Conference: A Proletarian Classics?

This Brave New Classics workshop explores the relationship between ancient Greek and Roman culture and world communism from 1917. It is hosted by the University of St Andrews with short panels and discussion sessions held online over the weekend of 23-24 October 2021.

Associated institutions:

• Classical Reception Studies Network
• University of St Andrews
• University of Ljubljana
• Faculty of Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw

Over the past decade thanks to the collaborative industry of colleagues based in Central and Eastern Europe (especially David Movrin and Elżbieta Olechowska) much light has been shed on the relationship between the study of Greek and Roman classics and European communism. This activity has taken the form of several international conferences and resulted in the edited volumes Classics and Communism (2013) and Classics and Class (2016). More recently ancient theatre and European communism has been the subject of an international conference and a third collected edition Classics and Communism in Theatre (2019). Furthermore, A People’s History of Classics (2020) has shown glimpses of the creative influence of Soviet communism on several scholars, writers and artists, who worked with classical antiquity in Britain.

Whilst the discipline of Classics (esp. the study of ancient Greek and Latin) suffered under the Soviet and Soviet-inspired regimes, in other and sometimes surprising ways classics (as cultural activity surrounding the ideas, images, texts and other remains of ancient Greece and Rome) can be seen to have flourished both within and beyond the academy, e.g. classical translation and Marxist/Leninist ancient history and archaeology thrived in certain areas.

The confluence of technological advances and increased leisure time in the 20th century (not to mention the concentration of effort within the USSR on creating proletarian culture) also meant that cultural participation burgeoned, and this included engagements with ancient Greek and Roman antiquity. The classics (broadly defined) were therefore accessible for the first time to mass audiences and mass readerships, where before they were largely limited, by education and means of access, to wealthy elites, who had nurtured them in the imperial European tradition of the ancien regime. The classics did not however necessarily lose their former class-connotations, even if the franchise was dramatically expanded.

How were the classical texts, images, objects and ideas received by the people under the influence of communism? How did Soviet ideology change the experience of ‘the classics’ both inside and beyond the Soviet Union and its satellites?

Click here for the PDF programme

To register for the online workshop please email classcon@st-andrews.ac.uk by Wednesday 20 October 2021. All we need is your name and the email address you will use to sign into Microsoft Teams.