Omry Ronen: In Memoriam

[Olga Meerson]

I knew Omry quite well. Memory blessed and eternal to him. My condolences
to his family, especially to Irena.
o.m.

On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Jean McKee <jarbaugh at umich.edu> wrote:

>                                                                 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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