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)

Gábor Dobó: Generation Change, Synthesis and a Programme for a New Society - Dokumentum in Budapest (1926-1927)

Nyugat14 dominated Hungarian literary affairs in such a way that - in Kassák’s view - it was preventing the emergence of a new literary centre, and he was determined to counter this by setting up his own journal.

Kassák and most of his colleagues on Dokumentum had been active in Hungarian literary journals for many years. They were well aware that as individuals, in the prevailing state of affairs, they might at most be able to pursue their own careers as writers (as Kassák, Déry and Illyés later did), but if they were to achieve a real breakthrough, they would have to work together. The most effective means of collective action was the journal, as contemporary international praxis and Kassák’s own experience in editing had proven. Indeed, we often identify the modernist movements with the editorial staff of journals. A Tett [The Action] and MA based themselves on alternative artistic institutions, and their editors presented themselves to the public as members of an artistic movement. Revealingly, Hungarian critics often referred to Kassák’s journal as representing the “MAist school”. The collective identity of a journal did not necessarily coincide with the individual viewpoints of its editors, but enabled it to speak as the voice of a salient idea, programme or group, or as the herald of a new artistic ideal. This was true of Nyugat in 1908, when it was being launched, and subsequently of Kassák’s journals A Tett, MA and - in 1926 - Dokumentum. Kassák was well aware that the principles of a newly-formed group would inevitably be intellectually incompatible with any existing journal and could not be integrated into it. [Fig. 9]

This was true for Nyugat, even though it incorporated certain avant-garde features (such as poetic forms) into its integrative programme of traditionpreserving modernity, and regularly published avant-garde authors. The policy of Nyugat towards the avant-garde may be described as one of domestication: it made space for the avant-garde and published the more conventional work of avant-garde authors with the intention of fitting them into its own programme. Nyugat wanted to represent the modernity of the moment. This ambition (and the associated frustrations) can be traced in its reception of Italian Futurisms and the Hungarian avant-garde. The first major article about this was Mihály Babits’ Ma, holnap és Irodalom [Today, Tomorrow and Litera- 14 15

14 Recent research does not bear Kassák out in this assertion, but partly leaves the question open. On the workings of the Nyugat editors and its financial base, see Attila Buda, A Nyugat könyvkiadó története [The history of the Nyugat publishing house], Borda Antikvárium, Budapest, 2000.

15 Gábor Dobó, Framing Futurism in Hungary (1909-1944), in Günter Berghaus (ed.), International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, De Gruyter, Berlin, 2018, [forthcoming.]

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