Anna Lisa Crone spent her life in Russian literature, generously imparting to others her vast knowledge, wisdom and guidance. She will be sorely missed by her family, her colleagues and the scores of students whose lives she has blessed.
Born in Brooklyn on 9 June 1946, Lisa was raised in North Carolina and graduated from Goucher College in 1967. After receiving her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1975, Lisa came to the University of Chicago in 1977. For thirty years she was the life of the program in Russian literature, directing almost twenty dissertations. Lisa taught through 2006, when she was forced to focus on her battle with cancer, but she remained active as a scholar and as the director of several dissertations.
Lisa was a wide-ranging scholar of Russian and Slavic literature and language. Her first monograph, published in 1978, was an innovative literary study of the Russian philosopher Vasilii Rozanov; entitled Rozanov and the End of Literature: Polyphony and the Dissolution of Genre in Solitaria and Fallen Leaves, it opened a new chapter in the study of Russian philosophical discourse. In 2001 Lisa published The Daring of Deržavin: The Moral and Aesthetic Independence of the Poet in Russia. In 2004, together with Jennifer Day, Lisa published My Petersburg/Myself: Mental Architecture and Imaginative Space in Modern Russian Literature. Her final years were devoted to a monograph on the philosophies of eros in Russian modernism. Her friends will ensure that her final works reach the printed page.
Lisa was a dedicated and innovative teacher of both language and literature. Lisa received a Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1985, and in 2000 she was recognized for her graduate teaching by both the University of Chicago and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. In 1979 she founded Slavic Forum, an annual graduate-student conference, which for the twenty-ninth time this May showcased the work of graduate students from universities as far afield as Virginia and Yale. In 2006 the Slavic Forum reunited many of her students and colleagues in a celebration of her career. The proceedings of this conference were edited by three of her students and published in 2007 as Poetics, Self, Place: Essays in Honor of Anna Lisa Crone, a fitting tribute to the breadth and energy of her intellectual interests.
Lisa is survived by her husband Vladimir Donchik, her daughter Liliana, and her sisters Laurel and Moira.