In 1967 Olga Sedakova began her studies at the Philological Faculty and received her PhD in Slavic Antiquities in 1973. She studied under the aegis of Sergei Averintsev and a number of other prominent philologists such as M. V. Panov, Iurii Lotman, N. I. Tolstoi. Her scholarly interests include the history of Russian and Old Slavonic languages, traditional culture and mythology, liturgical poetry, and the general hermeneutics of the poetic text. Sedakova quickly came to understand how indispensible it was to be able to read in other languages during the period of the “Iron Curtain,” and so she learned a number of key European languages. This would eventually help her earn her keep by writing surveys of new work in the humanities (from 1983-1990 she worked in a division of the Russian Academy of Sciences as a reviewer of foreign literary criticism), as well as to translate “for herself and her circle.” In the last several years a number of these translations, never intended for publication, have come out—translations of European poetry (English folk verse, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Donne, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Celan, St. Francis of Assisi, Dante, Paul Claudel), drama, philosophy, theology (Paul Tillich et al.).

In 1986 her first book came out with the Paris-based YMCA Press. Soon after this her poetry and essays began to be translated into European languages, published in various journals and anthologies and to appear in book form. Her first book to come out in her own country was Chinese Journey, in 1990. So far she has published 27 books of verse, prose, translations and scholarly research (in Russian, English, German, Hebrew and Danish; Italian and Albanian volumes are forthcoming).