38
NOTES OF GRATITUDE
A final gift With the Banjanin Family Scholarship, beloved Russian professor Milica Banjanin and her husband created a legacy that will support the next generation of student scholars.
by
JOSH VALERI
Through their estate, Professor Emerita of Russian Milica Banjanin and her husband, Stanko, established the Banjanin Family Scholarship as an enduring gift to the WashU community. Last year, five undergraduate students became the first to benefit from this final gift of the devoted WashU student and scholar. Milica Banjanin was born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia) in 1938. She met Stanko after they both immigrated to the United States. Milica, an orphan after World War II, had made the journey in 1956 at the age of 17. Stanko, having experienced some of the most harrowing decades in modern European history, arrived a few years later to pursue the American dream, according to friends. Banjanin moved between St. Louis and New York City for her education, earning her bachelor’s degree from Washington University in 1961 and her master’s degree from Columbia University in 1963. She returned to WashU as an instructor in Russian the following year, completing her doctorate in comparative literature at the university in 1970. In 1986, she was appointed chair of Russian, a position she held until her retirement in 2006. As a scholar, she had a particular interest in Russian modernism and its encounter with the city, especially as expressed in poetry and painting. “Milica was drawn to the ‘poetics of the street,’ as she termed it, and poetry that involved ‘listening to the new rhythms of life,’” said Lynne Tatlock, the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities. “From the start, women writers and artists occupied a significant place in her engagement with cultural production.” Banjanin’s work included essays on the historian Lidiya Ginzburg, the painter Boris Ender, the lyrical poet Aleksandr Blok, and the playwright Lydia Scheuermann Hodak. Above all, she was considered a global expert on Elena Guro, a Russian futurist painter, playwright, poet, and fiction writer. “Milica’s scholarship on Guro stresses two sides of her artistic sensibility and production: the artist’s intense encounter with the city, complemented by a lifelong engagement with nature,” Tatlock said. For her research, Banjanin was honored with grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the International Research & Exchanges Board, and the Fulbright-Hays Program.
