Olga Shore

Olga Shore (Russian: Ольга Александровна Шор, also known as Olga Deschartes, 1894-1978) was an art and literary historian. She was also the companion of poet, writer and philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov during his Italian exile.

Born into a prominent Moscow family of musicians and intellectuals, Olga Shore received her philosophical training in Russia and Germany. After the Revolution of 1917, she worked in the People's Commissariat of Education and the State Academy of Arts and met Vyacheslav Ivanov in 1924, on the eve of the poet's departure to Italy. For three years, O. A. Shore was his official representative in the USSR, responsible for copyright protection, publications, and forwarding the Central Commission for the Improvement of the Welfare of Scientists' grant to Italy, as V. I. Ivanov was considered to be on a business trip abroad. In 1927 she moved to Italy with the Ivanovs, worked as a guide in Rome and as a clerk in Pavia, in 1928-1932 she worked on the preface of the Italian edition of Correspondence from Two Corners by V. I. Ivanov and M. O. Gershenzon, after 1934 she devoted herself entirely to maintaining Ivanov's household and working capacity. After his death in 1949 she wrote a continuation of the philosophical poem The Story of Svetomir the Tsarevich, calling it the fulfillment of the poet's will, began to publish the collection of works of V. Ivanov. Ivanov, for which she wrote a biography-prediction (1971). She died and was buried in Rome; she never took Italian citizenship. O. Shore's own works on the Italian Renaissance and religious philosophy remained mostly in manuscript, the work on Michelangelo was published in 2011 and 2017 as a whole and in fragments; in 2023 manuscript materials on O. Shore's own philosophical system Mnemology were published. Olga Alexandrovna's archive is stored in the Vyacheslav Ivanov Research Center in Rome and has been dismantled since 2023.