1904–1936
○ Illness
Author of How the Steel Was Tempered, paragon of socialist realism
Life is given to us but once. So live that, dying, you can say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in the world — the fight for the liberation of humankind.
Bolshevik activist from age 13, Red Army cavalryman in Kotovsky's brigade, and Komsomol organizer, Nikolai Ostrovsky wrote How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–1934) after ankylosing spondylitis left him blind and paralyzed at 25. Dictating to volunteer secretaries through a writing frame, he produced a semi-autobiographical novel whose protagonist Pavel Korchagin became the moral template for generations of Soviet, Chinese, and Korean communists. With 36.4 million copies sold, it remains the best-selling book in the Russian language and one of the best-selling books of all time. Awarded the Order of Lenin in 1935, Ostrovsky died at 32, his life itself a testament to the revolutionary will his novel celebrated.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1917Bolshevik underground courier, Shepetivka
- 1919Joined Komsomol and Red Army; served in Kotovsky cavalry brigade
- 1921–1923Electrician and Komsomol secretary, Kyiv railway workshops
- 1924Joined Communist Party; district Komsomol secretary, Berezdiv and Iziaslav
- 1930–1934Wrote How the Steel Was Tempered while blind and paralyzed
- 1935Awarded the Order of Lenin
- 1936Began Born of the Storm; died before completing it
Related historical events
- 1917–1921Ukraine’s revolution and warsBolshevik underground courierIn 1917 he served as a courier for the Bolshevik underground in Shepetivka.
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionRed Army cavalrymanHe volunteered in August 1919, served in Kotovsky's cavalry brigade and the First Cavalry Army, and was wounded near Lviv in August 1920.
The Writing and Reception of How the Steel Was Tempered
Ostrovsky wrote his novel under physical conditions that made solitary work impossible. At the end of 1930, already nearly blind and immobilized, he began How the Steel Was Tempered. He first wrote by hand, but because his lines ran over one another illegibly he devised a cardboard writing frame, or stencil, with slits cut to the width of a line, and wrote through it. Later his right arm too failed, and he began dictating slowly, phrase by phrase. Nineteen volunteer secretaries transcribed the manuscripts, and their handwriting is still legible in the manuscript copies held at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). He finished Part One during 1931 and completed Part Two, dictated entirely, by mid-1932.
The road to publication was not smooth. The manuscript submitted to the journal Young Guard drew a scathing review, its "unreal types" condemned, and was accepted only after Ostrovsky demanded a second review and party organs intervened. Editors then reworked the text heavily: passages in which the author depicted the wounded hero's suffering and the breakdown of his marriage were cut from the 1932 serial and the 1936 book, or reshaped to fit socialist realism. On learning of the book's publication Ostrovsky wrote: "The book is out, which means it is recognized! Which means there is something to live for!"
What made the country aware of his existence was Mikhail Koltsov's sketch "Courage" in Pravda in 1935. Ostrovsky received the Order of Lenin, the Ukrainian government built him a house in Sochi, and the Moscow authorities gave him an apartment on Tverskaya Street. In 1936 the People's Commissariat of Defense conferred on him the honorary rank of brigade commissar, and his photograph in that uniform became his iconic image. The novel became the most-published Soviet literary work of 1918–1986, with 36.416 million copies in 536 editions, and by the eve of the USSR's collapse it had appeared in 75 languages and some 53.85 million copies.
The novel's influence crossed borders. In China, Pavel Korchagin was widely read as a moral model for the young, and the book is still named among university students' favorites. According to the scholar Go Koshino, it reached China through five adaptations, the Soviet films (1942, 1957), a lianhuanhua picture book (1972), a Japanese manga (1975), and a 1999 Chinese TV drama, and readers became deeply attached to the doomed love with Tonya, a heroine meant to be read negatively as bourgeois. After the USSR's collapse the novel dropped out of the Russian school curriculum and was widely pulp, though in 2023 the Russian education ministry announced its return. The fate of a single novel traces the rise and fall of twentieth-century socialist culture.