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)

György Tverdota: 2x2 - The Journal Edited by Lajos Kassák and Andor Németh (1922)

an admirer of Endre Ady, iconic poet of Hungarian modernism, throughout his life. He maintained close friendships with other writers of Nyugat, including Dezső Kosztolányi, Frigyes Karinthy and Zoltán Somlyó. He respected the editor Ignotus, György Lukács, Mihály Babits, Zsigmond Móricz and even the “aestheticizing” Ernő Szép. Like so many of his generation, he waited a long time for Ernő Osvát, “grey eminence" (informal editor) of Nyugat, to discover him for the modernist literary journal. He also remained open to the output of the avant-garde schools that the Kassák circle had put behind them.

In a heated argument with Kassák, Németh gave voice to another reservation concerning MA. In summer 1922, on the pages of the Bécsi Magyar Újság [Viennese Hungarian Daily], he took sides in a debate between MA and Egység [Unity], a Viennese Hungarian avant-garde journal with a committed communist outlook, produced partly by authors who had broken from MA. Németh did not defy Kassák and did not turn against his own journal, but by partly agreeing with the communist Egység, he displayed some ambivalence towards Kassák's endeavours. He claimed that just when a new form of revolution was taking shape - on the pages of Egység, for example - Kassák was carrying on a free-thinking revolutionary poetic tradition that had peaked in the 19th century.8 Kassák did not satisfy the demands of this new ideal, and Németh admitted the validity of the critic Andor Rosinger’s claims, particularly in the light of numbered poems and the Dadaist poems of total despair, that the intellectual leader of MA was a romantic bourgeois individualist and not a new-type revolutionary.9 Kassák responded in his own journal with a very robust defence of his revolutionary credentials.10 An outside observer might have expected the two writers' paths to have finally diverged, but the opposite happened. The emergence of this conflict bound Kassák and Németh into an even closer alliance. It was not an alliance based on uniformity of outlook, but on mutual respect and acknowledgement of differences.

This development gives the lie to the legend of Kassák’s ruthless tyranny as an editor, one who ostracized anyone who defied him and admitted writers, artists and intellectuals into the MA community only if they bowed to his will. In addition to his confidence in Németh’s commitment to modernity, Kassák realized that he had great need of a writer and journalist of such broad out8 Andor Németh, Egység kontra MA [Egység versus MA], Bécsi Magyar Újság, 16 July 1922, 7.

9 Andor Rosinger, A “MA” forradalmi ideológiája [The revolutionary ideology of “MA"], Egység, 1/2., 1922,14-16.

10 Lajos Kassák, Válasz sokfelé és álláspont [Standpoint and answer to multiple queries], MA, 7/8., 1922, 50-54.

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