Gennadii Gennadievich Panin was born September 25, 1895 in Moscow, the son of an engineer. His early childhood was spent in the northern town of Viatka, and from 1903 in Petersburg. In 1906, his mother Varvara Fedorovna abandoned the family, and Panin spent the following years moving between her new household and that of his father Gennadii Andreevich. He lived with an aunt in Kazan' for several years before moving to the Crimea in 1912 to rejoin his father. Panin graduated from school in Simferopol' in 1914 and returned to Petersburg to attend a technical college. He was drafted in 1916 but did not see action; in 1917 he returned to Simferopol' where he began to take active part in local literary circles and publish his own poems. Panin fought with the anti-Bolshevik Volunteer Army in the Crimea and remained there after its defeat, although his father evacuated and eventually made his way to the United States. Panin subsequently served in the Red Army, worked for the newspaper Krasnyi Krym, and pursued a number of careers before becoming an accountant in 1927. In 1925 he married Frantsiska Matveevna Shneider, with whom he remained until her death in 1984.
A new chapter in Panin's life began with his detainment by the NKVD (the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, precursor of the KGB) from June to December 1938. At the start of the war, due to his wife's German ancestry, the Panin family was exiled to the Caucasus. When the Germans occupied the territory, Panin returned to Simferopol' and worked for the newspaper Golos Kryma . In 1943 Panin's translations of the Armenian poet Simeon Babiian were published in two small collections. In late 1943, Panin left the Crimea together with the evacuating Germans. After spending several years in camps for displaced persons in Germany, Panin followed his daughter Liudmila to America in 1950 and settled in Shelton, Connecticut, not far from where his father had settled. Tragically, one of Panin's first publications, of which multiple copies are preserved among his papers, was his father's obituary.
Panin's life in the United States was a combination of hard work at a local factory and a satisfying existence on the periphery of émigré literary circles. He corresponded with many greater and lesser writers and poets, generously bestowing them with acrostics of his own composition. In time, Panin's acrostics became a staple of such newspapers as Novoe russkoe slovo and journals like Sovremennik and Novyi zhurnal ; in the latter he also published an article on acrostic theory. His love for acrostic poems found its greatest expression in a twenty-six-volume collection of the poems in various national literatures Materialy k istorii akrostikha, mezostikha, telestikha. So vremen Assirii i Vavilona do nashikh dnei . Panin included all of the poems he could find in all of the many languages in which he claimed competency, from Assyrian to Lithuanian. Panin also collected his own poetry, several short-stories, his memoirs "Putiami poter'", along with his diaries and correspondence into bound volumes. All in all, Panin completed forty-one homemade volumes before his death, and they constitute the bulk of his papers. Panin died on January 13, 1990, and is buried at Evergreen Cemetary in Ansonia, Connecticut.
From the guide to the Gennadiĭ Panin papers, 1897-1985, (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
