Lajos Kassák (1887-1967) poet, novelist, painter, essayist, editor, theoretician of the avant-garde and occasional translator, was the father of many modern isms.
He was also the first genuine working-class writer in Hungarian literature. Self-taught, it was within the socialist movement that he became a writer and artist. That progress filled him with rock solid confidence. "Art is a privilege and indeed, from the ranks of the working class, only the privileged covet it and set out towards art as a life of the spirit. For them, art means fulfilment", he summed up his personal experience in 1934.
[...]
From the Epic Poem... onwards, Kassák wrote free verse only, regarding it, like Marinetti, as the badge of modernism. He never re-published the early poems in formal verse. The free verse of Epic Poem... won acclaim from the critics, who heard in it the voice of the metropolis. They carefully distinguished it from Futurism - mainly for political reasons, as Italy had by then entered the war, against the Central Powers. Free verse was perceived as problematic only after A Tett was launched, when free verse itself became a programme. From then on it was attacked, first for allowing for less variations than formal verse such as the sonnet, then for political considerations. It was claimed, from the late 20s on, that whoever wrote free verse was a communist; after the war the Stalinists termed its practitioners the representatives of bourgeois decadence.
In 1916 A Tett was banned. Kassák soon launched a new review, MA (Today). There was a substantial difference between the two. As editor of the former, Kassák still was primus inter pares, with several contributors who were as renowned as himself. MA was the review of the young, the youngest even, the majority of them spotted by Kassák, who looked up to him as leader of the new literature, an attitude not conflicting with the intentions of their editor. If Nyugat devoted a special issue to Ady, Kassák published a special issue of MA in which Ady was described as history and Kassák as the present and the future. After the Russian revolution, the ensuing collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the proclamation of the republic, in the winter of 1918-19, Kassák and his movement - which had in the meantime, in true avant-garde fashion, split in two - seemed to have won. Kassák held himself a communist and wanted to change the bourgeois revolution of 1918 into a socialist revolution on the Russian model. In the spring of 1919 he hailed the communist takeover, only to fall out with the new holders of power over his defence of artistic freedom. After four months, however, the Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed - and in the victorious counter-revolution Kassák was among the first to be arrested.
After his release in 1920, he fled to Vienna and re-launched MA as an international review of the arts in unimaginably difficult financial circumstances. The community of exiles, with legitimist, bourgeois radical republican, social democratic and various communist groupings in it, was far from unified. Old feuds were revived and new contention generated. The composition of MA's contributors changed several times. Kassák wrote an epic poem of the revolution, Máglyák énekelnek (Bonfires Singing, 1920), wrote picture poems, Dadaist and Constructivist poems, and published his poetic chef-d'oeuvre, the long poem "A ló meghal a madarak kirepülnek" (The Horse Dies the Birds Fly Away). Exiled, Kassák had to confront his own past, the proper occasion for such a confrontation being the great event in his life, his wanderings in 1909. "The Horse Dies the Birds Fly Away" is in fact an autobiographical narration of his journey. He recounts the same story in prose in Csavargások könyve (The Book of Tramping). The difference between prose and verse, recurrent though not always of relevance, can easily be spotted here - verse, on account of metaphors and a looser structure, allows for fewer words and a tighter rhythm than prose can afford. "The Horse Dies the Birds Fly Away" is a narrative of a journey in both the geographical sense, from Budapest to Paris and back to Budapest, and the spiritual sense; it is the story of a psychological development from obscure beginnings (his fate as devised by an alcoholic father) to a firm undertaking of name and calling. Throughout the work Kassák uses small print for all the names, including those of Szittya and Vandervelde, the Belgian socialist politician, whom he saw in Brussels. Yet in the penultimate line of the poem his own name appears in capitals, rendering mythological perspectives to it: "I am LAJOS KASSÁK / and our heads twist up for the flight of the nickel samovar".
[...]
The Hungarian Quarterly, Volume XXXVII No. 143 Autumn 1996 - Some Highlights