“The most precious thing for a person is life.

It is given to him once, and he must live it in such a way that it would not be excruciatingly painful for the aimlessly lived years, so that he would not burn the shame for a vile and petty past, and so that, dying, he could say: all life and all strength were given to the most beautiful in the world. - struggle for the liberation of mankind.

Nikolai Ostrovsky

Nikolai Ostrovsky was born on September 29, 1904 in the village of Viliya in Volhynia in the family of a retired military man.

His father Alexei Ivanovich distinguished himself in Russian-Turkish war 1877-1878 and for special courage he was awarded two St. George's crosses. After the war, Anatoly Ostrovsky worked as a maltmaker at a distillery, and Ostrovsky's mother, Olga Osipovna, was a cook.

The Ostrovsky family did not live well, but together, they valued education and work. Nikolai's older sisters, Nadezhda and Ekaterina, became village teachers, and Nikolai himself was admitted to the parochial school ahead of schedule "because of his outstanding abilities," which he graduated at the age of 9 with a certificate of merit. In 1915 he graduated from a two-year school in Shepetovka, and in 1918 he entered the Higher Primary School, later transformed into the Unified Labor School, and became a student representative on the pedagogical council.

From the age of 12, Ostrovsky had to work for hire: a cube-maker, a worker in a warehouse and an assistant fireman at a power plant. Subsequently, he wrote to Mikhail Sholokhov about this period of his life: "I am a full-time stoker and I was a good master when it came to filling boilers."

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Hard work did not interfere with Ostrovsky's romantic impulses. His favorite books were Spartacus by Giovagnoli, Gadfly by Voynich, novels by Cooper and Walter Scott, in which brave heroes fought for freedom against the injustice of tyrants. In his youth, he read Bryusov's poems to friends, having come to Novikov, he swallowed Homer's Iliad, Erasmus of Rotterdam's Praise of Stupidity.

Under the influence of Shepetov's Marxists, Ostrovsky became involved in underground work and became an activist in the revolutionary movement. Brought up on romantic adventurous bookish ideals, he accepted the October Revolution with enthusiasm. On July 20, 1919, Nikolai Ostrovsky joined the Komsomol and went to the front to fight against the enemies of the revolution. He first served in the Kotovsky division, then in the 1st Cavalry Army under the command of Budyonny.

In one of the battles, Ostrovsky fell off his horse at full gallop, later he was wounded in the head and in the stomach. All this severely affected his health, and in 1922 the eighteen-year-old Ostrovsky was retired.

After demobilization, Ostrovsky found a use for himself on the labor front. After graduating from school in Shepetovka, he continued his studies at the Kiev Electrotechnical College without leaving work, and, together with the first Komsomol members of Ukraine, was mobilized for the restoration National economy. Ostrovsky participated in the construction of a narrow-gauge railway, which was supposed to become the main highway for providing firewood to Kyiv, which was dying from cold and typhus. There he caught a cold, fell ill with typhus and was sent home unconscious. Through the efforts of his relatives, he managed to cope with the disease, but soon he caught a cold again, saving the forest in the icy water. Study after that had to be interrupted, and, as it turned out, forever.

He later wrote about all this in his novel "How the Steel Was Tempered": and how, saving the timber rafting, he rushed into ice water, and a severe cold after this labor feat, and rheumatism, and typhus ...

At the age of 18, he learned that the doctors had given him terrible diagnosis- incurable, progressive Bechterew's disease, which leads the patient to complete disability. Ostrovsky had severe pain in his joints. And later he was given the final diagnosis - progressive ankylosing polyarthritis, gradual ossification of the joints.

Doctors suggested that the shocked young man go on disability and wait for the end. But Nicholas chose to fight. He strove to make life in this seemingly hopeless state useful for others. However, the consequences of exhausting work increasingly made themselves felt. He experienced the first bouts of an incurable disease in 1924 and in the same year became a member of the Communist Party.

With his characteristic full dedication and youthful maximalism, he devoted himself to working with young people. He became the Komsomol leader and organizer of the first Komsomol cells in the border regions of Ukraine: Berezdovo, Izyaslavl. Together with Komsomol activists, Ostrovsky participated in the struggle of the ChON detachments with armed gangs seeking to break into Soviet territory.

The disease progressed, and an endless series of stays in hospitals, clinics and sanatoriums began. Painful procedures, operations did not bring improvement, but Nikolai did not give up. He was engaged in self-education, studied at the Sverdlovsk Correspondence Communist University, and read a lot.

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At the end of the twenties in Novorossiysk, he met his future wife. By the autumn of 1927, Nikolai Alekseevich could no longer walk. In addition, he developed an eye disease, which eventually led him to blindness, and was the result of complications from typhus.

Nikolai Ostrovsky with his wife Raisa a year before his death.

In the autumn of 1927, Ostrovsky began to write autobiographical novel"The Tale of the Cats". The manuscript of this book, created by a truly titanic work and sent by mail to Odessa to former comrades for discussion, unfortunately, was lost on the way back, and its fate remained unknown. But Nikolai Ostrovsky, who was used to enduring and not such blows of fate, did not lose courage, and did not despair.

In a letter dated November 26, 1928, he wrote: “People, strong as oxen, walk around me, but with cold blood, like that of fish. Moldy smells from their speeches, and I hate them, I can’t understand how healthy man can get bored in such a stressful period. I have never lived such a life and never will."

Since that time, he was forever bedridden, and in the autumn of 1929 Ostrovsky moved to Moscow for treatment.

"The brought stop of 20 - 30 books was barely enough for him for a week," his wife noted. Yes, in his library there were not two - two thousand books! And it began, according to the mother, with a magazine sheet in which they wanted to wrap a herring for him, but he brought the herring, holding it by the tail, and put the magazine sheet on the shelf ... "Have I changed a lot?" Ostrovsky later asked Martha Purigne, his old friend. "Yes," she replied, "you have become an educated man."

In 1932, he began work on How the Steel Was Tempered. After an eight-month stay in the hospital, Ostrovsky and his wife settled in the capital. Absolutely immobilized, blind and helpless, he remained completely alone for 12-16 hours a day. Trying to overcome despair and hopelessness, he was looking for a way out of his energy, and since his hands still retained some mobility, Nikolai Alekseevich decided to start writing. With the help of his wife and friends, who made him a special "transparency" (a folder with slots), he tried to write down the first pages of a future book. But this opportunity to write himself did not last long, and in the future he was forced to dictate the book to his relatives, friends, flatmate, and even his nine-year-old niece.

He fought the disease with the same courage and perseverance with which he once fought in the civil war. He was engaged in self-education, read one after another book, graduated from a communist university in absentia. Being paralyzed, he led a Komsomol circle at home, prepared himself for literary activity. He worked at night, using a stencil, and during the day, friends, neighbors, wife, mother together deciphered what was written.

Nikolai Ostrovsky strove to learn how to write well - traces of this are clearly visible to an experienced eye. He studied the art of writing under Gogol (scenes with Petliura's Colonel Golub; beginnings like "good evenings in the Ukraine in the summer in such small towns as Shepetovka...", etc.). He studied with his contemporaries ("chopped style" B. Pilnyak, I. Babel), those who helped him edit the book. He learned to paint portraits (it turned out not very skillfully, monotonously), to look for comparisons, to individualize the speech of characters, to build an image. Not everything was successful, it was difficult to get rid of clichés, to find successful expressions - all this had to be done, overcoming illness, immobility, the elementary impossibility of reading and writing ...

The manuscript sent to the journal "Young Guard" received a devastating review: "the derived types are unrealistic." Ostrovsky, however, secured a second review of the manuscript. After that, the manuscript was actively edited by Mark Kolosov, deputy editor-in-chief of the Young Guard, and Anna Karavaeva, executive editor, famous writer that time. Ostrovsky acknowledged the great participation of Karavaeva in working with the text of the novel; he also noted the participation of Alexander Serafimovich.

The first part of the novel was a huge success. It was impossible to get the issues of the magazine where he was published, in the libraries there were queues for him. The editors of the magazine were flooded with a stream of reader letters.

The image of the protagonist of the novel - Korchagin was autobiographical. The writer rethought personal impressions and documents, and created new literary images. revolutionary slogans and business speech, documentary and fiction, lyricism and chronicle - all this was combined by Ostrovsky into something new for Soviet literature piece of art. For many generations of Soviet youth, the hero of the novel has become a moral model.

Once, dissatisfied with some of the family scenes in the novel, a critic wrote that they contributed to "liquefying the granite figure of Pavka Korchagin." Nikolai was outraged - granite is not a building material for a living person. He called the article "vulgar": "I am heartily ill, but I will answer with a blow of a saber." One of his voluntary secretaries, Maria Barts, left us evidence of what bothered him during dictation: "Did it turn out like a human? Isn't it popular? Isn't Pavel Korchagin too orthodox?

In 1933, Nikolai Ostrovsky in Sochi continued to work on the second part of the novel, and in 1934 the first complete edition of this book was published.

In March 1935, an essay by Mikhail Koltsov "Courage" was published in the Pravda newspaper. From it, millions of readers first learned that the hero of the novel "How the Steel Was Tempered" Pavel Korchagin is not a figment of the author's imagination. That the author of this novel is the hero. Ostrovsky began to admire. His novel has been translated into English, Japanese and Czech languages. In New York, he was published in a newspaper.

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October 1, 1935 by Decree of the Presidium Supreme Council USSR Ostrovsky was awarded the Order of Lenin. In December 1935, Nikolai Alekseevich was given an apartment in Moscow, on Gorky Street, and a dacha in Sochi was built especially for him. He was also given military rank Brigadier Commissar.

Ostrovsky continued to work, and in the summer of 1936 he finished the first part of Born by the Storm. At the insistence of the author, the new book was discussed at an off-site meeting of the Presidium of the Board of the Union of Soviet Writers at the author's Moscow apartment.

The last month of his life, Nikolai Alekseevich was busy making amendments to the novel. He works "in three shifts" and was preparing to rest. And on December 22, 1936, the heart of Nikolai Alekseevich Ostrovsky stopped.

On the day of his solemn funeral, December 26, the book was published - the workers of the printing house typed and printed it in record short lines.

Meyerhold staged a performance about Pavka Korchagin based on a dramatization of the novel by Yevgeny Gabrilovich. A few years before his death, Yevgeny Iosifovich Gabrilovich told what a grandiose spectacle it was: "At the screening, the hall exploded with applause! It was so burning, so amazing! It was a solemn tragedy." We can clearly see the tragedy of that era today. Then it was forbidden to see her. After all, "life has become better, life has become more fun" ... The performance was banned.

The novel "How the Steel Was Tempered" by Ostrovsky went through more than 200 editions in many languages ​​of the world. Until the late 1980s, it was central to the school curriculum.

Nikolai Ostrovsky was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

The most precious thing for a person is life. It is given to him once, and it is necessary to live it in such a way that it would not be painfully ashamed of the aimlessly lived years, so that shame would not burn for the mean and. a petty past and so that, dying, he could say: all life and all forces are given to the most important thing in the world: the struggle for the liberation of mankind. And we must hurry to live. After all, an absurd disease or some tragic accident can interrupt it.

Triumph of will.

The main feature of Nikolai Ostrovsky was truthfulness and the search for justice.

December 22, 1936, at eight o'clock in the evening, in Moscow, on Tverskaya, one person said:

“Did I moan? No? This is good. So death can't overpower me."

Nikolai Ostrovsky. 1926 © / RIA Novosti

He died within half an hour. died undefeated - proudly and with dignity. His name was Nikolai Ostrovsky. He was 32 years old.

Ostrovsky's novel was published in a circulation of approximately 60 million copies. “Approximately” - because China is participating in the race, where the book was published with a circulation of 15 million. And this is not the limit - “How the Steel Was Tempered” is considered a deficit in the Celestial Empire, and Chinese youth are met halfway and the circulation is constantly reprinted.

Soviet writer Nikolai Ostrovsky (1st from left) at a meeting of the Berezovsky district party committee (from the collections State Museum N. Ostrovsky). 1923 Photo: RIA Novosti

In 1934 Lugansk student-philologist Marchenko wrote an indignant letter to the Young Guard magazine (he wanted to take How the Steel Was Tempered from the library, but it turned out that 176 people were in line for the book):

Why do they do this to readers? Print more, please, so that there is enough for everyone!”

Eight years later, in the most severe winter of 1942, in besieged Leningrad, “How the Steel Was Tempered” was republished at the initiative of the townspeople. The text is typed in a dilapidated building. Circulation is printed by turning the machines by hand, since there is no electricity. And they sell 10,000 copies in two hours.

Covers of the book “How the Steel Was Tempered”, published in Hungarian, German and Portuguese Photo: AiF Collage

Covers of the book How the Steel Was Tempered, published in Spanish, Vietnamese and Hindi. Photo: Collage AiF

This is the USSR. But here is the letter that Ostrovsky received from the state of Queensland (Australia):

“If not for the injury to my leg, I would have been working and saving money for a trip to you, my favorite Russian writer.” And here is the news from the prison in the Bulgarian city of Stara Zagora: “After long ordeals, one copy of the book “How the Steel Was Tempered” was finally received. Two of us have already read it, and all 250 political prisoners have to read it... I am delighted with the book, and the comrade who is reading it now does not tear himself away from it for a moment.”

That the book is not a primitive agitation, but a great literary event, said many foreign reviewers. The English edition of the Daily Worker publishes an obituary:

"The fact that Ostrovsky died so young is a loss not only for the USSR, but for the literature of the whole world."

Suppose it is the newspaper of the British Communists. But here's how Reynold's Illustrated News responded to the lifetime edition of How the Steel Was Tempered:

"Ostrovsky in in a certain sense genius".

"Genius", "innovator", "pride and glory of the generation", "a beacon for many thousands of people", "personification of courage" - it's all about him. And they talk about it famous people. The authors of the last two definitions are Nobel laureate, writer Romain Rolland and poet, member of the Goncourt Academy Louis Aragon.

In his youth, Nikolai Ostrovsky suffered three typhus and dysentery. Then Bechterew's disease (inflammation of the joints and spine), glaucoma and blindness, heart damage, pulmonary fibrosis, kidney stones and regular pneumonia. Against this background, the following is constantly happening:

“My gallstone ruptured my gallbladder, resulting in hemorrhage and bile poisoning. Doctors then unanimously said:

"Well, now amba!"

But they didn’t succeed again, I scratched myself out, again confusing medical axioms. ”

So Ostrovsky wrote 4 months before his death. Of course he was treated. But even treatment often caused pain. So, in 1927, he was assigned sulfur baths at the Goryachiy Klyuch resort. The distance from Krasnodar (which is 46 km) the writer covered 6 hours. During this time, he lost consciousness 11 times from pain. But he was silent.

Writer Nikolai Ostrovsky with his family on the day he was awarded the Order of Lenin. From left to right: the writer's wife Raisa Porfirievna, sister Ekaterina Alekseevna, niece Zina, brother Dmitry Alekseevich and mother Olga Osipovna. 1935 Photo: RIA Novosti / O. Kovalenko

Nine years of continuous suffering. “The patient freezes first large, and then the rest of the joints. He turns into a living statue - the limbs are in different provisions, depending on how they were flooded with the lava of the disease ”- this is the most approximate description of how Ostrovsky lived.

Nikolai Ostrovsky received an apartment on Tverskaya, which became his last refuge, in 1935, along with the Order of Lenin. What happened before, the writer himself can tell:

“I'm not a blues champion. Let the grabbers crawl through, occupy the apartments, it doesn’t make me feel hot. The place of a fighter is at the front, and not in the rear squabbling holes. The purpose of my life is literature. It is better to live in a closet and write than to seek an apartment.”

"His main feature there was honesty. He was internally charged with the search for justice, ”the critic commented on Ostrovsky Lev Anninsky. This is a very Russian trait. source

Jet Li:“My favorite hero is Pavka Korchagin. And by the way, there is one great book, which I read in my youth and which had a decisive influence on me - "How the Steel Was Tempered" by Nikolai Ostrovsky. As, however, main character— Pavel Korchagin.

This book, in fact, raised a man out of me. And I still constantly re-read it, I remember it, and wherever I am - in the USA, in China, somewhere else in Asia - I always quote the words of Paul:

"Do not be afraid of any obstacles and ups and downs on your way, because steel can only be tempered in this way."

(September 16 (29), 1904, in the village of Viliya, Ostrozhsky district, Volyn province - December 22, 1936, Moscow) - Soviet writer, author of the novel How the Steel Was Tempered.

Short biography.

Childhood and youth

Born on September 16, 1904 in the village of Viliya, Ostrozhsky district, Volyn province Russian Empire(now the Ostrozhsky district of the Rivne region of Ukraine) in the family of a non-commissioned officer and excise official Alexei Ivanovich Ostrovsky (1854-1936).

He was admitted ahead of schedule to the parochial school “because of his outstanding abilities”; He graduated from school at the age of 9, in 1913, with a certificate of merit. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to Shepetivka. There, Ostrovsky worked for hire from 1916: first in the kitchen of a station restaurant, then as a cube-maker, a worker in material warehouses, an assistant to a stoker at a power plant. At the same time he studied at a two-year (from 1915 to 1917), and then a higher primary school (1917-1919). He became close with the local Bolsheviks, during the German occupation he participated in underground activities, in March 1918 - July 1919 he was a liaison officer of the Shepetovsky Revolutionary Committee.

Military service and party work

July 20, 1919 joined the Komsomol. “Together with the Komsomol ticket, we received a gun and two hundred rounds of ammunition” Ostrovsky recalled.

August 9, 1919 went to the front as a volunteer. He fought in the cavalry brigade of G.I. Kotovsky and in the 1st Cavalry Army. In August 1920, he was seriously wounded in the back near Lvov (shrapnel) and demobilized. Participated in the fight against the insurgent movement in the special forces (CHON). According to some reports, in 1920-1921 he was an employee of the Cheka in Izyaslav.

In 1921, he worked as an assistant electrician in the Kyiv main workshops, studied at an electrical technical school, and at the same time was the secretary of the Komsomol organization.

In 1922 he participated in the construction railway line for the supply of firewood to Kyiv, while he caught a bad cold, then fell ill with typhus. After recovery, he was commissioner of the Vsevobuch battalion in Berezdovo (in the region bordering Poland).

He was the secretary of the district committee of the Komsomol in Berezdovo and Izyaslav, then the secretary of the district committee of the Komsomol in Shepetovka (1924). In the same year he joined the CPSU (b).

Illness and literary creativity

From 1927 until the end of his life, Ostrovsky was bedridden. incurable disease. By official version, Ostrovsky's state of health was affected by injury and difficult working conditions. The final diagnosis is "progressive ankylosing polyarthritis, gradual ossification of the joints."

In the autumn of 1927, he began writing the autobiographical novel The Tale of the Kotovtsy, but six months later the manuscript was lost during shipment.

After unsuccessful treatment at a sanatorium, Ostrovsky decided to settle in Sochi. In a letter to an old communist acquaintance in November 1928, he described his "political organizational line":

“I have plunged headlong into the class struggle here. All around us here are the remnants of the whites and the bourgeoisie. Our house management was in the hands of the enemy - the son of the priest ... ". Despite the protests of most of the residents, Ostrovsky, through local communists, ensured that the "son of the priest" was removed. “There was only one enemy in the house, a bourgeois arrears, my neighbor ... Then the struggle for the next house went ... He was also won by us after the“ battle ”... Here the class struggle - for eliminating alien and enemies from the mansions ...”.

From the end of 1930, with the help of a stencil invented by him, he began to write a novel. "As the Steel Was Tempered". Ostrovsky dictated the text of the book to volunteer secretaries for 989 days.

In April 1932, the Young Guard magazine began publishing Ostrovsky's novel; in November of the same year, the first part was published as a separate book, followed by the second part. The novel immediately gained great popularity in the USSR.

In 1935, Ostrovsky was awarded the Order of Lenin, he was given a house in Sochi and an apartment in Moscow on Gorky Street (now his house-museum) for living.

In 1936, Ostrovsky was enrolled in the Political Directorate of the Red Army with the rank of brigade commissar.

For the past few months, he has been surrounded by universal honor, hosting readers and writers at home. Moscow Dead Lane (now Prechistensky), where he lived in 1930-1932, was renamed in his honor.

Compositions:

1927 - "The Tale of the Kotovites" (novel, manuscript lost during shipment)
1930-1934 - "How the steel was tempered"
1936 - Born of the Storm

encyclopedic Dictionary winged words and expressions Serov Vadim Vasilievich

Life must be lived in such a way that it is not excruciatingly painful for the aimlessly lived years.

Life must be lived in such a way that it is not excruciatingly painful for the aimlessly lived years.

From the novel (part 2, ch. 3) "How the Steel Was Tempered" (1932-1934) Soviet writer Nikolai Alekseevich Ostrovsky(1904-1936): “The most precious thing for a person is life. It is given to him once, and he must live it in such a way that he is not painfully ashamed of the aimlessly lived years, so that he does not burn shame for a vile and petty past, and so that, dying, he can say: all life and all strength are given to the most important thing in the world: struggle for the liberation of mankind. And we must hurry to live. After all, an absurd illness or some tragic accident can interrupt it.

Overwhelmed by these thoughts, Korchagin left the fraternal cemetery.

Quoted as a call to a decent, active life.

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