On Saturday, January 19, 1935, the newspaper Kathimerini announced that "next Friday at 7:15 PM, there will be a lecture at the Artists’ Club featuring Mr. A. Empeirikos, with the topic 'On Surrealism'." This famous lecture, which took place a few months before the release of "Ypsikaminos," had been lost since the late 1930s and was recently rediscovered. Elytis attended the lecture and shared his impressions with us. "The next day, the lecture took place in front of some stern bourgeois who listened, visibly annoyed, to the fact that besides Koundylis and Tsaldaras, there were other interesting people in the world, whom they called Freud or Breton.

Good conductors of heat were missing, the youth. Nevertheless, the seed had been sown, and soon, amidst the golden dust of the arriving spring, strange names and unheard-of terms began to float and shimmer: the subconscious, automatic writing, hasard objectif, collages, the paranoid-critical method, the marvelous, and so on" (Open Papers). (From the publisher's website)

Dadaism was a great revolt and can be considered the dynamism of a revolution; however, it was not a revolution per se, while Surrealism is a true revolution—disciplined, with actions responding to a complete and autonomous theory and with conscious aims. [...] Here is the first impact of contemplating the new world that the application of Surrealism opens before us.

And when we say new world, we mean on a spiritual level, something entirely analogous to the discovery of Columbus, with the difference that Surrealism, with "the psychic automatism through which it expresses the true function of thought," is a means of continuous and voluntarily induced discovery. In other words, its Americas have no borders. They are endless, uncharted, and literally vast, just like our unconscious, which exists within us and whose existence and content we do not know.

[...] Let not some narrow-minded revolutionaries be displeased, but I see no reason why we should avoid the problems of love, dreams, madness, art, and religion as long as we examine them from the same fate as those - the Revolution." [Excerpt from a presentation text by the publisher or edition]