18 Facts About Vera Panova

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

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

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

Vera Panova's reading included the works of Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Ivan Turgenev.

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

Vera Panova described her first editing job and her first steps in this career in her novel Sentimental Romance.

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

Vera Panova then moved to the village of Shishaki to stay with relatives.

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

Vera Panova worked for a local newspaper and published her first novel The Pirozhkov Family.

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

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

Vera Panova published the stories Valya and Volodya, about children, in 1959.

Vera Panova was twice awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.

Vera Panova's published travel notes and articles, and an epilogue to the Russian translation of The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger, show her affinity for Western life and culture.

Vera Panova helped many younger writers who later become famous, among them Yury Kazakov, Sergei Dovlatov, Viktor Konetzky, Andrei Bitov, and Viktor Golyavkin.

Vera Panova's son Boris Vakhtin was a notable dissident and Russian writer, the founder of the group Gorozhane.

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