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)
ing, had no trouble in giving expression to doubts-and even criticism of war in general - in their poetry. Amidst the ‘war culture’ rhetoric that dominated the public discourse, poetry was more suitable than journalistic writing - which was easier to censor - as a medium for expressing doubts on the current state of the war. (Nonetheless, poems judged by the censor to be encouraging refusal to serve at the front, such as Mihály Babits’ Játszottam a kezével [I Played with her Hand], set off scandals at this time.14) Kassák was not the only writer - several Nyugat contributors were among them - who found poetry to be the best medium for criticizing the war in public, and letters for doing so in private. Correspondence of writers and intellectuals bear this out. Kassák, for example, in his correspondence with writer Dezső Szabó in April 1915, described himself as “cowering, friendless and alone, in the roaring torrent of blood’’.15 THE RADICAL ANTI-WAR STANCE OF A TETT It was with the launch of his own journal, A Tett, in autumn 1915, that Kassák became a radical anti-militarist. He perceptively realized that he needed a channel of his own to develop the principles of his anti-war programme, which involved a line of thought that could not be integrated into existing periodicals, or only at the expense of compromises. Kassák and his co-editors also set the direct objective of transforming society by artistic means, and this directly implied their anti-war stance. [Figs. 5-7] Even in the first issue, Kassák and his associates interpreted the slaughter of the war - which the war-party press was trying to present as proof of the Hungarian people's preparedness to make sacrifices - as destruction. In his prose poem Fejfa [Epitaph], Kassák described war as a periodic catastrophe.16 This voice and attitude may be regarded as one of the first signs of intellectual demobilization, a loss of enthusiasm for the war that took place throughout Europe, but only in a few cases - like Kassák's-did it go so far as public rejection.17 Although the fundamental values of life come into focus during every armed conflict, and the simultaneous portrayal of eras and thanatos during the First World War was not a new phenomenon, the themes of libido, sexuality and death took on a special significance then, as reflected by many articles in A Tett. Bodily suffering was much more widespread and painful in the First 14 Mihály Babits, Játszottam a kezével [I played with her hand], Nyugat, 8/16., 1915, 884-885. 15 Letter from Lajos Kassák to Dezső Szabó, Budapest, 15 April 1915. KM-lev. 381/1. Petőfi Literary Museum-Kassák Museum, Budapest. 16 Tamás Föld [Lajos Kassák], Fejfa [Epitaph], A Tett, 1/1., 1915,11-12. 17 See, e.g., Peter Parent, German Encounters with Modernism, 1840-1945, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2001,140. 38
