Nina Ivanovna Petrovskaya

Nina Ivanovna Petrovskaya (, March 1879, Moscow – 23 February 1928, Paris) was a Russian writer, translator and memoirist who moved at the centre of the Symbolist circles of early twentieth-century Moscow. She is remembered above all as the prototype for Renata in Valery Bryusov's novel The Fiery Angel and as one corner of the love triangle the book grew out of, with Bryusov and Andrei Bely.

Early years and literary debut

Petrovskaya was born in Moscow into the family of a minor official. She finished dental courses but never practised, and her first prose piece appeared in 1903 in the almanac Grif, run by the poet and publisher Sergei Sokolov-Krechetov. She became Sokolov-Krechetov's common-law partner and helped run the Grif press, one of the small Moscow houses that brought out the second wave of Russian Symbolists. Stories of hers soon followed in Vesy, Zolotoe Runo and Russkaya Mysl.

Alexander Blok noted in his diary that she was clever and pleasant company. Vladislav Khodasevich, who knew her from the same period, later wrote that her real talent lay in the urge to live her own life as if it were a literary text.

Her single book of short prose, Sanctus Amor, came out in Moscow in 1908.

A long memoir of her years with Bryusov, written after his death in 1924, appeared in fragments in the émigré press.

Death

By 1927 Petrovskaya had moved to Paris together with her sister Nadezhda. The two lived in real poverty, and Nadezhda died at the start of 1928. On 23 February 1928 Petrovskaya killed herself with gas in a small Paris hotel.

Khodasevich devoted to her one of the central chapters of his memoir book Necropolis (1939), titled "The End of Renata", which has remained the main narrative source for her life.

Legacy

The full Bryusov to Petrovskaya correspondence, edited by Nikolai Bogomolov and Aleksandr Lavrov, came out in 2004 from Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye and is considered a key document of Russian Symbolism. Sarah Vitali's English translation of Necropolis, published by Columbia University Press in 2019, brought Petrovskaya's story to a wider Anglophone readership. Joan Delaney Grossman's 1994 study of her conflict with Bryusov treats Petrovskaya as a central case in the Symbolist programme of zhiznetvorchestvo, the deliberate fashioning of life as a work of art.