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)
was attacked for aestheticizing the war.2' Kassák and associates thus criticized modernist writers not just on aesthetic grounds, but also for contributing to the ‘war culture’. Aladár Komját’s verses ironically adjusted army songs and poems, items of popular culture that identified with the culture of sacrifice.28 The war-party intellectuals looked on these as evidence of the public willingness to make sacrifices, and private and government funds were made available for systematic collection of the songs. A Tett also pilloried the glorification of the heroism of the Hungarian peasants. The sociologist Imre Vajda, for example, satirized this theme in the work of “conservative poets”.29 Other pieces caricatured the favourite subjects of official war-party literary journals. One of these was the “fall of individualism" in favour of communality, widely seen as a beneficial consequence of the war. It is significant that the author of the journal’s opening article was Dezső Szabó, who was known for his criticism of individualism.30 Kassák’s choice of Szabó betrays his own contradictory views on the subject, stemming in part from his ideas for building a movement. Several other articles denied the failure of individualism,21 and after a while, Kassák - as is borne out by his manifesto of March 1916 - resolutely stood up for individual values and thus for the ideal of artistic freedom. He asserted the international nature of literature and the arts and put forward the idea of “new art”, a reference to the “new literature" previously propagated by Nyugat, but extended to other branches of the arts. He also outlined his programme for “non-party political commitment”33 and autonomy of the arts, coupled with a demand for an influential role in public affairs.34 Kassák also designated for his own movement the points of orientation characteris27 Ferenc Koszorú, Balázs Béla: Lélek a háborúban [Review of Béla Balázs: The soul in war], A Tett, 2/14., 1916, 246. 28 Aladár Komját, Katonadalok 1916-ban (Iskolai olvasókönyvek számára) [Army songs in 1916 (For school readers)], A Tett, 2/12., 1916,188-189. Dániel Szabó, Katonadalok és az első világháború [Army songs and the First World War], Aetas, 22/1., 2007, 44-62. 29 Imre Vajda, Dózsa György ébresztése [The awakening of György Dózsa], A Tett, 2/7., 1916, 101-102. 30 See, e.g., Dezső Szabó, A francia pszichéhez [On the French psyche], Huszadik Század, 16/1., 1915, 38-44. Idem, Az individualizmus csődje [The collapse of individualism], Huszadik Század, 16/8., 1915, 81-94. 31 Zoltán Haraszti, A betűktől az istenig [From the alphabet to God], A Tett, 1/3., 1915, 38. Imre Vajda, Dózsa György ébresztése, op. cit., 101-102. 32 Lajos Kassák, Programm [Program], A Tett, 2/10., 1916,153-155. English translation in Timothy O. Benson-Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, A Sourcebook of Central-European Avant- Gardes, 1910-1930, LACMA-MIT Press, Cambridge-London, 2002,160-162. 33 György Kálmán C., Élharcok és arcélek, op. cit., 23. 34 Kassák Lajos, Programm, op. cit., 155. 41
