186 - [MANUSCRIPT - HUNGARIAN AVANT-GARDE] BODZASY, István. Szittyák. No. 30, November 2, 1917.

[MANUSCRIPT - HUNGARIAN AVANT-GARDE] BODZASY, István. Szittyák. No. 30, November 2, 1917. An exceptional manuscript of this underground journal produced at the Austro-Hungarian officers’ camp in Urum in Tsarist Russia. Quarto, paperback; covers of very faded brown cardboard bound with a brown percaline spine. 36 handwritten pages, 1 illustrated title page, 8 watercolor drawings, and 1 graphite portrait within the text. Cover is worn but sturdy; some soiling at the bottom of the pages; four paper reinforcement strips along the inner margins of the double-page spreads. An exceptional artistic and historical artifact, this unique manuscript was completed clandestinely at the Urzhum camp shortly before the outbreak of the October Revolution. Having miraculously survived the early turmoil of the Russian Civil War, the work was finally seized and stamped with the Bolshevik censorship seal in the summer of 1918. Located in the Vyatka Governorate, this camp housed a micro-society of Austro-Hungarian officers. Protected by the Hague Convention, these officers were exempt from labor and received a regular salary. These conditions allowed them to purchase art supplies and finance a clandestine cultural life (classes, theater, workshops). The creation of the magazine was central to this dynamic of resilience, seeking to bring the high standards of the Budapest avant-garde into the heart of their confinement. By naming it *Szittyák* (The Scythians), in reference to the nomadic horsemen considered the mythical ancestors of the Magyar people, these captive officers proudly asserted their identity and defiance in the face of their Russian captors. Issue No. 30 opens with a lyrical elegy by Imre Gyomai (1894–1962) titled “Koszorú nélkül járunk az örök-nyugvó csöndben” (We Walk Without a Wreath in Eternal Silence). Captured in Siberia at the age of 23, the author settled in Montmartre after the war. Having become a leading figure in the Parisian literary avant-garde, he served as secretary of the France-Hungary Association following the Liberation. His writings from captivity thus form the direct foundation of his future work on uprooting. This is followed by “Gondok, Gondolatok” (Worries, Thoughts), an introspective essay on spiritual resilience written by cadet Sándor Calderoni, a descendant of a famous Budapest dynasty of opticians and art dealers. Lieutenant Kálmán Miklóssy then offers a lengthy meditation on death titled “Vado Mori.” Following him, László Hézser lambasts propaganda and the financial mechanisms of conflict in “A világháború margójáról.” This author would establish himself in the 1940s as a noted essayist and sociopolitical theorist. His contribution is complemented by that of Ferenc Gallay, “Én és a világháború,” which offers a keen analysis of the erasure of the “self” through military discipline and the trauma of the trenches. The manuscript also offers a literary dimension with Pál Ferencz’s short story, “Captains Iványi and D’Armont,” which recounts the forced coexistence of a Hungarian officer and a French captain in the midst of a Siberian blizzard. Finally, daily life in the camp is satirized in a skit by Lieutenant Pál Lóránth (“Berlitz, Langenscheidt, Sauer, and the Slovak”), mocking the prisoners’ obsession with learning languages as their ultimate defense against boredom. The collection concludes with “Krónika” by Béla Bartha (signed “D. B.B.”), the group’s aesthetic theorist and guardian of its modernist charter inspired by the journal *Nyugat*, which documents social life in the camp. The 10 compositions are signed by the Impressionist and Symbolist painter István Bódzásy (1887–after 1923). Trained at the famous Nagybánya School, then in Munich and Paris, this artist was captured on the Russian front in 1914 and spent his captivity at the Urumqi camp. Upon his return to Hungary in 1919, the power of his works captivated the great poet Gyula Juhász, who introduced him to the literary avant-garde. The Viennese Secession and Art Nouveau styles serve as the decorative and ornamental thread running through the magazine. This aesthetic bursts onto the scene from the very first page with two horizontal bands of intertwined nude figures framing the large title “Szittyák.” Inside, it culminates in the superb funeral banner for Miklóssy’s essay “Vado Mori,” depicting an immense skull towering over a frieze of black crosses into which stream lines of people from all social classes. Symbolism is also on full display in the allegorical scene of a battlefield strewn with naked bodies and topped by a pink shroud, which illustrates Gyomai’s elegy, as well as in the silhouette of a young, horned triton emerging from the waves for Lóránth’s play. In contrast