Nina
Vedeneyeva (1 December 1882 – 31 December 1955) was a Russian physicist
involved in the study of mineral crystals and their coloration. Heading
numerous departments at such institutions as the All-USSR Institute of Mineral
Resources, the Institute of Geological Sciences and the Institute of
Crystallography, she conducted research into color variants of clay minerals
and classifying clays which occurred in organic dyes. She was noted for
development and design of instruments to improve the methods of optical
crystallography. She was the last partner-muse of the poet
Sophia Parnok
and was awarded the Stalin Prize and Order of Lenin for her scientific studies
and inventions.
Nina Evgenievna Vedeneyeva was born on 1 December 1882 in Tbilisi, capital
of the Caucasus Viceroyalty, Russian Empire to Pelageya Ivanovna (née
Avdeyeva) and Evgeny Lvovich Vedeneyev.
Vedeneyeva had three siblings: Olga (born 1880), who became a musician and
lived in Japan; Boris (1885-1946) who was a hydraulic engineer and
academician; and Maria (1887-1958), who became an architect in Leningrad.
After completion of her studies at gymnasium, Vedeneyeva with the
encouragement of her father went abroad to study architecture in Belgium.
Headed for Ghent, she stopped in Liège and met her future husband, Leonid
Ivanovich Sirotinsky almost immediately. He was a student at the Liege
Electro-Technical Institute and Vedeneyeva then changed her plans and entered
the same school. In January 1902, her father was murdered and she returned
home until spring.
After a year of studies, Vedeneyeva left school
and on 28 July 1903 at the Russian Orthodox Church in Brussels, she and
Sirotinsky married. He finished his studies and the couple returned to his
parental home in Nikolaev, where their son, Yevgeny was born at the end of the
year.
In 1907, Vedeneyeva entered the Chemical Department of the Bestuzhev
Courses and graduated in 1912-13, receiving her degree from the USSR Academy
of Sciences in 1912 and passing her examination at Moscow University in 1913.
In 1914, she began teaching and conducting research in the Bestuzhev Courses,
which would later merge with Second Moscow State University and at the
Institute of Fine Chemical Technology. In 1915, she enrolled in the
Mathematics Department and passed her examination in 1916.
She continued teaching first chemistry, then courses on atomic matter,
radioactivity and pedagogy until 1919 at Second University. In that year, she
divorced Sirotinsky and went on holiday with Eugenia Avramenko to Nikolaev
again, where her son was living. Unable to return to Moscow because of Anton
Denikin's offensive against the city, she and Avramenko proceeded Avramenko's
home town and found employment working in Women's Gymnasium in Melitopol for
the next two years.
Beginning in 1921, both Vedeneyeva and Avramenko taught at the Moscow State
Forest University. Vedeneyva taught physics there until she was transferred in
1925 to Leningrad. Avramenko was also transferred to Leningrad in 1925.
The following year, Vedeneyva's son, Yevgeny, who was a student at the Moscow
Higher Technical School, was arrested and charged as an enemy of the state for
participating in scouting, a banned activity. After spending six months at the
Solovki prison camp, he was barred from living in any of Russia's major cities
and sent in exile to
Glazov. It
was probably in this period in 1927, when Vedeneyeva met Sophia Parnok, as
Parnok's partner at the time,
Olga Nikolaevna
Tsuberbiller, was a colleague of Vedeneyeva.
Tsuberbiller was a mathematician and had written the standard textbook used
for several decades in the high schools of the USSR.
She assisted Vedeneyeva in obtaining the textbooks Yevgeny needed to complete
his mathematics degree. In 1929, he continued his exile in Tver and was not
allowed to return to Moscow until 1931.
In 1930, Vedeneyeva became the department head of crystal optics at the
All-USSR Institute of Mineral Resources [ru]
in Moscow.
The following year, she also began conducting scientific research at Giredmet,
the State Research and Design Institute of Rare Metals.
She worked on some of the first studies of anomalous dispersion, studying
nature of the colorations of both natural and synthetic transparent crystals.
In 1932, she moved out of the apartment she had shared since 1918 with
Avramenko,
moved in with her son, and around the same time her relationship with Parnok
intensified. Between January 1932 and August 1933, Parnok wrote thirty poems
in two cycles to Vedeneyeva. The first cycle, containing seven poems, was
called Ursa Major and the second, containing an additional twenty-three
poems was called Useless Goods.
The poems are a lyric diary of their affair and are openly erotic poems
addressed to her lover, making full use of double entendre to taunt potential
censors.
Parnok continued living with Tsuberbiller and Vedeneyeva visited her almost
daily until her death.
The relationship was intense and in the beginning, Vedeneyeva was reticent
about making the relationship physical.
It may have been her first lesbian relationship.
Vedeneyeva was with Parnok and Tsuberbiller when Parnok died in 1933
and she fell into a depression. Traveling alone in the summer of 1934 to
Armenia, she sought to restore herself,
but the depression returned in 1936 and she took a retreat at the beginning of
1936 to sanatorium near Moscow and then in the summer another solo trip to
Sudak.
Returning to Moscow, Vedeneyeva completed her doctorate in Physical and
Mathematical Sciences in 1937 and moved to the Institute of Geological
Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences of the USSR to head the optical
section in 1941.
Working with the Red Army Engineering Unit, she developed a method of
spectrophotometry to be used in the field which dealt with the problem of
color masking due to crystallographic defects. When the war ended, in 1945,
Vedeneyeva became the supervisor of the Crystal Optics Laboratory at the
Institute of Crystallography.
That same year, she was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honour.
Vedeneyeva's research continued, with the study of smoky quartz. She
evaluated the absorption and luminescence process of the quartz, and the
interrelation of them to its thermoluminescent properties. She also evaluated
the adsorption of organic dyes upon thiazine and barium nitrate crystals, as
well as upon lead and strontium. She developed and designed instruments which
improved the methods of crystal-optical examination and developed methods to
classify and diagnose clay minerals and clays found in organic dyes.
In 1952, Vedeneyeva was awarded the Stalin Prize in the third degree for
inventions and improvements in methods of production in the field of
exploration and mining and in 1954, she was presented with the Order of Lenin.
Vedeneyeva died in Moscow on 31 December 1955 a few months after her friend
Avramenko.
Her research methods and inventions were widely used in geology in both Russia
and abroad.
The papers relating to the work of Vedeneyeva are located at the Moscow State
University of Fine Chemical Technologies.
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