Donald Lee Fanger, 94

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on March 4, 2025, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Donald Lee Fanger was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Donald Fanger liked to say that he was privileged to have worked in the golden age of American academic life. His many friends, colleagues, students, and readers bear witness to his outstanding contributions, formal and informal, to it as scholar, teacher, mentor, and citizen. Fanger’s education at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard and his faculty positions at Brown, Stanford, and Harvard certainly placed him in centers of academic prominence. His career advanced swiftly and decisively. He became a full professor while still in his 30s and devoted nearly 70 years to building vibrant communities in his fields and universities.

As a young professor at Brown (1962–1965), Fanger founded an important series of publications that brought the best of Russian literary criticism back into print. At Stanford (1966–1968) he directed the new Slavic languages and literatures division and set it on a true course before leaving for Harvard. Once here he helped steer his two departments, Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, toward new projects and orientations, including engagement with recent theories of literature. As one of few comparatists with fluency in Russian and a profound understanding of Russian culture, he helped to broaden the range of inquiry in both of his fields. His talent for sharing his love of literature made it possible for him to work with colleagues in other disciplines and, through his many reviews in public-facing journals, to extend his insights to non-academic audiences. While building his departments, he reached out internationally to bring students and scholars to Harvard. One search found him traveling to Poland to recruit the prominent young poet Stanisław Barańczak and then tenaciously battling to bring him to Harvard. Many wonderful dinner parties in the Fanger home helped welcome newcomers and visiting writers to the Harvard community. He remained a treasured interlocutor and active scholar in the 26 years that followed his retirement in 1998.

As a teacher, Fanger excelled in the seminar room and in the lecture hall. His mellifluous baritone and elegant, precise English made his courses unforgettable in both venues, as did his rigorous preparation, insightful readings, and ability to engage his students, regardless of their level of expertise. He worked with historians to offer large courses on Russian civilization for the undergraduate Core Curriculum Program and taught memorable lecture courses on a range of topics, including Dostoevsky, urban fiction, and theory of comedy. His advanced seminars on Russian realism and on 20th-century prose thoroughly prepared their participants for careers in scholarship and teaching.

Fanger’s own scholarship (three books and over 40 articles, primarily on Russian literature), like his teaching, grew from his lifelong fascination with the intricacy and often unresolvable complexity of literary texts. Written in remarkably subtle, controlled, but often dazzling prose, these studies seemed to be working simultaneously on a variety of levels. With his fluency in multiple languages, keen eye for textual detail, and attention to patterns within and across works, he made literary works come alive in new and unexpected ways. He had a particular fondness for experimental fiction, which he transposed into demonstrations of how familiar, canonical texts arose from their authors’ daring innovations in theme and structure. Believing that criticism rises toward the level of the material it addresses, he worked exclusively with challenging texts, framing his inquiries broadly in historical, social, and cultural contexts. His first book, “Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol” (1965), took the urban mythmaking of three writers who worked independently and showed how Dostoevsky, who knew their writing, developed its themes and techniques (the grotesque, the sensational, the unnatural) to craft a poetics of the city, which Dostoevsky called “fantastic realism.” Fanger’s second book, “The Creation of Nikolai Gogol” (1979), remains our most insightful and profound book on Russia’s first great prose writer. Fanger took the salient property of Gogol’s life and texts, elusiveness, and made it the key to interpreting not just Gogol’s texts but also his life and literary milieu. A pioneering contribution to literary criticism, literary sociology, and literary biography, the book won Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award in 1980. A year later, Fanger was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Fanger’s third book, “Gorky’s Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences” (2008), took him to a new period, the early 20th century; a new author, Maxim Gorky; and a new literary problem, how we remember figures who contribute to the literary process with much more than their imaginative writing. Gorky, one of the most popular Russian writers of the early 20th century, is now remembered primarily for his efforts in defense of Russian culture during the turmoil of the post-Revolutionary years and for the part he played in normalizing Stalinist literary politics in the early 1930s. But Fanger turned to Gorky’s works that have best stood the test of time, his insightful memoirs of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others, selecting the most incisive of them and, with illuminating annotations, making them a reflection on writerly selection, arrangement, and interpretation. The volume became a casebook on Gorky’s legacy not as a myth or figure but as a talented creative artist.

Fanger’s many articles present readings of individual texts or contribute to the understanding of specific theoretical problems. A significant number of them address the principal agents in the making of literature: authors, readers, censors, and critics. Taken together they constitute a lifelong meditation on the literary process and on literature as an institution.

Fanger was married for 46 years to Margot Taylor Fanger, who passed away in 2001. In 2006 he married Leonie Gordon, who survives him. He leaves his three children with Margot, Steffen Fanger, Ross Fanger (Allyson Fanger), and Kate Fanger (Jeremy Jackson); six grandchildren; a stepson, Nicholas Gordon (Alison Haskovec); and three step-grandchildren.

On Nov. 8, 2024, a memorial gathering brought together many friends and family members to celebrate Fanger’s wit, erudition, endearing personal charm, and exceptional capacity for love and friendship.

Respectfully submitted,
Julie A. Buckler
Michael S. Flier
Stephen Greenblatt
Justin Weir
William Mills Todd III, Chair