Stephen Rudy, N.Y.U. professor of Russian and Slavic languages

Stephen Rudy, N.Y.U. professor

of Russian and Slavic languages

Stephen Rudy, 54, associate professor of Russian and Slavic languages at New York University and a Village resident, died of head injuries after an accidental fall at home on Aug. 11.

Taken to the hospital immediately after the fall, he was released and sent home. An assistant, with whom he had been working while on leave from N.Y.U. last semester, found his body at home on Aug. 13, according to a university spokesperson.

Prof. Rudy was a specialist in Russian 19th and 20th century literature, poetics and literary theory and in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Russian in 1971 from Wesleyan University and a master’s and doctorate from Yale University.

He complied and edited a bibliography of the Russian Futurist Roman Jakobson and was a translator of Jakobson’s “My Futurist Years.” He also edited critical texts of Dostoevsky and Gogol and collaborated on articles about semiotics in the Soviet Union.

His mother, Barbara Grave, and a brother, Michael Rudy, both of Michigan, survive him.