Balázs Eszter: Art in action. Lajos Kassák's Avant-Garde Journals from A Tett to Dokumentum, 1915-1927 - The avant-garde and its journals 3. (Budapest, 2017)

György Tverdota: 2x2 - The Journal Edited by Lajos Kassák and Andor Németh (1922)

look-and Németh was at home in both the German and French cultures (and increasingly in the English language) - if he was to build up international (and Hungarian) contacts. It is also possible that Kassák shared Németh’s third reservation concerning MA - namely that the journal reached only a very limited public, a problem that had to be remedied by finding connections to potential readers - and that this also motivated him to his tolerance. Art historians now see the activity of MA in Vienna as a success story, and this is borne out by the journal’s steadily-widening circle of international contacts.

The internal tensions among the émigré community heightened, and the Hungarian intellectuals who had fled in 1919 gradually drifted apart and filtered back to Hungary. This, and the gathering strength of Hungarian intellectual life in the neighbouring countries, led to a dwindling of interest in MA. Hungary’s opening to the outside world also reduced the attraction of the journal to the Hungarian public. The “movement logic" deriving from manifestos and directives was increasingly exposed as sterile. Both Németh and Kassák realized that something had to change if public interest in the avant-garde was to be maintained.

EXPERIMENTATION AND POPULAR LITERATURE - DIVISION OF LABOUR IN THE EDITORIAL POLICIES OF MA AND 2*2

For Kassák, 2*2 was an experiment in creating a journal with a dual structure. MA remained the primary base, where committed followers assiduously cooked up the new ingredients of modernity, manifestoes and essays appeared, and bold experimentation continued. By contrast, the bright, friendly pages of the new journal served up the new recipes as if they were as self- evident as 2*2=4, leaving the complexities of work in the kitchen discreetly curtained off. Although Németh’s personality and intellectual qualifications suited him to experimentation, he had doubts about its usefulness. He performed editorial tasks with the strictest artistic standards, but wanted to remain in practice as a writer and to reach out to the audience. He wrote in Bécsi Magyar Újság in an article announcing 2*2, that the new journal “does not put forward a programme and does not pronounce new themes”. Kassák also accepted this approach: “I do not propose any fixed programme”, he wrote in his editorial.ii 12 Both undertook that their joint journal would be an up-to-date, elevated literary forum, rejecting all constraints related to publishers and cornii Andor Németh, író és közönség [Writer and public], Bécsi Magyar Újság, 8 October 1922, 8.

12 Lajos Kassák, [2*2], op. cit., 33.

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