Marianna Bezsmertnaya

Marianna Bezsmertnaya
Born	May 2, 1915
Died	1991  (aged 75–76)

Marianna Sergeevna Bezsmertnaya, née Yurkevich (Template:Lang-ru; 2 May 1915 – 1991) was a Soviet and Russian geologist, mineralogist, petrographer and petrologist, candidate of geological and mineralogical sciences (1957), developer of new methods for diagnosing minerals, active participant and author of the discovery of a number of new minerals. For 25 years, he has been a leading employee of the Moscow Institute of Mineralogy, Geochemistry and Crystal Chemistry of Rare Elements, the author of new methods for determining minerals. In the late 1950s — early 1960s, she re-checked and revised the mineralogical collection of the institute.

In 1979, in honor of Marianna Bezsmertnaya and her husband Vladimir Bezsmertny (1912-2002), a new mineral found in Kamchatka, bezsmertnovite, was named in composition — a complex plumbotelluride of gold, copper, iron and silver, the brightness of the color surpasses even gold.

Biography

Marianna Yurkevich was born in Moscow. Father, Sergei Yurkevich, is a zemstvo doctor, mother is a rural teacher. After the early death of her husband in 1922, her mother continued to teach literature in Moscow schools. In 1929, Marianna entered the geological prospecting technical school, and then, from 1933 to 1938, she studied at the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute. In 1941 she was sent into evacuation, first in the Ryazan region, and then further to Frunze. In 1941–1945, Marianna Yurkevich was the head of the geological party of the Kyrgyz Geological Department of the Ministry of Geology.

In the last year of the war she worked at the Kirovograd Geological Department, then returned to Moscow. In 1945–1950, she successively held the positions of senior laboratory assistant, assistant and, finally, junior researcher at the Institute of Non-Ferrous Metals and Gold named after M.I. Kalinin. She spent the next seven years (1950–1957) in the Altai polymetallic expedition, first as a geologist and then as head of the geological party.

Returning to Moscow, she defended her Ph.D. thesis in 1957. In the same year, she joined the Moscow Institute of Mineralogy, Geochemistry and Crystal Chemistry of Rare Elements (IMGRI), where she worked until 1988, first as a junior researcher in the mineralogy department, and from 1962 as a senior researcher in the specialty “Mineralogy and Petrography”. She worked for a long time in the mineragraphy room, and for more than ten years she held the position of head of the ore microscopy room. Her area of specialization was the field of microscopic studies of ores. During her work at IMGRI, she was responsible for ten scientific topics.

For almost fifty years, Marianna Bezsmertnaya was married to the famous Moscow geologist, specialist in the field of geology of ore deposits, associate professor at the Polytechnic and Pedagogical Institute Vladimir Bezsmertny, with whom they formed a productive scientific tandem in the 1950-1970s. Most of the positions that Marianna Bezsmertnaya held after 1940 were, in one way or another, related to her husband’s service record. V. Bezsmertny himself came from a family known in Moscow geological and mineralogical circles. As the son of a Baku feldsher, he was the nephew of Maria Bezsmertnaya (Bessmertnaya), an assistant and confidant of Vladimir Vernadsky, who stood at the origins of Soviet biochemistry in the late 1910s.

Publications

• Spiridonov E., Bezsmertnaya M., Chvileva T., Bezsmertny V. Bilibinskite, Au₃Cu₂PbTe₂, a new mineral gold-telluride deposits. Intern. Geol. Rev. 1979. Vol. 21. P. 1411–1415.