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)

Gábor Dobó: Generation Change, Synthesis and a Programme for a New Society - Dokumentum in Budapest (1926-1927)

[3.] Cert Caden, Hanging Construction, Dokumentum, 1/1., 1926,1., Budapest [4.] László Moholy-Nagy, [Painting], Dokumentum, 1/2., 1927,15., Budapest

The creation of connections between these far-flung areas was seen as the main task of an avant-garde journal. Somewhat at odds with this rational artistic outlook was the special place the editors assigned to poetry, which they described as “magic”, “creation”, and “action”.4 They believed that these qualities would intuitively illuminate the hidden interconnections of the contemporary world. Set against the journal’s rational investigations, echoing international Constructivism and the Bauhaus, the approach derived from Surrealism, relying on allusions and the magic of words, presented a fundamental contradiction that the editors did not resolve. The special place of poetry in Dokumentum derived in part from the fact that the editors were themselves all poets and regarded literature as standing apart from any other mode of expression, a view with a long history in Hungarian culture. In Hungary, in lack of (total) national sovereignty, literature always had a distinctive role in national self-expression.

ATTEMPT TO ENTER THE DOMAIN OF LITERATURE

Hungarian cultural affairs of the time may be described, using the term of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, as a “field" in which the various players,

4 Andor Németh, Kommentár [Commentary], Dokumentum, 1/1., 1926, 6-12. Gyula Illyés, Sub specie aeternitatis, Dokumentum, 1/2., 1927,24-25.

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