Early Life
Vera was born into the family of an impoverished merchant (later an accountant) in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. 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. Unfortunately 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, Nikolay Gogol, and Ivan Turgenev. She also read numerous textbooks on science, geography, and history as a form of self-education. 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. 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.
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