Vol.2, No 7, 2000 pp. 201 - 202
In memoriam
VIDA E. MARKOVIĆ
Vida E. Marković, the author of the introductory paper to this issue of
FACTA, has not lived to see it published - she died on March 25th 2001
in her 85th year.
On finishing Grammar School in Zagreb, where she was born in 1916,
Vida E. Marković moved to Belgrade, where her father Edo Marković, the
well-known economist, patriot and democrat settled with his family of six
children and was killed at the threshold of his home in 1939. In Belgrade
Vida E. Marković obtained a B.A. at the English Department, winning the
St. Sava Prize as the best student of Belgrade University in that academic
year.
Vida E. Marković started her career as a teacher of German only to
abandon it on April 6th 1941 and resume it as a teacher of French and English
at the French and English Institutes. Soon after the end of World War II
she got the post of editor and translator in TANJUG and as such was engaged
at the Paris Peace Conference and the first session of the United Nations
in New York. On return from New York Vida E. Marković joined as a teaching
ssistant at the English Department, Faculty of Philosophy, University of
Belgrade. During a three month stay in England in 1951, sponsored by The
British Council, she met the distinguished professor Bonnamy Dobree from
the University of Leeds, who accepted her proposal for a doctoral thesis
on John Galsworthy, which she presented and defended with distinction three
years later. Due to the prolonged sojourn of her husband, the first secretary
of the Yugoslav Embassy in London, she rejoined the English Department
in 1955.
That year is a landmark in Vida E. Marković's brilliant university
career. Now as a docent (reader), well equipped and acquainted with modern
methods and trends in teaching literature, based on the assumptions derived
from the approaches of I.A. Richards, F.R.Leavis and Edmund Wilson, she
begins teaching Modern British and American Literature. That means teaching
literature as an exploration of human experience. From 1960 to 1970 as
Head of the English Department she carries out a radical reform of English
Studies at the Department, opens it to and establishes lasting links with
the leading British and American universities, plays host to outstanding
professors of literature and linguistics and helps younger members of her
own department to win grants for shorter and longer stays at various British
and American universities. The doors of the Department are thus wide open
to the new achievements in English Studies. She herself lectures as visiting
professor at numerous universities in Yugoslavia and abroad, becomes a
member of several international associations of professors of literature
as well as several editing boards.
The 1960s and 70s are Vida E. Marković's most fruitful period in strictly
academic terms - she writes critical essays, articles on literary topics,
introductions, translates from Engish and writes books from which generations
of students acquire fundamental knowledge of modern English literature:
Galsworthy in English Criticism (doctoral thesis); The Modern English Novel
I, II; Discrepancy Between Word and Play (Raskol izmedju reci i igre),
which, based on the text of Hamlet, reconsiders a clash between two aesthetics
- drama as literary text and as theatre; A Contribution to the Epistemology
of Literature, a book which, based on research, brings forth her views
of teaching literature as an interaction with student as active recipient
in the process of mutual fruition; The Changing Face (Podeljena licnost),
first published in the USA, which deals with the disintegration of man
in the modern British novel as a common phenomenon in 20th century art;
Encounters, with the portraits of seven great men, mainly men of letters,
gives her work a sense of roundness and completeness.
Her success in reading and teaching Modern British and American literature
would have certainly been impossible without a thorough knowledge of Shakespeare,
to whom she recurrently refers and with whom she ends her teaching career
- A Special Course in Shakespeare.
In 1971, when the local and university authorities of Niš initiate
talks on the opening of the Faculty of Philosophy, Vida E. Marković is
invited to join the Founding Board and participate in all the activities
that lead to the opening of the English Department as one of the seven
departments that receive the first generation of freshmen in November 1971.
She, as the first Head of the Department and Ljiljana Mihailović as Vice
Dean (whom Vida had persuaded to leave Belgrade for Niš), embark on a new
academic adventure as if they were at the outset of their careers. Niš
to them is both a challenge and a test - under their guidance the Department,
with the young assistants selected from their former students and those
from Niš, gains quickly a reputation for the high quality of teaching and
as the only department in Yugoslavia where all teaching is in English from
the first day of the stutents' enrollment. Vida E.Marković is proud that
she can do in Niš what she could not have done even in Belgrade, to achieve
something towards which all great professors of literature are heading,
to use Northrop Frye's words: 'the end of literary teaching is not simply
admiration of literature; it is something more like the transfer of imaginative
energy from literature to the student.' After her lectures students leave
the classroom with unconcealed admiration for both literature and the lecturer,
as well as with a feeling of gratitude for being enriched with an experience
which enables them to see themselves and others with new eyes.
In 1981, when the young members of the staff, due to her guidance and
immeasurable efforts, become fully qualified by obtaining Ph.D. degrees,
to take over Ljiljana's and her work, Vida E. Marković retires, with a
Festschrift published in her honour. For her it is a new beginning - she
turns to fiction, a specific kind of autobiographical novel. The sequence
opens with Nezustavljeno Vreme (The Unstopped Time) in which she brings
to life and gives meaning to her recollections from childhood. In Festina
Lente she further examines the events that have confirmed her forebodings
of the tragic situation into which we were thrown. In Izmedju dva sveta(Between
Two Worlds) she enlivens the periods and dilemmas they brought, alongside
the reminiscences of London, Belgrade, Paris and New York before, during
and after World War II. With Ex Cathedra she resumes her life story, dominated
by the encounters with the famous writers and university professors (William
Faulkner, Christopher Isherwood, Austen Warren). Her last novel Svi moji
universziteti (All My Universities), whose content is suggested by the
title of the book, ends with a question which occurred to her on leaving
New York for Belgrade, just at the end of the 60s: "Will America, as a
big power, be able to lead mankind into a better future, or will it, being
as it is, with its rude force, become humankind's biggest threat?" The
answer was supplied at the public presentation of the book in Autumn 2000:
"She, who had during her entire teaching career talked about the wealth
and values of Anglo-American culture and civilization, has lived to see
aircraft coming from that culture and civilization bomb her country and
people for almost three months, adding, not without bitterness, that those
who have done that have betrayed and denied the values of the culture from
which they come."
The news of Vida E. Marković's death reached us a day after the burial.
Such was her last will. Only a few days before her death, in a telephone
chat, did she ask for some details from the time of her work in Niš - just
a check before 'putting' them into the book she was writing. The fact that
the book on the Great Decade of the Niš English Department by its founder
remains unfinished makes the great loss of an erudite and prolific writer
of inexhaustible energy, a dedicated teacher, humanist and a friend even
greater.
Ratomir Ristić
