Dear colleagues,

It saddens me greatly to report to you the death of Edward Wasiolek, the Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literature, English Language and Literature, Comparative Literature, and the College. He died on May 3 of this year, having retired in 1996 after more than forty years of teaching and research and having moved in retirement from Chicago.

Born in 1924, Ed earned the BA from Rutgers in 1949, the MA from Harvard in 1950, and the PhD from Harvard in 1955. He was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard in 1953-54 and an Instructor at Ohio Wesleyan in 1954-55. He then came to Chicago as Assistant Professor in 1955. He chaired the Committee on Comparative Studies in Literature from 1965 to 1983, and was in fact chair when I was asked to join that committee. He chaired Slavic Languages and Literature from 1971 to 1977, taking on two chair assignments concurrently.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983-4, a Quantrell Teaching Prize in 1961, a Laing Press Prize in 1972, and a Research fellowship from Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics in 1963, among other honors. He addressed the United Nations in 1988 on Tolstoy.

His special interests included the Russian and American Novel and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Major books included Tolstoy’s Major Fiction, University of Chicago Press, 1978; L. N. Tolstoy: Life, Work, and Criticism; Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction, 1964; Fathers and Sons: Russia at the Cross-roads, 1993; and Critical Essays on Tolstoy, 1986. He was co-author with Raymond A. Bauer of Nine Soviet Portraits, 1959 and was co-editor with Fyodor Dostoyevsky of the notebooks for Crime and Punishment (University of Chicago Press, 1968 etc). Many of these works remain in print today.

I remember him as an extraordinary colleague and chair, a major literary critic, and a much-cherished friend. He will be greatly missed.

-David Bevington, Secretary of Faculty Emeriti and co-chair of the Emeriti Steering Committee