The Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies notes with sadness the passing of Professor Angela Livingstone. She worked at the University of Essex for thirty-one years. She taught mainly Russian Literature, Practical Criticism and the famously interdisciplinary first year course “The Enlightenment”. In 1992, she was appointed Professor and elected Head of Department.
Professor Livingstone joined the then-Department of Literature in 1966. It was, by her account, a place of vigorous and continuing debate. Students studied English Literature with a strong emphasis on comparison with the literature of the Americas and Russia. The prevailing spirit was, she writes, one of “innovation and debate, the re-thinking and replacing of old structures.”
This energy continues today, and Professor Livingstone played a key role in communicating it to the next generation of academics.
Dr Owen Robinson remembers her thus: “I have fond memories of Angela. As a student in the early-to-mid-1990s, I found her an inspiring lecturer. My respect for her intellect, and her generosity with that intellect, as well as her warmth and energy well into retirement, only grew in the years that followed, especially during our hugely enjoyable gatherings to discuss literature for the sheer joy of doing so.”
This joy for literature, its discussion and debate, runs through Professor Livingstone’s own writing, in her acclaimed translations of Russian literature and in her collaboration with poet and founder of the department Donald Davie. Their Pasternak: Modern Judgements (1969) was a groundbreaking selection of critical essays on Boris Pasternak in which the poetry was translated by Davie and the prose by Professor Livingstone. Late in her career, she also published her own collection of poetry Certain Roses (Mica Press, 2017). She combined formidable scholarship with rich creative practice, an entwining that is a continuing tradition in the research and education of the department.
Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Professor Sanja Bahun remembers, “Angela was an incredibly generous person, both intellectually and emotionally, and she was wonderfully supportive as an active Professor Emerita in my early years at Essex.”
Professor Maria Christina Fumagalli, FBA: “I too remember Angela fondly: her extreme kindness and solid encouragement towards new members of the department like me and, more personally, incredibly inspiring discussions on Dante and Mandelstam punctuated by her sudden bursts of focused energy when something that was being said enabled one to glimpse a new vista … a generous, rare, energetic and towering intellect.”
Professor Jeff Geiger: “Angela was very much an active and leading member of the department after her retirement in 1996, as Research Professor through 2008, when she became Emeritus. Her contributions to research seminars were ongoing and her support for new people in the department (such as myself) was very helpful and encouraging. She also provided a direct link to some of the key people who helped to set up Literature at the University, such as Donald Davie and Stanley Mitchell, who were so central to the ethos of comparative literatures in English, Russian, and Latin American studies.”
Professor John Gillies: “I vividly remember Angela from the first day of my own appointment interview back in 2000. She was wonderfully erudite and accomplished, a sensitive conversationalist and a truly gracious person. She brought enormous credit to the department.”
Professor Livingstone described her books as follows:
“Except for one book on a German topic – namely the monograph Lou Andreas-Salomé, Her Life and Writings (1984) – my research has been concerned with Russian writers. The book Pasternak. Doctor Zhivago (1989) is indeed also a monograph, and Poems from Chevengur (2004) is a somewhat idiosyncratic work (a ‘transposition’ into English verse of passages from Andrei Platonov’s novel Chevengur), but all my other books (except for the edited ones) offer translations from Russian with introduction, commentary, notes and appendices. These are: Pasternak on Art and Creativity (1985); Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva (1992); The Ratcatcher, a Lyrical Satire by Marina Tsvetaeva, (1999); The Marsh of Gold: Pasternak’s Writings on Inspiration and Creation (2008); Marina Tsvetaeva, Phaedra (a drama in verse) with ‘New Year’s Letter’ and Other Long Poems (2012).
In addition to these books, she also published a collection of her poetry. At the suggestion of a friend, here is Professor Livingstone’s poem, ‘On living when others have died’.
On living when others have died
We’re living in the after-life of lives.
Our minutes are those minutes and those hours
Some confidently called their future, then
failed to inhabit, leaving them as ours.
Even one who pressed to the very edge
of Now — like someone staring in, face smack
against the window, vivid with argument
and indignation — failed and faltered back.
Our filled-up bodies, our all-filling talk,
politics, prayers, our weathers blue or grey,
our science and love and music — all are nought,
mere blank space with every star blacked out,
from their (gone) point of view, to their (decayed)
discernment. Not one object where I am
exists for them. So, have they been betrayed?
Him so admired, her, so much called upon,
I derelicted— dropped into “the past”
the instant he, she, froze all his, all her
warm being into so-called “memory”.
I gave up hope of seeing them, and preferred
that this additional, broken-off for each
of them, this never-more-continuing time
continue airy to my avid breath.
They’re paralysed. We walk along the beach,
and take our children to the pantomime.
Professor Angela Livingstone
'On living when others have died' is published in Certain Roses: Poems 1980-2010 (Mica Press, 2017), the collection is still available from Mica Press.
You can read more about Professor Livingstone's life and work on her personal website: angelalivingstone.uk
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This tribute was prepared by Head of the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies Matthew De Abaitua
