Her father, Yakov Bryansky, was a tragic actor of the classical school, while her mother, Anna Matveevna Stepanova, sang opera and appeared in dramatic performances.

During the last illness of the Sovremennik critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov, Panaeva acted as his nurse and as a mother figure to his younger brothers.

[2] In 1845, Fyodor Dostoyevsky read his first novel Poor Folk to a literary gathering organized by Panaeva and Ivan Panaev.

[6] Other salon visitors included Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

[2] Her memoirs, Memories (1889), while not always factually accurate, contain interesting portraits of her contemporaries, and are an important source of information on the Russian literary scene of the 1840s and 1850s.