Daniel Pratt’s paper on the Polish writer Bruno Jasieński (1901-1938) demonstrates this attempt to become a true internationalist, from Jasieński’s initial futurist writings in the early post-war era to his editorial work on the Soviet journal International Literature in the 1930s. Jasieński was not interested in being a part of a particular national paradigm, rejecting his own specifically Polish background, preferring instead to define himself as an international writer. Jasieński used his literary publications, his editorial work, and his own identity to create a distinctly non-national version of international literature. Jasieński, despite his own European background, nonetheless defies these traditions, allowing us to develop a Socialist internationalist understanding of world literature beyond the scope of the nation itself.
The work of Hungarian artist, writer, editor, and activist Lajos Kassák (1887-1967) has primarily impacted the world of art and design, because of the role he played in avantgardist networks across Europe. Kassák’s legacy in the twentieth-century Hungarian literary world is complicated by his early left-wing radicalism, his exile in Vienna, and even more so by his attempts to find his place in postwar Communist Hungary. However, the biggest challenge to integrating Kassák into a world literary canon is the visuality of his writing, the experimental nature of them which privileges form, shape, and design in a way that denies primacy to the power of the word: for this reason he cannot ’represent’ a national cultural identity forged by Romantic poets. This paper by Jessie Labov will foreground how Kassák’s visuality functions in the Internationalist paradigm but fails as world literature.
The Hungarian-German-Jewish Béla Balázs (1884-1949) is most frequently discussed as a film theoretician (The Visible Man, 1924) and film director, who co-wrote several of Leni Riefenstahl’s films and even assisted with the direction of her 1932 picture The Blue Light. In this paper, however, Lilla Balint turns to Balázs’s rarely discussed interwar writings to discern elements of an internationalist aesthetic present in these works. Already during World War I, whose outbreak Balázs welcomed with patriotic enthusiasm, his diary entries testify to Balázs’s growing internationalist allegiance and identification with Europe. Balázs also became a member of the Hungarian Communist Party (in 1919) and the German Communist Party (in 1931). Eschewing any straightforward convergence between aesthetics and politics, the paper traces how Balázs’s decisive turn away from nationalist frameworks informs some of his little-discussed literary projects of the interwar years.
The final presentation takes on Yugoslav socialist internationalism. In political-economic terms, the 1948 break with Stalinism led to the rise of workers’ self-management and creation of the Non-Aligned Movement. The impact was felt even more in cultural production, where modernism became a state-sponsored aesthetic. A key figure in this massive political and cultural transformation was the Zagreb-born author, playwright, and critic Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981). His programmatic 1952 speech at the Writers’ Congress in Ljubljana is usually seen as the founding document of Yugoslav socialist or non-aligned modernism. In his paper, Djordje Popović traces the origins of supranational Yugoslav literature to a much earlier text, Krleža’s 1922 antiwar collection Hrvatski bog Mars (Croatian God Mars), where a new social and cultural vision of the world is articulated as a negation of national literary traditions and of some larger synthetic whole they may form. Internationalist aesthetic is shown to develop not in response to the exigencies of the Cold War, but prior to the possibility of socialist revolution