Panova, Vera Fedorovna (1905 - 1973) Sentimental´nyi roman. M.,- L., Sovetskii pisatel´, 1965. 294 p., portr. €17,50
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8 vo, original binding, dust jacket and flyleaves designed by M. A. Kulakov. GOOD TO VERY GOOD. Minor damage to lower part of spine. RARE WITH DUST JACKET PRESERVED.

SECOND EDITION.

Valuable material for studies in the history of Soviet provincial journalism in 1920s and everyday provincial life in the south of Russia. In this fictionalized memoirs Vera Panova described her first editing job and her first steps in her jornalistic career (First published in 1958).

Vera Fedorovna Panova was a Soviet novelist, playwright, and journalist. She was also a successful and prolific script writer in mid 1960s. She 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.

From her earliest years Vera Panova 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 Trudovoi Don, publishing articles as V. Staroselskaia (the surname of her first husband Arsenii Staroselskii whom she had married in 1925 and divorced 2 years later) and Vera Vel´tman.She learned newspaper work by experience, serving in turn as an assistant to the district organizer of labor correspondents, a reporter, and an essayist.

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.

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.
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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) 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 (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.

With the onset of the Khrushchev Thaw she wrote Vremena Goda (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.

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.

In her later years she helped many younger writers who later become famous, among them Yury Kazakov, Sergei Dovlatov (her secretary for many years), Viktor Konetzky, Andrei Bitov, and Viktor Golyavkin. Her son Boris Vakhtin (1930–1981) was a notable dissident and Russian writer, the founder of the group Gorozhane.- Adopted from Wikipedia.
See: Alexandrova, Vera (1971). A History of Soviet Literature. Greenwood Press Reprint. ISBN 0-8371-6114-2; Wilson, Katharina (1991). An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, Volume 1. Taylor and Francis. pp. 955–956. ISBN 0-8240-8547-7.
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