Spring 2009 Issue

 

 

By Marilyn Kok

Reading the Russian novelist Turgenev at age 10?

When Rosina Neginsky, now an associate professor of interdisciplinary studies and comparative literature at the University of Illinois at Springfield, told her grandmother, a literature professor at the University of Leningrad in St. Petersburg, that she had finished reading all of Turgenev’s books, her grandmother wondered just how much a ten-year-old child could actually be taking in at that age.

“I remember my grandmother asking very pertinent questions,” Neginsky says, “making sure that I was able to follow what I read.”

This same grandmother laid the groundwork for Neginsky’s interest in symbolist art, a late-19th-century artistic movement that valued mystery and ambiguity. “She always told me when I was very little that fairy tales are not just fairy tales. They are a hidden reflection of what is happening in the world.”

Neginsky, who was born in St. Petersburg, moved with her parents to Paris at an early age. When she was eighteen, while living  at the Center for Russian Studies in Paris, a gentleman at the Center introduced her to the Symbolist Movement. “He was the one to plant a seed, telling me that Symbolism could eventually become my passion and area of discovery. He was right. That’s how it started.”

After completing undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Paris, she came to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for a doctorate. She wrote her dissertation on Zinaida Vengerova, a well known turn-of-the-20th-century literary critic whose importance and contributions to intellectual, artistic and political movements had been forgotten.

Before coming to UIS, Neginsky taught languages and literature at several colleges, including Grinnell, Kenyon, and École Polytechnique in Paris. She now teaches in UIS’ women’s studies, liberal studies/individual option and art programs.

Neginsky is well published in her field and has given several papers on symbolist art and literature. She has even found and translated Zinaida Vengerova’s original letters, which reveal Vengerova’s passion and commitment to the arts. Neginsky’s seminal dissertation work has since been published into a book, Zinaida Vengerova: In Search of Beauty.

Odilon Redon (1840-1916), Beatrice, 1885 (image cropped)

Further, Neginsky is also a poet and has published three collections of her own: Dancing over the Precipice, Under the Light of the Moon, and the forthcoming book, Juggler. She also is working on a book entitled Salome: An Image of a Woman Who
Never Was.

As a result, Neginsky was nominated and selected by her faculty peers as UIS’ University Scholar for 2008-09, an award recognizing outstanding teaching and scholarship at all three University of Illinois campuses. She was one of 15 faculty members, and the only one from UIS, chosen for this award; she will receive $10,000 a year for three years to support her research and scholarship.

When asked about what UIS alumni should be most proud of, she said, “I think UIS is an unusual institution because it has been experimenting with different types of delivery and working with an extremely wide range of people, which is not necessarily ‘typical’ of most universities. This is a university that has an online degree, blended delivery, on-campus delivery. It has begun an undergraduate program, an honors degree, a general degree.”

“This is a university that is never complacent,” she continued. “And I find that extremely positive. We also serve a body of students who, without our different modes of delivery, might never have an opportunity for education. We open many doors for people.”