Prior to the October Revolution she studied for 2 years at a private gymnasium, before her formal education was stopped because of money problems in her family.

[1] She learned newspaper work by experience, serving in turn as an assistant to the district organizer of labor correspondents, a reporter, and an essayist.

In 1935, her second husband, Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist Boris Vakhtin, was arrested and imprisoned on Solovki where he died (the exact death date is unknown, probably the later thirties).

She and her daughter were put in a concentration camp near Pskov, but they managed to escape to Narva, where they lived illegally in a destroyed synagogue.

[3] Although these 2 plays won prizes, Vera felt that the dramatic form confined her, and, by her own admission, she was unable to fit all that she wanted to say into its strict framework.

She worked for a local newspaper and published her first novel The Pirozhkov Family (later renamed Yevdokia, the source of a Soviet film produced by Tatyana Lioznova in 1961).

With the onset of the Khrushchev Thaw she wrote Vremena Goda (Span of the Year, 1953) about the relations of fathers and sons within the Soviet intelligentsia.

Her published travel notes and articles, and an epilogue to the Russian translation of The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger, show her affinity for Western life and culture.

[3] In her later life, she published many works of fiction (most of them autobiographical or based on Russian history of the 17th century), plays, and film scripts.

Her son Boris Vakhtin (1930–1981) was a notable dissident and Russian writer, the founder of the group Gorozhane.