She was one of the "fellow travelers" of the 1920s led by the Serapion Brotherhood and became one of the most prolific communist writers experimenting in satirico-fantastic fiction.

She received a private education, and in 1912 obtained a degree in History and Philosophy, and began her career as a writer.

"[10] During the mass arrests when Nikolai Yezhov was chief of the NKVD, she had a signed half page article in Pravda in which she claimed that prisoners now known to have been forced to make false confessions under torture were doing so voluntarily out of a sense of responsibility to soviet society.

"[12] In August 1938, the first part of her novel A History Exam - the Ulyanov Family, a fictional account of the early life of Lenin was published in the magazine Krasnaya Nov.

On 5 August, the novel was banned, by order of the Politburo, Shaganyan and Krupskaya were reprimanded, and the editor responsible, Vladimir Yermilov, was sacked.

This resolution was overturned by the Central Committee as "erroneous and fundamentally wrong" on 11 October 1956, after which a revised version of the novel was published, and a sequel, The First All-Russian in 1965.

The Russian bohemian elite gathered in Koktebel every summer and stayed there until September, spending time at the Voloshin house.

"[14] Mandelstam also claimed that Shaginyan - a "tiny wizened figure" and a "deaf old bore with her thoughts on Lenin and Goethe, and her discovery of a direct relationship between a miner's lamp, the useful activities of Faust, and the famous plan for electrification"[15] - was unusual in that she made a "terrible fuss" if any suspected police spy came near her, when most soviet citizens simply put up with them, but Mandelstam suspected that she sometimes deliberately screamed at people whom she knew were not informers, to deter genuine spies.

[citation needed] A minor planet 2144 Marietta discovered in 1975 by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh is named in her honor.