Manifestoes of Surrealism

Chapter 7 includes the texts of three speeches given by Breton in 1935. He prefaces the chapter with a nostalgic look back at the early days of the Soviet Union, an era when, in his view, the Socialists' dream of that country seemed stable and genuine. The intellectual Socialists worked hand in hand with the working class to analyze the failures and successes of the movement and determine how the revolution should proceed in the future. Breton believes that early Socialist movements were truly movements of the people and created new ideas that would bring about genuine social change. By 1935, however, he sees the Soviet Union as a country with top-down leadership similar to that of every capitalist country. He states that the Socialists there are determined to follow every whim of the Soviet leaders, relying on them to tell the rest of the world's adherents to their views what to do and think. To Breton, this makes no sense. He believes that socialists should embrace their right to think for themselves and that “this contemplative, ecstatic attitude is totally irreconcilable with the revolutionary sentiment” (209). The introduction concludes by stating that Breton no longer feels that Surrealism has a specifically socialist impetus; instead, it should be “a method of creating a collective myth with the much more general movement involving the liberation of man” (210).