When the intelligentsia sang of Rome: Georg S. Knabe (1920–2011) on cultural memory and Russia’s unrealized europeanization

Abstract Initially trained as a classical historian and philologist, Georg S. Knabe (1920–2011) was among the first Russian-speaking scholars to engage intensively with the study of everyday life. Beyond Roman history, his research also encompassed countercultural movements, rock and punk music, and fashion trends. These diverse subjects were unified, however, by Knabe’s original theory of cultural memory, which brought together Aristotelian teleology, Romantic natural philosophy, Goethe’s morphology, the philosophy of life, Ernst Cassirer’s notion of the inner form of culture, and Roland Barthes’s semiology. Despite his openness to novelty and his strong pro-Western orientation, at the beginning of the twenty-first century Knabe grew increasingly critical of the shifting intellectual climate in the West and of new EU policies. He argued that under the ideology of multiculturalism and political correctness, Europe was severing its ties with the past—particularly with its Roman heritage. Although this rhetoric echoes that of many Russian and Western conservative thinkers and is not entirely original, what proves most illuminating are not Knabe’s sometimes biased conclusions, but the causes that led him to them. This article examines those causes by analyzing Knabe’s post-Soviet writings and contextualizing his arguments within contemporary conservative and communitarian thought. It argues that Knabe’s rightward shift was driven by three main factors: (1) the crisis within the Western community of classical scholars, (2) the recognition that his vision of the Russian intelligentsia’s mission—to promote the nation’s “return to Europe” through grassroots cultural renewal rather than through political decree—had become impossible, and (3) the incompatibility of new EU identity politics with his view of cultural memory and of communities as its primary bearers and subjects.