Olga Petrovna Tissarevskaia

Olga Tissarevskaia was born Ol'ga Petrovna Krasnova on 28 September 1895 (O.S.) in the village of Bogdanovka, near Samara, Russia. In 1921, she emigrated to Poland with her husband, an engineer named Viacheslav Doubrava, and ran a boarding house until the Second World War. Doubrava died in the mid-1920s, and Olga married a former colonel named Georgii Tissarevskii.

Coming to the United States in 1949, she worked for a brief period as a housekeeper to the Swedish ambassdor to the U.S., but through intelligent real estate investments soon achieved financial independence for herself and her already ill husband (who died in 1965). Living in retirement in Phoenix, Arizona, she gained recognition as a painter (specializing in oil paintings on silk), and also wrote for the émigré press, particularly Novoe russkoe slovo (where she published accounts of her travels). She was married again in the 1970s to a Russian named Nikolai Topalov. Her autobiography, Svet i teni moei zhizni, was published in Buenos Aires in 1973.

Detailed processing and preservation microfilming for these materials were made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by matching funds from the Hoover Institution and Museum of Russian Culture. The grant also provides for depositing a microfilm copy in the Hoover Institution Archives.The original materials and copyright to them (with some exceptions) are the property of the Museum of Russian Culture, San Francisco.

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