Olga Forsh

Olga Dmitryevna Forsh (, ), née Komarova (July 17, 1961), was a Russian/Soviet novelist, dramatist, memoirist, and scenarist.

Early life Forsh was born in the fortress at Ghunib, in Daghestan, the daughter of a major general in the Russian Imperial Army. Her father met her mother, Nina Shakhetdinova, an azerbaijani, while he was stationed in the Caucasus. Nina died when Olga was very young. Olga's stepmother, who was also her former nurse, showed little interest in her, especially after the birth of her own daughter by Olga's father. When her father, Major General Komarov, died in 1881 Olga was placed in an orphanage for children of the nobility.

She married Boris Eduardovich Forsh, who had also been born into the family of a high-ranking military officer, in 1895. In the 1890s she studied at various art schools,

The fate of the creative individual under an oppressive regime is treated in the novel The Contemporaries (1926), which is about Nikolay Gogol and A. A. Ivanov. In the novels The Lunatic Ship (1931) and The Raven (originally titled The Symbolists, 1933), Olga portrayed life among the St Petersburg artistic intelligentsia in the early 20th century and the first post revolutionary years and created portraits of such contemporaries as Maxim Gorky, Alexander Blok and Fyodor Sologub.

She died in Tyarlova, a suburb of Leningrad, in 1961. She was buried in the Kazan Cemetery, on the outskirts of Pushkin.

English translations Palace and Prison, (novel), Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. from Archive.org Dolls of Paris, (story), from Great Soviet Short Stories, Dell, 1990. The Substitute Lecturer (one-act play), from An Anthology of Russian Women's Writing, Oxford, 1994. Pioneers of Freedom, (novel), University Press of the Pacific, 2003.