The Aesopian Moment. M.L. Gasparov and the Cultural Biography of the Soviet Intelligentsia. A Philological Fable.

Abstract

In one of his letters, written in 1992, Mikhail Gasparov mentions an article about the pitiful state of the Russian intelligentsia that he received from an American scholar. To Gasparov’s (rather ironic) surprise, the author of this piece stated that the term ‘period of stagnation’ had been introduced by Gasparov himself in his essay on Horace, which allegorically portrayed the Roman Age of Augustus. In the present essay, I trace the origins of this intriguing legend (an essay and a sociological theory by the eminent Israeli-American Soviet-Jewish scholar of nationalism Liah Greenfeld) and expand on the role of Roman allusions in the political imagination of the Soviet ‘thinking class’ from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s.

Did Gasparov coin the term? Were his famous philological essays on Roman culture allegorical by design? How did they correlate with his views of Soviet society and its intellectual dissenters? I argue that in his series of articles and chapters about the age of Augustus, Gasparov considered historical ‘Aesopian language’ as a symptom of the deep moral and intellectual crisis of Roman intellectual society, which, like its Soviet counterpart in the twentieth century, ‘thought little about new needs and conditions’ and was used to promote political jokes, gossip, hints, and squabbles.