Cold War Classics: Workshop Programme 2025

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, Charles University, Prague, and the University of Oxford’s APGRD. 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.

To register for online attendance at the hybrid elements of the workshop please email has22@st-andrews.ac.uk by 10 May 2025.  All we need is your name and the email address you will use to sign into Microsoft Teams. For in-person attendance there is no registration, please just drop has22 a line if you want to come.

PROGRAMME (titles and abstracts incoming below…)

Tuesday 13 May 2025 (Hybrid) 

 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 2025 (Hybrid) 

 10.00 – 11.15: 

• Elżbieta Olechowska (Warsaw) — Classics and Communism Network, since 2009.
• David Movrin (Ljubljana) online — From Liblice 1957 to Budapest 1988: Mapping the Eirene Congresses.

 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.

 16.00 – 18.00:

• Vassilios Paipais (St Andrews, SACRA)  — The Reception of Thucydides in International Relations.
• Stavroula Pipyrou (St Andrews) — Lurking Cold War.
• Emilio Zucchetti (RHUL) — Gramscian Grundrissers? The Seminario di Antichistica and Gramsci’s thought in 1970s–80s Italy.

Thursday 15 May 2025 (Hybrid)

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) — Re-visiting a Theatrical Event.

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

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”.

Milinda Banerjee: ‘Greco-Roman Antiquity in Decolonizing India’

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.

Vassilios Paipais: ‘The Reception of Thucydides in International Relations’

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.

Emilio Zucchetti: ‘Gramscian Grundrissers? The Seminario di Antichistica and Gramsci’s thought in 1970s–80s Italy’

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.

Alena Sarkissian: ‘Why Plautus? Czech Theatre and the People 1945-1956’

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.

Jakub Čechvala: ‘Towards a (Provisional) Typology of Stalinist Discourse in Classics’

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.

Julie Pšenička: ‘Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus on the stage of the Prague National Theatre in the late 1950s: the enslaved idol as a delegate of the subjugated nations and as a folk hero of the victorious Comrades’ International in socialist-realist choreography by Jiří Blažek (1923–2017)’

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.

Martin Pšenička: ‘“He radiates the power of his personality. We can compare him to Lenin, Castro, Khrushchev”: Re-visiting a Theatrical Event’

The quote in the title of my paper comes from a document stored in the National Theatre Archive in Prague, subtitled “director’s book with scene plans and photographs.” It should be a “director’s book” of Oedipus the Tyrant, the production staged in 1963 by Miroslav Macháček (premiered 10 January 1963). Eva Stehlíková in her latest publication, Why Shall We Care about Hecuba, in which she summarized her lifelong experience as a spectator and scholar with ancient drama and its staging, mentioned this document in a vivid recollection of Macháček’s production: “The real initiation, however, took place in Prague. Yes, it was Oedipus the King (in this translation Oedipus was literally the Ruler, my note). And in the title role with Vítězslav Vejražka, whose robust acting I admired. And on the endless stairs of Josef Svoboda. When I close my eyes, I can see the blinded Oedipus laboriously walking up them somewhere, into nowhere. […] I still see mainly Vítězslav Vejražka climbing the endless stairs. […] Macháček was, in my opinion, ahead of his time: simultaneously, somewhere in Paris, the still quite unknown Jean-Pierre Vernant was writing a book on the beginnings of Greek philosophy and was already preparing a study on ambivalence in Greek tragedy. […] I discovered Macháček’s director’s book in the archives of the National Theatre, a dream of every scholar: a text with the director’s handwritten notes and photographs pasted in. Reflections may vary, but I can now say with certainty that the reviewer Leoš Suchařípa and I saw exactly what Macháček wanted to tell us […].” The then twenty-three-year-old Stehlíková saw a performance that undoubtedly provoked contradictory reactions. The critics of the time, with a few exceptions, did not accept the production unanimously. Some reports, however, attest to the tumultuous reception from Stehlíková’s generational peers. In dialogue with her reminiscence, I would like to return to the 1963 production of Oedipus the Tyrant, the third at the National Theatre and the sixth on Czech stages since the Second World War, in our gradually forming Cold War Classics project. In recent years I have been examining the stage work of Miroslav Macháček, especially his work at the National Theatre in the 1970s and early 1980s. During this research, I have been working with Macháček’s director’s books provided to me by his daughter. And it was these director’s books for productions of Hamlet (1955) and Henry V (1971) that raised doubts about the nature of the alleged director’s book for the Oedipus the Tyrant from the National Theatre Archive. The doubts were confirmed – Kateřina Macháčková discovered the real director’s book in her father’s estate. The book from the National Theatre Archive, indispensably valuable, seems to be the post-premiere record written by an assistant director (probably Macháček’s student). This is a fresh find, which I will get to in its entirety later. For our joint-seed workshop, I conceive this post as a presentation of work in progress, offering a glimpse into the process of re-visiting/re-imagining a theatrical event as an intersection of multiple contexts. 

Christopher Anaforian: ‘Dead, Red, Athenian: Aristophanes’ Ecclesiasuzae and Anti-Communist Censorship’

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.

Anna Coopey: ‘”Each End is Also A Beginning”: Breaking the Iron Curtain in Kostas Varnalis’ (1947) The Diary of Penelope

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.