How the Steel Was Tempered

by Nikolai Ostrovsky

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 fe…