Vera Panova

Vera Fyodorovna Panova (Вера Фёдоровна Панова; March 20 1905 – March 3, 1973) was a Soviet and Russian writer, novelist and playwright.

At the age of 17, she started working as a journalist on the Rostov newspaper Trudovoy Don (Working Don), publishing articles as V. Staroselskaya (the surname of her first husband Arseny Staroselsky whom she had married in 1925 and divorced 2 years later ) and Vera Veltman.

In 1933, she began writing plays.

In 1935, her second husband, Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist Boris Vakhtin, was arrested and imprisoned on Solovki where he died (the exact death date is unknown, probably the later thirties).

The Gulag authorities allowed her only one meeting with Boris, which she described in her story Svidanie (The Meeting).

There she began her first serious works, the plays Ivan Kosogor (1939) and In Old Moscow (1940).

Although these 2 plays won prizes, Vera felt that the dramatic form confined her, and, by her own admission, she was unable to fit all that she wanted to say into its strict framework.

She felt that she could work with greater freedom in the novel and story forms.

From 1940, she lived in Leningrad.

The unexpected advance of the Nazis on the Leningrad Front found her in Tsarskoye Selo.

She and her daughter were put in a concentration camp near Pskov, but they managed to escape to Narva, where they lived illegally in a destroyed synagogue.

She then moved to the village of Shishaki to stay with relatives.

In 1943, when the Germans retreated from Ukraine, she moved to Molotov (now Perm).

In 1944, as a journalist, she was embedded for two months with a hospital train about which she wrote the novel Sputniki (1946; translated as The Train) that brought her a Stalin Prize in 1947.

She had begun writing the novel in 1944, but had been interrupted by the hospital train assignment.

In 1945, she married David Yakovlevich Ryvkin (1910–1980), a notable Russian science-fiction writer who wrote under the pseudonym of "David Dar".

Together with her husband and his two children and her own family, she returned to Leningrad.

She was a recipient of the Stalin Prize in 1947, 1948, and 1950.

Vera was born into the family of an impoverished merchant (later an accountant) in Rostov-on-Don.

Her father, Fyodor Ivanovich Panov, built canoes and yachts as a hobby, and founded two yachting clubs in Rostov.

When she was five, her father drowned in the Don River.

After her father's death, her mother worked as a saleswoman.

As a girl, she was taught by a family friend, an old school teacher named Anna Prozorovskaya.

Vera credited Anna with instilling in her a passion for reading.

Anna died after being with Vera for only a year.

Prior to the October Revolution she studied for 2 years at a private gymnasium, before her formal education was stopped because of money problems in her family.

From her earliest years, Vera was an avid reader, especially of poetry, at which she tried her hand at an early age.

Her reading included the works of Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Ivan Turgenev.

She also read numerous textbooks on science, geography, and history as a form of self-education.

In 1947, she published the novel Kruzhilikha, translated as Looking Ahead (Stalin Prize in 1948), about people working in a Ural factory.

In 1949, she wrote the novel Yasny Bereg (Bright Shore; Stalin Prize of 1950) about people working in a kolkhoz.

With the onset of the Khrushchev Thaw she wrote Vremena Goda (Span of the Year, 1953) about the relations of fathers and sons within the Soviet intelligentsia.

The novel was immensely popular with the reading public, but Panova was criticized harshly in the press for her "naturalism" and "objectivism".

In 1955, she wrote the novel Seryozha, one of the best works about children in Soviet literature.

She described her first editing job and her first steps in this career in her novel Sentimental Romance (1958).

She learned newspaper work by experience, serving in turn as an assistant to the district organizer of labor correspondents, a reporter, and an essayist.

She published the stories Valya and Volodya, also about children, in 1959.

Panova held a place among the top Soviet writers.

She worked for a local newspaper and published her first novel The Pirozhkov Family (later renamed Yevdokia, the source of a Soviet film produced by Tatyana Lioznova in 1961).

There was a Soviet film Poezd miloserdiya (Train of Mercy, 1961) and another TV-film Na vsyu ostavshuyuysya zhizn (For the Rest of One's Life, 1975) based on the novel; the scenario for the later film was written by Panova's son Boris Vakhtin.