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 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.

To register for online attendance at the hybrid elements of the workshop please email has22@st-andrews.ac.uk by 30 April 2025.  All we need is your name and the email address you will use to sign into Microsoft Teams.

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)
• 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)
• Vassilios Paipais (St Andrews, SACRA)  — The Reception of Thucydides in International Relations.

 16.00 – 16.45:  

• Emilio Zucchetti (RHUL)

Thursday 15 May 2025 (Hybrid)

10.00-12.00: Round Table 2 

Chaired by Justine McConnell (KCL)

• Alena Sarkissian (Charles University)
• Jakub Čechvala (Czech Academy of Sciences) — Towards a (Provisional) Typology of Stalinist Discourse in Classics.
• Julie Pšenička (Charles University)
• 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

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.

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.

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.