The Russian school of classical reception has been esteemed since imperial times, stemming from the state's centuries-long post-Byzantine re-orientation. Since the Renaissance rediscovery of classical Greek art, the classical artistic tradition has been considered as an expression of the ideal form and the eternal idea of beauty found in Plato's philosophy. In his new book The Impossibility of a Garden: The Ancient Greeks and the Invention of Dynamic Form (New Literary Review, scheduled for 2026), Iampolski shows that the Greek understanding of form was not based so much on the motionless and eternal, but on the principles of movement and its arrest – in which form is fixed for a short time in order to again absorb dynamics and development.

Immobility turns out not to be an attribute of the eternal, but a manifestation of death. Fixing form enables understanding; without such short moments of immobility, dynamics would become a constant, meaningless disintegration. This combination of movement and immobility applies to both the canon of Greek sculpture – that of Praxiteles, for example – and to Greek democracy, where unanimity and immobility inevitably lead to tyranny, requiring incessant dissension and internal crisis.

In conversation with Denis Maksimov, Iampolski will discuss the transhistorical relevance of ancient Greek ideals to contemporary politics and art.