What is "metarealism"

Metarealism is a direction in Russian poetry and art that was born in the 1970s to the 1980s. The term was first used by Mikhail Epshtein, who coined it in 1981 and made it public in the Soviet magazine "Voprosy Literatury" in 1983; see below his "Theses on Metarealism and Conceptualism" from 1983 and the following years 1 Also: Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. Ed. K. Johnson & S. M. Ashby. Preface by M. Epshtein, A. Wachtel, A. Parshchikov. University of Michigan Press, 1992 ISBN 0-472-06415-0, p. 10, 53, 184 2, Tom Epstein's essay «Metarealism» in the anthology Crossing Centuries: The New Generations in Russian Poetry. Ed. High, John. NY: Talisman House Pub., 2000 ISBN 1-883689-90-2, ISBN 978-1-883689-90-2, p. 87-89, and Marjorie Perloff "Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?" in Postmodern Culture, Volume 3, # 2, January 1993 3.

M. Epshtein insists that in its philosophic dimension metarealism is " metaphysical realism," while "stylistically" metarealism is " metaphorical" realism. (See the most detailed explanation and exposition of this term in Epshtein's articles "Theses on Metarealism and Conceptualism" 4, "A Catalogue of the New Poetries" (Russian version) and in its English version 5 Thus, "meta" means both "through" and "beyond" the reality that we all can see; hence, "metarealism" is the realism of the hyperphysical nature of things. The main expression of its essence is given through a non-visual metaphor or, according to another Epshtein's term, a "metabola" (rather than hyperbole), that means "transfer" or "transition," opening many dimensions. [See part 3 in . "Metabola" is different from the symbol or a "visual" metaphor, because it assumes the interosculation of realities. See: M.Epshtein. After the Future: the Paradoxes of Postmodernism & Contemporary Russian Culture. University of Massachusetts Press, 1995, 416 p. ISBN 0-87023-973-2, ISBN 0-87023-974-0, pp. 40–50. Metarealism has very little to do with surrealism, since it appeals to the superconscious and not to the subconscious, thus opening up a many-dimensional perception of the world.