Omry Ronen: In Memoriam

[Jean McKee]

                                                                Omry
Ronen:  In Memoriam



Dear Colleagues and Friends,



It is with great sadness that we, the faculty, students and staff of the
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Center for Russian,
East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Michigan, write to
inform you of the sudden passing of our dear colleague, Omry Ronen, on
November 1, 2012.  Professor Ronen was a world-renown scholar of Russian
literature, whose most influential scholarship ranged across many areas:
historical and descriptive poetics, metrics, structural analysis of verse
and prose, Russian Silver Age poetry, and particularly the work of Osip
Mandel’shtam.  His erudition was legendary and the energy and brilliance of
his work were widely admired.  Among the many other topics that his
half-dozen books and one hundred-fifty articles dealt with were Pushkin’s
poetics, subtextual interpretive strategies, the poetry of the *Oberiu*,
Vladimir Nabokov and the problems of literary multilingualism, the
picaresque in Russian literature, popular fiction and science fiction,
children’s literature, intersemiotic  transposition in the arts, literature
and cinema, the history of Russian formalism and structuralism, twentieth
century Ukrainian poetry, and, of course, the history and theory of Russian
Symbolism, Acmeism and Futurism.  Among his ground-breaking works are *An
Approach to Mandel’stam* (1983), *The Fallacy of the Silver Age in
Twentieth-Century Russian Literature* (1997), *The Poetics of Osip
Mandel’shtam* (2002), and the three published volumes of his essays, *Iz
goroda Enn* (*From the City of NN) *(2005, 2007, 2010).  Two additional
volumes of his essays, one on poetics and another on Acmeism, were in
preparation at the time of his death.  Throughout his career, until the day
of his passing, the pace of his scholarly productivity never slowed—he
published nine articles in 2011 and 2012.  One of those articles won the
International “Portal 2011” prize for best critical essay on science
fiction.



Professor Ronen was born in Odessa, Ukraine, USSR, on July 12, 1937.  As an
undergraduate he began his studies in Budapest, Hungary; he was arrested
and imprisoned following the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution
of 1956, but escaped to Israel, where he worked his way through college and
completed a B.A. in Linguistics and English literature at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem.  He then went on to complete his Ph.D. at Harvard
University in Slavic Languages and Literatures; while completing his Ph.D.,
he taught as a Lecturer  at Harvard, MIT, Yale, Tel Aviv University and the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  He rose to the rank of Associate Professor
of Russian and Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University during the
late 1970s and early 1980s, returning periodically as a visiting professor
to Harvard, Yale and the University of Texas.  In 1985, he began his tenure
as an Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the
University of Michigan and was promoted to the rank of Professor in 1994.
Professor Ronen served as a member of the Editorial Board of some of our
field’s most important journals, including *Elementa*, *Novoe Literaturnoe
Obozrenie* (*New Literature Review)*, and *Philologica.  *At Michigan, he
was the winner of awards for Excellence in Research and Excellence in
Teaching.



Professor Ronen was an inspiring teacher and a generous mentor.  He taught
courses on modern Russian poetry (Symbolism, Acmeism, Futurism), Silver Age
Russian prose, Pushkin, the Russian picaresque, Russian social fiction,
Bulgakov, Nabokov, Old Russian literature, Russian Formalism, and Poetics
and Rhetoric.  His present and past students (many of the latter now  teach
at prominent universities in our field) will sorely miss his presence as an
interlocutor and as a veritable encyclopedia of knowledge of Russian
literature, as will we, his colleagues.



*Herbert Eagle, Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures,
University of Michigan*

*
*

*----------*

Jean McKee
Student Services Coordinator | Assistant to the Chair
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
812 E Washington St | 3040 MLB | Ann Arbor | MI | 48109
voice 734.764.5355 | fax 734.647.2127
www.lsa.umich.edu/slavic

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