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)

Márton Pacsika: Purposeful Player of the New Instrument - Lajos Kassák and the Budapest MA

Hungarian Soviet Republic, but their relations had already deteriorated during the years of A Tett.16 17 Behind their quarrels lay differences in initial standpoints regarding modern art and several personal, political and aesthetic disputes.

REVOLUTIONARY ART OR REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT?

Among the contributors to MA, both regular and occasional, were some left-wing intellectuals at the beginning of their careers. They included József Révai, Ervin Sinkó, Mátyás György, Aladár Komját, József Lengyel and Imre Sallai, and almost without exception, they rose to prominence in the Hungarian communist movement. Their widening differences with Kassák’s group stemmed from conflicting interpretations of the relationship between the socialist cause and avant-garde art. As Lengyel wrote in his 1929 novel on the Hungarian Soviet Republic entitled Visegrádi utca [Visegrád Street], “we did not want to continue in a purely formal revolution, we no longer claimed that

1918

SZABADULÁS

GyörayTfáEyas

fcmjátAtadár

lengyePáxsef Révai József

[8.] Mátyás György-Aladár Komját-Oózsef Lengyel-József Révai, 7978, Szabadulás [1918, Liberation], Krausz, Budapest, 1918, [front cover]

16 On this, see Gergely Angyalosi, Lajos Kassák és Lukács György viszonya [Relations between Kassák Lajos and György Lukács], Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények, 91-92/4., 1987-1988, 462-471.

17 György Lukács, Régi kultúra és új kultúra [Old culture and new culture] in Idem, Történelem és osztálytudat [History and class consciousness], Magvető, Budapest, 1971, 29-47.

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