The paper is an overview of the dystopic texts produced by Hungarian modernist writers.
Anti-utopia is the dominant ap- proach in the speculative fiction of interwar Hungary,
which is demonstrated on the examples of Frigyes Karinthy’s satiric Gulliver sequels
and Sándor Szathmári’s Kazohinia that functioned as a cultic read in a not small circle
for a while. Pilot Elza by Mihály Babits is a genuine dystopia, which was celebrated
because it refuted the concept of belatedness in Hungarian literature. Babits wrote
his dire vision of eternal war and cultural decline simultaneously with the grand
modernist dystopias of world literature. However, despite some remarkable features,
the novel cannot compete with those.
