Wholesale Olga de Lebedeff - A Life Across Empires: A Scholar's Quest from Tsarist Russia to the Bosphorus and Beyond - Paperback

by Carina Hamilton (Author), Marilyn Booth (Contribution by) The sweeping, epic story of Olga de Lebedeff immerses the reader in a rarely seen multicultural world in the late Imperial period, when many Russian intellectuals were more integrated into European society. Olga's activities as scholar and activist shed light on the intersection between the Russian sphere of influence rooted in Orthodoxy and the Islamic world. Goddaughter to Tsar Alexander II, Olga was born in St Petersburg in 1852. She married the Mayor of Kazan, a Chamberlain of the Tsar, and for many years studied languages in Kazan with Jadid scholars, in Constantinople with high-ranking Ottomans and in Cairo with a sheikh at the al Azhar university.