How the Steel Was Tempered

What is the story?

Shepetovka, a small town in Volhynia. Twelve-year-old Pavka Korchagin drops tobacco into the dough of a hated priest-teacher and is expelled. Working at the station buffet he dozes off beside an open tap and floods the waiting room; a waiter beats him savagely, and his brother, a railway fitter, beats the waiter in return.

The revolution draws the boy in. The Germans arrive, and the sailor Zhukhrai teaches him English boxing and tells him about the Bolsheviks. Pavka frees Zhukhrai from a Petliurist escort and narrowly talks his way out of being shot. He falls in love with Tonya Tumanova, daughter of a forester, and sees Petliura's men carry out a pogrom. When the Reds come he joins up and moves to the First Cavalry Army for the Civil War and the Polish war; near Lvov a shell fragment in the head costs him the sight of one eye.

The novel's most famous scene is not a battle but labour. Winter is coming, and the firewood cannot be got out, so volunteers living in a ruined school at Boyarka lay a narrow-gauge railway. There Pavel meets Tonya again, now married to a railway engineer. He falls ill with typhus and his comrades believe him dead.

Recovered, he works without sparing himself until his health fails. In a Black Sea sanatorium doctors warn him of "the tragedy of immobility"; he marries Taya, daughter of his mother's friend. Paralysis follows and his remaining eye goes blind. He resolves not to give up and to become a writer. He writes Born of the Storm about his cavalry comrades, but the post loses the manuscript on its way back. He starts again, planning to kill himself if he fails, and finally an approving letter arrives from the publisher.

How much of it is real?

Nearly all of it is Ostrovsky's own life. He began writing in late 1930, gravely ill and almost blind. Lines ran over each other when he wrote by hand, so he had a cardboard stencil cut to line width; when his hand gave out, he dictated. Photographs of the manuscript show the handwriting of nineteen people. The lost manuscript happened too: his earlier cavalry tale, sent to Odessa for comment, never came back.

Why did it sell so widely?

It was the most published work of fiction in the USSR for 1918-1986: 536 editions and 36,416,000 copies, and by 1991, on another count, 773 editions in 75 languages and some 53.85 million copies. The manuscript first sent to Molodaya Gvardiya got a damning review ("the types are unreal") and was reconsidered on instruction from party bodies. What made the book known nationwide was Mikhail Koltsov's Pravda sketch "Courage". Ostrovsky received the Order of Lenin, had a uniform made for him, and delegations queued to see him.

What was cut?

The text kept changing as it was reprinted. The canonical version lost Pavel's part in the Workers' Opposition, the trade-union debate, scenes of Trotsky at the front and the bitter arguments with Trotskyists, as well as the opportunists of the NEP years and the philistinism of daily life; the love story was changed too. Koltsov, who had made the book famous, was soon arrested as an enemy of the people. After 1938 the preface was removed from library copies, because Vitaly Primakov, named in it among the "glorious commanders", had been shot. The cuts became known through research only in the 1960s and 1970s.

Is it still read?

After the Soviet collapse it left the school programme and libraries pulped their copies in large numbers; in 2023 Russia's education ministry put it back in. In China its popularity never faded, and a 20-part series made by Chinese state television with Ukrainian actors was acclaimed there in 2000. Films include Mark Donskoy's (1942), Pavel Korchagin (1957) and the six-part television version of 1973.