Obituaries: Anne Barton and Nina Diakonova

We are sorry to announce the deaths of Professor Anne Barton, of Trinity College Cambridge, on 11 November, at the age of eighty, and of Professor Nina Diakonova, of the St Petersburg State Pedagogical Institute, on 9 December of last year, at the age of ninety-nine.

Internationally famous as a scholar of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Renaissance drama, Anne Barton was also a great admirer of Byron. Born in New York in 1933, she studied for a PhD under Muriel Bradbrook at Girton College, Cambridge, where she subsequently became a Fellow. She left for the University of London before moving to New College, Oxford in 1974 where she lectured for ten years before returning to Cambridge. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1991. In addition to several papers and articles on Byron, Barton published the excellent lecture Byron and the Mythology of Fact (Nottingham 1968; rpt. in Alice Levine, sel. and ed., Byron’s Poetry and Prose, Norton 2009) and the immensely useful students’ introduction Byron: Don Juan (Cambridge: CUP 1992). She was the natural choice to write the essay ‘Byron and Shakespeare’ in Drummond Bone’s Cambridge Companion to Byron (CUP 2004). The common-sense balance of her approach to Don Juan is seen in such things as

[w]hile distrusting and sometimes abusing women, Byron was at the same time probably more sensitively cognizant than any other male writer of the period of the waste and futility of so many of their lives […]

(p. 25).

Anne was also well-known as a lover of cookery, regularly hosting lavish parties, antiques and cats (she is survived by two named Damon and Pythias, rechristened from their original names, which were Batman and Robin).

Perhaps not so well-known were her skills as an actress, shown memorably in her performance as A Cherub in the reading of The Vision of Judgement given at the International Byron conference at Duisburg in 1996; here her seeming flirtation with the equally memorable Derek Wise (St Peter) has stuck in the mind. Assisted in preparing for the role by her equally famous husband, John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company, she enacted the line ‘A Cherub flapped his right wing o’er his eyes’ by striking Derek in the face with the edge of her shawl. The comment made by Michael Foot after her London talk ‘Ovid’s Miss Medea’¹ – that he wasn’t clear whether he’d just heard a talk about, or delivered by Medea – sums up much about her personality.

Nina Diakonova was a famous and very popular Russian literary critic, a professor, a Board Member of the Byron Society of London, and a member of the editorial board of the academic series Literary Monuments. An authority on the history of English Literature, she wrote significant works on Shakespeare, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Dickens, Stevenson, Shaw, and Aldous Huxley. She started teaching in 1934, and through her teaching influenced many students.

She herself remembered it this way:

‘Teaching, both at the University and at home, was, apparently, the main driving force of my life’ (she was married with two sons). ‘It seems to me that such a choice has been defined not only by inclination, but also by the perception of it as a sacred duty of the intelligentsia. Thoughts of intelligentsia and of my belonging to it occurred to me very early. In 1929 or 1930 my uncle, a journalist, gave me a book under a boring title – “Gorky on writers”. I got down to reading it with reluctance, but, unexpectedly, took a fancy to it. Gorky says there that walking down the alley in the Summer Garden (Letniy sad) he saw Alexander Blok, on a bench, catching the sun’s rays with his hat. Noticing him, Blok stood up and began to walk with him, back and forth; he started talking “about the Russian intelligentsia in boring words of condemnation,” on which Gorky...