Erzsi Újvári and Sándor Barta are among the forgotten authors of Hungarian avant-garde literature. To date, literary history has largely dealt with their avant-garde period, when Kassák’s younger sister, Erzsi Újvári, and her husband Sándor Barta, co-editor of Ma, stood at the forefront of the Hungarian avant-garde for around five years, between 1917 and 1922. Their poems and manifestos were published in Kassák’s journals while they were active participants in shaping Ma’s revolutionary programme. However, in 1922, like their colleagues who also had come under the influence of the Communist Party, they left Kassák’s group, and moved to the Soviet Union in 1925. The decade or more that followed was an exciting, but little-researched, and even partly unknown period of their work. While partly on a continuum with their earlier avant-garde art, they also significantly transformed their public and literary image, and placed their art in the service of Soviet state propaganda. In 1938, despite his embeddedness and commitment, and like hundreds of thousands of his fellow revolutionaries and émigrés, Barta was executed following a show trial, while Újvári died of illness two years later.
Our aim is to present the works of the two authors within the context of the relational structure – one that has now become completely submerged and is therefore difficult to grasp – in which both artists considered themselves professional revolutionaries, if not revolutionaries first and foremost. The selection of poems, novellas, and essays in this volume was guided by the desire to present the two artists’ lives during their Budapest, Vienna, and Moscow periods. Furthermore, since the questions of women’s perspectives in society and the sexual division of labour were reoccurring themes in the literary oeuvre of both Újvári and Barta, this volume accords particular attention to understanding how the question of social reproduction is addressed in Újvári and Barta’s texts.
Written and edited by Sára Bagdi, Gábor Dobó and Merse Pál Szeredi
English translations by Gwen Jones and Alan Campbell
Design and prepress by Virág Bogyó
Logos by Klára Rudas
The Hungarian and English editions of the volume are available through the OPAC of the Petőfi Literary Museum:
The publication is the second volume of the online, open access series of the Kassák Museum, entitled "Kassák Workshop". The first volume is available here.