Precursors
“Karinthy was a spiritual father to me” — Dezső Keresztury quotes Szathmári in his afterword to Kazohina. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has also been mentioned, although the author is quoted by Keresztury in his afterword, “I wrote Kazohinia two years before Brave New World appeared. I could not have imitated it more perfectly if I had tried. Anyway, it was my good fortune that it was conceived two years earlier, because there are so many similarities between the two that I would never have been so bold as to write Kazohinia had I read Brave New World first.” Although one prominent literary scholar in Hungary believes that Szathmári had probably heard or read about Brave New World prior to writing Kazohinia, there is no evidence to suggest that in fact he had read the novel, whose Hungarian translation was published only after the author wrote Kazohinia. Also, despite some overlapping themes and a mutual interest in describing the technology of a possible future, Kazohinia — set in the present rather than the future, and highly comic throughout — is a fundamentally different book.
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