Along with Sebastian, and younger brother Axel, Katerina was a pupil at Ainslie Primary School in the bush capital’s northern suburbs.

In 1956, the family travelled on the P&O liner Arcadia to Britain. Manning Clark took sabbatical leave at his alma mater, Oxford University’s Balliol College, and started work on his six-volume A History of Australia.

Meanwhile, Katerina attended Oxford High School. Renowned actor and raconteur extraordinaire Miriam Margolyes recalls she met Katerina in the school playground.

“I saw this shy, lonely and very handsome stranger, and went up to her and said, ‘Would you like to be friends with me?’ and Katy said, ‘Yes’ (bravely), and for the rest of time, we were.”

Returning to Australia, Katerina Clark excelled in sport and academic pursuits at Canberra High, becoming the school’s athletics champion, and winning a scholarship to Melbourne University’s Janet Clarke Hall.

She enrolled for an arts degree, initially studying Russian as a single subject, but later, with the encouragement of her lecturer, Nina Christensen, ended up majoring in Russian.

After graduation with an honours BA, she secured an MA scholarship to the ANU, but spent much of her time in the Soviet Union, including lengthy stays in a dormitory attached to Moscow University.

Once again she was fortunate with academic mentors. At the ANU, professor Harry Rigby, a former World War II Australian infantryman and onetime British diplomat stationed in Moscow, was her teacher, and he stimulated her interest in Russian and Soviet literature and film.

It was the height of the Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union, and life for a foreign student in Moscow was spare and challenging. Katerina stuck it out, living like a stoic, and embarked on monumental journeys, including on the trans-Siberian railway.

After finishing her honours MA, she won a scholarship to Yale University in the US to study for a PhD in Russian language and literature. Like in her ANU MA, the PhD involved extensive stays in Moscow and travel throughout Russia.

On one European trip in 1968 she introduced Margolyes, already a prominent actor, to an old Canberra school friend, Heather Sutherland, a specialist in Indonesian studies and later a professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.

The two became life-time partners.

Meanwhile, Katerina was maintaining an extensive travel schedule. Sutherland recalls Katerina visiting her in Jakarta and staying with her in Beijing, and “she, Sebastian [her younger son] and I had a great visit to Shanghai”.

“She visited us in Italy, and she and I had a memorable trip around Sicily by bus. Katerina was an ideal travelling companion: prepared, curious, appreciative and never complaining or irritable. She was a stoic, and preferred foot or local bus.”

As Katerina’s first son, Nicholas, says, her “research and scholarly pursuits took her on marvellous travels and sabbaticals throughout her life, which she cherished”.

After she graduated with her PhD at Yale, Katerina taught Russian language and literature at a series of universities in the US, including the State University of New York at Buffalo, near the Canadian border, and Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

All the while she maintained close contacts with Yale University, and in particular Michael Holquist, her former PhD supervisor and a distinguished Russian and comparative literature professor at Yale.

The couple married in 1974. Between 1975 and 1986, Katerina taught Russian language and literature at the University of Texas in Austin and Indiana University at Bloomington, while Holquist was the head of both universities’ Slavic departments.

During this period sons Nicholas and Sebastian were born.

The couple returned to Yale in 1986 and bought a classic Connecticut home in Hamden, nine kilometres from the Yale campus.

This marked the start of Katerina most productive period as an academic and author. According to Edyta Bojanowska, professor and chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale, she was a “path-breaking scholar of 20th century Russian and Soviet culture, one of the most influential Slavists and comparatists of her generation”.

Katerina was “instrumental in overcoming reductive and politicised approaches to the study of Soviet culture that were set by Cold War rivalries, and helped transform this field into an intellectually vibrant critical enterprise that continues to be a source of scholarly innovation”.

Bojanowska singled out Katerina Clark’s The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, which was first published in 1981, as “the essential reference point on the subject”.

She expanded the boundaries of her speciality with a monograph, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (1995), and through analysis of Stalinist-era culture in works such as Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (2011), and Eurasia without Borders: Leftists Dream of a Literary Commons, 1919-1943 (2021).

Katerina also co-authored a monograph on Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1987) with her then husband, Holquist, and co-edited Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953 with Evgeny Dobrenko.

Her books have been translated into Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Czech, Portuguese and Spanish. She has been awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize for the best book in Russian, East European or Eurasian studies, the Historia Nova Prize for the best book in Russian intellectual history, and the Matei Calinescu Prize from the American Modern Languages Association. In 2007 she received a US award for Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship.

According to The Yale Herald, Katerina’s The Soviet Novel revealed a “wide array of overgeneralisations and incorrect assumptions about socialist realism which had long been accepted as common knowledge”.

“This conclusion of Clark’s isn’t just an insightful bit of analysis. It mounts a challenge to the didacticism with which socialist realism and the Soviet epoch as a whole is often treated, which strictly divides pre- and post-revolutionary epochs into good and evil.”

Apart from Yale, Katerina took term assignments to teach at the University of California campus at Berkeley, near San Francisco, and in Beijing, and gave lectures in Berlin, London, Tokyo, Paris, Melbourne, Madrid and Barcelona, and many other cities.

But it wasn’t just work, writing and travel to exotic places. Katerina, a proud Australian, ensured her connection with home continued, often taking sabbatical leave in Canberra, enrolling her two sons in Forrest Primary School, and spending lengthy periods at the family property at Wapengo Lake, on the NSW Far South Coast.

She was also beset with domestic turmoil, divorcing Holquist in 2000. The latter remarried and died in 2016.

For the past decade her professional focus had been on the interwar push by the Soviet Union for a Eurasian grouping, a policy that a century later has echoes in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and sabre-rattling in the Baltic States and Central Asia.

As part of Katerina’s Central Asian research, I accompanied her on a memorable journey through the “Stans” – Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan – in 2018. Travelling in buses on rutted, narrow roads, we visited legendary Silk Road cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara, and marvelled at the timeless desert vistas.

She also pursued a strong fitness regimen. According to son Nicholas, Katerina “rode her bike just about everywhere in the New Haven, Connecticut area, well into her 70s”.

“She held strong convictions regarding health and fitness, often hiking mountains with her sons and grandchildren in Vermont. Her joy for dancing was unparalleled, often dancing the night away at family gatherings while younger family members looked on in awe.

“Even stronger still were her convictions on generosity and family. She hosted jubilant family gatherings each Thanksgiving, and fostered a sense of family commitment, hospitality and joy. All were welcome at her table.

“Her own commitment to her Australian family and heritage were a firm priority. Her love for her family and her many childhood friends drove her and anchored her throughout her life.”

In October 2022, the rarely ill Katerina suffered from severe headaches and nausea and was diagnosed with lymphoma. Three courses of chemotherapy failed to stem its spread, and CAR-T cell treatment – in which the DNA of the body’s T-cells are reset to fight the lymphoma tumour – was introduced.

This succeeded for a time, and Katerina spent much of the past northern hemisphere summer hard at work, including supervising a group of post-graduate students.

However, the lymphoma returned late last year, and she finally gave up her struggle on the morning of February 1.

Katerina Clark is survived by Nicholas, an English teacher in Montpelier, Vermont, and Sebastian, a drug and alcohol counsellor in New Haven, Connecticut, and grandsons Marley and Julian.

A memorial gathering was held at Yale University on February 10. There will be memorial events in Melbourne on February 25 and in Canberra at Manning Clark House on March 3.

Andrew Clark is a younger brother of Katerina Clark