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)

victory,10 11 his expressionist poem Marsisten nyája [The Herd of the Cod Mars] showed signs of his contradictory feelings towards the war. Two issues later, in Harangok éneke [The Song of the Bells], he completely overcame his doubts and asserted the incompatibility of poetry and war.12 In spring 1915, he published a whole book of poems he had written since the start of the war.13 The title poem Eposz Wagner maszkjában [Epic in Wagner’s Mask], featuring a series of expressionist images, places the emphasis, in line with the avant-garde programme, on the process of artistic creation. [Fig. 5] These poems also demonstrate how, in the early months of the conflict, the different kinds of expression inherent in two literary genres - journalism and poetry - could allow the same author to manifest divergent attitudes to the war. Several authors, despite supporting specific war efforts in their journalistic writ15.] Lajos Kassák, Eposz Wagner maszkjában [Epic in Wagner’s Mask], Hunnia, Budapest, 1915, [front cover with József Sztanek's illustration]

10 K. L. [Lajos Kassák], Följegyzések, Antwerpen [Notes, Antwerp], Új Nemzedék, 1/42., 1914,4-5.

11 Lajos Kassák, Marsisten nyája [The herd of the god Mars], Ibid., 7-8.

12 Lajos Kassák, Harangok éneke [The song of the bells], Új Nemzedék, 1/44., 1914, 9.

13 Lajos Kassák, Egy ember élete, voi. II., op. cit, 186-188.

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