A Proletarian Classics

A Proletarian Classics, edited by David Movrin (Ljubljana), Elżbieta Olechowska (Warsaw) and Henry Stead  (SACRA) is an open-access volume of essays investigating the relationship between ancient Greek and Roman culture and mainly European communism from 1917. The articles were first delivered as papers at the international conference held at St Andrews in October 2021 and sponsored by the Classical Reception Studies Network.

This publication represents a continuation of the Classics and Communism project, of which SACRA is a member, but also constitutes the early stages of a new strand of the project seeking to uncover, or recover, the leftist tradition of engagements  with  classical  antiquity  both  inside  and  outwith  the  academy. 

Many such engagements have been suppressed or obscured by  Cold  War  attitudes.  For  the  many  and  now  well-documented  limitations and shortcomings of Soviet classical studies, applying a Marxist lens had a dramatic impact on academia on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Studies conducted under, or influenced by the strictures of  Marxism-Leninism  were  sometimes  decades  ahead  of  Western  scholarship (e.g., imperialism, slavery). It would be a mistake to suggest that these approaches and analyses were not already developing in Western Europe and the States, but they were undoubtedly energized by the electricity of the revolutionary period and sustained by the (for a time) utopian symbol of the Soviet alternative.

Beyond  the  academy,  class-conscious  and  politically  motivated  creative practitioners learned from public-facing studies written by scholars with communist sympathies. The broad-rimmed and perhaps slightly quizzical lens of “proletarian classics” will, we hope, continue to provoke, to generate new “ways in,” and encourage new ground to be broken by students and scholars across the globe.