Ol'ga L'vovna Dansker

Ol'ga L'vovna Dansker, a Russian musicologist and archivist, was born in Mishelevka, in the Irkutsk region, on 12 December 1921. She belongs to the generation of Soviet researchers who combined ethnomusicology with the study of Russian musical life. Her career began at Leningrad University, where she started oriental studies focused on the ethnology of Central Asia, but the Second World War interrupted her training and led her to work in military hospitals.

After graduating in 1948, she trained in ethnology and folk music with Gippius at the Miklukho-Maklai Institute of Ethnology (1949–1953), and attended the Conservatory sporadically, where she worked with Druskin, Rubtsov, Ginzburg and Sergei Bogoyavlensky. Between 1953 and 1958 she was a research assistant at the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences of the Tajik SSR, in Dushanbe, where she took part in expeditions to record the folk music of the Tajik mountain regions. On returning to Leningrad, she was an assistant at the Institute of History of the Arts from 1960 to 1981, and rejoined the institution in 1991 as a researcher in the manuscript room.

Her main lines of work are Tajik folk music and the history of Russian musical culture through figures such as Maximilian Steinberg, Viacheslav Karatygin, Nikolai Malko, Samuil Samosud and Isaiah Sherman. Her editions of letters, memoirs and writings by these musicians, as well as her studies of the musical life of Petrograd and Leningrad, make a significant documentary contribution to understanding those circles and their archives.