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)
Most prominent was Gyula Illyés, who in his article La littérature hongroise (dite jeune) [The Hungarian Literature (called Young)], wrote of nouvelle sensi- bilité to the world28 29 in Száműzetésem első keserű éneke [The First Bitter Song of my Banishment], he stated that his experiences in the years following the “machine age” caused him to see metaphors of the poet not in “the engineer” or “the technician”, as did the representatives of international Constructivism, itself a source of influence on Dokumentum, but the reverse - in the mystical, the “wanderer” who had traversed the "boulevard Aragon”. Illyés had elsewhere, in free indirect discourse (thus identifying with the book) quoted Louis Aragon’s paradigmatic surrealist novel Le Paysan de Paris [Paris Peasant] from 1926. “The apparently inanimate objects lying around us, the material and social facts, preserve the mystery of reality’’,30 wrote Illyés. [Figs. 18-19] WHY DOKUMENTUM CLOSED Despite being referred to by contemporaries and subsequently by literary historians as an unequalled avant-garde journal, Dokumentum, after only six months and five issues, closed in 1927.31 There are no contemporary comments on its closure, and we have to infer the reasons indirectly. They probably arose from a combination of three circumstances. Firstly, there was no section of the literary public of the time to which the journal could be directed. Secondly, journals formulating radical programmes did not have an easy time in the prevailing political climate and the censorship conditions, and nor did they fit with intellectual mood of the time. Finally, such journals did not find sources of support on which they could build a strong financial base. LIMITED PUBLIC EXPOSURE A condition for those receiving amnesty under prime minister István Beth- len’s policy of consolidation was to refrain from open declaration of political 28 Gyula Illyés, La littérature hongroise (dite jeune) [The Hungarian literature (called Young)], Dokumentum, 1/1., 1926, 5. 29 Gyula Illyés, Száműzetésem első keserű éneke [The first bitter song of my banishment], Ibid., 21. 30 Gyula Illyés, Louis Aragon (Édition de la Nouvelle Revue Framjaise, 1926), Dokumentum, 1/3., 1927, 34-35. For more details, see Imre József Balázs, Esőcsinálás, Illyés Gyula szürrealista kalandja [Making rain, Gyula Illyés' surrealist adventures], Irodalomtörténet, 42/T, 2011, 3-23. Judit Karafiáth, Kassák, Dokumentum (1926-1927) et le surréalisme hongrois, Anachronia, 4.,1997, 78-86. 31 See, e.g., Georges Baal-Marc Martin (éd.), Ombre portée, Le surréalisme en Hongrie [Drop shadow, Surrealism in Hungary], L’Age d'Homme, Paris, 1995. 226
