It includes fictionalized biographies of musicians such as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, artists like Dürer and Brunelleschi, writers Goethe and Cicero, and historical figures Superbus and Luther, etc., written in the form of collections of fragments or notes with a wealth of audacious metaphors.

[...] When people pigeonholed the book with ‘surrealism’ and other ‘isms’ I felt a bit like Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who on being taught the difference between poetry and prose, exclaims in astonishment, 'Good Heavens!

Szentkuthy's second book, Towards the One and Only Metaphor (1935), is a collection of short diary-like epigrams and reflections; it was intended as a literary experiment to follow the thinking self through the most delicate thoughts and impressions without imposing any direction on it.

Drawing on the tradition of great Encyclopaedic narratives such as Balzac's The Human Comedy and Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, Szentkuthy aimed at depicting the totality of two thousand years of European culture.

Literally enchanted by the effectiveness of this method – 'where, in his words, every epithet puts imagination in motion' – he decided to apply it on the spot to Casanova, which he had just annotated with gusto a German edition in six large volumes.

"[5] In the years 1939–1942, Szentkuthy published the first six parts of the series: Marginalia on Casanova (1939), Black Renaissance (1939), Escorial (1940), Europa Minor (1941), Cynthia (1941), and Confession and Puppet Show (1942).

Instead he wrote a series of pseudo-biographical novels on Mozart (1957), Haydn (1959), Goethe (1962), Dürer (1966), and Handel (1967) in which he mixed historical facts with elements of fiction and autobiography.

Yet, with only one monograph (József J. Fekete, P.O.S.T) and two doctoral theses devoted to his works, he is one of the most under-researched Hungarian writers, but some critics in France and elsewhere regard him to be as significant as Marcel Proust.

[citation needed] The Petőfi Literary Museum in Budapest has an archive of Szentkuthy's manuscripts which contain unpublished work, including approximately 80–100,000 pages of a sealed diary (1930s–1988).