In Memoriam: Katerina Clark

B.E. Bensinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature 

Katerina Clark – B.A. Melbourne University, M.A. Australian National University, Ph.D. Yale – was one of the most influential Slavists and comparatists of her generation. Perhaps her most widely known and influential work is The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, which, in three editions, inspired generations of scholars, introducing them to the many examples of Socialist Realism. It remains the essential reference point on this subject, and in the words of one critic,” has inspired an entirely new movement in Slavic studies.” 

To start with this important work is to make the merest beginning in listing her accomplishments. Her field, broadly, was Russian culture of the twentieth century—literature, theater, film, art and architecture, opera, linguistics, and scientific thought—with an emphasis on the 1920s, the 1930s, and the recent period. Within this compass she published an impressive number of monographs on Stalinism and Soviet culture. In books such as Moscow: The Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 and Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943, and in co-authored monographs such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953, she made pathbreaking contributions to the field. 

A tribute to her would be misguided without mention of her contributions to film studies, both in her research, and as a teacher and administrator. She was an expert in Russian film of the 1920s and 1930s and the post-Stalin and post-Soviet decades but also wrote on European and Asian film of this period. This virtuosity allowed her to make vital contributions to the Yale Program in Film and Media Studies—to her highly regarded courses, “Post-Stalin Literature and Film,” “War in Literature and Film,” and “Performing Arts in Twentieth-Century Russia,” and to annual conferences on European film which showcase films organized around a particular year. 

For five years she was a member of the core faculty for the Working Group on Contemporary Russian Culture, which comprised scholars from the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, The global impact of her scholarship garnered the highest awards in literary humanities: the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies; the “Historia Nova” Prize for the best book on Russian intellectual and cultural history; and the Matei Calinescu Prize from the Modern Languages Association. Now, as we feel her loss, we are also grateful that she gave us so much for so long.