Author Biography
Miron Petrovskii (1932, Odessa-2020, Kyiv) was a Kyivan philologist, historian of literature, and writer. He never held any positions at any universities or academic institutions nor any academic degrees. He earned an MA in Philology (extra-mural) from Kyiv University, 1957. He characterized himself as a self-taught individual and an outsider, both in the USSR and in the independent Ukraine. He served in 1959-1962 as a literary secretary of Kornei Chukovskii and an editor at “Iunost’” monthly (Moscow). Most of his life, he was unemployed. After 1994, he served (together with Gelii Aronov) as the literary editor of the “Yehupets” literary almanach (Kyiv). His publications appeared in such periodicals as “Novyi mir”, “Iunost’”, “Voprosy literatury”, “Detskaia literatura”, “Knizhnoe obozrenie”, “Literaturnoe obozrenie”, “Literaturnaia uchëba”, “Literaturnaia gazeta”, “Sovetskii ėkran”, “Sem’ia i shkola”, “Ogonëk”, “Filosofskaia i sotsiologicheskaia mysl’” and others. His books took dozens of years to see the light of day, and when they did, they appeared in a censored version or they have been heavily plagiarized while moving in the manuscript form from one publishing house to another. During his lifetime, he managed to publish less than half-a-dozen books, including Kniga o Kornee Chukovskom [A book on Kornei Chukovskii, 1966]; Muzyka ėkrana [Music of the movies, 1967; in Ukrainian]; Knigi nashego detstva [Books of our childhood, 1984; uncensored version, 2006]; Gorodu i miru [Urbi et orbi, 1990; 2nd revised and expanded edition, 2008]; Master i gorod: Kievskie konteksty Mikhaila Bulgakova [The master and the city: Kievan contexts of Mikhail Bulgakov, 2001]. He also co-edited a volume on Samuil Marshak (with Boris Galanov and Immanuel Marshak, 1975), on Lev Kvitko (with Berta Kvitko, 1976); and on the Russian romance (with Valentina Morderer, 1997). A significant part of his work remained unpublished (f.e., a monograph on the ideological aspects of the Soviet literature for children; a book on the circus as a phenomenon of the fin-de-siecle culture; and a study on the 20th century literary trends originating from the turn-of-the-century mass culture). His apartment in Kyiv served as a sui generis informal Tartu-University-type philological center in Kyiv.