Forsh was born in the fortress at Ghunib, in Daghestan, the daughter of a major general in the Russian Imperial Army.

In the 1890s she studied at various art schools,[2] most importantly in Kyiv and St Petersburg, where she worked in the studio of Pavel Chistyakov.

She continued drawing and painting, and worked as an art teacher at the Levitskaya School in Tsarskoye Selo in 1910-11, but she turned toward writing as time went by.

[1] Olga was interested in the fashionable ideas of the time, including Tolstoyanism, Theosophy and Buddhism,[2] but was increasingly drawn to Socialism.

[3] The fate of the creative individual under an oppressive regime is treated in the novel The Contemporaries (1926), which is about Nikolay Gogol and A.

In the novels The Lunatic Ship (1931) and The Raven (originally titled The Symbolists, 1933), Olga portrayed life among the St Petersburg artistic intelligentsia in the early 20th century and the first post revolutionary years and created portraits of such contemporaries as Maxim Gorky, Alexander Blok and Fyodor Sologub.