Departures of note

Andreas Guski was a German Slavist who shaped Slavic philology in German-speaking academia. He earned his doctorate in 1970 at the University of Munich with a dissertation on Mikhail Lermontov's concept of the literary hero, and later habilitated at the Free University of Berlin with a study of literature and work in the Soviet Union's first five-year plan. He held professorships at Ruhr University Bochum and, from 1989 to 2007, at the University of Basel, where he headed the Slavic philology institute and fought to save the discipline from abolition, securing the Engelhof building in Basel's old town. He inspired generations of students with his text-focused approach to Russian and Czech literature, contributing more than sixty entries on Russian literature to Kindlers Literatur Lexikon. Guski also wrote the fundamental biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, published in 2018 and translated into Chinese. He died in 2026 at the age of 82.