Charles Rougle (1946–2020)

In 1967, he graduated magna cum laude and was awarded a fellowship to Indiana University in Bloomington. That summer he visited the Soviet Union as part of the university's Russian studies program and met Eija Kivilinna in Leningrad. A native of Finland, Eija, also studying Russian at Helsinki University, was a summer tour guide for Finnish tourists in the Soviet Union. A year and a steady stream of letters later, Charles and Eija were married in Helsinki. In 1969 Charles earned his M.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Indiana University. He spent the next 16 years in Sweden due to his opposition to the Vietnam War. When Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1970, Charles served as one of his interpreters. In 1977 he earned his Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Stockholm, focusing his research and writing on the early Soviet period. From the late 1970s until the mid-1980s he lectured at the Universities of Stockholm and Uppsala. In 1985, Charles accepted a position as a professor of Russian language and literature in the Department of Slavic Languages at the State University of New York, Albany. Here, he taught courses on the theory and practice of translation. For many years he served as director of undergraduate studies in the Slavic Department (later reorganized as a Russian program), and ran the Russian University in the High School program, which helped support the teaching of the Russian language in schools in the Capital District and beyond. After nearly thirty years at the University at Albany, Charles retired in 2012.