primarily
to my family, my wife Anna, my children Lídia, Jázmin, Lóránt, and Imre,
and also my parents. You were always there when I needed you and for-
gave it when I didn’t pay the attention you deserve.
The Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University, also known as
ELTE, has been my alma mater—I graduated here, and I also completed
my doctoral studies as well as my habilitation. I have been working here at
the Department of English Studies since 2008, and in 2021 I was granted
a term’s leave which enabled me to complete the manuscript. I am particu-
larly grateful to deans Gábor Sonkoly and Dávid Bartus, and my colleagues
at the Department of English Studies, particularly Natália Pikli, Judit
Friedrich, Ákos Farkas, Péter Dávidházi, Zsolt Komáromy, Eglantina
Remport, Éva Péteri, Andrea Velich, Csilla Bácskai, and Dániel Panka. My
special gratitude goes to the director of the School of English and American
Studies, János Kenyeres, the late Professor Tibor Frank, and all my stu-
dents: I often feel I have learned more from them than the other way
round. Brigitta Gyimesi and Eszter Tóth were particularly active in giving
me help with the manuscript.
I wish to thank my friends and colleagues in various academic institu-
tions, for their inspiration and patience, primarily Éva Antal, Károly Pintér,
Vera Benczik, Zoltán Gábor Szűcs, Zoltán Balázs, Csaba Maczelka, Sándor
Hites, and Balázs Nyilasy.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research was helped by the Humanities Initiative of the Central

European University, Budapest. I wish to express my gratitude to particu-
larly the following people: Éva Fodor, András Bozóki, Nadia Al-Bagdadi,
László Kontler, Balázs Trencsényi, Matthias Riedl, Balázs Vedres, Éva
Gönczi, Adri Kácsor, Mate Tokic, and Sanjay Kumar, as well as my stu-
dents Daryna Koryagina and Benjamin Hayward.
The Utopian Studies Society (Europe) is a natural professional home
for me. Without their support I could not complete the research. I wish to
mention by name the following persons: Gregory Claeys, Justyna Galant,
Lyman Tower Sargent, Tom Moylan, Fátima Vieira, Ludmila and Artur
Blaim, Andrew Milner, Nicole Pohl, Sorin Antohi, Susanna Layh, and
Emrah Atasoy.
Many people were of especial help to me in the task. I would like to
mention by name Éva Kovács, Beáta Pozsár, and Klára Kisdi.
The completion of the manuscript was helped by the Gerda Henkel
Foundation, where the work of Sarah Sodke and Thomas Podranski have
been indispensable. I would also like to thank the editors I worked with at
Palgrave Macmillan, particularly Emily Russell, Arunaa Devi, Geetha
Selvapandiyan, and Jasper Asir.
I would like to express my gratitude to all persons, natural and super-
natural, that I did not mention by name and who helped me. They all have
a share in the merits of this book, whereas I assume all responsibility for its
shortcomings.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 The Circulation of Utopian Ideals in Hungary 39

3 The
 Moderate Optimism of the Enlightenment: Bessenyei
in Totoposz 65

4 Failed
 Utopias in Human History: The Tragedy
of Man by Imre Madách 93

5 Utopia
 Proper in Hungarian Literature: Eternal
Peace and Future Technology in Mór Jókai’s
The Novel of the Century to Come121

6 Gulliver in Hungary: Karinthy’s Faremido and Capillaria153

7 Dystopia
 in Interwar Hungary: Pilot Elza or the Perfect
Society by Mihály Babits181

vii
viii Contents

8 Sándor
 Szathmári’s Dystopias and the Positivistic
Simplification of Humans201

9 Conclusion235

Correction to: Utopia Between East and West in

Hungarian LiteratureC1

Index247
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 Bibliographic data of Hungarian translations of Thomas

More’s Utopia55
Table 4.1 The scenes of the Tragedy98

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

It was during my research of the English utopian and dystopian literature

that I became aware of similarly interesting (yet far less known) Hungarian
utopian writings. The current book attempts at outlining a coherent nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century utopian tradition that focuses on the rela-
tionship of the individual and the collective in the light of a specifically
Hungarian and Central European experience of social and political struc-
tures. This experience, as reflected in literary utopias and dystopias, is to
be analysed with the help of the concept of permanent liminality, a notion
developed by Árpád Szakolczay as an expansion on Van Gennep’s and
Turner’s concept of liminality.
It is a commonplace in Hungary that Hungarian literature is not well
known outside the Hungarian linguistic territory. Mihály Babits, one of
the main figures of modern Hungarian literature (and the author of the
first major dystopia in Hungarian), wrote a piece in 1913 titled Hungarian
Literature [Magyar irodalom], in which he claimed that “our literature
was a dark cell in the vast palace of the human genius, where no guests
ever passed, and it was hardly mentioned in the guides” (Orbán 2007).
Both common wisdom and my personal experience tells that the situation
has not changed significantly in the past century—despite the efforts of
translators, Hungarian literature remains mostly exotic and unknown to
most readers of other languages. Fekete (1989, p. 191) complains about a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
Zs. Czigányik, Utopia Between East and West in Hungarian
Literature, Palgrave Studies in Utopianism,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09226-8_1
2 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

similar phenomenon concerning Hungarian science fiction (SF) literature;

he claims that there is a “complete lack of familiarity with Hungarian SF in
the West”; even Suvin’s 1970 anthology of SF from socialist countries
ignored Hungarian literature. Without going into details, it may be recog-
nized that whereas Hungarian composers such as Ferenc Liszt or Béla
Bartók, scientists like Albert Szent-Györgyi or Mihály Csíkszentmihályi,
or even footballers such as Ferenc Puskás are well known outside the bor-
ders of Hungary and offer a significant contribution to universal or
European culture, Hungarian writers, poets, or dramatists (with a few
exceptions) are fairly unknown beyond the language community. The
present book attempts to shed some light on the utopian aspects of
Hungarian literature to serve as a reminder that valuable treasures lie out-
side the focus of interest of international scholars and the wider pub-
lic alike.
This work offers a critical overview of the Hungarian utopian tradition
without giving an exhaustive reading of all relevant writings. This first,
introductory chapter discusses the most important theoretical questions
that arise from utopia being in the no man’s land between literature and
the social sciences, such as problems of fictionality and the role of the
author. The second chapter outlines the utopian elements in early modern
Hungarian culture, alongside an analysis of the Hungarian translations of
Thomas More’s Utopia. Further chapters give detailed analyses of the
most important utopian and dystopian works of nineteenth- and twentieth-­
century Hungarian literature. The following works will be given special
scrutiny (translations from Hungarian to English—unless otherwise indi-
cated—are mine):

György Bessenyei, Tariménes utazása [The Voyage of Tariménes, 1804]

Imre Madách, Az ember tragédiája [Tragedy of Man, 1862, translated by
George Szirtes]
Mór Jókai, A jövő század regénye [The Novel of the Century to Come, 1872]
Frigyes Karinthy, Utazás Faremidoba [A Voyage to Faremido, 1916] and
Capillaria (1921), both translated by Paul Tabori
Mihály Babits, Elza pilóta, avagy a tökéletes társadalom [Pilot Elza, or
the Perfect Society, 1933]
Sándor Szathmári, Kazohinia [Voyage to Kazohinia] (1941, translated by
Inez Kemenes).

If Hungarian literature is unknown outside the language borders, uto-

pian works are doubly isolated as they are not very well known even within
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

Hungary. Béla Mester (2019) points out that Hungarian literature seems
to be poor in utopias, as the utopian works written by major authors are
not central in their oeuvres, whereas the authors whose utopias are central
to their body of writings are usually not considered major writers. This is
partly due to the fact that Hungarian utopian and dystopian works are
rarely examined in the context of a contiguous tradition; utopian pieces
are usually examined within the oeuvre of their authors and are often con-
sidered of lesser importance—especially compared to realist novels, which
still set the standard for the common reader and many critics as well. As
Fekete (1989, pp. 191–192) opines, referring to the fantasy works of liter-
ary authors, there is “a strong indigenous minority literary tradition of
fantastic writing whose contributors include some of the most important
Hungarian prose writers of the twentieth century—among them, Mihály
Babits, Frigyes Karinthy, and Tibor Déry.” One may add that there is also
a similar phenomenon in nineteenth-century Hungarian utopian litera-
ture, where some of the authors of the most important utopias (György
Bessenyei, Imre Madách, Mór Jókai) are amongst the most significant
authors of the era, though they are mostly not remembered for the uto-
pian element of their work. It would be an exaggeration if we applied to
Hungarian utopian literature the harsh terms Fekete (1989, p. 192) uses
to describe the situation of Hungarian SF in 1989 (“Hungarian SF thus
remains in a doubly ghettoized corner of world literature, suffering neglect
both inside and outside the country”), but the situation is similar.
During the analyses it will be argued that utopia and dystopia appear as
complementary, rather than opposing concepts in Hungarian utopian
works. In order to clarify the analytical concepts, a more detailed intro-
duction into the genres of utopia and dystopia, understood as being part
of a larger concept utopianism (cf. Sargent 1992), is given later in this
introductory chapter. The above works of art will be discussed essentially
as utopias; even though their literary and aesthetic characteristics will be
mentioned, it is their contribution to utopian thought which is in the
centre of the discussion. Nevertheless, it is also recognized that the uto-
pian ideas are expressed in a literary form and their interpretation must
take literary hermeneutics into consideration. This approach is encour-
aged by the ideas of László Imre (2015, p. 42), who, in his excellent essay
on one of the first works in Hungarian utopian tradition, Bessenyei’s The
Voyage of Tariménes, emphasizes the movements within the canon and the
recurrent changes of literary evaluations, especially in the second part
of the twentieth century, where new insights have been changing
4 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

traditionally accepted aesthetic axioms. Imre underlines the importance of

a renewed interest in the literary aspects of utopianism, and it is hoped
that the current volume sheds light on values of lesser known literary
works, and presents them in a new perspective. In the following a detailed
survey is given on the problems of interpreting utopias both as literary
works and as texts with a validity in social philosophy or the social sciences
in general. I will discuss the differences between the way literary studies
and the social sciences treat the role of the author, and also the problems
caused by the fictive nature of utopian and dystopian texts. A central issue
in interpretation will be the recognition of the polyphony of utopian texts,
that is, the existence of various layers within the text whose interferences
influence interpretation. It will also be argued (based on Vieira 2017) that
a fruitful method of interpreting utopias is to look at the proposed utopian
construction in the text as a thesis, to which the empirical political reality
of the reader relates as an antithesis; while the synthesis is not a part of the
text, it is formed by the reader as the result of a complex hermeneutical
process.
My aim here is not to offer an extensive reading of Hungarian utopian
literature, but to present this tradition within the context of utopianism
and to look at its relevance beyond literary studies, in the framework of
social sciences, with a detailed analysis of the most important literary
examples. It will be discussed what is meant by utopianism, how one can
interpret these phenomena, and what methodology will be followed. In
other words, the book is as much about the genres and phenomena of
utopianism, and its relevance in Central Europe and particularly Hungary,
as it is about certain major Hungarian utopian works of art.

1.1   Hungarian Utopianism in the Permanent

Liminality of Central Europe
Within utopian studies, more and more emphasis is laid on the importance
of widening the horizon of studies and the inclusion of works into the
corpus of investigation which are different from the well-known classics of
English literature. The importance of national utopian traditions (in
English or any other language) is stressed more and more often. As Sargent
(2005, p. 49) argues, “the national differences to be found in utopia-
nism … are both shaped by and help shape the differences among nations.”
The investigation of the utopian aspects of a nation’s culture provides us
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

with a fuller understanding of that culture, whereas the investigations of

various utopian phenomena of diverse cultures give us a more comprehen-
sive picture on utopianism than if we only focus on English and other
prevalent languages.
To understand the context of the Hungarian utopian tradition, I would
first like to clarify the cultural and political context of Central Europe and
why I think that it occupies a liminal position. Larry Wolff in his 1994
book Inventing Eastern Europe argues that the old division of civilized
South versus barbaric North, a division stemming in antiquity, was trans-
formed during the Enlightenment to a division between West and East, as
the cultural and economic centres of Europe shifted to the North, and the
traditional cultural position of the North being barbaric and backward
became uncomfortable and inappropriate. A new division was sought, and
since then the existence of Eastern Europe is primarily not an issue of
geography, but a question of cultural and political identity. The “old lands
of barbarism and backwardness in the north were […] displaced to the
east. The Enlightenment had to invent Western Europe and Eastern
Europe together. It was Western Europe that invented Eastern Europe as
its complementary other half in the eighteenth century […], defining each
other by opposition and adjacency” (Wolff 1994, pp. 4–5). Later Wolff
(1994, p. 7) argues that “the construction of Eastern Europe is a paradox
of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion”—being complementary with
Western Europe and mutually defining each other as metaphors of
advanced civilization and backwardness but offering a transitory area
between Western Europe and the real East, that is Asia. “Eastern Europe
was located not at the antipode of civilization, not down in the depths of
barbarism, but rather on the developmental scale that measured the dis-
tance between civilization and barbarism. […] Eastern Europe was essen-
tially in between, and by the nineteenth century these polar oppositions
acquired the force of fixed formulas” (Wolff 1994, p. 13, emphasis added).
Eastern Europe is the defining Other for Western Europe, yet the “idea of
Eastern Europe never attained the definitive ‘otherness’ of the Orient”
(Wolff 1994, p. 358). These formulas were becoming somewhat slacker by
the beginning of the twentieth century with the appearance of the term
“Middle” or “Central” Europe, and the cultural boundaries of Western
and Central Europe becoming more and more permeable. The division
between Western and Central Europe was once again reinforced by the
erection of the Iron Curtain during the cold war. The extension of the
European Union in the Central European region from 2004 on has been
6 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

a significant development, yet the “perspective of cultural condescension”

(Wolff 1994, p. 4) has not disappeared.
The fact that Eastern Europe appears in European thought during the
Enlightenment as the complementary “shadow” of Western Europe
results in the fact that knowledge in the West concerning Eastern Europe
has been very limited; the region was seen as simple and distant. As Wolff
argues, the “lands of Eastern Europe were sufficiently unfamiliar in the
eighteenth century… The operations of mental mapping were above all
association and comparison: association among the lands of Eastern
Europe, intellectually combining them into a coherent whole, and com-
parison with the lands of Western Europe” (Wolff 1994, p. 6). Kiossev
(2008, quoted in Harasztos 2021, p. 14) claims that the division has a
decisive role in the self-definition of the smaller nations in Central and
Eastern Europe. In their public imagination, Western European cultures
appear as representatives of the Other, something bigger and more impor-
tant than themselves, whereas their own cultures are perceived in terms of
backwardness.
The cultural concept of Europe does not coincide with its geographical
concept; this can be quickly tested if we look at its mountains; Mont Blanc
(4807 m) is usually considered as the highest peak in Europe, whereas
Mount Elbrus (5642 m), the highest point of the Caucasus, is almost a
1000 metres higher. The Caucasus forms the south-eastern geographical
boundary of Europe; hence, from a geographical point of view the correct
answer to the previous question is Mount Elbrus, yet culturally most peo-
ple do not consider such eastern places to be parts of Europe. Eastern
Europe, at least in Western European minds, is in a liminal position
between Europe and Asia; Europe proper is Western Europe. Eastern
Europe has been relatively unknown in the West; the attitude of distancing
and simplification is well represented in Honoré de Balzac’s 1846 novel,
Cousin Bette (1846/1965, pp. 229–230; also quoted in Wolff 1994,
p. 13): “The inhabitants of the Ukraine, Russia, the plains of the Danube,
in short, the Slav peoples, are a link between Europe and Asia, between
civilization and barbarism.” This is the world seen from Paris in the middle
of the nineteenth century: it reinforces the liminal position of Eastern
Europe, and even though it reveals some geographical knowledge, it also
discloses tendencies of ethnic and linguistic simplification, disregarding
Albanians, the Baltic nations, Hungarians, and Romanians—in other
words, the non-Slavic nations in Eastern and Central Europe. Balzac may
blame the French Encyclopaedia for this mistake, as it erroneously claims
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

that “the language of Hungary is a dialect of Slavic” (quoted in Wolff

1994, p. 357), but such details have not become widely known: knowl-
edge of Eastern or Central Europe in the West grows very slowly.
Beyond the concept of Eastern Europe, Larry Wolff occasionally men-
tions Central Europe in his book, but there is no proper reflection to this
region in his system—he is rather sceptical about the relevance of the
region, though he claims it was rediscovered by intellectuals in the 1980s.
He argues that the “advocates of Central Europe today are committed to
shattering intellectually the oppressive idea of Eastern Europe, to redeem-
ing the Czech Republic and Hungary, maybe Poland, even perhaps
Slovenia” (Wolff 1994, p. 15). These words characterize the situation in
the early 1990s fairly well, and I do not believe the commitment changed,
though its geographical scope has been widened. The relevance of the
expression of Central Europe has been questioned a number of times (cf.
Zombory 2019, p. 141), some claim it has become irrelevant after the end
of the Cold War, but I suspect that the concept is questioned partly
because its existence disturbs the simplifying binary oppositions of East
and West. A significant problem in understanding the concept is that it
combines geography with cultural and political structures, while the bor-
ders of the region are nowhere obvious and are historically changing. As
Hanák (1993, p. 163) claims, the region historically exists in its relation-
ship to the adjacent empires: its boundaries are unstable but alter in sub-
ordination to continental historical changes. He also argues (1993, p. 156)
that the widespread debates themselves prove the existence and reality of
the region, whose most important cultural characteristic is the fact that in
Central Europe, utopia and reality blend and mingle. Reflecting on Milan
Kundera, he also mentions that the region is in the centre of Europe from
a geographical point of view, it belongs to the West from a cultural point
of view, yet politically it is linked to the East (Hanák 1993, p. 158).
Wolff’s focus is the relationship of Western Europe and Eastern Europe,
the latter being a mediator between Europe and Asia. Hungarian historian
Jenő Szűcs (1983) insists on a more subtle model: the mediating region is
structured in a way that Central Europe is closer to Western Europe,
whereas the relationship of Eastern Europe to Asia is stronger. The exact
boundaries of any of these regions are nowhere clear and obvious either
synchronically or diachronically. Szűcs’s sophisticated system does not
only recognize the division of Europe to West and East, but he defines
three historical regions: Western Europe, Central Europe, and Eastern
Europe. Szűcs (1983, pp. 131–184) points out a clear difference between
8 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

Western and Eastern types of organizing society since the Middle Ages,
with greater autonomies in the West at lower levels, and a more controlled
power of the sovereigns, preventing a concentration of power (an essen-
tially democratic pattern). Such autonomies provide a counterweight to
the methods of unilateral subordination, whereas the Eastern (Asian) pat-
tern of centralized power structures allow minimal autonomy and require
an almost complete subordination of the subjects. Szűcs, reflecting on
political thinker István Bibó (1911–1979), claims that “in the first 500
years of Hungarian history after the turn of the millennium the Hungarian
society belonged in its structure to the West, or at least approximated to
doing so” (Szűcs 1983, p. 131). This development in Hungary came to a
halt with the Ottoman invasion after 1526, and “for more than 400 years
was forced into an Eastern European type of development marked by
‘inertness in the power relations of society’, ‘deadlocks’ and hopeless
attempts to return to the West, right up until the latter half of the 19th
century” (Szűcs 1983, p. 131).
In Szűcs’s tripartite system (of Eastern, Western, and Central Europe),
the par excellence East in the period that Wolff also discusses (the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries) is Russia in the north and the Ottoman
Empire in the south. Hence the justification for the existence of a transi-
tional region between East and West, a region that politically and cultur-
ally oscillates between the two power structures (or using the metaphor
widely accepted in Hungary: a ferryboat between the Eastern and Western
shore). From a political perspective this permanently liminal position is
expressed as an “elusive democracy” by political scientists András Bozóki
and Miklós Sükösd (2017, p. 79): “Between these two European regions
[democratic West, despotic East], in Central Europe, most of the area was
taken up by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with its dualistic system that
was constitutional and liberal but definitely not a democracy.” In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “democracy in Central Europe
was perceived […] as being always just a few steps away. It should be a
variant that went beyond the alienation and egoist individuality of the
West and the brutality and governmental centralization of the East”
(Bozóki and Sükösd 2017, p. 79). This statement resonates well with the
claim that Larry Wolff (based on Voltaire) makes about Russia, that it
“remains always just about to begin becoming civilized, whether in the
eighteenth or the twentieth century” (1994, p. 371). Exaggerated as both
statements may be, they reflect perspectives of a lag compared to the West
that exists in both the cases of Central and Eastern Europe, yet the two
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

regions east of Western Europe are on a significantly different level of the

scale of civilization or democratization and they both certainly exhibit
values of their own.
This detailed introduction into the history and meaning of the term
Central Europe is relevant to establishing the political background of the
intellectual and cultural context of Hungarian utopianism. In A History of
Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe Balázs Trencsényi
et al. highlight the following typically Central European features: an “‘eter-
nal debate’ between local cultures and imported ideas”, and modernity
perceived as “related to the idea of a temporal and spatial lag and the
imperative of following the already existing models of the ‘civilized West’”
(Trencsényi et al. 2016, p. 4).
These features of Central European political and social thought result
in the regular import of western ideas into Central Europe. Such import
means that “paradigms originating in Western European contexts had to
be ‘negotiated’ in a setting marked by radically different local conditions.
Thus, the conflicts and ambiguities surrounding them [the Western
European paradigms] became even sharper and more visible, making
research into their reception, transformation, or rejection all the more
relevant for debates about European values and identity” (Trencsényi
et al. 2016, p. 2). These peculiarities in the reception of Western European
political ideas can be well observed in the utopias and dystopias of
Hungarian literature.

1.2  The Concept of Liminality

The borderland that Larry Wolff defines in the concept of Eastern
Europe—the liminal region between Western Europe and Asia, the Orient
proper—needs further refinement with the inclusion of Central Europe,
the liminal space between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. This
region is in the situation of permanent liminality, as discussed by Árpád
Szakolczai. In the following I would like to explain how I understand
liminality, which is essentially a term of anthropology that was first coined
by Arnold van Gennep in 1909 as a concept used for analysing rituals,
especially initiation rituals, where significant changes occur in the life of
the individual, or in the relationship of the individual and the community
(e.g. initiation of youngsters into adulthood). The liminal period is the
10 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

phase of being in between, neither here nor there (which ideally is fol-
lowed by reintegration at another level).
The term gained a larger acceptance and broader application in the
1960s especially through the work of Victor Turner, and now liminality is
seen as an important concept in the social sciences. We can equally talk
about liminal periods of whole societies, or the features of liminal spaces,
such as airports or railway stations, which are by definition neither here
nor there, permanently in between departure and arrival. The most impor-
tant development in the understanding of liminality is the recognition of
the importance of these in-between periods either psychologically (in the
life of an individual, in families) or in large-scale societies (see also
Thomassen 2009). Liminal periods are recognized as “periods of uncer-
tainty, anguish, even existential fear facing the abyss in void, they can also
serve as a path towards renewal. In a liminal space, attachments to one
world or the other blur and dissolve, and in the midst of that disorienta-
tion there is a heightened possibility for new perspectives” (Horvath 2013,
p. 2). Such positive aspects of liminality are also distinguished: as liminality
allows for new cultural forms to appear in unusual combinations, it offers
a possibility for cultural hybridity without the generally accepted hierar-
chies having a defining effect. Liminality has an important role in a transi-
tion process, but without reintegration, without a new order being
established, “liminality is pure danger” (Thomassen 2009, p. 22).
Sociologist Árpád Szakolczai (2000, p. 220) examined particularly
cases in large-scale societies where the reintegration phase does not take
place, and liminality becomes permanent (or fixed). “Being ‘on the limit’
is a genuine Alice-in-Wonderland experience; a situation where almost
anything can happen. […] once previous certainties are removed and one
enters a delicate, uncertain, malleable state” (Szakolczai 2009, p. 148).
I argue that permanent liminality is a general state of affairs in Central
Europe, a territory where societies are in the state of constant change from
structures of totalitarian/controlled societies and democracy, between
Eastern and Western patterns of building society, between the Occident
and the Orient. This liminal position of Central European culture has far-­
reaching consequences, and, among others, can be detected in Hungarian
utopian literature.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

1.3  Utopianism: Literary and Political

Dreams of an ideal society called utopia, and their negative counterpart
dystopia, have been fascinating topics for the literary and social imagina-
tion.1 First of all, some definitions need to be clarified. Although utopia is
a Greek word, it was coined by Thomas More in 1516, more than 500
years ago. It appeared in the title of the book by More that was to initiate
this successful genre. “Topia” refers to the Greek word “τοπος,” meaning
“place,” whereas the first part of the word may either be the equivalent to
the Greek word “ου,” meaning “no,” or “ευ,” meaning “good”; hence,
the term may refer to either a “good place” or “no-place.” This ambiguity
is present in the history of the concept, and it also contributes to the suc-
cess of the genre: it is never obvious what exactly is meant by a utopia. The
concept is much older than the term—in fact, it has been present in human
thought since time immemorial in its simplest form as a longing for some-
thing better (for more on this topic see Vieira 2010). The term may be
500 years old, but the concept is perennial: scholars find its traces in
ancient writings including and preceding the Old Testament, in myths and
fairy tales and in the graphic arts as well. It is also understood as an anthro-
pological phenomenon: the literary pieces are in fact manifestations of
man’s eternal longing for a better place, our desire for a better life, or as
Fátima Vieira (2010, p. 20) argues (referring to Ernst Bloch): “a manifes-
tation of the wishing nature of man.” Ruth Levitas (2013, p. xi) also high-
lights a broad sense of utopia claiming that the “core of utopia is the desire
for being otherwise.” We may conclude that a general human wish for the
better is the fuel for every utopian attempt (literary or other), and lies in
the background of utopian literature and other aspects of utopianism.
When talking about utopia, unlike in the case of many other genres of
literature, one feels that the term needs to be defined. This is partly due to
the fact that utopia is not exclusively a literary genre. Utopia has always
been in the no man’s land between literature and the social sciences: liter-
ary works, including utopias, are often ignored by the social sciences,
although works of imaginary literature are sometimes used as illustrations.
Simultaneously, literary scholars often criticize (and sometimes ignore)
utopias for their dubious literary qualities such as their lack of
well-­developed characters, genuine conflicts, and complex narratives. As

1
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Zsolt Czigányik, ed. 2017. Utopian
Horizons. Budapest and New York: CEU Press.
12 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

we can see, the context for the interpretation of utopias is not unproblem-
atic, and there have been drastic changes in the way the subject of utopia
is discussed, from the wholesale rejection of utopian projects by both
Friedrich Engels and Karl Popper to the contemporary recognition of uto-
pia as a dynamizing force in the social sciences, as reflected by the 2012
annual meeting of the American Sociological Association titled “Real
Utopias: Emancipatory Projects, Institutional Designs, Possible Futures.”

1.3.1   Utopia and Ambiguity

Ambiguity is an inevitable constituent of the term utopia, and this ambi-
guity is often considered to be one of the greatest virtues of utopia. Even
though a standard definition of the term would mention an alternative
reality that is significantly better than the political reality experienced by
the writer (and presumably, the readers) of a certain piece, the utopian
reality described in a given work is often not really desirable. One some-
times does not even presume that some utopias were intended to be desir-
able by their creator (and let us set aside for the time being the complications
arising from dealing with the intentions of the author, a fallacy committed
by many scholars of literature). In fact, Sándor Szathmári’s Kazohinia
focuses on this ambiguity as it depicts two fictional worlds based on practi-
cally opposing qualities, yet both equally undesirable (for details see
Chap. 8). As Miguel Abensour (2008, p. 406) argues, ambiguity is a cen-
tral feature of utopia and a dogmatic reading is prevented by its constant
oscillation between eutopia and outopia, the “good place” and the “no
place.” A further point of this interpretative oscillation is the “bad place,”
the negative utopia or dystopia, an alternative reality that is not only non-
existent, but also explicitly not desired. Houston (2007, p. 425) also
argues that “ambiguity and irony have always been a feature of the Utopian
mode of discourse.” Artur Blaim (1982, p. 5) claims that utopian texts are
polysemic by nature, arguing that utopia is “a literary work which affirms
no single ideology and is open to many contradictory interpretations.”
Utopia’s power and attraction is fuelled by this creative and beneficial
ambiguity and polysemy, even if it makes its interpretation a more complex
task. Dystopian images and constructions prevail in twentieth-­century
utopian literature, they have become extremely popular both in the screen
and on page, whereas an honest, straightforward utopia is hard to find. It
is not without a reason that a properly utopian piece, Mór Jókai’s 1872
work, The Novel of the Century to Come receives special attention and a
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

most detailed discussion in this study. This novel duly seems to be the
product of an earlier age, one that is often read ironically today, with
a focus on its satirical edge, but where an underlying human feature, a
“longing for a better world” is clearly manifested.
By the second part of the twentieth century, since utopian studies as a
separate (yet interdisciplinary) scholarly discipline was established, a con-
sensus has been developing among utopian scholars on the meaning of
utopianism. Yet it must also be acknowledged that there is no complete
agreement in the various fields of studies that are relevant to the questions
of utopianism, on what utopia, or what a utopian text is. As Houston
(2007, p. 426) recognizes, the “uniform idea of what it means for a text
to be ‘utopian’ is lacking. Broadly speaking there is a distinction between
those critics who take Utopian to mean idealistic or perfectionist about
human society and perfectibility, and those for whom the deciding factor
is the nature of its engagement with the Utopian tradition or with a par-
ticular Utopian text,” usually Thomas More’s Utopia. In the following,
even though Sargent’s definition concerning the dreams and nightmares
of mankind will be primarily used as a guideline, and perfectionism is
rejected as unattainable for humans (though idealism is clearly no crime),
the texts’ engagement with the utopian tradition(s) will be the primary
factor in determining its utopian nature. It is also recognized that utopian
texts reflect on the workings of human societies; hence, an interdisciplin-
ary attitude involving the social sciences and literary studies is justified.
The word “interdisciplinary” has often been used and abused, yet I am
convinced that this volume also proves that utopian studies is a proper
intersection—or as I prefer to call it, meeting place—for the humanities
and social sciences, disciplines that essentially belong together yet far too
often are seen in opposition, or worse, alien to one another and disinter-
ested in each other’s efforts. The interdisciplinary nature of studies in uto-
pianism is becoming more and more accepted, yet the cooperation of the
various disciplines in interpretation is not automatic, and their emphases
and approaches may differ substantially. As Balázs Trencsényi et al. (2016,
p. 5) argue, “historians of political thought try to renegotiate the relation-
ship between history, literary studies and the social sciences, pointing out
that the understanding of a political interaction might necessitate the use
of a variety of different interpretative techniques and approaches.” Yet
interdisciplinarity is not only a technical issue. Ernest Gellner (1998, p. 3)
wrote that there is “what one might call the individualistic/atomistic con-
ception of knowledge. Knowledge, in this view, is something practiced or
14 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

achieved above all by individuals alone: if more than one person is involved,
and collaboration takes place, this does not really modify the essence of
the activity or of the achievement.” Later, however, he proposed a more
organic vision: “Knowledge is essentially a team game. Anyone who
observes, investigates or interprets the world, inevitably deploys concepts
which are carried by an entire cultural/linguistic community” (Gellner
1998, p. 6). The interdisciplinary endeavour of the study of utopianism
subscribes to the organic view of knowledge, and the cooperation of the
various disciplines implies that utopia may be nowhere, but it is also a
method and an opportunity to gain knowledge and to contemplate on the
past and future, as well as the present, of human fears and hopes.

1.3.2   Utopia: Fact and Fiction

Utopia is not only a literary genre, and even though I approach utopian
texts primarily from a literary point of view, serious efforts have been
employed to take their social, political, and ideological aspects into consid-
eration, to treat them as sources of political insight, as reflections of social
experiences. As it is hoped that this study may be fruitful for scholars of
political science and the history of ideas (and possibly other disciplines of
the social sciences) as well, we need to clarify certain concepts that are
treated differently in the methodologies of the social sciences and literary
studies; primarily the notion of fictionality and the concept of the author.
Literature, and particularly fictionality, has appeared as a problem, and
literary works have often been rejected as sources of knowledge since Plato
banned poets from the ideal Republic. It has been argued by many ever
since that fiction is devoid of any truth value; it may be a source of enter-
tainment but need not occupy much place in serious discussions—espe-
cially not in the social sciences, which deal with facts, not fiction. Even
realistic or naturalistic fiction, whose settings and subject matters are
closely linked to historical and social reality, is also often considered to
possess dubious truth value, even when these fictions frequently appear as
examples or illustrations of the corresponding historical periods. The basis
of using fictive literature in the social sciences is that even if a fictional
world appears as a separate system from historical reality, it is “dependent
on [a] cultural-historical reality in which it is created and with which it
holds more or less obvious affinities” (Ronen 1994, p. 15). Yet can one
expect scholars of the social sciences to take seriously such counterfactuals
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

as utopias, that deal with non-existing societies which are by definition

nowhere to be found?
There is more than one way of looking at fictional texts. George Steiner
(2013, p. 12, also quoted in Baccolini and Moylan 2003) considers the
capability of human language to express non-existent states of affairs, for
instance, wishes or conditional and future sentences, a unique ability that
makes human culture exceptional: “We endure, we endure creatively due
to our imperative ability to say ‘No’ to reality, to build fictions of alterity,
of dreamt or willed or awaited ‘otherness’ for our consciousness to inhabit.
It is in this precise sense that the utopian and the messianic are figures of
syntax.” Steiner finds the unique capability to discuss fictional states, such
as the future, as a general human ability and necessity, not as something
extraordinary that belongs only to the realm of arts and literature. The
same claim is advanced by Ruth Ronen (1994, p. 2) when she argues that
fictionality is not only a specific feature of the literary text, but an aspect of
human existence. The relationship between fiction and reality is a signifi-
cant question in literary studies, but it also involves a common human
experience of referring to non-actual states or events (in dreams, wishes,
memories, etc.). We could not live our lives without references to things
and events that do not (yet) exist—for instance, what we are going to do
tomorrow. Similarly, utopia is an expression of the importance of the
non-actual.
Fictionality, as we have seen, is traditionally contrasted with factuality,
as are literary works with historical accounts. Yet the works of historians,
and also those of social scientists, share many important features with fic-
tion. In establishing a distinct relationship between literature and politics,
Jacques Rancière (2004, p. 13) refers to Aristotle, claiming that according
to the ancient philosopher poetry is “more ‘philosophical’ than history
because poetry builds causal plots binding events together in a whole,
while history only tells the events as they evolve.” This cohesive nature of
epic poetry (and fictional literature in the modern era) is also recognized
by modern historiographers; Hayden White, for instance, underlines the
parallel aspects of writing fictional and factual histories. He emphasizes
that the chronological sequence of events is not a satisfactory form of his-
torical narrative: “[t]he events must be not only registered within the
chronological framework of their original occurrence but narrated as well,
that is to say, revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that
they do not possess as a mere sequence” (1987, p. 5). A writer of fiction
generally tries to produce a coherent narrative, and if historians (and
16 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

political scientists or sociologists, one may add) aim at finding coherent

patterns in the reality that they examine, there is an underlying similarity
in the framework of their endeavours. To achieve coherence “a historical
thinker chooses conceptual strategies by which to explain or represent his
data. On this level, I believe, the historian performs an essentially poetic
act, in which he prefigures the historical field and constitutes it as a domain
upon which to bring to bear the specific theories he will use to explain
‘what was really happening’ in it” (White 1973, p. x). The poetic act of
prefiguration links the social scientist to the writer of fiction, yet naturally
there are basic differences as well. Historians are generally disinterested in
hypothetical persons and events, and their endeavour is to link actual
events into a coherent structure; while a writer of fiction enjoys remark-
able freedom in using fictive characters and settings. The historian also
endeavours to reveal or “find” the coherence of events, as opposed to the
writer of fiction, who may create it. The conclusion we can draw from
White’s argument is that a sharp distinction between literary and historical
narratives—and in a valid extension, between literary narratives and the
narratives of the social sciences in general—disregards important common
elements. Literary studies is capable of analysing and interpreting the
peculiarities of the narrative nature of representations of reality offered by
the social sciences.
One such peculiarity is that the border between fact and fiction is by no
means clear-cut and obvious, and utopia as a literary genre is particularly
problematic in this respect, traditionally belonging to the realm of fiction,
yet having a very strong link to social reality. A good example how writers
themselves blur the distinction between fact and fiction is the introductory
letter in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: “I should have great reason to
complain that some of them are so bold as to think my book of travels a
mere fiction out of my own brain, and have gone so far as to drop hints
that the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos have no more existence than the inhab-
itants of Utopia” (quoted in Maczelka 2019, p. 266). Swift here not only
sets his tale in the realm of realistic travel narratives (where the exact details
are often practically unverifiable) but sets utopia as the locus of the ulti-
mately fictive.

1.3.3   Utopia and Utopianism

The interdisciplinary nature of the research implies that the present vol-
ume discusses utopia not (or not only) as a literary term. Many scholars
draw our attention to the fact that literary representations of utopia form
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

only one aspect of a broader concept of utopianism. This concept has

three equally important aspects: beyond the literary representations of
utopianism, one also has to take into consideration intentional communi-
ties (utopian practice) and the utopian aspects of political theory (see
Sargent 1994). This must also be taken into consideration when mapping
the Hungarian phenomena of utopianism; we do not discuss a few isolated
pieces of literature scattered in the drama and fiction written in Hungarian,
but patterns of political thought and reflections of political ideologies are
relevant parts of the interpretation. In Lyman Tower Sargent’s wording
(2010, p. 5), “utopianism refers to the dreams and nightmares that con-
cern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which
usually envision a radically different society from the one in which the
dreamers live. And utopianism, unlike much social theory, focuses on
everyday life as well as matters concerned with economic, political and
social questions.” As we have seen above, dreaming, just like fiction in
general, should not be dismissed as unimportant, childish, or marginal. In
George Steiner’s view, it is one of the chief manifestations of being human
and the key to our survival. Thus, although the essentially human capacity
for creating counterfactual constructions is manifested in literary utopias,
the literary aspect of utopianism is the chief, but not the only, aspect of the
investigation. Dreamers mould their dreams into either literary, practical,
or theoretical forms, and these three forms often interact with each other.
A literary utopia may have important theoretical implications that are also
relevant to the social scientist, and may motivate the establishment of an
intentional community, whose experiences in turn may become the object
of social studies, just to mention a few of the possible configurations. The
present volume concerns itself primarily with the interaction of the literary
element and utopian political thought in Hungarian utopianism, the way
the social, political, and economic aspects of human life are reflected in
literary forms. From this naturally follows that in this study more emphasis
is laid on contents than form, even when the literary form and the herme-
neutical strategies related to it cannot be neglected. Formal features of the
literary works will be reflected inasmuch as interpretation requires it, yet
esthetic qualities will not be in the focus.
In utopian studies, apology has become standard due to the rejection
of utopian ideas in the social sciences for most of the twentieth century.
An important reason for the marginalization of utopias in modern social
theory is that Marxism is known for its explicit opposition to the concept
of utopia, especially in the form of utopian socialism. Whereas Engels
18 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

allowed certain positive roles to the early utopians (primarily Claude Henri
Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen) in his influential pam-
phlet “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” he also maintained that “they
could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies” (1880/2008, p. 36).
Marx and Engels, while explicitly criticizing utopianism, developed their
own theories for the restructuring of society (an obviously utopian proj-
ect), thus becoming “anti-utopian utopianists” to use Stephen Lukes’s
term (quoted by Paden 2002, p. 67). This anti-utopianism had a lasting
and widespread effect, but even Marxists did not thoroughly reject utopia.
Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) looked at utopianism in the broadest sense in
The Principle of Hope (written between 1938 and 1947); here, the indi-
vidual is motivated by “dreams of a better life.” Hope becomes the fuel of
human existence and Bloch systematically examines the presence of hope
in many spheres of life. Phenomena like myths, fairy tales, and many ele-
ments of popular culture reflect what we may call the anthropological
aspect of utopianism. As Wayne Hudson (1982, p. 107) put it, Bloch
offered an unprecedented survey of human wishes, and his work natural-
ized utopia. Bloch looked at utopia as natural to human beings, a part of
human nature that is diffused in human culture.
As Sargent (1994, p. 22) argues, “the most complete success of the
anti-utopians was to make the label ‘Utopian’ take on the meaning of
fanciful, unrealistic, impractical.” For much of the twentieth century this
meaning overshadowed the potential in utopianism to form a vision of a
future society in social sciences, and hindered the existence of negotiable,
viable alternatives. This negative attitude went so far that proponents of
essentially utopian ideas avoided the term “utopia.” As Luisa Passerini
(2002, p. 15) argues, the protagonists of 1968 who used the utopian slo-
gan, “Being a realist means demanding the impossible,” did not like to use
the term “utopia,” because it acquired a negative sense and was mostly
used to express impossibility and absurdity. Passerini also claims that this
interpretation is not necessary, drawing our attention to the difference in
Italian between utopico, a term with positive connotations, and utopistico,
an adjective burdened with the meaning of absurdity and impossibility.
This duality is also present in Karl Mannheim’s study on ideology and
utopia, and the literary analyses of this volume (especially Chap. 8) reveal
that absurdity may also have a function in offering an ironic criticism of
the present situation, thus discrediting false possibilities. What appears
ridiculous or absurd in fiction will prove to be faulty or even catastrophic
outside literature as well. Both positive and negative utopias are definitely
critical as their point of departure from the real is that the present is
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

imperfect: it needs to be thoroughly transformed, or if the tendencies of

the present remain unchanged, we can expect such extreme consequences
that appear in dystopias.

1.3.4   Authorial Intention

There is no agreement amongst scholars as to how the intention of the
author is to be taken into consideration. This uncertainty arises mainly
from the interdisciplinary nature of utopian studies: whereas the author
for most social scientists is a fairly unproblematic concept, twentieth-­
century traditions of literary studies look at authorial intentions as a par-
ticularly problematic field. To give a detailed account of the problem
would go beyond the confines of this study, but some considerations must
be stated. New Criticism, a major movement in literary criticism in the
1930s and 1940s, established the autonomy of the literary work and
regarded the interpretation of a work of literature based on its author’s
intentions as misguided. Its proponents stated that such intentions are
partly dubious, partly irrelevant: what should guide interpretation is the
text itself, independently of the psychology and biography of the author
(see Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946). This view remained influential and
gained new impetus by the appearance of postmodern theories emphasiz-
ing the role of intertextuality, particularly in the works of Roland Barthes.
In his influential 1968 essay, “The Death of the Author,” Barthes
(1968/1977, p. 146) claimed that “the text is a tissue of quotations drawn
from the innumerable centres of culture,” thus relativizing the role of the
author and especially his or her interpretative authority over the text. The
writer for Barthes (1968/1977, p. 146) is not the origin of the text, but a
“scriptor” providing “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writ-
ings, none of them original, blend and clash.” This multiplicity called the
text may be disentangled by no one else but the reader, who becomes the
centre of the process of interpretation. Since the New Critics and Barthes,
the traditional concept of the author as an all-knowing source of the text
cannot be redeemed, though current trends in literary scholarship do not
necessarily reject referring to the author or discussing his or her role in the
creation of the text. This is at least partly due to the fact that the author is
dead neither to popular culture, nor consequently to the majority of the
readers. Unless literary scholars intend to hide in an ivory tower, the issue
of the author needs to be addressed, even if it is no longer the
20 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

unproblematic concept it may have appeared to be, not only to non-pro-

fessional readers, but also to social scientists.
Authorial intentions can be particularly problematic in the interpreta-
tion of utopias. The seemingly simple fact, whether a given piece is meant
to be utopia or dystopia, cannot be seen as an unchallengeable, objective
authorial intention that is perceived accurately by the reader. We can sup-
pose even without thorough investigations that the authors of negative
utopias usually reach their target in causing horror, disgust, or just simply
fear and abhorrence in most readers. In the case of positive utopias, how-
ever, the reader’s identification with the author’s intention is less auto-
matic: it is questionable whether we would feel content in Wells’s
industrialized, mechanical worlds, or in the cold, army-like order of
Bellamy, or in other, over-regularized places. The same is true of Hungarian
literature; the image of the future Jókai depicts in The Novel of a Century
to Come tells us more about the nineteenth century, the time of the writing
of the book, but readers today may have great difficulties in identifying
with the hierarchical order that is shown as ideal by Jókai. It often seems
that we cannot share the optimism of the authors of earlier times, and we
see a smothering dystopia in their wonderfully arranged worlds, having
lost our faith in the accessibility of an ideal state of affairs. As many have
argued, after the failure of utopian endeavours in the twentieth century,
a positive utopia is more difficult to accept, and contemporary readers
often prefer an ironic reading even of the most beautiful social designs.
This problem may become a central theme of a work of art, as in the case
of Sándor Szathmári’s Kazohinia, where two opposite worlds are depicted,
that of the Hins and of the Behins. Neither world seems to be endurable,
we may recognize the caricature of our own life in both of them.
In the interpretation of utopias, literary studies also need some adjust-
ment away from particularly strong attitudes in postmodernism, attitudes
that M. H. Abrams (1971, p. 25) calls the “isolation” of literature. This
approach “regards the work of art in isolation from all … external points
of reference, analyses it as a self-sufficient entity constituted by its parts in
their internal relations and sets out to judge it solely by criteria intrinsic to
its own mode of being.” Besides the noted concerns about the role of the
author, poststructuralism’s rejection of the referentiality of the text and
the mimetic function of literature makes the relevance of literature for the
social sciences (or for any social or political consideration) appear prob-
lematic. If one accepts the primacy of an interpretative method that severs
the literary work not only from its author, but from all external references,
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

the reader interested in social or political issues naturally and logically

withdraws. While there is no intention here to discredit literary approaches
that consider extratextual references marginal or irrelevant, it is suggested
that the analysis of certain genres of literature, particularly satire and uto-
pia, calls for the acknowledgement of the external referentiality of the text.
A work of art that criticizes a certain political reality will not be fully
understood unless that reality is taken into consideration.
Utopia, in its fullest form, is understood as an imaginary ideal world,
or, as Lyman Tower Sargent (1994, p. 9.) argues, a positive utopia is “a
non-existent society described in considerable detail […] that the author
intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably better than
the society in which that reader lived.” If we consider how greatly social
circumstances may change in time, we can recognize how difficult the
interpretation of texts may be, given the time gap between reading and
writing; readers today look at Thomas More’s social fantasy quite differ-
ently than contemporary readers did, and this is also the case with
Bessenyei’s or Jókai’s nineteenth-century works. The historical gap may
even result in adding further complications to the original ambiguity of
the term: a book that originally might have been intended to be a utopia
may now be read as a negative one, a dystopia.

1.3.5   Utopia and Dystopia

The present volume interprets works of dystopia, or negative utopia, as
parts of the literary tradition of utopianism. The existence of two terms,
utopia and dystopia, suggests two different concepts, or genres in the
literary context, and hence they could be treated separately, but I opt for
emphasizing their common elements. Dystopia is an even younger term
than utopia. It is popularly believed that it was coined by John Stuart Mill
in 1868, yet it had appeared in print in English as early as the mid-­
eighteenth century, and not only as an isolated occurrence (see Budakov
2010). Dystopia is usually seen as the negative counterpart, or as Krishan
Kumar puts it, the “shadow” of utopia. He also claims that this “shadow”
has been present ever since utopias existed, and “so close are the genres
that it is not always clear what is a utopia and what a dystopia” (2013,
p. 19). The difference often does not depend on the author’s intention (a
rather problematic concept anyway, as discussed above), but the readers’
interpretations. Many distinct utopias (including More’s eponymous
piece) have been considered dystopias, but at the same time “American
22 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

college students of the 1950s and 1960s found Aldous Huxley’s dystopia
Brave New World, with its easy availability of sex and drugs, a distinct
utopia” (Kumar 2013, p. 19). Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange
also generated followers who looked at the life of the protagonist as a
hedonistic utopia, whereas the fourth book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, which features the land of the Houyhnhnms, the rational horses,
has fuelled a debate since its publication in 1726 over whether it is to be
interpreted as an enlightened utopia, or the opposite of it—a bitter satire
of the devastating rule of the intellect. (Recently, in 2007, Chloë Houston
gave an overview of the issues around Gulliver’s utopian nature and con-
cluded that there is no consensus.) As Maczelka (2019, p. 267) argues,
the reason for the conflict in opinions is an inherent ambivalence within
Swift’s oeuvre, where such duality is natural; hence, satirical works and
serious projects are mingled. (Gulliver’s Travels is most relevant in
Hungarian utopian literature as several books in the twentieth century
claim to be sequels of Swift’s book, see Chaps. 6 and 8 on Karinthy and
Szathmári.)
Laurence Davis recently argued (at the Living in the End Times confer-
ence, see Czigányik 2021) that even though dystopia is historically the
shadow or alter ego of utopia, in the intellectual climate of the twenty-first
century, the roles shifted, and utopia arguably exists in the shadows of
dystopia—this fact certainly influences the interpretation of earlier works
as well. Even though positive utopias still exist, particularly in political
thought, really attractive literary utopias have become rare; it seems that
in twentieth-­century and contemporary culture the place of positive uto-
pia has been taken by its negative counterpart. At the same time dystopia
has become almost self-evident, and the readers of twentieth-century liter-
ary works find that social analyses run into gloomy consequences far too
often. Juvenal’s famous sentence (Satires I, 30)—that it is difficult not to
write a satire—referred to the world of the Roman Empire and has
remained valid for centuries, but it seems to me that in the age of global-
ization and climate change it is equally difficult not to write a dystopia.
The narrative, either in the case of a utopia or a dystopia, reflects the
social-political problems of the author’s world, yet in the framework of a
fictional reality that is isolated from the actual historical context. This iso-
lation or displacement of the narrative is either spatial (it appears in a non-­
existent space, such as on an unknown island in More’s Utopia, or in the
country of Totopos that is visited in Bessenyei’s The Voyage of Tariménes) or
temporal (in a non-existent time, such as in the future—for instance, in
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

Jókai’s The Novel of the Century to Come). The latter version became over-
whelmingly popular in the twentieth century and often gives the false
impression that these literary works describe the political and social condi-
tions of the future, and therefore of being prophetic in nature. This is a
common misunderstanding; a civilization’s conception of its future is of
great importance in shaping the actions people take, yet neither utopia nor
dystopia is capable of directly describing the future. However, they both
reflect on the present in a critical manner, and from this point of view it is
irrelevant whether they depict an attractive or an abominable alternative.
The satirical edge is present in both positive and negative utopia: an alter-
native is presented to the existing social-political reality because the pres-
ent is considered to be unsatisfactory or flawed. Based on this assumption,
the analyses in this volume will consider utopias with narratives dated in
the writer’s future as primarily criticizing the writer’s present in describing
a willed or dreaded future, rather than a forecast.

1.4  The Position of Utopian and Dystopian Texts

in Literature

1.4.1   The Evolution of the Dystopian Genre

The investigation of twentieth-century and contemporary culture reveals
that both the presence and the popularity of dystopias, and hence their
relevance, has been significantly growing. Gregory Claeys (2017, p. 498)
argues that “dystopia increasingly defines the spirit of our times.” In con-
temporary culture this phenomenon is coupled with the growing presence
of post-apocalyptic narratives—books and movies that describe the
destruction of human civilization and the re-emergence of human society
afterwards. (The post-apocalyptic is often part of the dystopian, as many
dystopias, like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Pilot Elza by
Mihály Babits, implicitly or explicitly include an apocalyptic narrative, a
war or other traumatic event that lies in the fictive history of the dystopia.)
Dystopian themes have become so popular that nowadays it is almost
taken for granted that when a movie or a novel takes place in the future,
its plot is set within an undesirable social or political structure, even when
these structures provide only a formulaic and vague background to the
events told. Dystopian settings are so popular that they appear in unex-
pected instances as well, such as in a recent film adaptation of Antoine de
24 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince (2015, dir. Mark Osborne), where the
ageing aviator tells the story of his meeting with the little prince to a
young girl in a dystopian suburb of a consumer society. It may be claimed
that presenting the utopian reality of “seeing rightly with one’s heart”
makes the dystopian aspects of our civilization explicit. The widespread
presence of dystopian notions and imagery in contemporary culture has
important consequences. As Maziarczyk (2011, p. 47) argues, “the term
dystopia seems to have become nowadays an ‘umbrella’ term for any work
depicting a gloomy vision of horrible society,” and one may add that it has
become an aesthetic, rather than an intellectual or political category in
contemporary culture. Tom Moylan (2021, p. 2) also notes “the upsurge
of dystopian expression” and adds (using Vandana Singh’s expression)
that in the past decades it has often taken the form of “dystopia porn,”
“that feeds a fatalist, anti-utopian, pessimism rather than provoking the
prophetic awakening of which the dystopian imagination is capable.”
As we have already seen in the literary example of Swift’s Houyhnhnms,
utopian works may have dystopian interpretations; therefore, it would be
futile to look for the first dystopia. Herrero and Royo-Grasa (2021, p. 6)
argue that literary dystopia has its roots in Menippean satire, but “the
novels that are regarded by most critics as laying the foundations of dysto-
pian fiction are E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), Yevgeny
Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and
George Orwell’s 1984 (1949).” The imaginary world of Zamyatin’s We is
a mathematically organized dystopian police-state called the “One State.”
This organization aims at the total control of citizens who live in transpar-
ent glass-houses and have codes like D-503 or I-303 instead of names.
Zamyatin’s We already includes the most important basic topics which
have kept occurring in dystopian literature and cinema ever since. These
include mind control, the repression of emotions and imagination, subli-
mation of individuality in a larger social unit, and the existence of a non-­
conformist revolt group, including the alienated protagonist whose
sufferings highlight the impossibility of human existence within the frame-
work of the total state. Thus, the focus of this genre (whether on page or
on the screen) becomes the limits of humanity in the context of an
extremely oppressive social construct that often claims to be beneficial.
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

1.4.2   Dystopia and Satire

In contemporary culture, with utopia becoming peripheral in literature
and dystopia getting more and more prevalent, the latter genre appears to
be leaving its parent utopia, and at the same time the importance of the
satirical aspect of literary utopianism cannot be underestimated. By the
end of the twentieth century positive literary utopias have become rare,
but it is not necessarily their place that dystopias are taking. One way of
looking at dystopias is through their relationship with utopia, yet from a
literary point of view there is also another option. Dystopias can be seen as
satires that are displaced, cast in the future or confined in space, and do
not limit themselves to the scathing criticism of certain people or phenom-
ena, but scrutinize the workings of the society thoroughly, usually putting
one element of the problems in the centre, and that element, being mag-
nified, distorts the whole system, or more precisely, shows its dis-
torted nature.
It is self-evident for Northrop Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism (1966,
p. 233) to list dystopia under the mythos of winter: irony and satire, more
precisely in the second phase of satire, when “the ‘other world’ appears in
satire, […] as an ironic counterpart to our own, a reversal of accepted
social standards.” If the tone is darker, more demonic, the work of art
belongs to Frye’s sixth phase, where satire gives over to irony, and we no
longer want (or can) laugh at the tragic hero or situation. Laughing is a
victorious war-cry: the thing or person that is being laughed at is defeated;
we are no longer in its power. Dystopias, however, present “human life in
terms of largely unrelieved bondage. […] In our day the chief form of this
phase is the nightmare of social tyranny” (Frye 1966, p. 238). Frye’s point
of view is very different from mine, yet it is a telling fact that the two
genres are also related to each other in his analysis. Houston (2007,
p. 437) argues that the eighteenth-century satirical mode of utopian lit-
erature (particularly through Swift) led to “the development of the
Utopian satire, the necessary development for the emergence of the dys-
topia, or anti-utopian fiction.” She further opines that “Gulliver’s Travels’
utopianism can ultimately be identified in its denial of the possibility of an
ideal state on earth” and also includes a “deliberate mockery of earlier
descriptions of new and ideal societies” (Houston 2007, p. 427). The fact
that Gulliver’s Travels has a great influence on twentieth-century
Hungarian utopian literature suggests that these satirical and ironic ele-
ments are particularly strong within the Hungarian tradition. Mester
26 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

(2019) argues for the use of pessimist utopia in the case of Hungarian
utopianism instead of negative utopia or dystopia. In his opinion, in the
Hungarian tradition it is usually the pessimist anthropology of the “hope-
lessness of human nature” that ruins the utopian construct.
In accordance with the arguments above, we may analyse dystopia as a
branch of satire, and to begin with, I shall highlight among the character-
istics of dystopia the feeling of inevitability, the belief that the present
world is going in a direction whose future consequences are shown in
dystopias, and we cannot alter these repercussions: we do not rule the
course of the world; the catastrophe is unavoidable. Dystopias re-evaluate
the notion of progress; we can no longer expect with optimism a better
world where everything goes well on its own. On the contrary: we antici-
pate in anxiety the fulfilment of those tragedies whose germs we experi-
ence in our own age. Our anxiety is increased by such works of art, such
as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Pilot Elza by Mihály Babits,
that do not place the catastrophe in a distant future, but in the life of their
own, or in the next generation.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are generally looked upon by
literary historians as the golden age of satire; by the twentieth century this
genre has become much rarer in its traditional form, satire is more often
present in literature as an element or tone in other genres, like in the
novel. The satirists of the golden age, as Alexander Pope or Jonathan
Swift, shared the conviction of regarding themselves as the purifiers and
guards of civilization. In Cuddon’s (1992, p. 832) view, “dystopianism
has also produced a kind of satire: the creation of a futuristic society whose
shortcomings and evils are then exposed.” The traditional moral purifying
role of satires, however, is only partially present in dystopias. As Zoltán
Abádi Nagy (2018, p. 43) argues with reference to Karinthy’s relation to
Swift (in detail see Chap. 6), the satirical norm in the background became
unstable and eventually disappeared, having lost a consensus about it in
the twentieth century.
Sutherland states that the satirist views the criticized phenomena from
an external point of view, attacking the social structure that produced the
topic of the satire (quoted by Szalay 1963, p. 143). Dystopia, in this con-
text, is the par excellence, extreme satire, which attacks social structures
directly and in their totality. One can interpret Sutherland’s opinion in a
way that the topic of satire is practically a pretext for the examination of
the social system, a symptom that shows grave problems which cannot be
cured on their own because they cannot be isolated from the other set of
 1 INTRODUCTION 27

problems. Dystopias do not seek such pretexts, they show the problems of
society directly, in their complexities. When Jonathan Swift in A Tale of a
Tub attacks pedantry and self-complacency, he also attacks, at least implic-
itly, the society that tolerates or even promotes such behaviour. This global
consideration, however, remains in the background in the genre he culti-
vates (liberating the reader to a hearty laugh), whereas in a dystopia the
general problems of society and human civilization come to the fore-
ground, rendering impossible the feeling of extraneousness and superior-
ity that could make the reader able to laugh.
In the satires of the first half of the twentieth century the satirical supe-
riority became relative: the society to be criticized was felt to have sunk
very deep. This has led to a pessimism that makes writers see the problems,
but not the solutions—the very opposite of the utopian attitude. It is not
a coincidence that it was the same age (and partly the same authors) that
made dystopia an important genre. The social and political problems that
usually serve as a background to the satire have grown so great that they
can no longer stay in the background and instead, occupy the centre of the
satire, thus turning it into a dystopia. As Pollard (1987, p. 34) puts it: the
hopeful satirists offer a remedy to the maladies of the human race, but
according to the writers of dystopias, “the cure is worse than the disease.”
Sutherland remarks that “much of the world’s satire is undoubtedly the
result of a spontaneous, or self-induced, overflow of powerful indignation,
and acts as a catharsis for such emotions” (quoted in Pollard 1987,
pp. 4–5). The element of indignation is not absent from dystopia either
(though it is often replaced by resignation), but we do not find a catharsis
that cleanses our emotions and relieves our anxiety. The author of a dysto-
pia cannot undertake this task: problems can be shown, but solutions are
rarely found. Satirists, especially in the golden age of satire, in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, trusted in the power of criticism, but
many authors of dystopia are not optimistic even with respect to their own
role. And even the satirist can only hope for an obviously limited power.
According to Harris (2002) “the practical hope and aim of the satirist is
that his barbs will be sufficiently irritating to stop or at least slow down the
increase of evil, even though it cannot be reversed.” Alexander Pope wrote
to John Arbuthnot (2nd August, 1734): “I hope to deter, if not to reform”
(quoted by Harris 2002). Harris opines that satire’s implicit methods are
necessitated by a hypocritical society, and they can work because we are
not all scoundrels and we accept some moral values at least in principle:
“Once we become a world of knaves, there will be no room for satire.
28 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

Fortunately, every age including our own (so far) has been content merely
to remain on the brink of complete knavery, total disaster, and absolute
ruin” (Harris 2002). Dystopia looks a little further, over this brink, where
even the traditional weapons of satire prove to be ineffective.

1.5  Utopia and Ideology

Even if this book mostly deals with utopias and dystopias of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, the present-day readers’ interpretative atti-
tudes also need to be taken into consideration. Modern dystopias often
reflect on the great dictatorial regimes and ideologies of the twentieth
century—fascism, Nazism, and communism—all of which have a utopian
ideology at their respective roots. Václav Havel (1986) argued that the
failure of a great utopia causes scepticism towards any utopian scheme.
This fact understandably has given a suspicious shade to any form of uto-
pianism since the mid-twentieth century. In the terms of literary theorist
Northrop Frye (1980, p. 114), there occurred “something of a paralysis
of utopian thought and imagination” due to the disaster of communism,
“the most influential utopia of political thought.” Despite Karl Mannheim’s
cautiously positive analysis of certain aspects of utopianism, this paralysis
and suspicion seemed to prevail in the second part of the twentieth cen-
tury. A symbolic and influential figure of this intellectual trend is Karl
Popper, whose 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies notably con-
trasted “piecemeal social engineering” to “utopian social engineering.”
The former means that social action is directed cautiously at one goal at a
time with readjustments if the situation so requires. By utopian social
engineering, Popper meant that a preconceived idea of the good is forced
upon society. This contrast of two kinds of social engineering, however
influential, is considered rather unfortunate by a number of contemporary
critics, especially as it is based on the identification of utopias with blue-
prints. Blueprint utopianism means reading utopias as detailed plans for
a social change, whereas current criticism argues that most utopias are not
written or read “with the intent of implementing them in detail” (Sargent
1982, 570). If we read utopias as being critical of the existing societies,
and showing directions rather than destinations, it is more appropriate to
employ interpretative strategies that are open to a number of interpreta-
tions, taking the polyphony and polysemy of the literary text into consid-
eration, rather than highlighting one single interpretation as the “message.”
 1 INTRODUCTION 29

This way utopias lose their threatening force and become intellectual loci
to discuss possibilities for a social change.
Hungarian-born Catholic thinker Thomas Molnar in his influential
Utopia: The Perennial Heresy (1967) disregards such polysemy and pres-
ents all utopias as dangerous political constructions, primarily for their
collectivist attitudes. He opines that utopias are essentially blueprints,
since “once we acknowledge the desirability of an ideal state of affairs, we
must immediately proceed to bring it about; any hesitation or reckoning
with obstacles is an unforgivable scandal” (Molnar 1967, p. 43). A similar
anti-utopian inclination is reflected in the words of Leszek Kołakowski,
who claimed that any “Utopia which purports to offer a technical blue-
print for the perfect society now strikes me as pregnant with the most
terrible dangers …. To go to the lengths of imagining that we can design
some plan for the whole society whereby harmony, justice and plenty are
attained for human engineering is an invitation for despotism. I would,
then, retain Utopia as an imaginative incentive” (Urban 1981, p. 12).
These extremely cautious thoughts (quite understandable after the fall of
the Nazi regime and in the political context of the Cold War with the
planned economies of socialist countries) resulted in an intellectual cli-
mate of rejection of utopianism by the social sciences for much of the
twentieth century. This climate is also reflected in Hungarian literature:
after major eutopian constructions in the nineteenth century (particularly
by Bessenyei and Jókai), the twentieth century lacks major positive utopias
written by a Hungarian author.
In the twenty-first century it is easier to agree with Northrop Frye, who
calls for the critical reactivation of utopia. Already in 1965 he claimed that
it was time to rediscover “the real strength and importance of the utopian
imagination both for literature and for life …. Utopian thought is imagi-
native, with its roots in literature, and … less concerned with achieving
ends than with visualizing possibilities” (quoted in Modena 2011, p. 46).
Thus, utopianism may serve as a dynamizing force in our critical under-
standing of societies, provided we recognize that there are two sides of the
coin called imagination: it may be unrealistic or infeasible, but it has
potential positive effects as well, such as offering new opportunities and
allowing for breaking the rules of monolithic and static ideologies.
Another reason why utopia became suspicious in the second half of the
twentieth century is that it was perceived to be superseded by ideology
(Passerini 2002, p. 16). This is primarily due to the overarching influence
of Karl Mannheim, the Hungarian-born sociologist who published
30 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

Ideology and Utopia first in 1929. Mannheim (2001, p. 22) is critical of

the spirit of utopia, and essentially sees it as a phenomenon of a dual
nature—either as an unreal, escapist portrayal of the future, or as a possi-
bility for the future. Despite the dangers of escapism lying within utopia,
“the complete disappearance of the utopian element from human
thought … would bring about a static state of affairs” (Mannheim
1929/1991, 236). It follows from this that the basic message of utopia-
nism (in any form) is that things can be different: any particular social or
political configuration is contingent. Utopianism highlights the possibility
of change and relativizes any existing power structure—including itself,
the particular alternative or fictive political structure it depicts or proposes.
Dynamism and a rejection of finite structures is an implicit aspect of any
utopian phenomenon.
For Mannheim, there is a contrastive, dynamic relationship between
ideology and utopia. The representatives of a given ideology often apply
the negative label “utopian” to all ideas that from their point of view are
never to be realized. However, if utopia is realized, it becomes ideology;
thus, the utopia of yesterday may be the ideology of tomorrow. In Lyman
Tower Sargent’s words (2013, p. 447), today “ideology and utopia are
best seen as intimately connected in that there is a utopia at the heart of
every ideology because all ideologies have some notion of the better world
that will come about if the ideology is fully implemented.” The later con-
sensus that there are three key aspects of utopianism—literary, practical,
and theoretical—was not yet known to Mannheim, and he focused on the
theoretical aspect of utopianism. Utopia for him is not a literary term, but
essentially a way of political thinking. Conversely, whatever is claimed of
the political theoretical aspect of utopianism cannot automatically be
applied to works of literature, even when their connection seems apparent.
The investigation of the delicate relationship of the three aspects of
utopianism is an ongoing process, of which the present volume is a part.
The relationship of literature and politics is generally an unsolved problem
and remains to be under investigation by political scientists and literary
scholars alike. That works of imaginative literature can be used as illustra-
tions in the understanding of social or political concepts and processes can
only be a starting point in the context of “the ‘rehumanisation’ of the
social sciences in recent decades” (Whitebrook 1995, p. 55). It should be
pointed out that the formation of political ideology, both in its essence
and formulation, is influenced by concepts, symbols, and metaphors that
appear in literary works, and that literature may become “an essential
 1 INTRODUCTION 31

source of political understanding rather than mere illustration”

(Whitebrook 1995, pp. 57–58).
The relevance of the investigation of the literary, and with increasing
significance cinematic representations of political notions, can be under-
lined by the insight of another significant thinker. Paul Ricoeur (1984)
sees ideology as a discourse that justifies the identity of a group. Yet the
reaffirmation of one’s identity takes place not only through concepts, but
most effectively through symbols and narratives. However, the process of
reaffirmation that is so important for the coherence of a society may be
perverted by the ruling elite that seeks to justify its own power. A dis-
course of utopia (distinctly symbolic and often of a narrative nature) serves
to control this distortion by introducing a sense of doubt towards existing
structures and offering alternative options to a society. As for dystopia, a
similar attitude is suggested by Peter Fitting (2010, p. 141), who claims
that “the critique of contemporary society expressed in the dystopia
implies (or asserts) the need for change.”

1.5.1   The Political and the Literary

Another benefit of investigating literature in the social sciences, to
Whitebrook (1995, p. 60), is that “literature disturbs a dependence on
reason and rationality, it expands the concept of ‘reality’; it enlarges the
vocabulary of politics.” Furthermore, literature “provides the occasion
for … the imaginative contemplation of political possibilities … [and]
allows a sense of perspective … [for] the significance of the individual in
politics.” Utopia naturally emphasizes structural elements in politics,
depicting societies as impersonal socio-economic structures in which the
individual often appears only as a cogwheel in a machine. In a literary nar-
rative, however, agency necessarily appears in the form of actions of char-
acters, thus the literary text inevitably highlights the individual and
particular, while simultaneously presenting the universal. If the role of the
individual is marginal, as in the classical literary utopian tradition (com-
pare, for instance, Thomas More’s Utopia, but Bessenyei’s The Voyage of
Tariménes often displays similar structures as well), the modern reader’s
attention to the lack of individual action and agency reveals the individual-­
centeredness and natural intentionality of popular political discourse. In
the dystopian mode, the individual’s lack of agency stemming from the
suffocating effects of a totalitarian system usually form an essential pattern
of the narratives, highlighting the helplessness of the personal subject.
32 ZS. CZIGÁNYIK

There seems to be a contradiction in the way that narratives of mod-

ern literary utopias and dystopias operate and how social sciences present
utopian discourses. As Whitebrook (1995, p. 58) argues, the “benefits of
bringing literature into politics include literature’s attention to particu-
larities.” Later, she claims that it is also literature that brings attention to
the individual in politics. The logic of the literary narrative demands the
existence of conflicts and characters, whereas social sciences present uto-
pias that essentially deal with social-political structures and are less con-
cerned with individual agency. From an aesthetic point of view, this
underlying tension often results in a lack of well-developed characters,
conflicts, and proper plots in utopian literature, especially in the early
modern period. Theoretically, it is the ideal socio-economic structure of
the utopian state that is responsible for the ultimate well-being of man-
kind. But in both utopian and dystopian contexts, it is often revealed
that harmony can only be achieved and maintained through the indi-
vidual virtues of the main heroes; it is a recurring element that the cun-
ning of a protagonist defeats all opposing, negative powers (cf. Dávid
Tatrangi in Jókai’s The Novel of the Century to Come). The fundamental
role of the individual in literary discourses is in opposition with the
structuralist view of history, most prominently expounded by Hungarian
Marxist philosopher György Lukács (1971), who claimed that individual
action constitutes only the surface of historical movements, beneath
which more profound historical forces control events. He bases his argu-
ment on Karl Marx’s ideas, who in the first edition of The Capital
(1867/1887) claims that “it is not a question of the higher or lower
degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the
natural laws of capitalist production. It is a question of these laws them-
selves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable
results.” The “iron necessity” rules out the importance of individual
action in Marx’s argumentation. Imaginative literature naturally stresses
the necessity of individual agency in the narrative and hence draws our
attention to the polemics between the intentionalist and structuralist
view of history and politics. The analysis of literary works and especially
utopias may help in this delicate question, as long as it is remembered
that the literary element in utopian and dystopian literature naturally
emphasizes the personal agency of individuals against structural elements
in history. This feature is particularly strong in Mór Jókai’s The Novel of
the Century to Come, where the structural changes induced by the
 1 INTRODUCTION 33

invention of the flying machine are only realized through the smartness
and courage of the protagonist (whereas the negative forces of history
are represented by evil characters—for a more detailed discussion of the
issue see Chap. 5).
Sutherland (1967, p. 1) states in the very beginning of his book on
satire that “the satirist is destructive; he destroys what is already there …
and he does not necessarily fill the vacuum that he has created. He is … ‘a
demolition expert.’” The author of a dystopia destroys not only what is
already there, but also what exists only potentially in the time of the
author, when only its possibility is apparent. It would be unfair to expect
a satirist to correct the vices besides presenting them, and it would be
equally unfair to expect a dystopia to show the way towards a happy future,
or a bypass of the horrid future it depicts. The authors of dystopias recog-
nize the dangers hidden in their age, but to avert these dangers, if it is
possible at all, is not in their competence.
According to Arthur Pollard (1987, p. 3.), the best satire is the one that
is the most certain in its values. The best way to perceive evil is to be aware
of what good is. Abádi (2018, p. 43) argues that in the twentieth century
the consensus disappeared behind the norm of satire and it lost its stability.
Dystopia is the satire of such less confident times: we are not really certain
of what is good and desirable, but it is good news concerning the future
of civilization that we know at least what is bad or abnormal. And should
we forget it, then dystopias will always remind us.

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