About
He studied at the Moscow State University. Lomonosov, Faculty of Biology, Department of Anthropology.
Engaged in the genetics of human populations. In 1975 he graduated from the university and, having refused a place in graduate school, received a free distribution. For two months he lectured on the origin of man in the Timiryazev Museum, after which he got a job as a janitor. At various times he worked as a watchman, janitor, fireman, at the same time engaging in literary activity. Since 1984 he has collaborated with a number of samizdat magazines and foreign Russian-language publications. Since 1995 - Head of the Lifestyle Department of the Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Since 1997 - deputy editor-in-chief of the Nezavisimaya Gazeta and executive editor of the NG-Figures and Faces application. Since 2002 - Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the New Model magazine. From 2004 to 2007, he worked in the Political Journal as deputy editor-in-chief, and later as editor-in-chief. At the same time, it is actively published in the online magazine Peremeny, where it leads the project “Places of Power”, exploring the Russian anomalous zones and their connection with Russian history and the Lives of Saints. The author of novels and essays. Analytical articles and books by Oleg Davydov on Russian literature and modern Russian politicians are distinguished by a special method in which Freudian psychoanalysis is almost always combined with a strong intellectual provocation. Davydov first of all draws attention not to what the hero of his text wanted to say or do, but to what he “said” or “did” as a result — as if by accident, and analyzes those hidden mechanisms of the psyche that caused such an unexpected result. At various times, the works and biographies of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Alexander Blok, Eduard Limonov, Boris Yeltsin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Pushkin, Turgenev and many others were analyzed.