Authors

Rashel Zemlinskaya¹;  ¹ Personal capacity, Russian Federation

Discussion

The advancement of byzantine studies in the late XIX century fostered a search for classical heritage in Russian art, and this quest became intertwined with the debate on Russian cultural identity. In the 1960s, when Mikhail Alpatov, a prominent Soviet scholar, embarked on a search for elements of antiquity in Russian iconography, he aimed to show that the Russian artistic tradition stemmed from the same Greek source as Europe, thus being an inherent part of the global cultural heritage. The paper argues that Alpatov invoked a highly politicized view of ancient Greece shaped by the ideologists of Social realism. In the 1930’s the matter of national heritage acquired an immense relevance within the developing nationalistic narrative. This context highlights to what extent the ideological underpinnings of the 1930’s affected academia in subsequent decades. It also allows to show that in Soviet scholarship the idea of ‘Russian antiquity’ remained a subject of continuous interest for generations of thinkers. We shall see that this concept turned out to be versatile enough to reconcile the strive to prove Russian cultural independence with the longing to to bind Russian culture with Europe.