Vera Panova - Career

Career

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).

From 1940 she lived in Leningrad. The unexpected advance of the Nazis on the Leningrad Front found 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. She then moved to the village of Shishaki to stay with relatives. 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.

In 1943, when the Germans retreated from Ukraine, she moved to Perm (called Molotov at that time). 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). 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. 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.

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 2 children and her own family she returned to Leningrad. In 1947 she published the novel Kruzhilikha, translated as Looking Ahead (Stalin Prize in 1948), about people working in a Ural factory. She had began writing the novel in 1944, but had been interrupted by the hospital train assignment. 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 published the stories Valya and Volodya, also about children, in 1959.

Panova held a place among the top Soviet writers. At the Writer's Congresses of 1954 and 1959 she was elected as a member of the Presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers. She was twice awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1955, 1965). As an established writer she was allowed to travel to England, Scotland, and Italy, and in 1960 she toured the United States. Her published travel notes and articles, and an epilogue to the Russian translation of The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, show her affinty for Western life and culture.