Surrealism

Surrealism is an avant-garde movement that arose in France in the 1920s (André Breton's manifesto, 1924) and proclaimed the liberation of creativity from the control of reason, logic, and morality for the sake of releasing the unconscious, the dream, delirium, and automatic writing. The Surrealists sought to join the incompatible and created unexpected, unreal images, drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis. Its leading figures are André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon; in painting, Salvador Dalí. In Ukrainian literature markedly Surrealist features — phantasmagoria, the joining of the real and the unreal, free associativeness of the image — mark the work of Bohdan-Ihor Antonych with his mythopoetic, exuberantly elemental world (Three Rings, The Green Gospel). Elements of Surrealism are also present in the poetry of the New York Group, in particular Emma Andijewska, and in modern Ukrainian writing.