Like many of the leaders of the great "restart" after World War II, Anna seemed destined by family history to be attracted to Comparative Literature. She has told the story so succinctly in her memoir "How and Why I Became a Comparatist," that I urge younger colleagues to consult it together with her The Snowflake on the Belfry for a fuller sense of the values she championed. The outline of Anna's biography is a familiar one in the foundational annals of Comparative Literature: a series of real cultural migrations were the stimulus for later explorations in an often difficult and combative career, and from this life's work there emerged her guiding conviction that "The transcendence of ethnic and gender differences is what creates the summits and depths of human consciousness as it is reflected in literature" and that "Comparative Literature is one of the most effective ways to make contact with the universal psyche" (Building, 87).

Her childhood began in the Armenian community (with the benefit of a French kindergartren!) in teeming, polyglot Constantinople, but as this crossroads metropolis changed into Istanbul during the turbulent period of strife in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean following World War I, her family fled first to Vienna for several years, then to the French Alps, and after an initial refuge in New Britain, Connecticut, eventually settled in teeming, polyglot New York in the 1930's. Anna had finally found the metropolitan home with which her contribution as an academic leader and teacher would henceforth be indissolubly liked. She majored in French at Hunter College and went on to earn a Master's at Columbia University, initially with the aim of teaching in highschool. However, the experience of being mentored by Paul Hazard, the great exponent of the European Enlightenment, lifted her sights and spirit. She dared to violate the canonical rule of the day at Columbia for suitable dissertation topics by pursuing Surrealism and its multinational character. A thirteen-member jury applauded her interdisciplinary work, which she presented in 1943 at the ripe age of 27 and eventually published under the title Literary Origins of Surrealism (1947), as trailblazing scholarship. Thus while World War II was drawing toward its conclusion she began her teaching career at Syracuse University (1943-53), covering the entire gamut of French literature from the Chanson de Roland to the Existentialists.

The next crucial breakthrough, in her own telling, was the chance to participate in the since legendary bus trip of 1958 from the docks of New York to the lawns of Chapel Hill in the company of European, North American, and Japanese scholars who were gathering for the second triennial congress of the fledgling ICLA. ICLA's inaugural congress had taken place auspiciously at the world-symbolic capital Venice in 1955; the proposition whether comparatists could indeed sustain a movable feast was yet to be tested. At Chapel Hill former wartime allies and enemies united to establish the lasting pattern of an dynamic, open, and at its heart idealist discipline on the international level - the amazingly supple and durable framework which has allowed scholars of all continents to join in multiple collaborations for almost half a century now. Soon the American Comparative Literature Association was constituted as a regional organ for the field and grew steadily as a force in the academy of the New World, but - against the wishes of the pioneer comparatists - in inverse relation to the decline in the fortunes of foreign language and literature groups at American universities, a development that eventually endangered Comparative Literature's multilingual knowledge base and identity. Anna found congenial homes in ICLA and ACLA; she was an activist in both organizations, serving a term as President of the national and two as Vice President of the international body.

She had already moved to New York University as her permanent academic home in 1954 and, though frequently and widely invited as a speaker and guest professor in the United States and abroad, would remain until her retirement as of 1986. She served as chair for more than a decade from the mid-1970s and then stayed near as an active emerita. Her first loyalty was to the proudly independent Department of Comparative Literature at NYU and its many students old and new. There in the course of fighting the good cause early on, "As I lost the friendship of some colleagues at my university, antagonized deans, and converted students, I began to feel like the chauvinist of antichauvinism" (Building, 79). Colleagues who might otherwise have regarded her a traitor to "pure" French studies (after all, she brashly refused the award of the Palmes Académiques) nonetheless had to admire her work enhancing "their" modernism - the magisterial books on André Breton, Magus of Surrealism (1971), The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal (2nd ed., 1977), and Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (3rd ed., 1986). For ten years she served as a regular reviewer for The Saturday Review (1960-71) and was continuously prolific as a reviewer in scholarly and literary journals, principally in her favorite areas of poetics and the avant-garde. Quite apart from these accomplishments, there were several major areas in which she made an indelible mark during her three decades as a professor at NYU.

Upon an initiative adopted at the 1967 congress in Budapest, ICLA created a self-renewing Coordinating Committee to foster a Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages. The only expression adequate to describe Anna's response is that she fell in love with the impossible dream. She pitched in with her remarkable energies and wide sympathies to organize and lead a team of 56 scholars drawn from nations around the globe whose task was to write the hefty volume The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages, which appeared in 1982 under her editorship. Among the features that made and make this the master reference work on Symbolism - and an example for other collaborations in comparative literary history - is that it treats not just the languages and cultures of Western but also of Eastern and Southeastern Europe and the New World and their multifarious relationships. Anna later was elected to the supreme editorial council of the CHLEL series and participated in its annual deliberations as one of its most highly motivated members. It stood to reason that she was sought out in her busy years as an emerita to contribute defining articles on Dada, Surrealism, and Symbolism by the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics (1993) and on Symbolism by the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (1998).

1982 happened also to be a high water mark for Comparative Literature in the United States. In 1979 at Innsbruck, Anna had assumed the awesome responsibility of organizing the next, the tenth triennial congress of ICLA. She carried the arduous task splendidly to completion. The tenth congress took place in downtown New York and drew the largest attendance of members and interested outsiders ever to date, from an assortment of 70 nations. This was one of the last grand occasions when most of the eminent personalities among the first "restart" generation in America (e.g., Harry Levin, René Wellek, Henry Remak et al.) and their European and Asian counterparts, plus the immediate second and third waves whom they had inspired, had the pleasure of being together. The air was filled with innovatory élan and spirited debate over new directions. Mealtimes in the faculty dining hall at the top of NYU's new Bobst Library were vibrant. At receptions, Anna made everyone feel en famille - with a distinctly Armenian warmth and heartiness. She was ably assisted by husband Stepan Nalbantian, a New York businessman who liked to accompany her on conference trips, by daughter Suzanne, herself a rising comparatist, and by son Haig and sister Nona, a writer on art and culture for the New York Times.

Sudden summer rain storms broke over Washington Square, but nothing could dampen the enthusiastic exchange of knowledge and views that resulted in an impressive three-volume publication. Serving then as an ICLA Secretary, and as a visiting professor at NYU immediately after the congress, I had glimpses behind the scene that have left an indelible memory. Anna was truly a heroine, inspiring a tiny staff of graduate student workers, wrestling with innumerable logistical problems, tirelessly fund-raising to the very moment the congress opened, receiving visitors from far and near with unfailing cordiality, and soon marshaling persons and resources in the next demanding business of shaping the proceedings for press. She had her own brand of gallows humor as a risk-taker that helped her face the mounds of telephone notes, correspondence, and documents. She also understood the art of getting a lot, often the very best, out of some of the finest colleagues in our field whom she would rope in for guest stints and conferences at NYU on the slimmest of resources - to which she readily admits in "How and Why." From my own direct observation and conversations with a dozen such visitors to NYU (I shall spare the list), I believe the secret was that she genuinely admired them, and if circumstances allowed, even at some hardship, for the most part they could hardly resist the temptation of being so manifestly appreciated. Thus Comparative Literature at NYU enjoyed a stellar parade of visiting faculty who contributed to building its program. I have also been privy to moments when Anna admonished a mutual acquaintance to greater personal sacrifices for the sake of that colleague's own family and when she cried with spontaneous heartfelt grief for a student who had met a tragic fate. Hers was never exactly the correct WASP behavior, yet her respect for Anglo-American fair play was profound. In my view the "miracle" of the 1982 congress would not have been possible without her special combination of New York smarts and Armenian caring.

All of which brings me to the subject of Anna's general scholarly contribution, one present across the aggregate of some hundred essays and ten books. Striking in her work from the beginning is her consistent return to poetry, in her view the relatively neglected area of modernism in comparative studies if one contrasts the enormous volume of commentary on prose fiction and drama. This devotion to poetry is laid down in innumerable essays and translations and reached a new peak in the book The Fiction of the Poet, with major chapters on Mallarmé, Valéry, Rilke, Stephens, and Jorge Guillén. Throughout her life Anna refined her thesis that the essential core of high modernism appeared not in the major novelists of the first few decades of the twentieth century - in her view prose fiction lagged because of its late-nineteenth-century entanglements - but in the startling revolution in poetry, especially with the advent of Surrealism. In her last major book, The Snowflake on the Belfry, she reaffirmed her sense that the deep paradigm shifts in modern science - a new understanding both of the human mind and of the structure of the universe - had truer analogues in poetry and painting. She believed much remained to be done in inter-media studies. Snowflake also firmly restated her advocacy of a benign view of literary culture in the face of the rising tide of contestatory movements and factions. She resisted the formidable pressures to dehistoricize and dismember literature, and in answer to the fragmentation of our field proposed that comparatists should maintain contacts, connections, and continuities as central to the discipline. Her concerns over the parlous condition of literary scholarship impelled her to be one of the spontaneous founders of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics in the mid-1990's; she embraced it as another channel for rededication. Anna Balakian was a woman scholar who forged ahead alone in a pre-feminist era in the study of modernism. (She was the sole non-wife on the famous bus trip of 1958!) With the passage of time she felt great joy over the growing company of women comparatists dedicated to serious scholarship, but it was the same joy she felt over the presence of dedicated men. Her ecumenical spirit will live on in our moveable feast.

Gerald Gillespie

Stanford University

PRINCIPAL WORKS CITED

___. Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute. 1957; 3rd ed., Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1986

___. The Symbolist Movement: A Critical Appraisal. 1967; 2nd ed., New York: New York UP, 1977

___. André Breton, Magus of Surrealism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971

___, ed. The Symbolist Movement in the Literature of European Languages. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982

___, ed. Proceedings of the Xth Congress of the ICLA/ Actes du Xe Congrés de l'AILC (New York, 1992). 3 vols. New York: Garland, 1985

___. The Fiction of the Poet: From Mallarmé to the Post-Symbolist Mode. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1992

___. The Snowflake on the Belfry: Dogma and Disquietude in the Critical Arena. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1994

___. "How and Why I Became a Comparatist." Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the History of Comparative Literature in the United States, ed. by Lionel Gossman and Mihai I. Spariosu. Albany: State U of New York P, 1994: 75-87

___. "Hérodiade and Virtual Reality." In Mallarmé in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Robert Greer Cohn and Gerald Gillespie. Cranbury, NJ, and London: Associated UP, 1998: 131-42