Donald L. Fanger

Donald L. Fanger, Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, passed away at home on July 17th, at the age of 94, after a short illness. Following appointments at Brown and Stanford Universities (1960-68), he joined the faculty at Harvard, serving until retirement in 1998. During that time, which he referred to as "the golden age of academic life," he chaired the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, overseeing the expansion of Harvard's Slavic program, while contributing significantly to the field of Russian literature with three books and over 40 influential essays: Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism (1965), The Creation of Nikolai Gogol (1979), and Gorky's Tolstoy and Other Reminiscences (2008). For his work on Gogol, he won the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for Literary Scholarship in 1980. The following year, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Don Fanger was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929, and educated there through his sophomore year of high school, before moving with his parents, Max and Rae Fanger, to Los Angeles in 1945, where he completed high school then began undergraduate studies at UCLA. In 1951, he graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in English. He served briefly in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, before earning an M.A. in Russian studies at Berkeley in 1954, and later, a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard in 1962. At Berkeley, he met and married Margot Taylor, the daughter of professor of agricultural economics Paul S. Taylor, whose second wife, the esteemed photographer Dorothea Lange, played a large role in cultivating his aesthetic sensibilities. Until Margot's untimely death in 2001, they enjoyed 46 years of marriage, enriched by three children, Steffen Fanger, Ross Fanger (Allyson Fanger), and Kate Fanger (Jeremy Jackson). His Fanger/Jackson grandchildren, Max, Jake, Ella, Tallulah, Nell and Maxine, were a constant source of delight and pride. In 2006, he married Leonie Gordon in Cambridge, MA, spending 18 precious years with her. Her son, Nicholas Gordon (Alison Haskovec), brought an equal measure of joy to his life through grandchildren Pierce, Stella and Tess. As a professor, Fanger was a beloved fixture at Harvard with both faculty and students. As a teacher and lecturer, he was awe-inspiring. His elegant, refined English, faultless spoken Russian and ability to connect with his audience made him a favorite at the podium. But it was his wit, his erudition, and his personal charm that most endeared him to students and colleagues, friends and family alike. He was unstinting in the time he gave to a person seeking advice or friendship, and he shared with those who were fortunate to know him life, literature, laughter and love.