The works of Louis Aragon, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Henrik Edoyan from the perspective of surrealism

Abstract

The article presents a comparative analysis of the works of Louis Aragon, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Henrik Edoyan through the aesthetic, philosophical, and historical-cultural dimensions of Surrealism. French Surrealism is examined as a twentieth-century movement born from the rebellion of Dadaism, which consciously sought to shatter the boundaries of human consciousness, unveiling the creative powers of the subconscious, of dream, of absurdity, and of the unconscious.

Aragon, Breton, and Artaud aspired to liberate reason and art from social and moral constraints, transforming poetry into a realm of spontaneous psychic revelation. Within their works unfolds the collision between the human inner world, its pain and its passions, and external reality. For Breton and Aragon, poetry becomes a metaphysical space of freedom and love; for Artaud, it is a field of disassembly-of language, body, and consciousness.

Within the context of contemporary Armenian literature, Henrik Edoyan’s poetry emerges as a singular continuation of Surrealism’s philosophical legacy. He intertwines the aesthetic principles of Western avant-gardism with Armenian historical memory, existential reflection, and national identity. In Edoyan’s verse, dream and reality are interwoven, becoming terrains of memory, suffering, and the quest for being. In his hands, Surrealism ceases to be a mere movement and transforms into a spiritual experience, an act of inner resistance, and a mode of historical re-living.

The article concludes that both the French Surrealists, with their revolutionary aesthetics, and Henrik Edoyan, with his existential and national interpretation, perceive poetry as a path toward transcendence of limits and the unveiling of inner freedom. For them, poetry becomes a means of rearticulating identity and memory, where the subconscious, the dream, and the philosophical apprehension of human existence converge into a unified creative vision.