Emil Szittya

Emil Szittya was the most established pseudonym of the Hungarian-born Adolf Schenk (1886–1964). A vagabond in both his writing and his practice, his life intersected with everyone throughout Europe in the years of high modernism, whether he was setting up a publishing house with Blaise Cendrars in Paris, crossing paths with Lenin and Trotsky in Zürich, seeing the birth of Dada in the Cabaret Voltaire with his friends Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, or writing the first books on artists such as Chaïm Soutine and Marc Chagall. Szittya settled in Paris later in life, fighting in the Resistance during the war and working at the Café Les Deux Magots before dying of tuberculosis. His many works, in Hungarian, German, and French, include novels, essays, art criticism, and a history of suicide.