Nikolai Ostrovsky: "a place in the iron battle for power". Russia on the eve and after October. Article two
To reveal the theme of Russia after October, 1917, Nickolai Ostrovsky's book «How steel was tempered» is one of the most significant. In it, in its purest form, there is a portrait of an ideal revolutionary - a Bolshevik, merciless not only to the enemy, but to himself and others as well, a man, from whom, according to the poet's figurative expression, there could be made the strongest nails in the world. The book was enthusiastically received by the thirteen million army of party members and Komsomol members. For some, Pavel Korchagin was an ideal to emulate, for others - an image that reinforced their own myths about past heroic deeds, allowing them to settle warmly in the present. For the authorities, the story, cleared by censorship from the Bolshevik democracy of the first years, was an artistic forerunner of the future Stalinist «Short course of the AUCP history». One of the most thoughtful Soviet literary critics, Leo Anninsky, considered the story to be a story about people «engaged to an idea». In a sense, this is true. However, the engagement prevented both Ostrovsky and his Soviet interpreter from seeing the real historical process in its tragic depth and contradictions. For the hero Pavel Korchagin, there are neither the beginnings of Stalinist totalitarianism, nor the tragedy of a collectivized, starving village. Living as if out of time, he preaches the same thing - a class struggle that never fades for a moment. It seems that the fire of struggle will be extinguished and the hero's life will be interrupted. In fact, this is not allowed to happen: the constant intensity of the class struggle, which, as Stalin said, will grow more and more as we move towards socialism, is the secret of Soviet totalitarianism, represented and justified in an artistic form by Nikolai Ostrovsky.