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)
World War than ever before, and the new combat techniques took destruction to new levels. The aesthetic of heroism and the slogans of battlefield courage lost their credibility for many people. Kassák’s journal signalled a change that was going on throughout Europe. The suffering of the male and - to a lesser extent - the female body became the subject of many poems and stories. Writing that looked on erotica and the body as a source of vitality and energy inherently rejected a favourite theme in the official war-party discourse - the juxtaposition of the masculine front and the feminine hinterland. By giving women authors the opportunity to express themselves and write opinions in the journal, Kassák and associates were representing, in the cataclysm of war, “a new model of companionable relations between the sexes”.18 This openness was a great step towards publishing women authors on equal terms, but it was not free of contradictions. For example, Kassák and other authors sometimes resorted to misogynist rhetoric in their rejection of “bourgeois art”, calling it “feminine", and thus of less value. The editorial staff of A Tett also drew lessons from the overwhelming public influence of war-party writers and intellectuals through their domination of the press and other channels of mass communication. This was a pan-European phenomenon. Kassák and associates attempted to stand up to them and to voice dissent against the ‘war culture’ in general. In autumn 1915, when the editor Jenő Rákosi launched a campaign against writers and intellectuals having the audacity to criticize the war (the Ady-Rákosi dispute), the poet and journalist Zoltán Franyó, who happened to be on leave from the front, wrote an article for A Tett defending Rákosi’s targets (the censor deleted a part of the text).19 Similarly, Károly Gallovich satirized the heroic cult surrounding intellectuals who fell on the battlefield.20 A Tett authors steadfastly attacked art that was put into the service of Hungarian war propaganda, and regularly targeted what they saw as intellectual 18 On this pattern, see Birthe Kundrus, Gender Wars, The First World War and the Construction of Gender Relations in the Weimar Republic, in Karen Hagemann-Stefanie Schüler-Sprin- gorum (eds.), Home/Front, The Military, War and Gender in 20th Century Germany, Berg, Oxford-New York, 2002,167. Györgyi Földes, Avantgárd, nők, háború, Újvári Erzsi és Réti Irén az aktivista folyóiratokban [Avant-garde, women, war, Erzsi Újvári and Irén Réti in activist journals], in András Kappanyos (ed.), Emlékezés egy nyár-éjszakára, Interdiszciplináris tanulmányok 7974 mikrotörténelméről [Memories of a summer night, Interdisciplinary essays on the micro-history of 1914], MTA, Budapest, 2015,195-208. György Kálmán C., Élharcok és arcélek [Front lines and profiles], Balassi, Budapest, 2008, 32-49. 19 Zoltán Franyó, Néhány gorombaság az igazság nevében [Some coarseness in the name of truth], A Tett, 1/1., 1915,18-19. 20 Károly Gallovich, Még egyszer Zubolyról [On Zuboly, once again], Ibid., 19-20. 39
