Cover of How Steel is Made. Profile picture
Sculpture of Nikolai Ostrovsky. Image China
I have been teaching the History of Russian Literature in the university for a few years, and when I start the class, I am faced with young teenagers who have recently entered the university, for whom this course is not as boring as a language course, there are many stories to listen to, and many pictures to imagine. In the course of teaching the history of Russian literature in the 20th century, I enjoyed talking about the writer Nikolai Ostrovsky and his work How Steel is Made. Standing on the podium, you can see the changes of the students in the classroom and see the glowing eyes on the faces of youth.
4 "Paul Kochagin"
When it comes to "How Steel is Made", most of the students will smile and recite the famous text together, "The most precious thing about a person is life..." The children know that this is a red classic, and they know that this is a heroic figure, but they rarely explore the reason why this book has become a classic. I read this book in middle school, and it was only a hilarious reading at the time. Later, I opened the book again, covered up the volume, and more and more sketched a Paul Kochagin with a tenacious vitality, which is the integration of the characters of different stages one after another.
At the beginning of the novel, 12-year-old Paul Kochakin is a teenager who can't help but cry. He studied in general, pranked during the make-up exam, and was dropped out of school, which is really the most common headache in our lives. I asked the students, do you know such a Paul? In the classroom, they exchanged ears, whispered, and some laughed, must have remembered some of the troubles of their youth. So I knew, young Paul, that the students liked it. Paul's second image is very romantic, he meets the lively, cultured, kind Tonya, Tonya's sailor suit, Tonya's laughter, Tonya's blue eyes all touch Paul. This is the first love of the two people, and young boys and girls from different circles of life are cautiously approaching. I talked about Tonya looking in the garden from time to time in order to be able to meet Paul, and the girls in the class would listen quietly with their hands on their cheeks; I talked about Paul with messy hair at the mercy of Tonya, and some boys would have shyness on their faces; I talked about paul's strong "self-esteem" and sense of boundaries that caused the two to break up, and a girl told me that this was the romance that was unique to the bitterness of first love.
After the two "Pauls", the atmosphere of the classroom has changed significantly. Paul is no longer the distant, one-eyed image at first, he gradually approaches, making people feel familiar, so that the "third Paul" is ready to come out. The "Third Paul" appeared on the battlefield as a brave warrior, wounded in the thigh, infected with typhoid fever, and hit in the head by shrapnel. The cruelty of war forced him to experience pain and illness, but at the same time it also brought a boy to show the world of flesh and blood. Here we see for the first time a seriously read Paul, the protagonist of the novel "The Bullfly" who has often become Paul's spiritual pillar and role model. The pain forced him to leave the battlefield to join a series of domestic work, such as banditry, party group construction, railway construction, etc., and Paul still adhered to the all-out momentum when he participated in each work. In fact, Paul was only in his early 20s at this time, and this momentum was the most primitive expression of his vitality, that is, the full devotion to what he loved. Therefore, even if contemporary college students have different opinions about Paul's way of doing things at this stage, they all agree with the vivid exhilaration brought about by full devotion. The "Fourth Paul" occupies only forty or fifty pages in the whole book, and constantly wanders between the nursing home, the operating table and the bed, and the weakness, paralysis, and blindness trap him a little by little, when Paul is 24 years old. When it comes to Paul's age, I see a look of surprise and regret in class. At this time, the students had a temperature in their hearts for "Paul" and for the book.
The recklessness of youth, the rampage and abrupt stubbornness of youth, the contemplation and review of the edges of life, the 4 images are pinched together to form a complete and dynamic Paul Kochagin. In recent years, the overall transformation of world culture has greatly affected the reader's evaluation perspective of red classics, the lofty status of the original spiritual intention has decreased, and the aesthetic characteristics of art have become the main evaluation mechanism of such works. Compared with the 19th-century Russian classic realist masterpieces, the original text and various translations of this work are inferior in terms of character diversity, language style, and plot structure, which has also caused some debate about its literary value. We can't help but ask, why did "How Steel is Made" sit on the list of classics for so long?
"Resonating" with the times
The understanding of classical literature is always constantly changing, or emphasizing the aesthetic value within the text, or advocating the driving role of literature to the external society. These two definitions are justified, but if they are completely separated, they are biased, because the writer himself is responsible for the output of the words in his writings internally, perceives the reality of reality and can be touched externally, and then transforms into works, so that every writer becomes a medium connecting internal words with the external objective world. Good media bearers need to present readers with a tactile literary world that allows for a certain degree of virtuality, but is more favored for evoking emotional resonance with the reader, which is intertextual between words, authors, readers, and reality. The word "classic" in "classical literature" is the aftermath of the shock, which continues under the baptism of time. From this point of view, Ostrovsky's "How Steel is Made" fully meets the requirements of "classics". The contemporary critic Lev Anningsky, after reading How Steel is Made, said from the bottom of his heart: "... It changed me completely. It was Ostrovsky who told me the story of our fathers. I didn't know my father before I read this book, but it was he who revealed a new reality to me. The "new reality" here has really existed, and those real teenagers who have also been free to youth have put out the heat and enthusiasm of life in the intricate changes of the times, and constantly explored and realized their understanding of value.
How Steel is Made was a huge sensation soon after its publication, with 2 million copies printed in the Soviet Union in 1935 alone, and people even had to wait in line in the library for the book to be borrowed. "How Steel is Made" was translated into China shortly after its publication, and set off the first climax of reading the book in the more than ten years since the founding of New China, in addition to the publication of full translations and abbreviated versions, there are also rewrites, comic strips, stage plays and other forms of communication. In 2000, the TV series "How Steel is Made" co-produced by China and Ukraine was broadcast on CCTV, which once again aroused readers' attention to the work. According to statistics, during the broadcast of the TV series, many versions of the book by 15 publishing houses in the Beijing Book Building were snapped up in half a month.
When we re-examine the novel "How Steel is Made", we can perceive a constantly growing, short-lived but enthusiastic lifeform, which in the early days savagely hit the shackles of living space, so we see a Paul who bumped into a bag in contradictions and controversies, but firmly believed in the middle of contradictions and always followed the previous line. Beliefs and dreams have many similarities, they are more like the breath that people hold in distress, and there is this breath that life is colored and radiant. In the process of adhering to the faith, Paul completed the enlightenment and growth of the individual from the earlier barbarism to the later reflection and adjustment. The "fourth Paul" lingered on the sickbed but never recovered from his illness, constantly thinking about returning to work. Inspiring young Komsomol members, applying to work as an assistant at a newspaper, and rewriting again when the manuscript is lost, these seemingly hectic "tosses" gradually give Paul the ability to control his life. Taking control of life is one of the driving forces that many people continue to work for today, and Paul always resonates with us.
How Steel is Made is considered Ostrovsky's autobiographical novel, and the authors of the ordeal in the book have experienced almost all of them. In the last years of his life, the author read a lot of books to make up for the lack of his own literary literacy, and the result visible to the naked eye was the thick stack of manuscripts, and from the manuscripts was Ostrovsky's exploration of the state of his own life, which was a broadening of the dimension of life. At the beginning of the writer's creation, I am afraid that he never had the luxury of getting many awards, so even if the manuscript is lost and the eyes are blind, he must complete the review of this life. We seem to be able to hear the long exhalation of the writer after writing the last word, a consummation that Ostrovsky gave himself.
Iron ore is torturous and painful in the process of forging steel, and it is necessary to survive these to obtain qualitative change. Useful steel is also a combination of many ores of different sizes, so "the success does not have to be in me, the success must have me." This is like the many "Pauls" who live around us, from green to powerful, from coarse to pure, and finally refined into steel.
(Source: People's Daily)