Anna Karavaeva

Born Dec. 15 (27), 1893, in Perm’. Soviet Russian writer. Daughter of an office worker. Became a member of the CPSU in 1926.

Karavaeva graduated from the Bestuzhev Higher Women’s Courses in 1916. She was editor in chief of the journal Molodaia gvardiia (1931–38) and a correspondent for the newspaper Pravda (1941–43). Her first works were published in 1922. The main theme of her early period was the struggle for a new life in the rural areas before collectivization—the novella The Household (1926) and the novel The Timber Mill (1928), which concern the beneficial effect of socialist construction on the life of the peasantry.

At the center of her later works are the problems of the moral training of the young person. These works were devoted to the prerevolutionary democratic intelligentsia, the Komsomol members of the Civil War era, and the workers of the present: Stories of Knowledge (1934), the novel Lena From Crane Grove (1938), the collection of short stories The First Generation (1959), and the novel Facets of Life (1963). The heroic labor of Soviet people on the homefront during the Great Patriotic War (1941^5) is the theme of the trilogy Homeland (the novels Fires, 1943, Running Start, 1948, and Native Home, 1950; State Prize of the USSR, 1951). She is the author of Starry Capital: Notes and Reminiscences of a Contemporary (1968).

Karavaeva was a delegate to the International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture (1935) and to other congresses. She met with outstanding contemporary figures, whom she described in her memoirs—A. Serafimovich, N. Ostrovskii, A. Fadeev, and M. Zalka. She was awarded the Order of Lenin, five other orders, and various medals.