Lajos Kassák (March 21, 1887 – July 22, 1967) was a Hungarian poet, novelist, painter, essayist, editor, theoretician of the avant-garde and occasional translator, was the father of many modernisms.
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.
Although he cannot be fully identified with any of the avantgarde movements, his main influences were expressionism, futurism and later dadaism.
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Born as a son of an apotechary assistant father and a laundress mother, in Érsekújvár in present day Slovakia. Despite his parents wanted him to attend higher education, he decided to quit his studies and started to work as a locksmith assistant, and acquired a letter of indentures. In 1904 he moved to Budapest, where he started to work as a factory worker on the outskirts of the city. Participated in the labor union movement, and organized several strikes. In 1905 he was fired several times, since he organized strikes. In 1907 he left for Paris on foot without any money, from where he was expelled back to Hungary in 1910. The experiences of this voyage was later covered in his autobiography entitled Egy ember élete (A Man's Life) (1927–1935).
Despite his lack of formal education and inadequate writing skills, he fought fiercely to publish his works. His first poem was published in 1908, and his first collections of short stories in 1912, titled Életsiratás. In 1915 he published his first collection of poems, Éposz Wagner maszkjában (Epic in the Mask of Wagner), and in the same year he launched his first journal, entitled Tett (Action), which was soon censored and banned for being "pacifist".
During the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 he become a member of the special Writers Directorate, but after fierce debates with the republic's leader, Béla Kun, he decided to distance himself from Bolshevism, yet he always remained leftist and never made a distinction between a socially responsible individual and an artist. He described himself, his art, his view on political social issues as a "socialist man". After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic he immigrated to Vienna, where he continued publishing his second journal, Ma (Today). He returned to Hungary in 1926 and continued editing and publishing journals like Munka (Work) (1927-1938) and Dokumentum (Document) (1927), both of which were independent leftist avant-garde journals.
His autobiography, Egy ember élete (A Man's Life) was published periodically in the Hungarian literary journal Nyugat between 1923 and 1937, but after he published it as a book, he was prosecuted because of its chapters concerning the Hungarian Soviet Republic. He regularly published in leftist newspapers and from 1945 he edited the journal Kortárs (Contemporary) until 1947 when it was banned. In 1947 he returned to political duties and became the head of the Social Democratic Party's Art Commission, in 1948 he became an MP. A year later he had to change seats in the Parliament, and later he had to resign, and finally retire because of the change of the political climate . In 1953, he formed critics on the Party's cultural politics, and therefore he lost his party membership. Because of this, he was not allowed to publish or years, until 1956, when he was elected to be a chair in the Writers Association, an influential organization of the era. From 1957 he become practically muted by the cultural censorship of the Party, and was not allowed to travel, exhibit and publish until his death. However even in his silence, he influenced a large number of artist both in Hungary and internationally.
Kassák is considered to be the main father figure of Hungarian Avant-garde, and one of the first poet/writer/artist we had an authentic working class background. His views on historical avant-garde movements influenced the regions perception and artistic production, especially because the journals he edited and published, the Ma / Today and the Tett / The Deed. He was heavily influenced by the international constructivist movement and issued several manifesto: Képarchitektúra / Image Architecture (1922), Vissza a kaptafához / Back to the Basics (1923), A konstruktivizmusról / On Constructivism (1922). Nowadays, since he is very hard to associate with a single style or movement, most art historians refer his work to be an "activist", a special label issued to mirror the socially engaged style of his artistic production. Functionality and social effectivity were the main characteristics of his works, which have to be implemented by the modern being in order to create a world of social equality. His works include concrete poetry, billboards, design, novels, and paintings, and were influenced by Expressionism, Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism and Constructivist tendencies. Kassák is associated with all of these movements, and considered be one of the most coherent ouvre in the Hungarian art history.
He has a small museum dedicated to his work close to his last residence in the northern part of Budapest.
Péter Konok: Lajos Kassák and the Hungarian Left Radical Milieu (1926-1934). In: Regimes and Transformations. Hungary in the Twentieth Century. Edited by István Feitl and Balázs Sipos. Napvilág, Budapest, 2005. 177-194. pp.