![\"cqqxcuqwgaan7d5\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.bravenewclassics.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/CqQXcuqWgAAn7d5.jpg?resize=244%2C300\")
Like\u00a0I say,\u00a0I was in school all\u00a0morning, but the afternoons were my own \u2013 and since I was there for work, work is what I did (well, most of the time…). My\u00a0second objective — after the language learning — was to conduct interviews with local researchers, locate libraries and archives, hunt down early Soviet classical translations,\u00a0and generally soak\u00a0up what I could of the prevailing attitudes towards my major research questions.<\/p>\n
One of the most useful things I did in week two\u00a0of my stay\u00a0was given to me as homework by Stanislav. It was to write an introduction in Russian to Brave New Classics<\/em>, explaining why I was in Russia and what I wanted to find out. The early stages of a new research project are haunted by these questions:\u00a0What exactly is it that I want to know? What is my hypothesis?\u00a0And what the hell are my research questions? The limited vocabulary and syntax I had at my disposal forced me to cut to the chase:<\/p>\n “I am in Russia because I study the relationship between communism and ancient culture. I am interested in the influence of early Soviet cultural practice (and policy) on British culture. Over the next few years I will write a book on this theme and, of course, my\u00a0story begins in Russia.”\u00a0This was enough to get the conversation started, at least.<\/p>\n In the field of classics this can be supported by the fact that much of the most inspiring work was done by classicists\u00a0who, in the 1920s and 1930s, were considered \u201cenemies of the state\u201d. Many spent long years in labour camps for crimes unknown, and some were simply shot. In the gulag — as I was poignantly reminded in the newly relaunched\u00a0History of the Gulag Museum, Moscow<\/a>\u00a0—\u00a0people\u00a0often\u00a0witnessed and suffered the most hideous atrocities, and were essentially spirited\u00a0away to\u00a0the back-breaking and mind-numbing routines of labour camps.\u00a0There was a joke Professor Gavrilov of theBibliotheca Classica Petropolitana<\/a> (BICL) translated\u00a0to me, a joke that was once told by his former teacher Aristid Dovatur<\/a>. It went something like this:<\/p>\n Prisoner (P) to New Arrival (NA), about to begin a\u00a010 year sentence<\/em><\/p>\n P: \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0“So, what did you do?”<\/p>\n NA: \u00a0 “Nothing!”<\/p>\n P: \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0“No, that cannot be. For nothing you only get 7 years.”<\/p>\n Prof. Alexander\u00a0Gavrilov is the Founding Director of the fantastic BICL. He was generous enough not only to regale me with anecdotes of his fascinating\u00a0teachers (Dovatur and Barovsky), but also to help me formulate\u00a0the questions I wanted to ask of the material I intend to look\u00a0at for BNC.\u00a0He spoke to me of the effect it had on him and his contemporaries to encounter these exotic and learned men, like Dovatur, who had\u00a0been released\u00a0from\u00a0the gulag. They appear to have been for Gavrilov’s generation\u00a0intoxicating relics\u00a0of an old world, and a distinctly European old world:<\/p>\n![\"screen-shot-2016-08-20-at-18-28-32\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.bravenewclassics.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/Screen-Shot-2016-08-20-at-18.28.32.png?resize=300%2C169\")
<\/a>Through chatting with people in St. Petersburg about my research, my ideas were continuously\u00a0developing. The reading I’d done before arriving\u00a0in Russia — largely in preparation for the World Literature conference at KCL<\/a> — started\u00a0to settle into its geographical as well as its historical context. As time went by\u00a0it seemed more and more likely that early Soviet cultural practice had been an important influence on the Western Leftist\u00a0intellectuals\u00a0who occupied central positions in British culture at the time. The channels of influence may have long been obscured, and it is obvious that certain democratising streams of tradition were already in place, but the exportation of the almost feverish theorisation and explicitly ideologically driven commitment to spreading literacy and making the best of culture available to the people, must have been contagious, especially when divorced from the reality of life in the USSR. It is no great stretch to the idea that this Soviet export\u00a0<\/em>intensified <\/em>if not directly fed into\u00a0democratising cultural practice\u00a0abroad, among the Leftist communities united as they were for a time under their abhorrence of the fascist threat. I was excited to find\u00a0mention of some of the British classicists I’m going to be focussing on in Russian state archives.<\/p>\n![\"siberiandoping\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.bravenewclassics.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/siberiandoping.jpg?resize=300%2C197\")
As I was to be told in different ways over the month, this idea\u00a0– however intriguing historically – is (on a personal\u00a0level) not a bit appealing to most Russian scholars. To put it bluntly, the default position of most liberal scholars is to state that nothing of cultural value came from communism. Anything good that was\u00a0produced during the era,\u00a0tends to be attributed to those artists and scholars who were brought up and educated in pre-revolutionary Russian society.<\/p>\n