Maria Sergeyevna Petrovykh (Russian: Мария Сергеевна Петровых, IPA: [mɐˈrʲijə sʲɪrˈɡʲe(j)ɪvnə pʲɪtrɐˈvɨx]; 26 March [O.S.

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.

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.

But Akhmatova considered her "Naznach' mne svidan'e na etom svete" (Make me a date on this earth) "one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century lyric poetry.

... Petrovykh did not write a great deal, but she left some exquisite love lyrics and a number of admirably precise poems of natural description.