WINNER, Thomas G(ustav) 1917-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born May 4, 1917, in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic); died of complications from pneumonia, April 20, 2004, in Cambridge, MA. Educator and author. Winner was a professor of comparative literature who was considered an authority on Russian literature, especially the works of Anton Chekhov. Winner, who was Jewish, was a fortunate recipient of a Harvard University scholarship that allowed him to escape Europe just as Nazi Germany was invading Poland at the start of World War II. At Harvard, he was a vocal protestor against the Nazis, while working to earn his master's degree in 1942. During the war, he served as a translator of the Office of War Information; with the war over, he returned to his studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1950 from Columbia University. Fluent in twenty languages, Winner accepted a teaching position at Duke University, where he taught until 1958. This was followed by eight years at the University of Michigan, and in 1966 he joined the Brown University faculty as professor of Slavic languages. In 1977 he became a professor of comparative literature, retiring as professor emeritus in 1982. From 1977 to 1983, he also worked as director of the Center for Research in Semiotics, and beginning in 1984 was director of the Program in Semiotic Studies at Boston University. The author of The Oral Art and Literature of the Kazakhs of Russian Central Asia (1958) and Chekhov and His Prose (1966), Winner was editor of several scholarly texts in Russian and English, including the coedited The Peasant and the City in Eastern Europe: Interpenetrating Structures (1982) and Sign System and Function (1984).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, April 29, 2004, p. A25.