Inber, Vera Mikhailovna

Born June 28 (July 10), 1890, in Odessa; died Jan. 1, 1972, in Moscow. Soviet Russian writer. Became a member of the CPSU in 1943.

Inber began to publish her works in 1910. Inber’s earliest poems were marked by the love of life and elegant, sober irony that were characteristic of her mature work. The collections The Goal and the Path (1925) and To a Son Who Does Not Exist (1927) reflect the poet’s interest in the creative forces of the new society. In the mid-1920’s, Inber was close to the constructivists; she later became a journalist, a writer of sketches (for example, her travel notes America in Paris, 1928), and a prose writer (humorous short stories from daily life in the cities; the autobiographical chronicle A Place Under the Sun, 1928). The collection of poems Sotto Voce (1932) conveys the warmth of new human relations. In this collection she studies the “region of the heart”; such was also the spirit and tone of Inber’s narrative poems about her trip to Soviet Georgia entitled Travel Diary (1939). During the Great Patriotic War, Inber was in besieged Leningrad, and with great artistic power she registered the heroic defense of the city: the collection of poems The Soul ofLeningrad (1942), her Leningrad diary Almost Three Years (1946), and the narrative poem The Pulkovo Meridian (1943; State Prize of the USSR, 1946). Among her postwar works are a book of poems entitled April (1960), with Lenin as its theme, and a book about literary experience, Inspiration and Craftsmanship (1957).

Inber is a poet of calm meditation and pensiveness, inclined to domesticating and “warming” the wide world. These same traits are also present in her popular poems and stories written for children. Inber was awarded three orders as well as medals.