A Proletarian Classics?
Henry Stead*
THE BACKSTORY
The relationship between the study of Greek and Roman classics and 
European communism, particularly in the USSR and the Soviet bloc, has 
attracted increasing critical attention over the past decade. There have 
been several international conferences organized by scholars, including 
my coeditors David Movrin and Elżbieta Olechowska, which have 
resulted in the volumes Classics and Communism (2013) and Classics 
and Class (2016).1 More recently, ancient theater and (mainly) Soviet 
communism in Central and Eastern Europe has been the subject of 
an international conference, resulting in a third volume, Classics and 
Communism in Theatre (2019).2 The subject is gaining momentum. 
A new network established by The Centre for Classical Studies at the 
Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, 
and collaborating with Oxford’s Archive of the Performance of Greek 
1 Karsai, Klaniczay, Movrin, and Olechowska, Classics and Communism; Movrin 
and Olechowska, Classics and Class. This publication came from the original 
meeting of the network, organized by György Karsai, Gábor Klaniczay, and Jerzy 
Axer. The project was funded by Thyssen Foundation and was conducted by Col-
legium Budapest and the University of Warsaw. It was initially called “Gnôthi 
Seauton! – Classics and Communism: The History of Studies on Antiquity in 
the Context of the Local Classical Tradition.”
2 Movrin and Olechowska, Classics and Communism in Theatre. See also 
Olechowska, Classical Antiquity on Communist Stage in Poland. Exceptions 
included the Western panel, resulting in Hall, “American Communist Idealism 
in George Cram Cook’s The Athenian Women (1918),” 1–22 and Stead, “British 
Communist Theatre and Aristophanes: The Case of Ewan MacColl and Joan 
Littlewood,” 23–43. On the panel also were Justine McConnell, presenting on 
CLR James’ Toussaint Louverture (1934), and Rosa Andujar, on Greek fidelity in 
Fidel’s Cuba.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4312/clotho.4.2.9-25
* University of St. Andrews, School of Classics, Swallowgate, Butts Wynd, 
St. Andrews KY16 9AL, UK; has22@st-andrews.ac.uk.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   9 21. 02. 2023   11:15:53
HENRY STEAD10
and Roman Drama and the University of St. Andrews’ Centre for the 
Receptions of Antiquity is embarking on an exploration of “Classics 
and Cold War Theatre 1956–1989.” In the British context, A People’s 
History of Classics (2020) has shown glimpses of the creative influence 
of Soviet communism on several scholars, writers, and artists who 
worked with classical antiquity in Britain.3 There have been plenty of 
discrete studies conducted over the years, many of which have been 
collated on the “Brave New Classics” website’s research page.4 But 
there is an extraordinary amount of work yet to be done on classics 
and communism as both a dominant and countercultural ideological 
force worldwide.
Whilst the discipline of Classics (especially the study of ancient 
Greek and Latin) suffered under the Soviet regimes, in other and 
sometimes surprising ways, “classics” – as cultural activity surroun-
ding the ideas, images, texts, and other remains of ancient Greece 
and Rome – can be seen to have flourished both within and beyond 
the academy. For example, even within the Soviet bloc, classical 
translation and Marxist-Leninist ancient history and archaeology 
thrived in certain areas, as the closing segment of this issue illu-
strates with examples from Poland and Slovenia. The confluence of 
technological advances and increased leisure time in the twentieth 
century (not to mention the concentration of effort within the USSR 
on creating “proletarian culture”) also meant that cultural participa-
tion burgeoned, and this included engagements with ancient Greek 
and Roman antiquity. The classics (broadly defined) were therefore 
accessible for the first time to mass audiences and mass readerships, 
where before they were largely limited, by education and means of 
access, to wealthy elites, who had nurtured them in the imperial 
European tradition of the ancien régime. The classics may not have 
entirely lost their former class connotations, even if the franchise 
was dramatically expanded.
The international workshop in which the following articles were 
initially presented as papers was held online in October 2021. Hosted 
by the School of Classics, University of St. Andrews, and sponsored 
by the Classical Reception Studies Network, it aimed to explore fur-
ther the conflicted and complex relationship between classics and 
communism, using the prism of the ambiguous or polysemic con-
cept of proletarianism. What, after all, is “a proletarian classics”? We 
3 Hall and Stead, A People’s History, esp. 476–495. See also Stead and Hall, 
“Between the Party and the Ivory Tower,” 3–31.
4 Brave New Classics, www.bravenewclassics.info.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   10 21. 02. 2023   11:15:53
A PROLETARIAN CLASSICS? 11
invited colleagues to discuss how classical antiquity was received by 
inhabitants of communist states. We asked how Soviet ideology and 
cultural policy could change the experience of “classics” both inside 
and beyond the Soviet Union and its satellites. Although in our call 
for papers we explicitly invited colleagues with a view on classics 
and communism outside of Europe, e.g., in Africa, Asia, Australasia, 
South and Central America, and the US, where we know there are 
interesting tales yet to be told, we did not manage on this occasion 
to attract papers. We did, however, receive a range of abstracts from 
people examining classical engagements in Belarus, Bulgaria, East 
Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Russia, Scotland, Slovenia, 
and Ukraine.
PROLETARIAN LITERATURE
In 1925 Leon Trotsky argued that there was “no such thing as proleta-
rian culture and […] there never will be.” His thinking was that before 
the revolution, the workers would remain too oppressed to create, 
and then after it, there would no longer be any proletarians because 
it would be a classless world. The concept did, however, catch on. In 
1935 William Empson wrote:
One might define proletarian art as the propaganda of a facto-
ry-working class which feels its interests opposed to the factory 
owners; this narrow sense is perhaps what is usually meant but not 
very interesting.5
He even agrees with Trotsky that “You couldn’t have proletarian lite-
rature in this sense in a successful socialist state.” But then he moves 
onto an altogether more expansive sense of the term, including “such 
folk-literature as is by the people, for the people, and about the people.” 
Empson is non-committal on whether it has to be all three at once. 
For him, the concept of proletarian literature is at once “vague” and 
“somehow obvious.”6 He explains that even the Bolshevik Russians 
did not seem to have a single accepted definition.
Vague the term may be, but bland and unimaginative proletarian art 
need not be. In the 1934 All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, Maxim 
Gorky described how socialist realism sought to have a real trans-
formative effect on the world, but it aimed to do this by myth-making:
5 Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 6.
6 Ibid., 17.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   11 21. 02. 2023   11:15:53
HENRY STEAD12
Myth is invention. To invent means to extract from the sum of a 
given reality its cardinal idea and embody it in imagery – that is how 
we got realism. But if to the idea extracted from the given reality we 
add – completing the idea, by the logic of hypothesis – the desired, 
the possible, and thus supplement the image, we obtain that roman-
ticism which is at the basis of myth and is highly beneficial in that it 
tends to provoke a revolutionary attitude to reality, an attitude that 
changes the world in a practical way.7
Immediately preceding this passage, Gorky shows the real-world 
power and application of myth in classical terms:
This same folklore in our days has raised Vladimir Lenin to the level 
of a mythical hero of ancient times, equal to Prometheus.
Gorky’s speech was delivered at a pivotal moment in Soviet cultural 
history, the adoption of “socialist realism” in the place of the more 
radical and sectarian concept of proletkult. This coincided with the 
anti-fascist “Popular Front” period (1934–1939), which precipitated a 
shift away from the more militant “for the worker, by the worker” model, 
toward more inclusive models, including, e.g., “about the worker” and 
simply “in service to the class struggle.” Proletarian literature – in the 
sense of what an anti-fascist writer should produce according to the 
Communist International – became capacious enough to envelop 
the works of Western, middle- and (more rarely) upper-class “fellow 
travelers.” Their attitude toward Soviet communism or the brand of 
communism espoused by their national Communist Party (not always 
the same) was sometimes less than enthusiastic. This said, the canon 
of Soviet-endorsed Western “progressive writers” might surprise most 
students of English and Modern Language Studies today. Some of the 
most celebrated and popular foreign authors, while published widely 
throughout the Soviet Union and its satellites, are scarcely read today 
(e.g., Jack Lindsay and James Aldridge).
DISCIPLINARY MATTERS
Our two-day workshop ended with a round table in which respon-
dents Edith Hall (Durham University), Neville Morely (University of 
Exeter), and the Chinese Studies specialist Gregory Lee (University 
7  Gorky, “Soviet Literature,” 25.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   12 21. 02. 2023   11:15:53
A PROLETARIAN CLASSICS? 13
of St. Andrews) reflected on the workshop papers and discussed 
broader matters. Given that there has been considerable scrutiny 
of the discipline in recent years in terms of its associations with 
imperialism, racism, misogyny, ableism, classism, it is unsurprising 
that talk turned toward the state of the discipline. Far from being a 
summary of that day’s discussion, the following is a reflection inspired 
by our conversation. Given its formerly privileged status in modern 
society, the story of classics has long been told by people for whom 
the elitist narrative benefits. The study of ancient Greek and Roman 
classics – so the story goes – is uniquely valuable and rigorous: the 
literary classics have, after all, “stood the test of time,” and the kind of 
education (largely linguistic) required to read them and the cultural 
activities that surround it are therefore considered to be delivered, 
conducted and consumed by an intellectual elite. This narrative has 
lost considerable currency over the past century, but it is stubborn. 
Since our disciplinary histories have long tended to focus on the 
receptions of an elite, both within and beyond the ivory tower of 
academia, the discipline and classical culture, especially literature, 
have strong associations of elitism.
However, this is just one side of the story. The extent and im-
portance of the other side are still largely unknown. The projects of 
recovering both working-class engagements with classics, against the 
wider (and also true) narrative of exclusion, and the recovery of leftist 
classics, against the received narrative (also true) of its disciplinary 
and aesthetic conservatism are aligned. This was one of the aims of 
Edith Hall’s and my A People’s History of Classics (2020), which told 
the story of Classics “from below,” but also included many radical 
classicists, who in various ways were engaged in the workers’ struggle. 
Recovery is a necessary step toward exposing the underlying corrup-
tion of the existing narrative and challenging its hegemony. As Neville 
Morley warned, however, in the round table, it is also the case that the 
working-class and radical classicists we recover may have inadvertently 
contributed to the maintenance of the cultural hegemony enjoyed by 
the classics. I have considerable sympathy with this view, but I also feel 
a responsibility to counter the dominant narrative, skewed as it is by 
selection bias, rather than either cede the discipline and culture upon 
which it is founded to the reactionary right or consign it to the flames.
Those who lived in the Soviet Union and its satellites faced a 
similar dilemma in the wake of the October Revolution. Radical 
factions demanded the eradication of what they saw as the bourgeois 
or counterrevolutionary classical education, but pockets of resistance 
held, and the discipline was protected through the actions of seve-
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   13 21. 02. 2023   11:15:53
HENRY STEAD14
ral brave figures. This is the conventional story, but it applies more 
comfortably to the fate of classical philology than a Classics more 
broadly con ceived.
It is important to remember that the histories of both classical cul-
ture and communism in every region are different, sometimes subtly, 
sometimes dramatically. When we study Western communist classics, 
we tend to find excitingly countercultural radicals, using Marxist 
ideas and pioneering Soviet aesthetics to challenge local convention.8 
They were very often also passionate advocates for civil rights and 
the kinds of freedom of expression that were denied their “Second 
World” counterparts. In the USSR and the nation states forming the 
Soviet bloc, for many, Marxism-Leninism was the oppressive con-
vention against which the spirited rebels yearned to defy. That said, 
as we shall see, space is now emerging for more nuanced evaluations 
of the debt of Marxism to the discipline. Elżbieta Olechowska put it 
well when she said at the beginning of the workshop:
To date, we have focused on persecution and difficulties. The time has 
come now to recognize that half a century of communism did not 
result only in a spectacular economic and ideological collapse of the 
practical application of communist principles, but also accelerated a 
much-needed transformation of methodology and focus, resulting 
in a better understanding of the ancient world.9
This step from a narrative of disciplinary decline via persecution 
toward a more balanced assessment of classical culture in the age of 
Marxism and Leninism opens up exciting new ground both in parts 
of the world where communism was a dominant and often oppressive 
ideology and where it was a countercultural and liberating force attrac-
tive to internationally minded and anti-capitalist artists and writers.
PEACE AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE
That we can now access more fully proletarian classics is surely, in 
part, a result of the changing political climate. Between November 
1989 and February 2022, we have enjoyed more or less free collabo-
ration across Europe and high levels of access to formerly restricted 
archives. We have managed to tell our shared histories in ways that the 
8 Bertolt Brecht, Isadora Duncan, Joan Littlewood, for example, were all conside-
red parents of their art form.
9 Spoken in the opening session of the workshop, October 23, 2021.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   14 21. 02. 2023   11:15:53
A PROLETARIAN CLASSICS? 15
polarizing Cold War environment precluded. The present invasion of 
Ukraine by Russian forces has reminded us once more how fragile and 
precious peace is. Quite apart from the tragic loss of life and terrible 
living conditions of the victims of the invasion, the war has also recon-
structed all too familiar barriers which serve to separate us. The present 
situation reminds us how we must fight to keep avenues of cultural 
and intellectual exchange open, even when freedom of movement is 
restricted. The pandemic catalyzed and quickly normalized affordable 
and accessible international collaboration. Our online 2021 workshop 
was an example of this. We benefited hugely from participation from 
scholars across the world, including both Ukraine and Russia. These 
scholars now write from very different worlds to those in which they 
prepared their papers for the workshop, as do we all.
LEFT BEHIND
Another renewed urgency for the project has perhaps been provided 
by the high-profile appropriation of classical culture by bigots and 
fascists (including the so-called Alt-right) in the service of overtly 
harmful ideas (misogyny, racism, xenophobia, classism). Nevertheless, 
away from the extremes (and as briefly discussed above), the busi-
ness-as-usual model of “Classics,” complete with its associations with 
reactionary politics and elitism, continues quietly to shore up social 
division and intensify the privilege of the powerful and wealthy, in the 
UK and the US at least.10 This background fuels several of the following 
explorations of classics and communism. When the discipline seems 
poisonous enough to elicit calls from within to be “burned down,” 
we might profitably look to ways in which the same cultural entities 
(ancient Greece and Rome) have been dealt with and harnessed in 
other times and cultural contexts by “progressives” (both radical 
and less so). It is worth noting that these “progressive” appropria-
tions may, at times, be just as harmful, repulsive, mind-numbing, 
or misinformed as their reactionary counterparts. The difference is 
that we have simply not focused on this side of our intellectual and 
cultural history while we have happily plumbed the depths of our 
rightist history. A rigorous “both/and” approach is required. The 
history of fascist Italy and Germany, for example, has been recently 
10 For contemporary rightist and racist abuses of classical antiquity see, e.g. Dozier, 
PHAROS. See also Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men, for misogynist abuses 
of classics by the contemporary US right.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   15 21. 02. 2023   11:15:53
HENRY STEAD16
well addressed by scholars,11 but explicitly anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, 
or “red” classics are comparatively underexplored.
One of the aims of the workshop was then to help recover the 
contribution of leftist thought (especially Marxism-Leninism) to 
our conception of the classical. The international, if not quite global, 
focus of our discussion, as well as the provocation and flexibility of 
the term “proletarian,” has enabled us to access this “other side” of 
classics. We are very much at the beginning of this project, but the 
present issue of Clotho constitutes a significant step forward in our 
assembly of case studies illuminating twentieth-century non-elite 
and anti-capitalist classics.
THE ESSAYS
The articles that follow are unified by their rich interdisciplinarity 
and showcase a broad range of methods and approaches to the sub-
ject of “proletarian classics.” Ancient historians rub shoulders with 
literary and reception scholars. The receptions engaged with here 
range across the intersecting fields of the history of scholarship, the 
history of the book, theater studies, comic book studies, political 
theory, cultural studies, and, of course, classical studies. The issue 
also presents two summarized and translated interviews with scholars 
whose careers were to different degrees and in different ways framed 
by the communist era in which they studied and their careers were, 
for the most part, conducted. The issue is illustrated by a photo essay 
depicting a visit to Greece by Slovenian students in 1958, which has 
been preserved and presented by one of the photographers herself, 
Ksenija Rozman.
The first essay introduces readers to the presentation of the classical 
world within a Workers’ Encyclopedia, Arbeidernes leksikon, produced 
between 1931 and 1936 by intellectuals aligned to the Communist Party 
of Norway (NKP). Eivind Seland analyses the revolutionary classical 
education condensed into the entries of this encyclopedia, with a par-
ticular focus on historical narrative. Unlike contemporary reference 
works, this Marxist encyclopedia provided an ancient history based on 
the concept of class struggle. It presents proletarian heroes, such as the 
Gracchi and Spartacus, in largely positive terms, while ancient “class 
consciousness” is shown to have been suppressed by the delivery of 
11 See, for example, Han Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse, Fascist Latin Texts, 
available online; and for twentieth-century fascism and classics, see Roche and 
Demetriou, Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   16 21. 02. 2023   11:15:53
A PROLETARIAN CLASSICS? 17
entertainments, economic sops, and a cross-class dependence on slave 
labor. Working-class solidarity is emphasized and promoted throughout. 
Every opportunity to prove the validity of Marxist analysis is taken. 
Seland shows how the emphases placed on social injustice, poverty, 
gender, ethnicity, slavery, and imperialism in the 1930s encyclopedia 
foreshadow scholarly preoccupations, which would only be taken up 
in earnest by Western historiography in the 1970s.
In the second article, Vittorio Saldutti focuses on the reception 
of Athenian democracy in the Soviet Union. His main subject is the 
German Professor of Ancient History and communist political leader 
Arthur Rosenberg (1889–1943), who was the first publicly to compare 
ancient Athenian democracy to contemporary German and Russian 
councils. In his hands and later those of the Dutch revolutionary An-
ton Pannekoek, Athenian democracy becomes a benchmark of true, 
uncorrupted democracy, as opposed to bourgeois democracy and later 
the “democracy” experienced in the Soviet system.
Our third article heralds a section of three essays on the reception 
of Spartacus. This cluster of independent studies on the commu-
nistic image of the Thracian slave leader across different times and 
places is helpful in that it effectively explodes the myth of Comin-
tern monoculture, based on the idea that communist-controlled 
constituencies followed a dogmatic cultural policy formulated in 
Moscow. While the dogmatism and presence of centralist cultural 
policy are undeniable, their eventual manifestation was almost as 
kaleidoscopic and various as the people involved in its creation and 
the social contexts in which they created them. As we shall see, 
several strong common aesthetic, thematic and ideological features 
unify them, but there is also space for significant divergence and 
individuality concerning creative approach, medium, and even 
content. The representation of Spartacus in the public sphere is a 
vast subject, and the three essays here illustrate well the diversity 
of communistic receptions across time.
While actively engaged in military service in defense of Ukraine, 
Oleksii Rudenko heroically managed to complete his research on 
early Soviet performance receptions of Spartacus in Kyiv in the latter 
part of 2022. As his essay explains, Tiberius Gracchus, Marcus Junius 
Brutus, and Spartacus were the only ancient historical figures to be 
included in a list compiled by Lenin in 1918 of subjects of “monumental 
propaganda.” In practice, Spartacus was the only figure of the three to 
be welcomed wholeheartedly into the Bolshevik parade of heroes. The 
Italian writer Raffaelo Giovagnoli’s 1874 novel Spartaco was translated 
into Russian in 1881. It became a key source for Soviet receptions of 
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   17 21. 02. 2023   11:15:53
HENRY STEAD18
Spartacus. Rudenko traces the extent of the influence of this Italian 
mediation as he analyzes the theatrical receptions of Spartacus written 
by Vladimir Mazurkevich (1920) and Vladimir Volkenstein (1921). He 
also investigates the presentation of Spartacus in early Soviet mass 
performances. These were colossal audience participatory events, 
with vast casts and often performed out of doors and comprising pa-
geant-like processions of revolutionary heroes. Such processions would 
frequently be peopled by Spartacus and his slave army. Rudenko tracks 
these early Soviet representations onto contemporary Soviet historio-
graphy and, where possible, government policy. Contemporary reviews 
of performances in a thriving genre of Soviet theatrical criticism are 
addressed to reveal a fast-changing and energetic engagement with 
what became, in this revolutionary moment, an extremely familiar 
and popular feature of Roman antiquity.
Miryana Dimitrova’s essay on the reception of Spartacus by Bul-
garian comic creators from 1979–1983 further explores the extraordi-
nary popularity of the tale of Spartacus. She highlights the (perhaps 
surprising) diversity of the slave hero’s representation within the Soviet 
bloc through an in-depth discussion of his unique Bulgarian reception, 
which includes an enthusiastic adoption of a conjecture by a German 
philologist in 1955, which transformed Spartacus’ origin story. Instead 
of hailing from an indistinctly “nomadic” Thracian tribe, Spartacus 
becomes a member of the “Maidi” tribe and, therefore, from a region 
in southern Bulgaria. Dimitrova thus shows a Bulgarian nationalistic 
reception of the Soviet hero. Her analysis brings Spartacus’ reception 
up to the post-Soviet present day, which enables her to demonstrate 
the ideological malleability of the slave leader, stemming – as she 
persuasively argues – directly from the lack of concrete evidence 
about Spartacus’ life before Batiatus’ gladiator camp.
We complete our Spartacist hat-trick by turning back in time and 
to Ultima Thule (specifically Caledonia), with an article by Scott Lyall, 
a Scottish literature specialist, who explores how Spartacus’ slave 
army was envisaged by James Leslie Mitchell (alias Lewis Grassic 
Gibbon, 1901–1935), a radical Scottish leftist and working-class au-
thor. Mitchell’s pen gave Scotland one of its most celebrated modern 
classics, the trilogy A Scots Quair (1932–1934), the opening book of 
which, Sunset Song (1932), is the most well-known. It would be tele-
vised in 1971 and adapted into a film in 2015. In 1933, at the height of 
his creative powers, Mitchell wrote Spartacus, a novel based on the 
Third Servile War, 73–71 BC. As well as presenting the first in-depth 
analysis of this novel’s relationship with its classical sources, Lyall’s 
essay presents Mitchell’s distinctive blend of utopian pessimism and 
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   18 21. 02. 2023   11:15:53
A PROLETARIAN CLASSICS? 19
atavistic progressivism with admirable clarity and nuance. Spartacus 
radically focuses the narrative exclusively on the enslaved, leaving 
“the masters” (the Romans) all but uncharacterized. They become 
the faceless mass. Mitchell’s creative process of self-professedly 
propagandistic myth-making from historical sources feeds into his 
broader reflection on what a revolutionary anti-capitalist writer in 
the 1930s should do. It is interesting to note that Mitchell seems to 
have come to a similar conclusion to his contemporary communist 
historical novelist, Jack Lindsay (1900–1990), who in 1937 advocated 
for a similarly propagandistic historical mode in an American com-
munist monthly, New Masses.12
In a letter to the Scottish author Naomi Mitchison, now held in 
the National Library Scotland, Mitchell wrote:
For years I’ve wanted to write the story of Spartacus and the Gladiator 
chaps. This year I did it. And all the while I wrote – and even while I 
corrected the proofs – I was scared that the next issue of [Jonathan] 
Cape’s Now and Then would tell me that Naomi Mitchison had done 
the same. It seemed impossible she could keep off the subject for 
long – it was so essentially hers.13
Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999) never did write a Spartacus, but – as 
the following essay by Barbara Goff shows – the Scottish writer and 
activist did on several occasions contemplate revolution in antiquity 
in her historical fiction. Mitchison’s classical writings stretch the 
bounds of “proletarian classics” in exciting ways. She came from 
a prominent aristocratic Scottish family but worked tirelessly on 
the left of the parliamentary Labour Party UK, then committed to 
gradualist reform rather than revolution. As Goff demonstrates, 
Mitchison used antiquity as a site of experimentation with forms 
of political and social radicalism. While the novels discussed in the 
essay tended to sell well and – as evidenced by Mitchell’s fan mail, 
cited above – enjoyed an enthusiastic following among readers on 
the left, Goff asserts that “in terms of long-term popular or critical 
success they have not been favored,” but they do, she continues “fail 
in interesting ways.”
12 For a discussion of Lindsay’s historical fiction based on his Brief Light (1939) see 
Stead, “Class Struggle in Catullan Rome.”
13 Letter from James Leslie Mitchell to Naomi Mitchison, dated “Tuesday” 
[August? 1933]. National Library Scotland: Papers of Naomi Mitchison and her 
family. Acc. 5885.3.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   19 21. 02. 2023   11:15:54
HENRY STEAD20
Failure is a concept infrequently discussed in Classical Recep-
tion Studies.14 It is, however, something with which those of us who 
study the work of radical leftist writers, artists, and scholars on the 
western side of the Iron Curtain – i.e., in the uniquely polarizing 
context of the Cold War and its anti-communist aftermath – are all 
too familiar. History is often kinder to authors and artists than the 
days in which they lived. Mitchison is currently enjoying something 
of a renaissance, with the reprinting of her novels and the imminent 
release of Edinburgh University Press’s Naomi Mitchison: A Writer 
in Time, the first scholarly volume on her as a writer.15
Goff’s discussion of Mitchison’s ancient revolutions exposes the 
author’s fascination not only with female emancipation but also myth 
and ritual, influenced by the kinds of anthropology in vogue at the 
time performed by James George Frazer and those scholars associated 
with the “Cambridge Ritualists” label. Both cultural anthropology 
and “failure” feature prominently in Claudio Sansone’s essay on Pier 
Paolo Pasolini, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, and the “irrational.” He traces the 
Italian writer and filmmaker’s relationship with Aeschylus’ tragedies, 
exploring Pasolini’s attempt “to excavate patterns of ideological re-
sistance” in them. It was not so much in critical accolades that Sansone 
deems Pasolini to have failed, but in his ultimate disappointment with 
his own notion that the irrational in Greek tragedy had revolutionary 
potential. Pasolini’s attempt to turn the classical to political ends is 
shown to have been frustrated. The study ranges across different kinds 
of evidence: archival, play scripts, translator’s notes, published essays, 
a posthumously published novel, and an unfinished study for a film. 
From this collage of sources, we witness the struggle of the Italian 
artist to make engaged versions of the classical. His classicism and 
radical politics appear held in an antithetical conflict from which no 
synthesis would ultimately be found. The Cambridge Ritualists, E. R. 
Dodds (esp. The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951), Antonio Gramsci, and 
the communist professor of Greek at Birmingham, George Thomson 
(esp. Aeschylus and Athens, 1941), are identified as key sources for Pa-
solini’s shifting conception of the revolutionary irrational. Ultimately, 
Sansone offers the study of Pasolini’s frustration as a cautionary tale, 
advising against reading revolutionary content into “elite products of 
14 In 2019 Rosa Andujar and Daniel Orrells (Kings College, London) called for 
papers on negatively received theatrical receptions of antiquity for a Society for 
Classical Studies conference entitled “Problems in Performance: Failure and 
Classical Reception Studies.” 
15 Purdon, Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   20 21. 02. 2023   11:15:54
A PROLETARIAN CLASSICS? 21
past literary history,” which might themselves be antithetical to such 
readings.
Also focused on the reception of Greek tragedy is Natasha Re-
moundou’s article, which primarily takes on Sophocles’ Antigone 
in the hands of the Irish poet, writer, and playwright Aidan Carl 
Mathews (b. 1956), staged at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in 1984 
– a busy year for Antigone in Irish theaters.16 She opens, however, with 
a discussion of an earlier Irish reception of Antigone in the anonymous 
poem “The Prison Graves.” The poem, which appears to date to March 
1918, takes a recent production of Antigone at the Abbey Theatre as a 
contemporary hook on which to hang a politically motivated elegy to 
the executed Irish diplomatist turned anti-colonial rebel, Roger Case-
ment (1864–1916), whose remains, first buried in Pentonville Prison, 
were reinterred in a Dublin cemetery as late as 1965. The anonymous 
poet uses the grief of Antigone to express their own at the death and 
lack of proper burial of Casement, but also (and quite strangely) uses 
a topical allusion to the recent interment of an executed murderer in 
the grounds of the prison to demonstrate the relevance of both the 
ancient play and the poem’s subject. An elaborate publicity stunt? But 
Mathews’ The Antigone (1984) is the main subject of Remoundou’s 
posthuman lens. It may be conceived as a proletarian classic as it of-
fers a radically class-conscious interpretation of the tragedy. Set in a 
dystopian, post-nuclear, militarized, surveillance state where atrocities 
and violence have become normalized. The Polynices character (Poly) 
has been spirited away and suffers a Stalinesque damnatio memoriae. 
Antigone’s bleak struggle is never ending and apparently hopeless: 
tragedy and history repeat themselves indefinitely. The essay intro-
duces readers to two underexplored and hard-to-access receptions of 
Sophocles’ tragedy.
The final two essays move us away from tragedy and Western 
leftist receptions of classical antiquity and into the realm of the disci-
plinary history. On the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain, we observe 
the impact of Marxism-Leninism on the activity of classicists in the 
Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia and the Polish People’s Repu-
blic. David Movrin presents an exciting archival find in the recently 
rediscovered personal papers of the doyen of Slovenian classicists in 
the postwar period, Anton Sovre (1885–1963). Unlike several other 
Slovenian classicists, Sovre was not considered a threat by the com-
16 See, e.g., Macintosh, “Irish Antigone and burying the dead”; Torrance, “Post-
-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland.” Full bibliography in Remoundou’s 
article.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   21 21. 02. 2023   11:15:54
HENRY STEAD22
munist authorities. It was to him that the job of preparing a document 
on the future of classical philology for the Third Yugoslav Five-Year 
Plan fell. Movrin shows how Sovre attempted to use the document to 
counter the suspicions Party officials had about the discipline, which 
had a bourgeois reputation and was thus frequently scapegoated. 
Movrin’s analysis of this fascinating document reveals not only what 
Sovre wrote but also uses his knowledge of the unique social context to 
read between its lines since Sovre was not untouched by the brutality of 
Tito’s regime. Movrin also presents part of an interview he conducted 
in early 2022 with the scholar, Kajetan Gantar (1930–2022), who was 
named prominently in the 1959 document. Gantar revealed that the 
document was essentially a hasty collaboration between the two men. 
Movrin sets their plan for classical philology in its wider context of 
seemingly pointless bureaucracy and abortive planning cycles. The 
plans, however fanciful they may have been for the historical moment 
in which they were produced, were – Movrin explains – slowly and 
successfully put into practice over the succeeding generations.
Elżbieta Olechowska rounds off the essays , and she comes out 
swinging: “For Poles, Communism has become synonymous with 
Soviet domination at the end of World War II, an ideological smoke-
screen hiding imperial aspirations inherited from czarist Russia.” In 
addition to revealing and embodying a trend in the former Soviet 
bloc of deeply felt anti-communism, her article reminds us that there 
were few Marxists among Polish classicists following World War II. 
Those few, however, who survived the decimation of the War played 
an instrumental role in maintaining the discipline and providing 
an institutional space within which students and colleagues of all 
ideological inclinations could learn and then ply their trade. One 
such was Kazimierz Majewski (1903–1981). In spite of his communis-
tic worldview, explains Olechowska, he was not only tolerated by the 
academic community but widely respected for his scholarship and the 
vital role he played in organizing and contributing to the intersecting 
fields of philology, ancient history, and archaeology, first in Wrocław 
and later in Warsaw.
That concludes the essays of this issue of Clotho, but not the 
issue itself. There are two interviews, summarized and translated by 
Olechowska, conducted by Adrian Szopa and Andrzej Gillmeister on 
April 22, 2016. The first is with the Polish historian and papyrologist 
Professor Ewa Wipszycka (b. 1933), whose work, especially in the history 
of the Christian Church in Egypt during late antiquity, has been widely 
lauded. The second is with Professor Benedetto Bravo (b. 1931), Ewa’s 
husband, a historian of ancient Greece. Their interviews complement 
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   22 21. 02. 2023   11:15:54
A PROLETARIAN CLASSICS? 23
Olechowska’s article on Majewski well since Wipszycka and Bravo 
were in the same Warsaw University as Majewski in the early stages 
of their academic careers. Another interview, with Professor Ferenc 
Hörcher from Budapest, provides another and different window into 
the region during the decades that followed.
The essays collected here represent a continuation of the Classics 
and Communism project, but also the early stages of a new strand 
of the project seeking to uncover, or recover, the leftist tradition of 
engagements with classical antiquity both inside and outwith the 
academy. Many such engagements have been suppressed or obscured 
by Cold War attitudes. For the many and now well-documented 
limitations and shortcomings of Soviet classical studies, applying a 
Marxist lens had a dramatic impact on academia on both sides of the 
Iron Curtain. Studies conducted under, or influenced by the strictures 
of Marxism-Leninism were sometimes decades ahead of Western 
scholarship (e.g., imperialism, slavery). It would be a mistake to suggest 
that these approaches and analyses were not already developing in 
Western Europe and the States, but they were undoubtedly energized 
by the electricity of the revolutionary period and sustained by the (for 
a time) utopian symbol of the Soviet alternative.
Beyond the academy, class-conscious and politically motivated 
creative practitioners learned from public-facing studies written by 
scholars with communist sympathies. The broad-rimmed and perhaps 
slightly quizzical lens of “proletarian classics” will, we hope, continue 
to provoke, to generate new “ways in,” and encourage new ground to 
be broken by students and scholars across the globe.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   23 21. 02. 2023   11:15:54
HENRY STEAD24
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dozier, Curtis, ed. PHAROS: Doing Justice to the Classics. Available 
online at pharos.vassarspaces.net.
Gorky, Maxim. “Soviet Literature.” In “Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934,” 
edited by Gorky, Radek, Bukharin, Zhdanov and others, 25–69. Lon-
don: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977. First published in 1935.
Hall, Edith. “American Communist Idealism in George Cram Cook’s 
The Athenian Women (1918),” in Classics and Communism in Theatre: 
Graeco-Roman Antiquity on the Communist Stage. Edited by David 
Movrin and Elżbieta Olechowska. Warsaw: DiG, 2019. 1–22.
Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question. 
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Karsai, György, Gábor Klaniczay, David Movrin, and Elżbieta 
Olechowska, eds. Classics and Communism: Greek and Latin behind 
the Iron Curtain. Budapest: Collegium Budapest Institute of Advan-
ced Study, 2013.
Macintosh, Fiona. “Irish Antigone and Burying the Dead.” In Antigone 
on the Contemporary World Stage, edited by Erin B. Mee and Helene 
P. Foley, 90–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Movrin, David, and Elżbieta Olechowska, eds. Classics and Class: Greek 
and Latin Classics and Communism at School. Warsaw: Wydawni-
ctwo DiG, 2016.
Movrin, David, and Elżbieta Olechowska, eds. Classics and Communism 
in Theatre: Graeco-Roman Antiquity on the Communist Stage. War-
saw: Wydawnictwo DiG, 2019.
Olechowska, Elżbieta, ed. Classical Antiquity on Communist Stage in 
Poland. Warsaw: OBTA, 2015.
Purdon, James, ed. Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time. Edinburgh: 
Edinburgh University Press, (forthcoming) 2023.
Roche, Helen, and Kyriakos Demetriou, eds. Brill’s Companion to the 
Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
Stead, Henry. “British Communist Theatre and Aristophanes: The Case 
of Ewan MacColl and Joan Littlewood.” In Classics and Communism 
in Theatre: Graeco-Roman Antiquity on the Communist Stage, edited 
by David Movrin and Elżbieta Olechowska, 23–43. Warsaw: Wy-
dawnictwo DiG, 201.
Stead, Henry. “Class Struggle in Catullan Rome: Jack Lindsay’s Brief 
Light (1939).” In Class and Classics: Subalterns and the Production of 
Classical Culture, edited by A. M. Cimino, M. Bellomo, V. Saldutti, 
and E. Zucchetti. Trends in Classics – Pathways of Reception. New 
York: De Gruyter, forthcoming [2023].
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   24 21. 02. 2023   11:15:54
A PROLETARIAN CLASSICS? 25
Torrance, Isabelle. “Post-Ceasefire Antigones and Northern Ireland.” In 
Classics and Irish Politics, 1916–2016, edited by I. Torrance and Donn-
cha O’Rourke, 326–346. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution, translated by Rose Strunsky. 
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960 [1925].
Zuckerberg Donna. Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Miso gyny in 
the Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.
clotho 2022-2, za tisk.indd   25 21. 02. 2023   11:15:54