Vera Panova

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Vera Panova

Vera Fyodorovna Panova (Russian: Вера Фёдоровна Панова; March 20 [O.S. March 7] 1905 - March 3, 1973) was a Soviet Russian writer.

Vera was born to the family of an impoverished merchant (later an accountant) in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. When she was five, her father drowned in the Don River. Before the October Revolution she took four years of a private gymnasium, then her formal education was stopped because of money problems in her family.

At the age of 17 she started to work as a journalist in a Rostov newspaper Trudovoy Don (Working Don), publishing articles as V. Staroselskaya (her first husband's surname) and Vera Veltman. In 1933 she started to write 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 later 30ies). Her only meeting with Boris allowed by the GULAG authorities she described in her story Svidanie. Trying to escape from the Great Purge^{[citation needed]} she moved to the Ukrainian village of Shishaki (Poltava Oblast) were her relatives lived. Where she started her first serious works: plays Ivan Kosogor (1939) and In the Old Moscow (1940).

From 1940 she lived in Leningrad. Unexpected advance of the Nazi Germany on Leningrad Front took her in Tsarskoe 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 and then moved to the village of Shishaki to stay with relatives.

In 1943, when the Germans retreated from Ukraine, she moved to Perm (called Molotov at that time). She worked for a Perm newspaper and published her first novel Family of Pirozhkovs (later renamed Yevdokiya, the base of a Soviet film of 1961). In 1944, as journalist, she was embedded for two months with a hospital train. She wrote a novel Sputniki (1946) that brought her a Stalin Prize of 1947. There was a Soviet Film Poezd Miloserdiya (the Train of Mercy of 1961) and another TV-film Na Vsyu Ostavshuyuysya Zhizn' (For the rest of the life 1975) based on the novel, the scenario for the later film was written by Panova's son Boris Vakhtin.

She returned to Leningrad. In 1947 she published the novel Kruzhilikha (Stalin Prize of 1948) about people working on a Ural plant. In 1949 she wrote the novel Yasny Bereg (Stalin Prize of 1950) about people working in a kolkhoz.

With the onset of the Khrushchev Thaw she wrote Vreamina Goda (The seasons of a year, 1953) about the relations of "fathers" and "sons" within the Soviet Intelligentsia. in 1955 she wrote novel Seryozha one of the stories about children of the Soviet Literature. In 1958 she wrote an autobiographic Sentimental Novel.

In her later life she published many short stories (mostly autobiographical and based on Russian history of the 17th century), plays and film scripts. She helped many younger writers who later become famous. Among them are Yury Pavlovich Kazakov, Sergei Dovlatov (her secretary for many years), Viktor Konetzky, Andrei Bitov, Viktor Golyavkin and many others.

Her son Boris Vakhtin (1930-1981) was a notable dissident and Russian writer, the founder of the group Gorozhane. Her third husband David Dar (1910-1980) was a notable Russian Sci-fi writer.

Vera Panova died in Leningrad in 1973 and buried in Komarovo near Anna Akhmatova.