Mark Lambert, Asher B. Edelman Professor Emeritus of Literature
In a letter to the Bard community, President Leon Botstein memorialized Professor Lambert.
To the Bard College Community:It is with regret that I write to inform the Bard community of the death of Mark Lambert, Asher B. Edelman Professor Emeritus of Literature, on January 31, 2024. Mark passed away suddenly but peacefully at his home in New York City. He is survived by his wife Marina Petrova-Lambert, her daughter and his stepdaughter, Marianna Olshtein, and his daughter, Ruth Lambert, and her children Alicia, Maleah, Olivia, Serena (Lambert-Johns) and Kayla (Lambert-Jones). Mark was 82.
Mark grew up in New York City and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. At Bronx Science, he found himself in a minority, part of a cadre of students with a primary passion for the arts and humanities. In his high school years, Mark received local, regional, and national recognition for his poetry and fiction. As a student at Bard, Mark completed his senior project, a collection of poems, under the guidance of Irma Brandeis. Mark subsequently went on to Yale University for his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature. Marie Borroff was his mentor.
In 1967, Mark returned to his alma mater as a member of Bard’s faculty in the Division of Languages and Literature. In 1990, he became the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature. Upon his retirement in 2009, Mark was given the Bardian Award in recognition of his 42 years of dedicated service to Bard. Although during his career Mark also taught at various institutions, including Harvard University, St. Augustine’s College, and the University of York in the United Kingdom, he was most proud of his association with Bard, where he spent almost half a century as a student and faculty member.
Among the qualities that distinguished Mark Lambert as a teacher, colleague, and scholar was his commitment to genuine scholarship, the elegance of prose style and the significance of studying history. He was a defender not only of specialization, but the virtue of pursuing multiple lines of inquiry and fields. Above all, he communicated a love of literature and a profound respect for the traditions of scholarship and research. He was insistent that the highest expectations of scholarship in the humanities and the arts were central to the undergraduate curriculum at Bard.
Karen Sullivan, whom Mark admired and was a close colleague in the final years of his career at Bard, upon hearing of Mark’s death observed:
“Mark wrote two erudite volumes of literary criticism: Malory: Style and Vision in Le Morte Darthur (1975) and Dickens and the Suspended Quotation (1981), both published by Yale University Press. (Though Mark left the teaching of Victorian literature to colleagues who were specialists in this field, he published in this area as well as in medieval studies.) Reviewers of these books expressed admiration for the fine, stylistically-based interpretations Mark devised of the authors he was addressing. As one reviewer of the Malory book wrote, “The distinction of this book lies not in any novelty of method, … nor even in the originality of its arguments, … but rather in the quality of the author’s perceptions and in the tact and felicity with which he expresses them.” Readers of the Dickens book found his focus on the author’s tendency to interrupt his character’s speech and redirect the reader’s attention back to himself ingenious, and admired the ear that Mark showed for the cadences of Dickens’s writing and their effect upon the novels. In his article, “Telling the Story in Troilus and Criseyde,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer (2006), Mark addressed narrative technique in Chaucer’s second most famous poem, exposing how the texture of the writing is related to the structure of the composition. While the field of literary studies moved away from stylistic analysis, for better or for worse, literary critics could not help but express respect for Mark’s scholarship.
Mark taught an array of courses on early English literature that remained popular throughout his entire career at Bard, including English Literature I, The Heroic Age, Arthurian Romance, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Middle English Literature, Medieval Dream Visions, and Medieval English Drama. He helped respond to the strong demand for courses on Shakespeare with his classes on the tragedies and the comedies. One of the distinctive aspects of Mark’s teaching was his attention to language and style. He possessed an astonishing understanding of the English language, both diachronic and synchronic, which enabled him to show students how a word they thought they knew had a nuance unfamiliar to them, which changed the meaning of the text they were reading. As a result, his students were likely to write, not only thematically- or historically-based senior projects, but translations from Old and Middle English and even original verse compositions in these languages. Mark’s course on The History of the English Language was one of the most well-subscribed classes in the division, regularly attracting students concentrating in programs across the college. It is not surprising that Mark continued to be held in such high esteem by many of his students after graduation from Bard.
Since Mark had been an undergraduate at Bard, and spent almost his entire professional career at the college, he knew the institution as well as anyone. He was a wonderful storyteller, with an eye for the detail of an episode, a memory for the exact words that were spoken, and a gift for characterization. Among his professors and later colleagues were Irma Brandeis, Elizabeth Stambler, Mary McCarthy. Mark shared unforgettable stories about them. He served as an invaluable repository of institutional memory. A loyal friend to his peers, he was also a wise mentor to junior colleagues, always ready with advice, warnings, or encouragement.”
On behalf of the Bard community, particularly the alumni/ae and the faculty, I would like to extend my condolences to Marina, Marianna, and Ruth and her children, Alicia, Maleah, Kayla, Olivia, and Serena. Bard has lost a fine and exemplary Bardian, a devoted colleague, and a man of learning with a deep commitment to teaching.
Leon Botstein
President
Alumni/ae Remembrances
Mark Lambert made me want to become a medievalist. At the wise suggestion of Robert Kelly, I took his course on Middle English Literature my sophomore year (1987–1988), together with another inspiring one taught by Jean French on medieval manuscripts, and had what I still describe as an Augustinian conversion experience. The text was Pearl. When Mark spoke Middle English, it broke open a whole world. His classes were extremely subtle, just careful scrutiny of the text and all that shimmered within, illuminated by a few key historical details that caught the light like burnished gold.I went on to study Old English as a tutorial with Mark and to write my Senior Project under his supervision. Sitting in his office translating the Dream of the Rood against the backdrop of his books, which I gazed at in wonder (Anglo-Saxon Magic, Arab Dawn Songs, The Cult of the Saints), was a very privileged kind of apprenticeship. I was from North Hollywood, my mother was a waitress, and this was about as rarefied and exotic as anything I’d ever encountered. Mark devoted himself to texts and to teaching with an almost monastic sense of renunciation and quiet devotion. His was a unique kind of retreat, a flight into the text, and a world he generously shared with his students. Without Mark, I might not have had an academic career. I am forever grateful for all that he was and all that he taught me.
-Marlene Hennessy ’90
President Botstein’s message about Mark Lambert’s death sparked a flood of memories of my four years at Bard. In 1972, Professor Lambert agreed to teach me in a tutorial on 17th century poetry excluding Shakespeare. At the same time I was enrolled in a junior seminar with Elizabeth Stambler entitled Myth and Literature. Those two courses were probably the highpoint of my whole undergraduate career. While Mark paced the wooden floor of his office in Aspinwall explaining the delights of metaphysical poetry, the ancient heating pipes banged away and the snow fell outside the window. Then I’d wander down the hall to Professor Stambler's office at the opposite end of the building where we studied Ulysses, “The Waste Land,” and The Magic Mountain, or listened to Fischer-Dieskau's recording of Schubert's Die Winterreise while Professor Stambler puffed on endless cigarettes, I still have the glorious two volume anthology of poetry and still listen to Die Winterreise on snowy nights here in Maine. Mark Lambert taught me how to read poetry and appreciate scholarship and for that I am eternally grateful. One afternoon, for no reason I can remember, he recited “On His Seventieth Birthday” by Walter Savage Landor. It was the first time I had heard the poem, and I still remember it:
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art,
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Many thanks, Professor Lambert.
-Dorsey Kleitz ’73
I am very saddened to hear of Mark’s passing. Mark was a true Bardian who taught us in a uniquely Bardian way that no other professor could possibly replicate.
I am reminded often, in my everyday life, of just how still profoundly affected I am by his teachings—either actual lecture materials or varied musings peppered in them.
- “Perish was used exclusively to mean to die from hunger, so when we now say, ‘perish from hunger’ that can be said to be redundant.”
- “All dogs used to be hounds—the specialization came later.”
- “The love object in Shakespeare is always endlessly malleable.” (I admit, I have taken this to heart rather well.)
-Kaythee Hlaing ’06
Of any professor with whom I studied during my four years at Bard, Mark Lambert was exceptional in so many ways, especially as an adult now looking back, but even then as a young student. He was humble in his brilliance, respected his students implicitly, and was never not there in his office to listen and discuss. Most of all, Mark Lambert was truly professorial in the classiest sense. He carried himself with a kind of formality that was both endearing and distinct within the Bard community.
After graduating I recall hearing about his joy at becoming a father. He was one of those few teachers one has when young that makes one long to be back in time to not only thank him, but to just appreciate that which we don't often as “kids.”
-Liza Wherry ’77
Great, great man, I’ll never forget him. His Chaucer classes (I took both semesters) were magnificent. I still remember the sound of him reading from the Tales in the original M.E.—he would read a passage amid utter silence in the big classroom in Aspinwall, and whenever he finished a reading, a number of us would be begging for more, like little kids at story time. His insight and daring on Chaucer (he encouraged open discussion of the bawdy sexuality of the Tales) made me look forward to every class.
I bet I’m far from the only alum with cherished memories of Professor Lambert. He was a great scholar and an even better man.
-Brian Donohue ’80
Post Date: 02-05-2024