Richard Folke Gustafson, Professor Emeritus in the Barnard/Columbia Slavic Department, died on May 5, 2024, in New York City. He was 90.
Gustafson was on the faculty of the Slavic Department at Barnard for over four decades and served in many roles, including as department chair at Barnard and Director of Graduate Studies for Columbia’s department of Slavic languages. He was a masterful teacher, an inspiring mentor, and an influential writer. His expertise ranged from poetry, to prose, and to religious thought, from the nineteenth century into the twentieth.
His first book, The Imagination of Spring: The Poetry of Afanasy Fet (Yale University Press, 1966), drew on the doctoral dissertation he completed at Columbia in 1963. It addressed both the philosophical themes and the artistic structures that animated Fet’s work. Those who took his poetry classes remember that he was brilliantly attuned to how form contributes to meaning.
In 1996, he published Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (Princeton University Press), a work with a tremendous impact on Tolstoy studies. He examined the religious and philosophical dimension to Tolstoy’s writings, from beginning to end, revealing the continuity from Tolstoy’s early work through his late work and the interrelatedness of his fiction and his work in other genres. Gustafson’s research has been vital to the movement in Tolstoy studies to reckon with the whole Tolstoy.
Gustafson was also instrumental in the movement to make Russian religious thought a subject of academic study and scholarship at Columbia and beyond. Together with Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, he edited and contributed to Russian Religious Thought (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). The collection examined writers active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Russia and in emigration, who approached religious and philosophical ideas from a modernist and/or post-modernist perspective.
After his retirement in 2006, Gustafson learned Spanish, traveled widely, and spent long summer seasons in Maine. His husband, Spencer Means, died two years before him.
All of us who knew Richard Gustafson at Barnard and Columbia— colleagues, former students, and others—cherish and honor his memory. The impact of his work over the years, in the classroom, in conversations around the Slavic Department and at the Harriman Institute, at conferences elsewhere, and in print, continues. ◆
Read the full obituary here.
Featured photo: Tymofiy Mylovanov, 2021. Photo courtesy of the Kyiv School of Economics
