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)

Dokumentum's authors, after 1927, abandoned the endeavour to subvert cultural life and started to build their careers as writers. Kassák continued his highly successful autobiography Egy ember élete [The Life of a Man] - which enjoyed a serious and warm critical reception - in Nyugat, and went on to become a regular contributor to the magazine. Déry and Németh, although they stayed with avant-garde poetry until the late 1920s, did not seek to continue their activities within a movement. Like Kassák, they regularly wrote for Nyugat, and Gyula Illyés became a senior member of its staff, and later a co-editor. By enabling these former avant-garde authors to find their place in its ambit by the late 1920s, Nyugat displayed the flexibility of its modernity programme. Another factor that brought them together was the gradual change in the former Dokumentum editors’ artistic outlook. Without a making any conspicuous break from the avant-garde period, they gradually revised their view of it, abandoned avant-garde poetics, and pursued a different kind of art.40

Dokumentum was the last major standard-bearer of a current in Hungarian literature that came to a stop at that time. It attempted to re-interpret international avant-garde trends in the Hungarian environment. Several decades later, the magazine’s former staff and sympathizers produced major works of literature-semi-autobiographical novels, memoirs and essays-that assessed Dokumentum from this point of view. These included Déry's A befejezetlen mondat [The Unfinished Sentence], which also evokes the direct cultural context of Dokumentum, István Vas’ Nehéz szerelem [Difficult Love], Andor Németh’s Emlékiratai [Memoirs] and Lajos Kassák and Imre Pán’s Izmusok története [The History of Isms],

40 György Tverdota, Kassák avantgarde-ja, a harmincas évekből visszatekintve [Kassák’s avant-garde, looked back at on from the thirties], in Lóránt Kabdebó (ed.), Tanulmányok Kassák Lajosról [Essays on Lajos Kassák], Anonymus, Budapest, 2000,196-202.

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