New Collaboration & Winter Moscow Trip

As I might have said before, I hope that this Brave New Classics website will act as a collaborative platform for international research in the emerging field of “Classics, Communism and World Culture”. My own work in this field doesn’t extend much further than British leftist receptions of Greek and Roman culture, and tends towards classical translation of poetry and drama. So I’m always happy when I come across other researchers who work along similar lines, and who are up for collaborating.

I am delighted, therefore, to announce a new BNC collaborator! Dr Georgina Barker has recently completed a PhD on classical reception during the decline and fall of the Soviet Union. Her doctorate focused on three Russian poets writing from 1963 to the present, Elena Shvarts, Il’ia Kutik, and Polina Barskova. Her work shows how these wonderful Russian poets used classical antiquity to estrange Soviet/Russian reality, “facilitating” as she says, “veiled dissidence and escapism, and making the ancient world an alter ego of Russia”. Her book on the subject will come out in due course, but in the meantime she has been kind enough to furnish BNC with a profile on Elena Shvarts, which you can read here:

Elena Shvarts

Moscow trip (Oct/Nov 2017)

Russia is a land of proverbs. The man — so the saying goes — who understands the exits of Kitai Gorod Station, is one who has sold his soul the devil… After a month of living just up the hill from this station (on a street once inhabited by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam), I’d just about cracked it. But it had taken its toll. The woman at the local ‘cheburechnaya’ (purveyor of deep fried snacks and vodka) no longer asked me what I wanted, but with a withering look that I came to admire, simply measured out my 100 grammes of vodka into a plastic cup.

But my 6 weeks in Moscow was much more varied than this makes out, thank goodness. I also stayed for a couple of weeks in a dizzying apartment on the 16th story of a Soviet high rise on Noviy Arbat. And throughout my time in Moscow, I met plenty of kind hearted and interesting people, and hung out with colleagues from various Russian universities. By some miraculous coincidence, Dr Hanna Paulouskaya (of Warsaw’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and BNC Collaborator) was also doing some archive digging in the Russian State Archive for Literature and the Arts (RGALI), related to her work on Classics and Soviet Childhood. So, we had a week of comparing notes and taking in what Moscow had to offer. I was also overjoyed to finally meet Omsk-based Ancient Historian Sergei Krikh at the third Soviet Antiquity conference.

When you’re scouring microfilm for hours you reach a trance-like state. There’s something about the sound of the film and the lights of the screen… The archivists at RGALI keep things fresh by making it really cold in their reading rooms. The windows stay open whatever the temperature outside. When you’re reading through the mist of your own breath, you at least feel like you’re breaking new ground.

These semi-hypothermic trances provided a peaceful landscape through which I could become acquainted with the protagonists of the story I will one day tell, about the interaction between British leftist classicists and the Soviet Union. The thrill of finding a load of letters from one of my project’s key “players” Джек Линдсей, or the Australia-born British communist writer Jack Lindsay (1900-1990), to various members of the Foreign Commission of Soviet Writers from the late 1930s to the early 60s, is hard to describe. It was a bit like arriving at night in a shabby, allocation-on-arrival hotel complex, and waking up the next day to meet an old friend at the breakfast buffet.

Imagine, then, what it must have been like to find an article written by Lindsay (and presumably published in USSR) comparing the work of the Soviet poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky with the Greek poets of the fifth century BCE. Over the weeks other characters emerged, some familiar (the British writers Doris Lessing, Herbert Marshall and Naomi Mitchison, and the London-based artist Pearl Binder); others who were new to me (e.g. the Irish writer Sean O’Casey). All, were at some point at the very least friends of the young Soviet Union, but most were committed pro-Soviet communists, who corresponded regularly with writers and administrators in the Soviet Union.

At this very moment, I am working on finishing the People’s History of British Classics (1730-1939) with Edith Hall, which is the major output of the Classics and Class in Britain project. This means I am hibernating a bit and not able to share my Moscow findings until the new year. The only exception is a paper on Jack Lindsay and Catullus which I’m giving at a conference in Kazan in October, to which everyone is, of course, very welcome.

More soon!