John Glad, American academic and translator, Died at 73

  Dead Famous

John Glad was born on December 31, 1941, and died on December 4, 2015.

He was an American academic who specialized in the literature and politics of exile, especially Russian literature; John has written about Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust.

John was born in Illinois in a family of immigrants from Croatia.

His surname in Croatian means “hunger”. “I am Ivan Hunger”, he used to tell his Russian colleagues.

At age of 20, John began studying Russian and spoke it fluently, which undoubtedly contributed his marriage to Larisa, nee Romanova, whom he brought from Saratov.

John was known as a very good interpreter, and as such he was invited to interpret speeches of high-ranking people from Russia, including Mikhail Gorbachev.

He received his MA from Indiana University in 1964 for his thesis “Constance Garnett and David Magarshack as translators of Crime and punishment.”, and his Ph.D. degree from New York University in 1970 for this thesis “Russian Soviet science fiction and related critical activity”.

John Glad passed away at age 73 in December 2015.