Raised Russian Orthodox, she was received into the Catholic Church in France and later became an oblate, taking the name Sister Olga.
[1] Hélène Iswolsky was born in 1896 into the family of Alexander Izvolsky, a Russian diplomat, and Countess Marguerite von Toll, a Baltic German noblewoman.
When the First World War broke out, Isvolsky and her mother were in Konstanz, Grand Duchy of Baden, Imperial Germany, while traveling from Russia back to France.
As Iswolsky's mother pleaded with the city's Herr Kommandant, a general in the Imperial German Army, for permission to leave the country, a messenger arrived, dismounted from a motorcycle, and shouted, "Germany has declared war on Russia!"
Following the February Revolution, Iswolsky learned that she and all other Russian doctors and nurses working there had been under surveillance by the Paris offices of the Tsarist secret police, or Okhrana.
The rite of joining the Catholic Church was in a Benedictine monastery, where she met two Russian-born nuns, Paula and Eustochia Komarov (mother and daughter).
Following her conversion, Iswolsky regularly attended the Divine Liturgy at the Church of the Holy Trinity, located near the Porte d'Italie in Paris.
Among the founders of the magazine were people such as Vasily Janowski, the writer and doctor, Arthur Lourie, a composer and convert to Catholicism and Alexander Kazembek, party leader of the Mladorossi.
The magazine published the work of authors such as Simone Weil, Edith Stein, Mother Maria Skobtsova and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
In 1961, she made a journey by car along the route Leningrad - Novgorod - Moscow - Vladimir - Tula - Oryol - Kharkiv - Poltava - Kiev.