Author(s): Szilárd KMECZKÓ

Title: EGY TÁVOLI IDEGEN KALANDJAI KAZOHINIÁBAN

Source: P. Baka, D. Borbélyová, A. Csehiová, K. Józsa, K. Kéri, B. Kiss, O. Magirovskaya, Y. Orsovics, B. Pukánszky, Sz. Simon, P. Šenkár, A. Tóth-Bakos, A. Tóthné Litovkina, A. Varga (eds.): 17th International Scientific Conference of J. Selye University. Sessions of the Faculty of Education. Conference Proceedings

ISBN: 978-80-8122-539-0

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36007/5390.2026.57

Publisher: J. Selye University, Komárno, Slovakia

PY, pages: 2025, 57-64

Published on-line: 2026

Language: hu

Abstract: Regarding the future possibilities of organizing communal life, utopias represent the positive branch. In light of the experiences of twentieth-century totalitarian systems, however, our relation to utopias today is far from naive. We can no longer view them as visions in which, once the pettiness and inconsistencies of present life and the peculiarities inherited from the past are eliminated, the closed and hitherto unknown possibilities of a life worthy of human beings would be revealed. In fact, utopia itself can also be read as dystopia. What makes the future conditions outlined in Sándor Szathmári’s novel Kazohinia particularly interesting is that the text was written in the 1930s, before the lasting Hungarian experiences of consolidated communism became available. This circumstance raises the question of whether we are dealing with a utopia or a dystopia. The grim, emotionless, yet undeniably functional Hin society is alarming to us, but precisely in this quality it enables us to perceive the taboos of our own thinking and the conditionality of intercultural understanding. The legacy of nineteenth-century positivism is the conviction that scientific and technological innovations profoundly shape the everyday life of a future that may never arrive. In this lecture, I will examine how Szathmári’s imagination operates within the scientific and technological dimension.

Keywords: travel, utopia, science, technology

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