Nikolai Ostrovsky

Life

Ostrovsky was born into a Ukrainian working-class family in the village of Viliya, then part of the Russian Empire. He attended a parochial school until age nine and was an honor student. In 1914 his family moved to Shepetivka, where he worked in railroad station kitchens, a timber yard, as a stoker's mate, and later as an electrician at the local power station. At thirteen he became a Bolshevik party activist, and around the same time developed ankylosing spondylitis, which would later blind and paralyze him.

During the German occupation in spring 1918 he ran errands for the Bolshevik underground. He joined the Komsomol in July 1918 and the Red Army in August, serving in the Kotovsky cavalry brigade. In 1920 he was wounded near Lviv and contracted typhus. After returning to the army he was wounded again and demobilized on medical grounds.

In 1921 he worked in Kiev railway workshops as an electrician and Komsomol secretary. In August 1922 he was sent to Berdyansk for treatment, and in October 1922 was officially declared an invalid. He continued working, becoming Commissar of the Red Army's Second Training Battalion and Komsomol secretary for Berezdiv in 1923. In January 1924 he became head of the Komsomol district committee in Iziaslav and joined the Communist Party in August 1924.

His health declined rapidly; after treatment in Kharkiv and a sanatorium in Crimea, polyarthritis left him virtually bedridden by December 1926. He completed a correspondence course at the Sverdlov Communist University in June 1929, and lost his vision in August 1929.

Legacy

How the Steel Was Tempered is considered one of the most influential works of Communist literature, despite being regarded as relatively weak in artistic merit. In Moscow the Ostrovsky Museum and Humanitarian Centre preserve his study and bedroom, with exhibits including achievements of disabled people.

The Ostrovsky Republican Prize was established by the Central Committee of Komsomol of Ukraine. Ukrainian decommunization laws banned the use of Ostrovsky's name for public places; Kyiv's Ostrovsky Park was renamed Mykola Zerov Park in 2020. A monument to Ostrovsky in Shepetivka was dismantled in December 2022.

Did You Know?

• He completed a correspondence course at the Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow from December 1927 to June 1929.
• He lost his vision in August 1929, but began writing his first novel in 1930.
• He was awarded the Order of Lenin on 1 October 1935.