In the third year of the civil war in the Ukraine, a consumptive compositor takes a boy aside in a printshop and puts a withered yellow hand on his shoulder.
"There's going to be a pogrom — that's a fact. The Jews are going to be beaten up. What I want to know is this — will you help your comrades in this calamity or not?"
The boy is Sergei Bruzzhak, one of the three friends the novel opens with. He has spent a year turning the wheel of a hand press twelve hours a day for Mr. Blumstein, and in that year the fourteen printers have struck repeatedly against their employer, who is himself a Jew. Mendel the compositor asks Sergei to go home and ask his father to hide old men and women, and to find out who else will. "The Russians will be safe from these bandits for the time being."
Note what Ostrovsky has done in half a page. The class line inside the Jewish community is drawn — the sweatshop proprietor is not spared by his workers, and the strike is not forgotten because a pogrom is coming. And the pogrom is not a metaphor. Eighteen times in Part One the word appears, and the novel goes through with it: the town, the bluff above the river, the overcrowded hovels, the three days, the men who proposed the thing "to provide a little diversion". Whatever else is true of this book, and a great deal is, it is one of the very few widely circulated accounts in any language of what the Ataman's men did to the Jews of the Ukraine in 1919, written by someone who was a boy in Shepetovka while they did it.
That is where an introduction to How the Steel Was Tempered has to start, because this is the most successful novel the Soviet Union ever produced and it is generally discussed as though it were an instruction manual. It became one. It did not begin as one.
Three dates. Nikolai Ostrovsky began the novel in November 1930, blind and immobilised, and finished it in June 1933; it reached Soviet readers through the magazine Molodaya Gvardiya and then in book form, and by the end of the decade it was the most reprinted book in the country. The English translation reissued here was published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow in 1952, in two parts, in the series the half-title page names as the Library of Selected Soviet Literature. This is that 1952 printing, not the later one: the work reappeared in Progress's Soviet Authors Library, advertised on the series jackets of the mid-1970s, and a reader who knows the novel from a Progress edition of that vintage has a different book in their hands from this one in at least one respect that matters, which is the foreword.
No translator is named. The copyright leaf of this printing gives none, and we have not invented one. The English is competent, plain, and slightly stiff in the speeches, which may be the translator or may be Ostrovsky; the dialogue between boys is markedly better than the dialogue at meetings, and that is certainly Ostrovsky.
The facts of his life, in outline, are not in dispute, and this volume's foreword gives them.
He was born in 1904 in the village of Viliya, in what is now western Ukraine, to a seasonal worker whose earnings were so small that his wife and daughters hired out as field labourers. He was a shepherd at nine. At eleven he was a kitchen boy in the buffet of the Shepetovka railway station, where the family had moved after the outbreak of the world war, and he escaped the buffet by spending his time with his brother in the railway depot, which is where he first heard Bolsheviks talk about Lenin. He was expelled from a two-year school at the insistence of the priest who taught Scripture, "whom the inquisitive lad had harassed with discomfiting questions". He was among the first five Komsomol members in Shepetovka. In August 1919 he ran away from home and joined the Red Army; at Lvov he was badly wounded and lost the sight of his right eye.
Then the part that makes the book what it is. In 1921 he went to Kiev, worked as an electrician in the railway workshops, studied, and led a brigade of young workers building a spur line to bring firewood into the city. The job was finished and it cost him his health. The following autumn, barely recovered, he went into the Dnieper floods to salvage rafted timber, working knee-deep in icy water. Between the battle wound, typhus and acute rheumatism he was finished as a worker at eighteen. He would not accept being invalided out, insisted on being given work, and was sent to Berezdov on the old western border. He joined the Party in 1924. By the end of 1926 it was clear he would be bedridden for life. In 1929 he went completely blind. By 1930 every joint but his hands and elbows had fused.
In November 1930, blind and unable to move, he began the novel. Part of it he wrote himself, through pain the foreword does not attempt to describe; the rest he dictated to his wife, his sister, and his friends. He was twenty-six. He finished in June 1933, and he died in December 1936, aged thirty-two.
It is worth being exact about that chronology, because it settles something. Whatever How the Steel Was Tempered went on to be used for, Ostrovsky was not a careerist and there was no career available to him. He was a disabled ex-worker who could not see, could not stand, and had been told he had nothing ahead, and who decided that the way back into the world was a book. The most famous passage in Soviet literature is his. It comes in Part Two of the novel, at a graveside, with Pavel's cap in his hand, and it is quoted here because it is the shortest way to say who wrote this book:
Man's dearest possession is life, and it is given to him to live but once. He must live so as to feel no torturing regrets for years without purpose, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he can say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world — the fight for the Liberation of Mankind. And one must make use of every moment of life, lest some sudden illness or tragic accident cut it short.
Two generations of Soviet schoolchildren copied that out. It is a young man's sentence, and it was written by someone for whom every clause of it was literal.
Part One is the making of Pavel Korchagin, and it is a good deal better as a novel than its reputation allows.
The kitchen boy at the station buffet, sacked for flooding the place; the three friends; the sailor Zhukhrai, who teaches Pavel to fight and gives him his politics; the Petlyura occupation, which the novel names sixty-five times and renders as what it was, a squalid and murderous chaos of atamans and uniforms; the pogrom; the rescue of Zhukhrai from a patrol, for which Pavel is arrested; the Red Army, the cavalry, and the head wound that nearly kills him and costs him the sight of one eye.
There is one scene in Part One that explains the whole book, and it is not a battle. Eleven scouts are sitting round a campfire and Korchagin is reading aloud to them.
"The book is called The Gadfly, Comrades. The Battalion Commissar gave it to me. It's got me, Comrades. If you'll sit quietly I'll read it to you."
Puzyrevsky, the regimental commander, rides up unnoticed and finds eleven pairs of eyes fixed on the reader. He identifies Korchagin and his friend Zharky for the Commissar, says that what they are doing is political work "and very effective it is too", and adds: "I hear these youngsters are called 'the young guard.' Most appropriate, in my opinion." Then he gets off his horse, sends the Commissar on ahead, rolls a cigarette, sits down next to Korchagin and says, "Go on reading, I'll listen too." Pavel reads to the end. Nobody speaks. The commander smokes and waits for the discussion, and Sereda starts it. "A grim story that," he says. "So there are people like that in the world. Few men could stand what he did. But when a man has an idea to fight for he's strong enough to stand anything."
The Gadfly is Ethel Voynich's 1897 novel about an Italian conspirator who is tortured and shot. Readers of this series will want to sit with that for a moment. The model for the most widely imitated hero in the literature of the Russian revolution was supplied by an Englishwoman, born in Cork, the daughter of the mathematician George Boole, in a book about endurance under interrogation; and the transmission happened by a battalion commissar handing a volume to a scout who read it aloud round a fire. Later, in a nurse's ward diary, comes the entry that settles it: "I know now why he never groans. I asked him, and he replied: 'Read The Gadfly and you'll know.'" That is the actual genealogy of Pavel Korchagin, and it is a great deal more interesting than the one the doctrine later supplied for him.
Puzyrevsky's phrase is worth a footnote of its own. "The young guard" was common Komsomol currency, not Ostrovsky's coinage and not Fadeyev's: it was already the name of the Komsomol's publishing house and of the magazine Molodaya Gvardiya, which is where How the Steel Was Tempered first reached its readers. Fadeyev's The Young Guard, also in this series, draws on the same stock phrase rather than on this line. Three things in the strand carry the name, and all three are drawing on one piece of Komsomol vocabulary.
And Tonya. Pavel's first love is the daughter of a forestry official, and the novel does not resolve her cheaply. She is generous, brave at the right moments, and irreducibly of another class; the break, when it comes, comes because she will not be absorbed and he cannot see why she would want anything of her own. The foreword files this under "wholesale rejection of private life", which is accurate as description and complacent as judgement. Ostrovsky writes it as a loss. He was better at loss than the doctrine that later claimed him had any use for.
Part One ends with the Korchagin brothers reunited in their mother's room, both alive against the odds, and Pavel going back to Kiev after two weeks because his work is waiting. The politics of the 1920s have not yet arrived. They arrive in Part Two, and so does the reason this novel needs an introduction rather than merely a reprint.
Every volume in this series carries a commissioned framing, and they are evidence. This one, eight pages headed "Nikolai Ostrovsky and His Novel", is a 1952 document and makes no attempt to be anything else.
It quotes "J. V. Stalin" on the Ukraine in the civil war. It quotes the History of the C.P.S.U.(B.), Short Course on the first Five-Year Plan. It credits Ostrovsky's political education to "the role played by the Party of Lenin and Stalin". It refers twice to "the First Stalin Five-Year Plan", and notes with satisfaction that brigades of young Stakhanov workers "at the great Stalin construction works" are named after the author and his hero. It states that Korchagin becomes "a fiery organizer of collectivization in the countryside" — the novel was finished in June 1933 — and offers this as praise, in a sentence that also lists his fight against slackers and against workers careless with their tools.
Set that beside the foreword Progress commissioned for Ivan Melezh's People of the Marsh, reissued in this same series of ours. In the 1979 volume, Stalin's name does not occur once; the word "collectivisation" does not occur once; the political content of the novel is confined to a single parenthesis. The house did not become more honest between 1952 and 1979. It stopped naming things. The 1952 foreword tells you what it wants you to believe and who told it so. The 1979 foreword tells you about the marsh.
Two further things in it are worth marking, because they are the doctrine describing itself in its own words.
The first is the foreword's account of the relation between Ostrovsky and Korchagin. It concedes the obvious likeness, quotes Ostrovsky's own insistence that the book "is a novel, and not simply the biography of Komsomol member Ostrovsky", and then says this: "the private, social and creative lives of both hero and author form one organic whole subordinated to service of the people. This is a feature common to all Soviet writers and one that lends convincing power and veracity to the characters they depict."
Read the second sentence again. The collapse of the distance between a writer and his hero is not being noticed; it is being required, of all Soviet writers, and offered as the source of veracity. That is the aesthetic doctrine of the period stated with unusual candour, and it is the exact opposite of what makes fiction able to tell the truth. A novelist who cannot stand at a distance from his protagonist cannot show you anything the protagonist does not already believe. Ostrovsky, as it happens, was better than the prescription: Tonya exists, Dubava exists, and both of them see things Korchagin cannot. But the prescription is what the house was recommending to its readers in 1952, and it is what the next generation of Soviet novelists had to write against.
The second is a reading list, and it is a gift to anyone working through this series. The foreword records what Ostrovsky read. As a boy: Garibaldi and the Gadfly, the poetry of Taras Shevchenko, Gogol's Taras Bulba. As a young Communist, in a correspondence course at the Communist University: Marx and Lenin, then the Russian classics — Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov — "and, above all, Gorky", whose Mother he had read to him when he could no longer read, and from whom he had friends copy out passages on the tasks of the proletarian writer. And on the Civil War specifically, three books: Furmanov's Chapayev, Serafimovich's The Iron Flood, and Fadeyev's Debacle.
Three of those are in this series of reissues. Serafimovich's The Iron Flood is here; Fadeyev's Debacle is here under the title The Rout; Shevchenko's poems are here, in two separate printings; Gogol is here and Turgenev is here. A reader who wants to know what made Pavel Korchagin can put the actual books on a shelf. We recommend doing it, and we recommend starting with The Rout, because Fadeyev wrote it at twenty-five, before he was anybody, and it is the one book on Ostrovsky's list that refuses every consolation this novel accepts.
One sentence in this 1952 foreword requires separate handling, and it is this:
The novel condemns all that is sordid and degrading to human dignity, as may be seen from Pavel's attitude towards the depraved Trotskyite Dubava, his encounter with the lewd Failo, and from the author's treatment of what passed between Razvalikhin and Lida. Nikolai Ostrovsky shows how political double-dealing goes hand in hand with moral dissipation.
Dubava is Korchagin's oldest friend and one of the best-drawn characters in the book. What happens to him in Part Two, and what that sentence is doing when it files an oppositionist between a lecher and a seducer, is the subject of the introduction to Part Two of this edition, where it belongs. Readers who have only this volume should know that the second half of How the Steel Was Tempered contains an extended dramatisation of the Party discussion of 1923 and 1924, in which the Left Opposition appears as the enemy; that our house has reissued it uncut; and that we have said in that volume exactly what we think of it.
There is a way of handling a book like this that we want no part of, which is to read it only as a symptom. How the Steel Was Tempered is not a forgery and Ostrovsky was not a liar. He was a worker who gave a wrecked body to the revolution, believed what his Party told him, and wrote down what he had seen with more honesty than the doctrine could comfortably absorb — which is why the pogrom chapter is in it, and why Tonya is a person rather than a class label, and why the book's grip on readers who have no interest in Bolshevism at all has never really loosened.
What was done to the novel afterwards was not done by him. He was dead within three years of finishing it, before the Terror, before the men his Dubava was modelled on were shot, before the book became a school subject and his hero became a set of instructions. Part One is the part of How the Steel Was Tempered where that has not happened yet: a boy in a railway town, a pogrom, a sailor teaching him to use his fists, and a cause worth a life.
Read it that way. Then read Part Two with the introduction we have put in front of it.