Name Olga Freidenberg Role Writer | Books Image and Concept | |
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Died July 6, 1955, Saint Petersburg, Russia | ||
Olga Freidenberg (March 15, 1890 in Odessa – July 6, 1955 in Leningrad) was a Russian and Soviet classical philologist, one of the pioneers of cultural studies in Russia. She is also known as the cousin of the famous writer Boris Pasternak; their correspondence has been published and studied.
Biography
Olga Freidenberg was born to Anna Osipovna Pasternak and Mikhail Filippovich Freidenberg. Freidenberg graduated from a St. Petersburg gymnasium in 1908. Restricted in her ability to pursue university education as a woman and a Jew, she traveled through Europe studying foreign languages on her own. As World War I broke out, she returned to Russia and became a military nurse.
Later she graduated from Petrograd University in 1923 and wrote a Ph.D. thesis in 1924, titled The Origins of Greek Novel.The University had only started accepting women as students in 1917, and Friedenberg was the first woman to defend her thesis in classical philology. In 1935 she was awarded the Russian highest scientific degree of Doctor of Science. During the Stalin era she was persecuted and her brother was arrested. In 1950, as part of the persecution of "rootless cosmopolitans" she was fired from the University where she had founded the chair of classical philology.