Frigyes Karinthy

Frigyes Karinthy (1887–1938) was a Hungarian writer, journalist, and polymath who was one of the central figures of Budapest’s literary café culture in the early twentieth century — a man of such restless intelligence that he produced masterworks in satirical fiction, science fiction, literary parody, journalism, translation, memoir, and what we would now call network theory. He remains one of the most beloved figures in Hungarian literature, and his work, particularly A Journey Round My Skull, has gained a devoted international readership.

Life and Career

Karinthy was born in Budapest and quickly became a fixture of the city’s café literary scene — the world of the New York Café and the coffeehouses where Hungarian writers, artists, and intellectuals gathered to argue, gossip, and create. He was phenomenally prolific, writing for newspapers and magazines while producing fiction, plays, poetry, and criticism at a pace that astonished even his contemporaries.

Így írtok ti (That’s How You Write, 1912) was his first enduring work — a collection of literary parodies so precise, affectionate, and devastating that it became a cornerstone of Hungarian humor. Karinthy parodied every major Hungarian and European writer of his time with a ventriloquist’s ear for style. The book has been continuously in print in Hungarian for over a century and remains widely quoted.

His science fiction — including the satirical novels Voyage to Faremido (1916) and Capillaria (1921) — was indebted to Swift and H.G. Wells but anticipated surrealism and absurdism. Capillaria, set in an underwater civilization ruled by women, was a sharp satire on gender relations that has been rediscovered by feminist critics.

Karinthy’s 1929 short story “Chain-Links” (Láncszemek) proposed that any two people on Earth could be connected through a chain of at most five intermediary acquaintances — the first articulation of what Stanley Milgram later formalized as “six degrees of separation.” The concept has had an extraordinary afterlife in mathematics, sociology, and popular culture.

Utazás a koponyám körül (A Journey Round My Skull, 1937; English translation 1939, Faber and Faber) was his masterpiece — a memoir of his diagnosis with a brain tumor and the surgery performed on him in Stockholm by the great neurosurgeon Herbert Olivecrona. The book, written with startling lucidity and dark humor, describes the experience of brain surgery from the inside — including passages where Karinthy, conscious during the operation, describes what he sees, feels, and thinks as his brain is cut open. The book has been rediscovered by English-language readers through the 2008 NYRB Classics reissue and is now considered one of the great illness narratives.

Karinthy died in 1938, a year after the surgery, at the age of fifty-one. His son, Ferenc Karinthy, also became a significant Hungarian writer.

Key Works

• That’s How You Write (1912)
• Capillaria (1921)
• “Chain-Links” (1929)
• A Journey Round My Skull (1937)

Collecting Karinthy

Hungarian first editions (especially Így írtok ti) are collected but difficult to find outside Central Europe. The English A Journey Round My Skull (1939, Faber and Faber) is genuinely rare — fine copies with dust jacket bring $200–$500. The 2008 NYRB Classics reissue is widely available and not yet collectible. Signed material is extremely scarce given his early death. Karinthy’s importance in Hungarian literary culture is comparable to Mark Twain’s in American culture, and his international reputation continues to grow.