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Vera (Fëdorovna) Panova (1905-1973) |
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Soviet writer and journalist, who
followed
in her works socialist realism quite faithfully, and empasized kindness
and sympathy between people. Vera Panova won three State Prizes and her
book were published in more than 50 languages. Several of her best
stories were devoted to children and explored the problems of moral
upbringing. Panova was also a successful playewright. "What Seryozha wanted to say was something like this: I can think what I like, I can cry as much as I like, it'll all be the same. You grownups have the power, you can allow or forbid, you can give presents or punish, and if you say I've got to be left behind you'll leave me behind whatever I do. That is what he would have answered had he had the words. The feeling of helplessness when faced with the tremendous, boundless power of grownups crushed him." ('Seryozha (An excerpt)' by Vera Panova, Soviet Russian Literature 1917-1977: Poetry and Prose: Selected Reading, compiled by Yuri Andreyev, introductory articles and biographical notes by Yuri Andreyev, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980, p. 558) Vera Panova was born in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia.
Panova's mother
worked as a bookkeeper. Her
father, who was a bank clerk, drowned
in a boating accident when she was only six years old. The family fell
on hard times. When still a child, Panova was forced to go to
work in a laundry. After the revolution of 1917 she could not continue
her education at the
gymnasium school in Rostov. However, she had a passion of reading. Her
self-education Panova continued through the tumultous civil war years. Panova had started to write poetry and prose at early age, and
in 1922 she joined the staff of a small local newspaper, Trudovoi
Don (Laborer's Don).
She also worked as a correspondent for other newspapers,
writing mostly book reviews, and on publications for children. Under the pseudonym "Vera Velt'man" she published humorous pieces and sketches in a number of Rostov papers and journals. In 1925, she married Arsenii Starosel'skii, a journalist. From 1930 to 1935 Panova wrote for a Pioneer magazine. In 1933 she began to compose plays, but, by her own admission, did not succeed well. Her first stage piece, Vesna (Spring) was produced by B. Fatilevich in the Theater of Drama of Rostov-on-the-Don. Il'ia Kosogor (1939), a four-act melodrama, showed the influence of Gorky. Her first marriage was not happy, and after divorce Panova
married Boris Vakhtin, a Pravda journalist and an aspiring writer. They
had
two sons. Vaktin was arrested in 1935 during the Stalinist purges; he
died in the Gulag. Panova was fired from her newspaper as the wife of an "enemy of the people." The family
split apart for a period. In 1939 she left her sons and mother in the
village of Shishaki near Rostov-on-Don, Ukraine. To survive without a regular income, Panova relied on the help of friends. She rented small rooms and wrote at kirchen tables, in a constant fear of being arrested in the middle of the night. Eventually she decided to write to Stalin and ask him for help. "I asked Iosif Vissarionovich to give me an opportunity to work, to bring me back into the society out of which I was thrown without a fault on my part." (quoted in 'In their own words? Soviet women writers and the search for self' by Anna Krylova, A History of Women's Writing in Russia, edited by Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 259) By the beginning of World War II, Panova lived with her daughter in the town of Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoe Selo) near Leningrad. When the area was occupied by the Nazis, she made her way to the Estonian border town of Narva. Panova was due to be deported to a German concentration camp with other Russian refugees and prisoners of war, but she managed to escape and returned to Ukraine, where she was reunited with her two sons and her mother. After the liberation of Ukraine, she moved to the city of Perm
in the Urals, where she wrote stories for a local newspaper and radio
station. The whole family was cramped into one little barracks room. In 1944 Panova was invited by the Perm Branch of the Union of Soviet Writers to travel on board a hospital train no. 312 and write a brochure about it. Panova interviewed the staff one by one. "They all needed a listener," Panova recalled. "They had already told each other everything long ago, but here was a fresh person, silent, attentive. I didn't interrupt, didn't counter: "And here's what happened to me," only listened." (quoted in Chapaev and His Comrades: War and the Russian Literary Hero across the Twentieth Century by Angela Brintlinger, Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press,:2012, p. 107) This journey formed the basis for Panova's popular novel Sputniki (1946, The Train), which won a Stalin Prize in literature and opened her doors to the Soviet Writers' Union the same year. The English translation of the novel by Eve Manning and Marie Budberg, published by Putnam in 1948, went largely unnoticed. "They had supper. The train crawled along slowly, half-heartedly, now and then stopped altogether. The highway with the retreating troops disappeared in the background. One could see the suburbs from the windows: huts and orchards and meadows hedged in. A country house gleamed in the distance: four smoky white walls without a roof and the empty eyes of windows. A village could be seen in flames and a cornfield behind it — smoke pervaded the air. The soil was dug up in trenches. Hardly any human beings about. The train shook almost uninterruptedly. And through the noise of the wheels one could hear the uninterrupted din of bombardment." (The Train by Vera Panova, translated from the Russian by Eve Manning & Marie Budberg, London: Putnam & Company, 1948, p. 80) The plotless story was composed of a series of episodes. The war is depicted indirectly, through the stories of the wounded and the train crew, their past and present. The political commissar Danilov, who keeps the train running, is the obligatory positive hero. His opposite is the weak and self-centered surgeon Suprugov, who collects books, sculptures, Venetian glassware and Chinese porcelain, but has little understanding of them. The real hero is the staff, all the characters except Suprugov. "Sputniki is a socialist realist novel, yet one which deviates from the socialist realist canon. It operates within the system of socialist realist themes and concers, yet it exposes the problematics in them." ('Socialist in Form, Humanist in Content: Vera Panova's Artistic Method in Prose and in Film' by Anat Vernitski, Blok, No. 2, 2003, p. 135; https://repozytorium.ukw.edu.pl/handle/item/5233. Accessed 1 July 2025) Later on the novel was adapted into screen by Iskander Khamraev under the title The Charity Train (1965) – the scenario was written by Panova – and in 1975 it was turned into a four-part television film. Curiously, Panova's novel did not have an omniscient narrator, but Khamraev's film includes a voice-over commentary. In 1945 Panova married David Iakovlevich Ryvkin, a science-fiction writer and poet, best known by his pen name, David Dar. With him she lived relatively comfortably in Leningrad. Panova's Devochi (1945, The Young Girls), won a Committee on the Arts award as the best play for young people on a contemporary theme. During the war years she had began writing the novel Kruzhilikha (1947), set in a factory town in the Urals. Like in The Train, Panova's characters were largely taken from real life. They are not only good or bad citizens. With the portrayal of the egocentric factory director Listopad she broke the rules of Socialist Realism: he is a "negative hero" who is treated with sympathy. Despite criticism she was given a Stalin prize for Kruzhilikha.
Panova's third Stalin Prize was awarded for Yasny bereg (1949,
The Bright Shore), in which the major figure, director of a collective
farm, was more in tune with the concept of the positive hero in Soviet
literature. When later speaking of the novel, Panova did not have much
good to say about her character description; it was weak and anemic. From the early 1950s Panova wrote regularly for the
prestigious literary journal Novyi mir. Vremena goda (1953, Span of the
Year) appeared first in the journal, and was praised in Literaturnaia gazeta, the organ of
the Writers' Union. The initial approval was buried under the wrath of
conservative writers, among them Konstantin Simonov. This time, the cause was the subtly
drawn parallel between corruption in the upper level and criminal
underworld, the latter personified in the character of Gennadii
Kupriianov, the son of an admirable Party woman. He is a stiliaga,
living a life of an antisicial misfit, but triumphantly. Panova refused
to renounce him. "I saw him then much too clearly: his dirty, uncut
hair, and jerky walk, his impudence and unwillingness to take into
consideration anybody or anything, and into consideration anybody
or anything, and his disproportionate pretensions to temporal
comforts." (quoted in An Analysis of Themes, Characters, and Literary Devices in Vera Panova's Major Fiction by Ruth L. Hinkle Kreuzer, Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa, thesis, 1977, p. 8) The
main negative character,
Stepan Bortashevich, is a scoundler hiding behind a mask of
respectability. When he is revealed near the end of the story (most of
it he is presenten as a likeable person), he shoots himself, unable to
face
the public humiliation of a court case. Panova tells that his life had
ended on the day that he reached out his hand for money. One of the
characters thinks: "A villa, a stone wall, a car to go to the market!
My God, to squander your life on such trash! Your one and only life." (Span of the Year, translated by Vera Traill, Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1977, p. 128) Span of the
Year was
widely discussed at the
Leningrad Writers Conference and in the
press. Panova herself did not participate in the dispute. Vsevolod
Kochetov, an arch-conservative writer and a secretary of
Leningrad's branch of the Soviet writers' union, criticized the novel
for its "naturalism" and distorting the portraits of Communists. Bad reviews did not prevent the book from becoming an immediated success with the reading public. It was also well received in England and the United States. "I really caught it from the critics because of my Gennadii," Panova wrote in her memoirs, "but I didn't renounce him and I will not. I saw him then much too clearly: his dirty, uncut hair, and jerky walk, his impudence and unwillingness to take into consideration anybody or anything and his disproportionate aspirations to personal comforts." ('Vera Panova' by Ruth Kreuzer, in Russian Women Writers: Volume 2, edited by Christine D. Tomei, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1999, p. 1015) Vremena goda is a
pathbreaking
novel that signaled hopes of change in the Stalinist
cultural policy, but it was Ilya Ehrenburg's
novelette The Thaw that gave its name to the "de-Stalinization"
era of the mid 1950's and early 1960s. Among the most famous works to
emerge from this period was Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich (1962). Largely autobiographical Sentimentalnyi Roman
(1958, A
Sentimental Romance) reflected some of Panova's experiences as a young
reporter in Rostov. The
story was presened as the reminiscences of a succesful writer; the tone
is bitterswee. The work was adapted to screen by Igor Maslennikov in
the 1970s. Serezha
(1955, Time Walked / A Summer to Remember) marked the beginning of a
new cycle of stories about children. It was a psychological novella,
seen through the eyes of a small boy, whose life changes when his
widowed mother marries a collective farm director, a kind and
understanding man. Serezha
was turned into a film in 1960,
which received
the main prize at the 12th International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary.
"Forget political friction for a moment," wrote the film critic Bosley
Crowther. "Out of Russia has come a sensitive and charming little
picture about the simple psychology of a child that sheds more light
upon the nature of the Russian people than all the fierce sky-filling
blasts of nuclear bombs." ('A Sensitive Film: 'Summer
to Remember,' Soviet Import, Opens' by Bosley Crowther, The New York Times,
November 7, 1961) Panova managed find room for her literary creativity and her liberal views under the pressure of the censorship and the constraints of Socialist Realism. Though she wrote about women's lives, her perspective was not strictly feminist; the term "woman writer" had in Soviet society negative connotations dating from prerevolutionary times. Focus on domestic issues and the private sphere without ideological content was regarded as a serious drawback by censors and critics. "Panova was essentially a Party writer, whose books were considered (on the whole) ideologically sound. Against a generally mediocre socialist realist background, however, she was noted for her vivid descriptions of real-life situations. Furthermore, the reader could identify with her characters who were not portrayed in purely black-and-white terms as either heroes or villains." ('Vera Fedorovna Panova 1905-1973: Prose writer and dramatist' by Anna Pilkington, in Reference Guide to Russian Literature, edited by Neil Cornwell, London; Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998, p. 613)
A Leningrad writer Kiril Koscinski characterized Panova as
straightforward and sharp in her evaluation of the authorities. On the
other hand, she participated with a number of other decent writers in
the campaing against Boris Pasternak, regarding
the publication of Doctor Zhivago abroad as a provocation
against the Soviet intelligentsia. As a part of
a delegation of Soviet authors Panova travelled in the
United States in 1960 and described her impressions in Iz Amerikanskikh vstrech (From
My American Encounter). Panova also wrote plays, film scenarios,
memoirs O moei zhizni, knigakh i chitateliakh (1975), and some
historical novellas about Russian princes and saints. She wrote the
first review of J.D. Salinger's The
Catcher in the Rye, translated by Rita Rait-Kovaleva; the novel
(especially the use of colloquial language) had a great impact on the
writing of the younger generation. In 1967 Panova suffered a stroke, from which she never fully recovered. Serafima Iur'eva, who was the author's literary secretary, said in Vera Panova: Pages of Life. Towards a Biography of a Novelist In Russian (1993) that her autobiography was censored. Vera Panova died in Leningrad on March 3, 1973; she had a Christian burial. Just before her death, she and her husband divorced. Panova's son Boris Vakhtin (1930-1981) founded the Gorozhane (Urbanists) group, a free literary association operating in Leningrad, which in contrary to the so-called "village prose" advocated more modernist and sophisticated writing. For further reading: V mire geroev Very Panovoi by S. Fradkina (1961); Tvorchestvo Very Panovoi by L.A. Plotkin (1962); Women in Soviet Fiction by Xenia Gasiorowska (1968); 'Panova, Vera (Federovna),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); An Analysis of Themes, Characters, and Literary Devices in Vera Panova's Major Fiction by Ruth L. Hinkle Kreuzer, thesis (1977); Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin by Deming Brown (1978); Vera Panova by A. Ninov (1980); Vera Panova: stranitsy zhizni: k biografii pisatel'nitsy by Serafima Iur'eva (1993); 'Vera Federovna Panova 1905-1973' by Anna Pilkington, in Reference Guide to Russian Literature, edited by Neil Cornwell (1998); 'Vera Panova' by Ruth Kreuzer, in Russian Women Writers: Volume 2, edited by Christine D. Tomei (1999); 'Socialist in Form, Humanist in Content: Vera Panova's Artistic Method in Prose and in Film' by Anat Vernitski, Blok, No. 2 (2003); A History of Women's Writing in Russia, edited by Adele Marie Barker and Jehanne M. Gheith (2004); Sovetskaia literatura:kratkii kurs by Dmitrii Bykov (2012); Chapaev and His Comrades: War and the Russian Literary Hero across the Twentieth Century by Angela Brintlinger (2012); Vera Panova's Produktionsroman" Kruzilicha"(1947) als nonkonformes Werk der Zdanovscina by Friedbert Trau (2024) Selected works:
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