Olga Freidenberg (March 15, 1890 in Odessa – July 6, 1955 in Leningrad) was a Russian and Soviet classical philologist, one of the pioneers of cultural studies in Russia.
Restricted in her ability to pursue university education as a woman and a Jew, she travelled through Europe studying foreign languages on her own and living in Germany, Sweden, Italy, and Switzerland.
The university had only started accepting women as students in 1917, and Freidenberg was the first woman to defend her thesis in classical philology.
She noted that the archetypal patterns in the plots of its different narratives were versions of the legomenon which can be traced back to the dromenon of fertility cults.
[3][2] For example, Freidenberg's 1935 dissertation The Poetics of Plot and Genre: The Classical Period of Ancient Literature was the only book published in her lifetime (in 1936) but was denounced by the Soviet authorities and taken out of circulation shortly afterwards.