From the viewpoint of the reception of the classical tradition, the region where independent states emerged - Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and a pared-down Hungary - became similar to western Europe during this time. National universities developed courses of study focused on antiquity and vigorously educated their own faculty. In the part of Ukraine and Belarus remaining within the Soviet Union, meanwhile, many academic circles were shut down in the 1930s, and part of the faculty were physically eliminated (Isayevych 2002).
At this time, references to antiquity were marginal in the definitions of their own identity constructed by nations in this region. A proposal that was ahead of its time for the concept of a battle of civilizations (similar in its intentions to the later ideas of Toynbee and Huntington) was developed in Poland (Koneczny 1962). It declared the primacy of the value of Latin civilization and its radical opposition to ‘‘Byzantine’’ civilization (understood as any system in which authorities have the advantage over individuals). The continuation of the Polish academic ‘‘cult’’ of Cicero (Morawski 1911) was characteristic, referring implicitly to Old Polish republican traditions and maintaining its validity for subsequent generations (Kumaniecki 1957).
The death of Zieliriski (1856-1944), the greatest Polish classicist, was the symbolic end of the epoch. Dreaming of a scientific synthesis of antiquity and Christianity that reconciled German Altertumswissenschaft with Slavic messianism, raised in Russia, educated in Germany, a professor in St. Petersburg and from 1920 in Warsaw, civis totius mundi (citizen of the entire world), Zieliriski died in Hitler’s Bavaria writing his Journal in Polish.
One can recognize another subculture of the reception of the classical tradition emerging during the Austro-Hungarian monarchy: that of the submissive nations in opposition to the dominating ones. This type of reception then developed in the countries that later emerged there, in the Latinitas linked to Catholicism and panSlavism (Slovakia) or messianism and nationalism. Later this subculture also invoked Italian or German Fascist thought (Hungary, Romania), which in turn was related to anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic slogans. After World War II, this Latinitas served the communist regimes as an excuse to oppose the classical tradition, forcing many intellectuals to emigrate (Eliade, Cioran, and Kerenyi).
7.2 Post-Yalta order (1945-89)
The division of Europe decreed after World War II meant that antiwestern ideology encompassed the whole region and ‘‘real socialism’’ reigned, while the classical tradition as a component of (elite) western culture was opposed and eliminated from education. The restrictions varied, though. In territories incorporated into the Soviet Union (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, western Ukraine and western Belarus, and Moldova), purges and physical elimination of the elites also involved circles teaching and studying ancient cultures, and artists drawing from these sources. Teaching of the classics at universities was practically eradicated in Vilnius, Lviv, Tartu, and Riga; archaeology was meant mainly to supply proof of autochthonic Slavism in the largest possible part of this area. The political pressure was almost as great in Czechoslovakia, increasing further after 1968. In Hungary it was the other way around: after 1956, classical studies developed gradually. In Poland, while the number of students was reduced, the faculty potential was not touched. After 1957 classical studies regained quite substantial contacts with the international community, since support for Mediterranean archaeology and classics was supposed to contribute to the communist government’s reputation in the west. The regime in Poland viewed the ancient tradition as relatively neutral compared to the Sarmatian or Romantic traditions.
The entire region was subject to ideological indoctrination and political control. There was, however, no serious plan for imposing any cultural unity. Against the ancient tradition, state ideology used the nineteenth-century polemics of activists demanding Slavic rebirth, especially among the Czechs. In Hungary and Poland, the cultural traditions of the noble-nations were opposed with particular intensity. On the other hand, there were some attempts to incorporate ancient themes into the new ideology. Slave uprisings were invoked as a kind of anticipation of proletarian revolutionary movements. The Renaissance, presented as lay, materialist, and antichurch, also gained an important place in education at the cost of the Middle Ages and Baroque era, accompanied by appropriate reinterpretation of the ancient tradition in that era. Communist authorities tried to build a new version of the reception of antiquity in art, especially in architecture. This was ‘‘socialist classicism,’’ drawing from the classicism of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. In Poland, due to the ‘‘golden age’’ tradition, this style was combined with local Renaissance elements. Attempts were also made to reorganize urban spaces in order to transform the chronotopos, the space and times aspects that were important to the identity of the residents (e. g., Warsaw was rebuilt from wartime destruction). Since the regime was antireligious and antichurch, there was no extensive return to what had been so important in Russia's nineteenth-century policy - namely, replacing the Latin tradition with the Byzantine tradition. Latin was opposed, however, as the language of the Catholic Church.
Resistance to these practices, especially in Poland and Hungary, often assumed forms similar to the nineteenth-century use of the classical tradition to fight against the educational system and censorship of the partitioning powers. In Soviet-bloc societies, Greco-Roman antiquity served the purpose of more or less open dissociation from communism. People emphasized the European nature of their national traditions, and allusive literary texts and theater performances were created. The ancient tradition was also a part of the ‘‘Aesopian speech’’ in literature (e. g., Herbert, Parnicki, and Bocheriski in Poland) and in drama and theater (e. g., 21 stagings of Antigone in Czechoslovakia). There are perceptible similarities here to the reception of antiquity in apartheid South Africa (Hardwick 2003a).
Antiquity served as a refuge for outstanding prose writers and poets who did not seek confrontation with the authorities, but wanted to avoid serving them. These issues require further study, but there seems to have been a clear subculture of the reception of the ancient tradition in the countries of this region in 1948-89.
7.3 After the disintegration of the Soviet Union (after 1990)
When the post-Yalta order collapsed, the classical tradition and the entire cultural heritage became the subject of thorough revaluation. The short time that has elapsed since then allows for only an outline of trends that seem characteristic of the region. In Lithuania and Croatia, less so in Ukraine, in a unique way in Belarus, despite the peasant roots and traditions of nineteenth - and twentieth-century independence movements in these countries, Latin texts - chronicles, poems, and plays - were seen to contain that layer of national tradition and historical memory that invaders (Russians, Poles, Serbs, etc.) had not managed to destroy in the past. This ‘‘nationalization’’ of the classical tradition occurring after the ‘‘autumn of the peoples’’ in newly formed states constitutes a kind of ‘‘catching-up’’ with nineteenth-century nationalism, an interesting sociopolitical move.
Meanwhile, in the countries that retained their statehood during Soviet domination (especially Poland and Hungary), antiquity in the new political situation stopped serving as a tool for playing games with censorship or as an arcadia providing refuge from reality, and Latinity stopped being identified with Europeanism. Opening up to the west caused an immediate triumph of mass culture and a rapid modification of educational programs according to Old Europe’s standards, assigning a marginal place to the classical tradition and languages. This process could be called a ‘‘catching-up’’ with the 1968 Paris revolt.
Whether central-eastern Europe will invoke its own reception of the ancient tradition in mass culture, or will only use the alphabet provided by global culture (especially American cinema) for its references to antiquity, is hard to determine today.
World History
