Irina Karsavina

Irina Karsavina (Irena Karsavinaitė) (1906–1987) was born in Saint Petersburg, where she attended a German school. As her father, Prof. Levas Karsavinas, was sentenced to exile, they went to Berlin, where she completed her secondary education at a gymnasium. In 1926, Karsavina moved to Paris, where she graduated from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris in 1934. From 1935 to 1937, she taught English and German in France, then moved to Lithuania in 1938. From 1940 to 1941, Karsavina taught Russian at Vilnius School of Art and Vilnius School of Music, while in 1943, she taught German to girls at Vilnius 2nd Gymnasium. In 1942, she applied for admission to the German Language Department of the Faculty of Humanities of Vilnius University and was accepted. No further information on the course of Karsavina’s studies is known. In 1944, she got a job at the English Language Department of the Faculty of Humanities of Vilnius University, where she worked until her expulsion in 1946. Karsavina was expelled from the university as she was deemed “unsuitable for a Soviet school” and “unfit for her duties”. According to the database “Lithuanians in Siberia”, she was arrested in 1948 and exiled to Mordovia. Karsavina returned to Lithuania on 15 July 1955. By an order of the Rector Juozas Bulavas, she was re-employed at Vilnius State University, where she then worked at the Department of Foreign Languages.

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