06 Transplanting Surrealism in Greece - a Scandal or Not?

Abstract

Transplanting the surrealist movement and literature in Greece and feedback from the critics and
philological and journalistic circles of the time is of special importance in the history of Modern
Greek Literature. The Greek critics and readers who were used to a traditional, patriotic and
strictly rule-conforming literature would find it hard to accept such a kind of literature. The modern
Greek surrealist writers, in close cooperation mainly with French surrealist writers, would be
subject to harsh criticism for their surrealist, absurd, weird and abstract productivity. All this
reaction against the transplanting of surrealism in Greece caused the so called “surrealist
scandal”, one of the biggest scandals in Greek letters.