Papers of Katharine Strelsky, 1896-1993

Editor, translator, and researcher Katharine Anderson Strelsky (1900-1993) was born in Rochester, New York, the daughter of Willis P. and Maud Harrington Anderson. She had a brother, Donald (1907-1979) and a sister Eloise (1909-1911). She graduated from the University of Rochester (AB 1922) and studied at Radcliffe College (1922-1923) and Columbia University (1935). From 1924 to 1930 she lived in Saranac Lake, New York, where she was treated for tuberculosis. In 1928 she married Nikander Strelsky, also a former patient, who went on to join the faculty at Vassar College and to develop the Russian department into one of the first and largest such programs at a woman's college in the United States. He died in 1946. They had no children.

Following his death, Katharine Strelsky lived in Italy, Paris, and London, serving as dean at Eversholme, an international school in Florence, and working as a free-lance writer, translator, and English coach for film and stage. Returning to the United States in 1953, she worked as assistant editor for the journals Isis and Daedalus. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute (1963-1965), where she worked on a study of Dostoevsky entitled "An Obsolete Image of Goodness," an analysis of his novel The Idiot. She published numerous translations of works in French, Italian, and Russian, including a translation of Dostoevsky's Notebooks for the Idiot (1967). She was also the editor, with Catherine Wolkonsky, of Alexandra Tolstoy's autobiography, Out of the Past (1981), and the author of occasional published poems and articles. She died in 1993; her affairs were taken care of at the end of her life by Anne and Peter Elvins. Strelsky had been a friend of Anne Elvins's mother, Dorothy Colman Wallace, and had become a friend of the Elvins family as well.