Nikolai Ostrovsky

Nikolai Ostrovsky (1904-1936) was a Soviet novelist associated with socialist realism. Born into a Ukrainian working-class family, he is remembered almost entirely for one book, whose reach far outlasted his short life. His illness and blindness, which shaped his final years, help explain the earnest, committed tone of his writing.

He was born in Viliya, in the Volhynia region of the Russian Empire, in what is now Ukraine. He attended a parish school and, in 1914, his family moved to Shepetivka, a railway junction where he took a series of jobs, from kitchen work at the station to the local power plant. At seventeen he was already active in the Bolshevik cause; by his thirteenth birthday, according to the official biography, he had been running errands for the local underground during the German occupation of 1918. He then joined the Komsomol and the Red Army, serving in Kotovsky's cavalry brigade. He was wounded in combat and contracted typhus, and in 1922 he was declared an invalid of war, though he kept up political and organizational work in Ukraine.

The ankylosing spondylitis that he probably had from around 1917 gradually left him almost immobile, and in August 1929 he lost his sight. That same period he completed a correspondence course at the Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow. In 1930 he began work on his first novel, How the Steel Was Tempered, drawing on memories of childhood and the revolution. The book is marked by a heroic tone and a passionate belief in the socialist cause, which explains much of its popularity among Soviet readers. He also left a second novel, Born of the Storm, about the civil war in Ukraine, which was unfinished when he died on 22 December 1936, aged 32.

His legacy is more political than literary. Critics often regard the artistic merit of his novel as modest, yet it reached millions of readers and was translated into many languages. In Moscow, a museum and a humanitarian centre were built to preserve his study and bedroom. After Ukraine's 2015 decommunization laws, his name was removed from public places: a Kyiv park was renamed for Mykola Zerov in 2020, and a monument to him in Shepetivka was dismantled in 2022.