Karinthy’s Kabaré

KARINTHY'S KABARE Imre Goldstein More than four decades after his death, Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938) is still the most widely read satirical author in Hungary. The undisputed wit of his day, who spent most of his waking hours in caf6s-he hardly ever worked at home-he was a past master of acrostics, anagrams and numerous wordgames of his own invention. He completed his first novel at the age of twelve and was not yet fourteen when his science fiction novel, Honeymoon Through the Center of the Earth was serialized in the Hungarian Illustrated World. His later novels, hundreds of short stories, and essays are periodically re-issued, and many of his one-acters and cabaret skits are still often performed. A translator of Pirandello, Wedekind, Kaiser, Romains, Galsworthy and Leacock , Karinthy himself is little known outside Hungary. Ironically, his most popular work, That's How You Write! (1912) defies translation. Karinthy called it a "collection of literary caricatures." It is in two major sections, Hungarian and foreign authors, with a further division into prose, poetry and drama, and in all of them Karinthy focuses his attention "not on a specific work but on a specific author, his manner of writing and mannerisms, in a word, on what makes him unique." This hilarious stylistic "caricature" however can be enjoyed only in the original, for the reader must not only be familiar with the Hungarian and other authors and their styles, but also be able to appreciate them in Hungarian. In his weekly column and thousands of articles between 1911 and 1938, Karinthy left no timely subject untouched. He advocated Esperanto as the diplomatic lingua franca of the future; warned against Hitler when the budding dictator was considered to be only a colorful upstart; welcomed the achievements of the young Soviet Union, at the same time poking fun at 87 and taking issue with revolutionaries falling into the errors of their predecessors . An insatiable student of science and technology, Karinthy was fascinated by the ideas of Darwin, Freud, Einstein, H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. He was among the first one hundred Europeans to fly in a dirigible and among the very first Hungarians ever to have flown in an airplane. His personal adventures were, in some measure, reflections of his artistic quest. All of Karinthy 's novels, for example, deal with some journey-three of them include the word "voyage" in their titles-a search for a world, a utopia where men can live in harmony, with equality between the sexes, peace between man and machine, and cooperation between nations and even galaxies. Two of his early novels, now available in English, Voyage To Faremido (1916) and Capil/aria (1921) are subtitled Gulliver's Fifth Voyage and Gulliver 's Sixth Voyage, respectively. In the former, which appeared four years before Capek's R.U.R., the action takes Gulliver to a land (Fa-re-mi-do) inhabited by robots called Solasi who speak a language made of musical phrases (so-la-si) and who are superior to humans. Manufacturing rather than procreating their offsprings, the Solasi consider humans their diseased cousins confined to the poor planet Earth who no longer help nor pose a threat to the universe for they are self-destructive. Ultimately, however, after an extended stay, Gulliver discovers the seeds of destruction and corruption even in this highly mechanized world. Capillaria is an underwater realm in which female creatures, Oihas, are serviced by mentally superior but physically fifty times smaller males called Bulloks. This short novel is a graphic demonstration, in Karinthy's own way, of a then current and pervasive notion that some of society's problems might be due to the unsatisfactory relationship between the sexes. In the real world around him, Karinthy welcomed all positive social changes, whichever quarter they came from, but he would never join a group or political party. His attacks on communism or capitalism were launched from a humanistic and not an ideological basis. When many of his fellow writers embraced various ideologies or fled the country because of these ideologies, Karinthy stayed home. He nonetheless became the Hungarian writer most universal in his outlook, and most akin in...