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

groups were all mixed up in the affair, but of all the players in the struggle, Kassák and MA clearly possessed the least political capital.41

In his speech to the June congress of the Party, Béla Kun condemned MA as “a product of bourgeois decadence”,42 even though he had spoken up against such attacks by others in the April dispute. The majority, including Kassák,43 interpreted Kun’s denunciation as a gesture to the Social Democrats. In his article Levél Kun Bélához a művészet nevében [Letter to Béla Kun in the Name of Art] 44 Kassák returned to the arguments of the March pamphlet, claiming that what he and his associates were doing in MA was the artistic equivalent of Béla Kun’s political activity. [Fig. 23] Kassák also stood up for the autonomy of art and put his public response into a pamphlet of which ten thousand copies were distributed, but failed to arouse Kun's sympathy. In any case, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was by that time facing much more urgent issues than differences among the factions. There is no documentary evidence that MA was banned for political purposes; journals of all kinds were being shut down because of the worsening paper shortage. MA did not become an official organ of the Hungarian Soviet Republic to the extent that the dailies Népszava and even more so Vörös Újság did, but it ranked alongside Nyugat and Huszadik Század [Twentieth Century] in the priority assigned to its publication^5 Kassák, however, despite not being the most important figure and being less influential than Lukács, was an active shaper of cultural politics during the period of the Soviet Republic.

After the fall of the communist regime in August 1919, Kassák wanted to resume publication of MA, but in the midst of arrests and reprisals, this proved impossible and even dangerous. Recognizing this, he cut his hair short, exchanged his Russian-type black shirt for a simple white one and, as his associates had already done, took the boat up the Danube to Vienna, where he soon put MA back into action.46

41 On this, see Béla Pomogáts, Kassák Lajos a forradalmakban [Lajos Kassák in the revolutions], in Idem, A szellem köztársasága [The republic of the intellect], Akadémiai, Budapest, 2004,198-214.

42 Kun elvtárs válasza [Reply from Comrade Kun], Vörös Újság, 14 June 1919, 4-5.

43 Lajos Kassák, Egy ember élete, voi. II., op. cit. 591.

44 Lajos Kassák, Levél Kun Bélához a művészet nevében [Letter to Béla Kun in the name of art], MA, 4/7., 1919,146-148. English translation in Timothy O. Benson-Éva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, op. cit., 230-233.

45 Farkas József, A Magyar Tanácsköztársaság sajtója [The press of the Hungarian Soviet Republic], Tankönyvkiadó, Budapest, 1969, 90-95.

46 Lajos Kassák, Egy ember élete, voi. II., op. cit., 673-674.

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