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)
Eszter Balázs: Avant-Garde and Radical Anti-War Dissent in Hungary-A Tett (1915-1916)
seology of the pro-war popular press ofthat time all show up in his writing. In September 1914, he still expected a sweeping success for the Central Powers, “turbulence" in Russia and the collapse of the French Republic.6 In an editorial of 4 October 1914, he spoke openly of victory for the Central Powers, and had a vision of the crumbling of all "Latin” Europe. He wrote of Germany as being the ideal state “against Tsarist barbarism and French decadence", with a strong sense of community, youthful strength and social solidarity.7 Echoing the war-party press of Europe, Kassák stood on the side of the Germans in the French-German civilizational conflict, but praised Paris for its universalism, in contrast with rural France, just as Endre Ady had done in the leading modernist literary journal, Nyugat [West] in September 1914.8 Like all of his phrases, this drew on the ‘war culture’ rhetoric that Hungarian intellectuals had made their own, and echoed the language of Hungarian Paris-admirers like the poet Endre Ady and the writer György Bölöni, who continued to uphold the virtues of French culture in the early months of war euphoria. This distinguished them from several writers, such as Géza Laczkó, Dezső Kosztolányi and Ferenc Herczeg, who compromised themselves by denouncing the French culture of which they had been prominent conduits for many years. Kassák’s early writing displays war rhetoric that matched the public mood. It was not free of incitement to hatred, talking of the war as a struggle that is “ridding us of the constantly discontented barbarian eccentrics”, a reference to Serbia, the enemy that attracted the most hatred in Hungary at the start of the war.9 At the beginning, therefore, Kassák followed many other left-wing intellectuals in backing the war-propaganda arguments (and hope for a better society by the end the conflict). He sometimes even took positions similar to those of war-party writers who were close to the government and had a fundamentally different outlook from his own. Kassák’s pro-war journalistic writing in this period stands in striking contradiction to the critical tone he struck in his poetry. In October 1914, at the same time as his article Antwerpen, which ardently stoked hopes of military 6 Lajos Kassák, Az orosz forradalom lehetősége [The possibility of a Russian revolution], Új Nemzedék, 1/38., 1914, 5-6. Lajos Kassák, Egy új francia forradalom perspektívájában [Prospects for a new French revolution], Új Nemzedék, 1/39., 1914, 6-8. 7 Lajos Kassák, A háború értéke nálunk és - náluk [The value of the war for us - and for them], Új Nemzedék, 1/41., 1914,1-3. 8 Lajos Kassák, Egy csavargó notesz könyvé bői I. (A német és francia csavargó-világ) [From a vagabond’s notebook I. (The world of vagabonds in Germany and France)], Új Nemzedék, 1/45., 1914, 8-9. 9 Lajos Kassák, A háború értéke nálunk és - náluk, op. cit., 3. 36
