Gnôthi seauton! Classics and Communism

The volumes Classics and Communism are the outcomes of a focus group project at Collegium Budapest in 2009-2010 convened by Jerzy Axer, György Karsai and Gábor Klaniczay and sponsored by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. The project aimed to discover and explore the history of classical philology after World War II in what was then considered the camp of socialist countries. Classical studies were explored in the following countries: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany, the Soviet Union (Russia, Lithuania, Ukraine) and Yugoslavia (Serbia, Slovenia). The studies discuss five themes: 1) there were some classical scholars who played an active role in the implantation of the new Communist ideology in their countries, while some others could preserve a leading position even without making such open ideological affiliation to the regime; 2) the more complex reality is illustrated by the curriculum of a selection of eminent classical scholars; 3) we also examined the history of some institutions which were representing the requirements of the Communist ideological system even in the field of classical philology and some others, which helped the preservation of classical scholarship from abroad; 4) for the majority of the ‘craft’ these were four decades of marginalisation (losing their university and academy positions), and outright persecution in these time by the authorities of their country; 5) three examples (from Slovenia, the Soviet Union and from Hungary) show how this repression was practiced by the sercet services.

Mutass kevesebbet