Olga Morozova, 1892 - 1970

Ol'ga Morozova was born Ol'ga Kolesova in Khar'kov on 3 July 1877 (N. S.), the daughter of the principal of the Khar'kov Agricultural School. Graduating from the Khar'kov women's institute in 1895, she established, with her own funds, a primary school for peasant children on the outskirts of Khar'kov. In the same year, she began a career as a journalist in various local papers and journals, also authoring a number of popular books on agricultural issues. She married the livestock specialist Iona M. Morozov and moved with him to Semipalatinsk in 1911, turning her energies to relief and nursing work with the Russian Red Cross during the First World War. In 1918 she established a 50-bed hospital in Semipalatinsk.

The Bolshevik advance in 1919 forced her to leave Semipalatinsk with her son Boris (her husband and a daughter, evacuating Omsk with Admiral Kolchak, were killed; another daughter, Vera, escaped by other means). Living in various towns and cities in China in the early 1920s, she finally moved to Tientsin in 1928, enduring a lengthy trek through the Gobi desert. It was in Tientsin that Morozova wrote most of the novels that gained her a literary reputation, such as Sud'ba, Nevozvratnoe, and Nora. Like many of her compatriots who evacuated China in the late forties and early fifties, Ol'ga Morozova spent some time in the Tubabao refugee camp before being admitted to the United States in 1951, an experience she chronicled in unpublished memoirs. Morozova died in Los Angeles on 1 January 1968.

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.

Olga Morozova Register