How The Steel Was Tempered: How The Steel Was Tempered - 1

Nikolai Ostrovsky

ene 1983 · How The Steel Was Tempered Edición n.º 1 · SHARDA PRAKASHAN

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 How the Steel Was Tempered is Nikolai Ostrovsky's epic semi-autobiographical novel, the only book he ever completed before his life was cut tragically short by illness at the age of 32 in 1936. Ostrovsky was a teenage soldier in the Red Army during the Civil War, before continuing his work in the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) and frequently appeared in Soviet magazines and on radio.

Through its hero, Pavel Korchagin who begins the story as a boy slaving in the kitchens of a railway station restaurant in wartorn Tsarist Ukraine, the book follows not just Korchagin's developing life but also the development of socialism from the ashes of the First World War, through the triumph of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution to the launch of the Soviet Union's planned economy at the end of the 1920s. In work and war Korchagin's view of life is described by Ostrovsky's brilliant and famous words:

"Our dearest possession is life. It is given to us but once. And we must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live, that dying we might say: all my life all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world - the fight for the Liberation of Humankind."

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Nikolai was born in the village of Viliya near Ostroh in the Volyn' governorate in Ukraine (Volhynia), then part of the Russian Empire, into a Ukrainian working class family. He attended a parochial school until he was nine and was an honor student. In 1914, his family moved to the railroad town of Shepetivka where Nikolai started working in the kitchens at the railroad station, a timber yard, then becoming a stoker's mate and then an electrician at the local power station. In 1917, at the age of thirteen he became a Bolshevik party activist.

According to the official biography, when the Germans occupied the town in spring of 1918, Nikolai ran errands for the local Bolshevik underground. In July 1918 he joined the Komsomol and the Red Army in August. In 1921, he began working in railway workshops of Kiev as an electrician and as the secretary of the local Komsomol. In 1923 he was appointed Commisar of the Red Army's Second Training Battalion and Komsomol secretary for Berezdov in western Ukraine. In January 1924 he went to Izyaslav as the head of Komsomol district committee and in August 1924 he joined the Communist Party. n December 1927 Nikolai began a correspondence course at the Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow that he completed it in June 1929. In August, he lost his vision.