Karen Rosneck translates Russian novel

by Benito Cardenas

Karen Rosneck’s English language translation of the Russian novel, The Boarding-School Girl by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya (1824-1889), was published this year by the Northwestern University Press. Rosneck, an LSA acquisitions liaison in the Area Studies Department of the GLS, is an independent researcher, writer and translator.

First issued in 1861, The Boarding-School Girl depicts the life of 15-year-old Lolenka, a diligent boarding school student who is successful until her encounter with a radical exile, Alexander Veretitsyn. He encourages her to question knowledge instead of mindlessly memorizing facts and figures. Lolenka eventually flunks her final exams in protest of the superficiality of her education.

Rosneck began working on the translation of The Boarding-School Girl when she realized few English language works are available that focus on 19th-century Russian women writers. It was also an opportunity to fulfill a childhood dream: to publish a book by the year 2000. Rosneck notes, "to undertake such a large project, there has to be some emotional value to make it worthwhile. I can easily identify with many of the characters."

After completing an undergraduate degree at Ohio State University with a double major in Slavic and Spanish languages and literature, Rosneck entered graduate school at the UW-Madison. Here, she completed masters’ degrees in comparative literature and library and information studies.

Rosneck is also the author of a bio-critical essay on Nadezhda Teplova (1814-1848). She translated some of Teplova’s poetry in Russian Women Writers in 1999. She also continues her work on Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, recently completing an essay that will appear in a volume of The Dictionary of Literary Biography in 2001.

The Boarding-School Girl at Northwestern University Press:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/99/northwestern/khvo99bo.ctl