Cold War Classics

Mary Woodcock Kroble
Monday 14 April 2025

Workshop, 13 to 15 May
Room SO3, Swallowgate
School of Classics, University of St Andrews.

The Cold War Classics project explores the ways in which ancient Greco-Roman culture was selectively interpreted, appropriated or suppressed to advance political agendas and bolster Cold War narratives.  Through the focusing lens of engagements with the relatively stable referent of Greco-Roman antiquity, we ask how ideologies (dominant and countercultural) manifested in the cultural sphere in the Cold War period.  Cold War cultural histories have tended to emphasise the polarity engendered by the ideological split between the socialist and capitalist worlds. We hope the assembled participants’ research will help nuance our understanding of Cold War Classics, identifying both commonalities and mutual exchange, as well as fundamental differences in approach to cultural and intellectual history.

This workshop is part of a collaboration between the University of St Andrews and Charles University, Prague. We are grateful to the Charles University-University of St Andrews Joint Seed Funding Scheme, The Leverhulme Trust, and the School of Classics, University of St Andrews, for their financial support of this workshop.

Programme

All sessions are hybrid

Tuesday 13 May

16.15 – 18.15: Round Table 1:  The Cold War Classics story so far… 

Knights of the Round Table

  • Martin Pšenička (Charles University)
  • Jakub Čechvala (Czech Academy of Sciences)
  • Henry Stead (St Andrews, SACRA)
  • Julie Pšenička (Charles University)
  • Alena Sarkissian (Charles University)
  • Fiona Macintosh (Oxford, APGRD)

Wednesday 14 May

10.00 – 11.15: 

  • Elżbieta Olechowska (Warsaw)
  • David Movrin (Ljubljana)

 11.45 – 13.00:

  • Hanna Paulauskaya (Warsaw) online — Heracles Struggling for Peace: Cold War Narratives in Soviet Animated Films on Antiquity.
  • Marianna Leszczyk (Oxford) — The Dangers of Looking Back: Zbigniew Herbert, Classical Reception, and Socialist Modernity.

 14.00 – 15.00:

  • Milinda Banerjee (St Andrews, SACRA) — Greco-Roman Antiquity in Decolonizing India.
  • Vassilios Paipais (St Andrews, SACRA)  — The Reception of Thucydides in International Relations.

 16.00 – 17:15:  

  • Emilio Zucchetti (RHUL) — Gramscian Grundrissers? The Seminario di Antichistica and Gramsci’s thought in 1970s–80s Italy.
  • Stavroula Pipyrou (St Andrews) — Lurking Cold War.

Thursday 15 May

10.00-12.00: Round Table 2 

Chaired by Justine McConnell (KCL)

  • Alena Sarkissian (Charles University) — Why Plautus? Czech Theatre and the People 1945-1956.
  • Jakub Čechvala (Czech Academy of Sciences) — Towards a (Provisional) Typology of Stalinist Discourse in Classics.
  • Julie Pšenička (Charles University) — Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus on the stage of the Prague National Theatre in the late 1950s.
  • Martin Pšenička (Charles University)

14.00-15.30:

  • Christopher Anaforian (St Andrews, SACRA) — Dead, Red, Athenian: Aristophanes’ Ecclesiasuzae and Anti-Communist Censorship.
  • Anna Coopey (St Andrews, SACRA) — “Each End is Also A Beginning”: Breaking the Iron Curtain in Kostas Varnalis’ The Diary of Penelope (1947).

Abstracts

  • One of the central themes in Soviet Cold War propaganda was the “struggle for peace,” a narrative prominently featured in the USSR’s cinematic output. The late 1960s marked a period of intensified propaganda production, coinciding with the rise of Soviet animated films – including the first works engaging with classical antiquity. However, only a few of these films can be considered openly propagandistic, and representations of antiquity within propaganda films remained relatively rare. In this paper, I analyze how ancient mythology was appropriated within Soviet ideological frameworks. I focus primarily on The Return from Olympus (dir. Aleksandra Snezhko-Blotskaya, 1969), which incorporates anti-American undertones, and Attention, Wolves! (dir. Efim Gamburg, 1970), which indirectly references classical motifs. By examining the semiotic role of antiquity in these narratives, I explore whether classical themes held significance in the ideological messaging of Soviet animation during the Cold War and what meanings were assigned to ancient culture and mythology in this context.

  • Academic readings of Zbigniew Herbert’s classical reception usually foreground his use of antiquity as a lens through which to comment on the authoritarian side of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL), or even as a “code” to get such criticism past the censors. What has remained unexplored is the role of socialist public discourse as an important cultural framework for Herbert’s self-presentation as literary receiver of antiquity. Zooming in on Herbert’s press appearances in the 1970s, this paper will shed new light on his classical reception by situating it within the discourse of socialist modernity. Highlighting the out-of-placeness of looking towards the past in this future-facing cultural climate, I will point to Herbert’s efforts at publicly justifying his subject matter through recourse to the language of the “scientific revolution” and to his attempts at re-negotiating the value of historical buildings, such as ancient ruins, in a society focused on building the “new world”.

  • How did Marxian/Communist frameworks shape the understanding of Greco-Roman—and, more widely, Mediterranean-Eurasian—antiquity in postcolonial India, in the age of decolonization and Cold War? And how did knowledge of ancient pasts deepen socialist political thought and practice in India? This talk focuses on four themes. First, it discusses key founding figures of Indian Communism who wrote on ancient Greece and Rome during the 1930s-40s. Second, it shows how, from the 1930s to the 1970s, many Indian socialists maintained distance from the official Communist Party of India—or, its offshoots, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)—but nevertheless, studied Greco-Roman history and philosophy. These included the Dalit (subaltern-caste) statesman B. R. Ambedkar. Third, in postcolonial India, Greek and Roman-themed plays were staged in varying adaptations. This talk shows how these plays offered critical commentaries on postcolonial Indian politics. Finally, many prominent Indian Marxist academic historians wrote on ancient Greco-Roman history. Their interpretations advanced novel paradigms of thinking about the origins of class society, patriarchy, and capitalism.

  • In this brief paper, I survey the reception of Thucydides in the field of International Relations (IR) and the appropriation of his thought by mainstream IR scholars for the purposes of ‘drawing lessons’ for the present. The question of Thucydides contemporaneity has been central in the development of realist thought in IR although the reception of Thucydides’ thought varied from caricature or anachronistic readings that tried to shoehorn Thucydides to the conceptual straightjackets of the discipline to readings that have been more sensitive to the cultural, linguistic, and discursive context of the author of the History of the Peloponnesian War. Recent interpretations that hail from critical and postmodern sensibilities have introduced more nuance and historicity to the use and misuse of Thucydides by IR scholars but they have not always managed to escape the demand of ‘relevance’ that continues to perpetuate the spell Thucydides has cast over the entire discipline.

  • This short paper explores the historiographical and theoretical contributions of the Seminario di Antichistica of the Istituto Gramsci, active in the 1970s and 1980s and closely linked to the Italian Communist Party. The group included many scholars who would become venerati maestri, such as Andrea Carandini, Luciano Canfora, and Aldo Schiavone. Despite the name, the Gramscian engagement is minimal in most of the publications, with the notable exception of the third volume of Società romana e produzione schiavistica. The intellectual roots of their work lie instead in the publication of Marx’s Grundrisse, which started to appear in German in 1953 and Italian in 1968. The Formen, above all, exercised an apparent influence on the scholars of the Seminario, also thanks to the edition published by Eric Hobsbawm in 1964. In this paper, I reflect on the Seminario’s place in the tradition of ‘Western’ Marxist historiography and the paradoxes of Gramsci’s reception: as his influence grew abroad, most notably through the Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, his direct impact on Italian scholarship began to fade, particularly after the disintegration of the PCI and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In hindsight, the Seminario’s works appear to be both a culmination of a Marxist moment in Italian scholarship and a prelude to the decline of Italian Marxism.

  • An interesting phenomenon in the Classical repertoire of Czech theatres after the war was the growing popularity of comedy and the gradual preference for Plautus over Aristophanes, which culminated in the 1950s. The paper will examine the dramaturgical and ideological reasons behind this phenomenon and shed light on this seemingly surprising anomaly. It will also explore the relationship between the popularity of Plautus and that of Aristophanes, the second prominent ancient comedian on the Czech stage.

  • The Stalinist version of Marxism (Marxism-Leninism) is a relatively easy to define and homogeneous field, found at all social levels in the so-called Eastern European bloc under Sovietization, as the Czech philosophers Jan Mervart and Jiří Růžička have recently shown in their important study of post-Stalinist Marxism (“Rehabilitate Marx!” The Czechoslovak Party Intelligentsia and Thinking Post-Stalinist Modernity, Prague 2020). But they also pointed out in passing that the norm is “itself a fluid and unstable quantity, depending on the current distribution of power and ideological forces”. In the same time, the literary theorist Roman Kanda, in his study (“Structuralists Doing Marxism,” 2019), problematised the current allegorical interpretations of some works from this period, and extended the tightly knit Marxism-Leninism to the moment when earlier types of thought persisted in it. Inspired by both approaches, which bring an element of heterogeneity to an otherwise stable system, I will attempt a preliminary basic typology of its manifestations within classics. From the specific language of official reports, to which allegorical interpretation is rightly applied, I will turn to Pavel Oliva’s monograph Early Greek Tyrannis (1954). I will consider Oliva’s work as an important contemporary manifestation that can be used to demonstrate both the rigidity of the system and moments of useful criticism of other approaches, as well as the continuity of types of thought other than those represented by Stalinist Marxism-Leninism.

  • On 3 November 1957, the Czechoslovak premiere of the ballet Spartacus, subtitled “On the 40th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution”, took place on the stage of the Smetana Theatre in Prague (originally an independent theatre for Prague Germans between 1888 and 1938, which became the representative opera house of the National Theatre in 1948). The cultural-political significance of this stage event framed not only the personal presence of the Soviet composer with Armenian roots, Aram Khachaturian, in the auditorium. It was especially the fact that the Soviet side provided the National Theatre in Prague with the musical material of Spartacus immediately after the world premiere of the work choreographed by Leonid Yakobson, on 27 December 1956 at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad (after the collapse of the USSR, again the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg). The opportunity to stage Spartacus in between its premieres in both centers of Soviet ballet – the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad and the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, where it was choreographed by Igor Moiseyev and performed on 11 March 1958 – was a significant privilege that Jiří Blažek was granted. Blažek’s personal contacts acquired during his five-year study of choreography at Moscow’s GITIS in 1951–1956 played a significant role. This circumstance probably also influenced Khachaturian’s written consent to alterations in the score, which he granted Blažek after their personal consultation. Khachaturian’s agreement to Blažek’s changes was very surprising, since the alterations made by Yakobson only a year before Blažek, had infuriated Khachaturian greatly. This paper will focus on the specific form of Blažek’s adaptation of N. D. Volkov’s libretto and Khachaturian’s score. It will present the specific poetics of Blažek’s production of Spartacus, which became an intersection of his respect for Khachaturian’s score and his efforts to avoid the “mistakes” blamed on Yakobson by Soviet critics. Above all, it became an expression of Blažek’s original socialist-realist vision of this Soviet ballet fresco adapted to the more intimate conditions of domestic performance, as well as to the context of domestic ballet tradition and current discourse. The paper will also draw attention to selected cultural and political aspects of the contemporary reception of Blažek’s adaptation, which (as revealed by a search of the Soviet press) was registered in the professional ballet community of the USSR.

  • It’s January 31, 1954 and all across the United States and in nearly every industry, Americans are suffering under “witch hunts” designed to root out an alleged infiltration of American life by communists. German professor, writer, and director Robert Klein with assistance from the American Academy for Dramatic Arts and New York’s Cooper Union staged a production of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae, renamed Time for a Change. Two weeks before the play’s performance, nine students dropped out of the play fearing that they would risk their futures by participating in such a communist play. Moreover, Klein’s script – despite being nothing more than Benjamin Bickley Roger’s 1923 translation – was heavily expurgated by the American Academy’s president – Lawrence Langner – because several of its lines might be labelled pro-communistic. This paper highlights a key instance where American anti-communist hysteria bled into the realm of cultural production to censor a play which is itself heavily anti-communist and I will analyse how the censoring of an ancient Greek comedy which satirises the idea of communal ownership is indicative of the widespread paranoia of 1950s America.

  • The Greek Civil War (1947-1949) was, essentially, the Cold War – just warmed up. Kostas Varnalis, radical Marxist poet, translator, and journalist, chose its first year to write his contribution to the conversation: The Diary of Penelope (1947), a warped satirical retelling of the Odyssey that figures as an often-bizarre allegory of Greek twentieth-century history. Lampooning Brits, Germans, and right-wing upper-class Greeks, the text is not shy in lobbing a Marxist critique of World War Two – and world politics as a whole – at thinly-veiled ancient stand-ins, before it seems to sink into yet another instance of left melancholia. It is my contention that, in his satirical classical reception in such a period, Varnalis rouses us towards action, breaking the fourth wall, the dialectical-historical-materialist cycle, and the Iron Curtain to agitate for a revolutionary effort to overcome, both violently in Greece, and in the worldwide (cold) conflict that was to follow.

[Last updated: 14 April 2025]

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