MAGUIRE, Robert A. 1930-2005

(Robert Alan Maguire)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born June 21, 1930, in Canton, MA; died of cancer July 8, 2005, in New York, NY. Educator and author. A professor emeritus at Columbia University, Maguire was an authority on Russian literature, especially the works of Nikolai Gogol. Completing his undergraduate work at Dartmouth College in 1951, he served in the U.S. Army for two years before returning to his studies. At Columbia University, he earned his master's degree in 1953 and his doctorate in 1961. After teaching at Duke University from 1958 to 1960, and at Dartmouth during the following two years, Maguire joined the Columbia University faculty in 1962. Here he remained for the rest of his academic career, becoming a full professor of Russian literature in 1970, chair of the Slavic languages department from 1977 to 1983, and again from 1985 to 1988, and Bakhmeteff Professor of Russian and East European Studies in 1992. In 1995, he was honored by the Modern Language Association with the first Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for studies in Slavic languages and literatures. Maguire retired from the university in 2003. A former president of the American Gogol Society, he published three books on the Russian author: Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays (1974; revised edition, 1976), Exploring Gogol (1994), and Gogol (1989), a work by V.V. Gippius that Maguire edited and translated. He was also an author and editor of texts exploring Russian literature in general, such as the coedited Russian Short Stories: A Bilingual Collection (1965) and Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature in the 1920s (1968). In addition, Maguire translated books by Russian and Polish authors such as Andrei Bely, Tadeusz Rozewicz, and Anna Swirszcynska. At the time of his death, he had just completed a translation of "Demons" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, July 31, 2005, p. A21.

ONLINE

Columbia News Online (Columbia University), http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/ (September 14, 2005).