Maria Sergeyevna Petrovykh was a Russian poet and translator.
Early life
Petrovykh was born in Norskii Posad, a village now within the city limits of Yaroslavl, where her engineer father worked in a cotton factory; her parents were married in 1896, and she was the youngest of five children. Her sister Ekaterina "suggests that the thoughtfulness and alertness that accompanied Petrovykh throughout her life were formed during their slowchildhood walks with their nanny along the Volga; her sister claims as well that Petrovykh's characteristic independence and determination to carry through her decisions appeared early in life." Her mother's brother Dmitri Aleksandrovich Smirnov and her father's brotherIvan Semyonovich Petrovykh were both priests who fell victim to Stalinist repression. From 1922 she lived in Yaroslavl, where she taught school and attended Writers' Union meetings; her poetry began to be appreciated there.
In 1925 she moved to Moscow, where she continued her studies at the State Higher Literary Courses. At this time she married Petr Granditsky, but the marriage did not last long. She became a friend of both Anna Akhmatova, with whom she remained close until Akhmatova's death, and Osip Mandelstam, who fell in love with her in 1933 and dedicated to her what Akhmatova called "the bestlove poem of the twentieth century," "". In 1936 she married Vitaly Golovachev, and in 1937 their daughter Arina was born; a few months after her birth Golovachev was arrested and sentenced to five years in the Gulag. Petrovykh worked as an editor and translator for Moscow publishing houses; in the summer of 1941 she and her daughter were evacuated to Chistopol in Tatarstan, where they spent World War II. Her translations were primarily from Polish and Armenian but also from Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and other languages. From 1959 to 1964 she conducted a seminar for young translators along with David Samoylov.
Legacy
As a poet she was much appreciated by a small circle but little known to the wider public; the only book of poems she published during her lifetime was Dalnee derevo, published in Yerevan in 1968. But Akhmatova considered her "Naznach' mne svidan'e na etom svete" "one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century lyric poetry." Stephanie Sandler writes:
