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)

to his autobiography, was highly critical of the party’s rigidity and political opportunism. In 1909, disillusioned with workers’ institutions and workers’ groups, he set off - on foot, and with no money - for Paris. On his way, he met Emil Szittya, a Hungarian vagabond, who was well informed in politics and the arts and knew his way around Europe. [Fig. 3] He was later to be involved in the launch of A Tett by providing the idea and the launch funding for the journal.2 3 4 5 On his return from Paris, Kassák was unable to fit back into his old life of work and activism. Instead of manual labour performed in fixed working hours, he saw informal creative activity as the key to freedom. His guiding vision from that time onwards was of an organic and dynamic, but not regulated, group of men and women. He rebelled against the social order and conventional artistic ideals, whether these stemmed from the “bourgeois world” or the ideology of the Social Democratic Party. After a great workers’ demonstration in Budapest came to a bloody end in 1912, he finally turned away from workers-movement politics and felt that he could best continue the struggle in the literary arena. He attended lectures at the Társadalomtudományok Szabad Iskolája [Social Sciences Free School], and submitted his first writing to literary journals and the socialist press.- The success of these attempts led, just before the outbreak of the First World War, to an invitation by István Milotay to publish in Új Nemzedék [New Generation], a political, economic and literary weekly that had been launched in 1913. [Fig. 4] Új Nemzedék linked the demands of independence with those of democracy, but also gave space to Anti-Semitic voices, and these strengthened during the First World War. Although it was not a war-party newspaper at the beginning, it accepted the war as an irrevocable fact and, after a while, started to support the war effort. Kassák adapted to the spirit of Új Nemzedék, and the subjects, style and phra2 Emil Szittya, born Adolf Schenk (1886-1964) was a writer, graphic artist and painter. He published together with Hugo Kersten an anti-war journal in Switzerland in 1915, Der Mistral (Journal littéraire de guerre). See Zoltán Rockenbauer, Szittya Emil és a képzőművészet [Emil Szittya and art], Enigma, 24/90., 2017, 89-104. Magdolna Cucsa, Szittya Emil - a határsértés mint élet- modell [Emil Szittya - crossing borders as a life model], Helikon, 63/1., 2017,110-117.

3 Eszter Balázs, Baloldaliság és munkásszubkultúra Kassák Egy ember élete című önéletírásában az első világháborúig [Left-wing sympathies and workers' subculture in Kassák’s autobiography The Life of a Man up to the First World War], Múltunk, 58/2., 2013, 83-105.

4 Founded in 1906, the Social Sciences Free School combined the workers’ courses ran by the “bourgeois democrats”and Oszkár Jászi’s sociological studies (all of them were founders of the

Bourgeois Radical Party in 1914). It consisted of weekly lectures, mainly for workers and, after 1912, for young people of the Galileo Circle.

5 Letter from István Milotay to Lajos Kassák, Budapest, 14 July 1914. KM-lev. 323. Petőfi Literary Museum-Kassák Museum, Budapest. Lajos Kassák, Egy ember élete [The Life of a Man], voi. II., Magvető, Budapest, 1983,218.

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