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Vera Mikhailovna Inber (1890–1972) was a Soviet writer, poet, translator and playwright from Odesa, Russian Empire (located in present-day Ukraine).
Leon Trotsky, a well-known Soviet political figure, was her father’s cousin and lived in their family’s home for six years during Inber’s childhood, leaving an influence on Vera Inber’s political views later in life.
Inber’s travels to Scandinavia in 1934, further display her image as a Soviet writer promoting the achievements of socialism abroad .
A notable milestone in Inber’s literary assimilation came in 1932 when she joined a group of 120 writers, led by Maxim Gorky, to produce a book on the .
From September 1941 to January 1944, Germany and Finland forces surrounded the city, cutting off supplies in an attempt to force its surrender. During the winter of 1941–1942, up to 700,000 civilians died from starvation and hypothermia, receiving as little as 125 grams of bread per day. While rations and evacuations improved in 1942, malnutrition and shelling continued, and the blockade ultimately claimed over a million lives before being lifted in 1944.
Inber’s wartime works included The Soul of Leningrad: Poems 1941–1942 and Almost Three Years (1946), a diary documenting the siege, written between 1941 and 1944 and published in 1945. She also authored her most famous work, Pulkovskii Meridian (1942), which presents detailed and observational accounts of life under siege. The success of her works was contingent on her presentation of herself as an authoritative spokesperson for the people of the blockade.
She remained politically active, participating in campaigns against other writers such as Boris Pasternak during Pasternak affair in 1958. She also contributed to a section on the Nazi extermination of Jews in Odessa, for Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman Black Book of Russian Jewry, a project that was ultimately suppressed due to the political climate.
Her later travels, involved a second visit to Finland in 1959 as part of a Soviet writers' delegation. She returned to Moscow in 1964 to attend an interview where she spoke of her writings, travels, and the duty of writers to work "in the service of peace". She also fondly recalled her 1934 trip to Scandinavia during the interview, expressing a desire to revisit Sweden, which did not end up taking place before the end of her life.
In the final years of her life, Inber remained in Moscow and did not publish another work as popular as Pulkovo Meridian (1942) or Almost Three Years (1945). Two months before her death in 1972, she donated her wartime diaries to Leningrad’s central library.
Doctor Ilya Davidovich Strashun, a Soviet physician, was Inber’s third husband. Strashun was a notable figure in Inber’s life, as reflected in her poetry. She dedicated the fifth chapter of her poem, Pulkovo Meridian, to him. The section depicts the narrator and her "lifelong companion" in Leningrad's Botanical Garden during the war.
Inber’s daughter, Zhanna Gauzner, ended up following her mother’s footsteps in pursuing a career as a writer. Inber’s daughter also had a son named Misha.
In her lifetime, Inber witnessed both her daughter and grandson die. Her daughter passed in 1962, and her grandson died during the blockade of Leningrad.
Her most acclaimed work, The Pulkovo Meridian (1943) is regarded as “one of the best long poems on the theme of war in Soviet literature”, and earned her the Stalin Prize in 1946.
Inber was also awarded the Stalin Prize in 1946 for (Also known as Leningrad Diary, in English), a collection of essays also based on her experiences during the Siege.
Her earlier work, A Place in the Sun (1928), gained international recognition and was translated into Swedish language and Finnish language.
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