Emil Szittya is the name under which the originally Austria-Hungarian multi-faceted libertarian writer Adolf/Avraham Schenk (18 August 1886 - 26 November 1964) published his first book, and it is the name by which he was and is most frequently known. The very many pseudonyms under which he may sometimes be identified include "Chronist, Emszi" and "Emil Lesitt". Along with his work as a novelist and journalist, he is also sometimes classified as an art critic and/or an inveterate traveller-vagabond. His earlier work was written in Hungarian. Later, as a young man, he also wrote in German. During the second half of his life he lived principally in France and wrote in French.
Life
Adolf Schenk was born in Óbuda (part of Budapest), a member of the Hungarian speaking Jewish community in what was at that time an ethnically diverse city. Ignác Schenk, his father, was a shoe-maker while his mother, born Regina Spatz stayed at home and looked after the children. According to the available information he was the eldest of his parents' five sons. Little is known of his early years. He himself would later come up with various mutually incompatible versions of his family origins and childhood, consistent only in terms of their implausibility. After he grew up he always refused to acknowledge his Jewish provenance, at times manifesting an aggressive level of alienation. By the time he settled in Paris he had for several years been leading what would have been termed at the time a conspicuously "Bohemian" life-style. Later that year he moved to Ticino, living during 1906/07 as part of the Monte Verità community on the edge of Ascona. It was here that he first met the communard brothers Karl and Gustav Gräser. The next year he was in Leipzig when, during the course of his travels, he met the flamboyant Swiss-born modernist novelist-poet Blaise Cendrars, with whom he would later collaborate in Paris.
By 1911 (not for the last time in his life) he had returned to Paris, where during 1911 and 1912 he worked on Les Hommes nouveaux, a newly launched Franco-German literary journal produced by a group of proto-libertarians with Cendrars. Between 1914 and 1918 he lived predominantly in Zürich. In 1915 he crossed paths with a group of Russian revolutionaries, including Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ("Lenin"), Radek and Leon Trotsky. It was also in 1915 that he joined with Hugo Kersten and others to launch Der Mistral, another short-lived internationalist "literary war magazine" (according to the main subtitle on one of the editions). Published in Zürich it was, Szittya wrote in 1923, "the first [pan-]European magazine to be set up during the war .... scorned by the entire Swiss press, and unfortunately, only taken seriously [much] later". During 1916 he became a regular presence at the short-lived Cabaret Voltaire, known to posterity as the cradle of the Dadaist movement, of which at least one admirer credits Szittya as a co-founder. Writing to a friend in 1964, Szittya nevertheless wrote of Der Mistral that it was often "... identified as a forerunner of Dadaism (which it was not) and people therefore assert, incorrectly, that I myself was also a Dadaist".
In 1918 he returned to Hungary where his presence coincided with that year's revolution. He met again with his old friend the socialist poet Lajos Kassák, founder of the anarchist-pacifist magazine A Tett which had been quickly banned on account of its "anti-militarist" tendencies. In 1918/1919 he teamed up with Karl Lohs and Hans Richter to produce the short-lived Dadaist literary periodical "Horizont-Flugschriften" which was published in Berlin, Vienna and Budapest.