How the Steel Was Tempered

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How the Steel Was Tempered
Author	Nikolai Ostrovsky
Original title	Как закалялась сталь
Country	U.S.S.R.
Language	Russian
Genre(s)	Novel
Publication date	1936
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	NA

How the Steel Was Tempered is a socialist realist novel written by Nikolai Ostrovsky (1904-1936) during Stalin's era. Pavel Korchagin is the central character.

In the USSR, three films were produced by this novel:

How the Steel Was Tempered, 1942 [1]
Pavel Korchagin, 1956 (Korchagin was played by Vasily Lanovoy) [2]
How the Steel Was Tempered, 1975 (TV series of 6 episodes; Korchagin was played by Vladimir Konkin) [3]

As late as 2000, China adapted the novel to a TV series of the same title, and all the members in the cast were from Ukraine.

The novel's protagonist, Pavel Korchagin, is fighting on the side of the Bolsheviks in the Civil War (1918-1921). He is a quintessential positive hero of socialist realism. The story is a fictionalized autobiography. In real life, Ostrovsky's father died, and his mother worked as a kitchen chef. As he joined the war with the red army of communist party, he lost his right eye because of an infection.