Nikolai Ostrovsky

Nikolai Alexeevich Ostrovsky
Nikolai Ostrovsky
Born	(1904-09-29)29 September 1904 Viliya, Ostrog county, Volhynian Governorate
Died	22 December 1936(1936-12-22) (aged 32) Moscow, USSR
Resting place	Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow
Occupation	Novelist, Chekist, Communist Party member
Language	Russian language
Nationality	Ukrainian
Alma mater	Sverdlov Communist University
Genre	socialist realist
Notable works	How the Steel Was Tempered
Spouse	Raisa Porfyrivna (nee Motsyuk)

Nikolai Alexeevich Ostrovsky (Russian: Николай Алексеевич Островский; Ukrainian: Микола Олексійович Островський; 29 September 1904 – 22 December 1936) was a Soviet socialist realist writer, of Ukrainian origin. He is best known for his novel How the Steel Was Tempered.

Ostrovsky was born in the village of Viliya (today a village in Ostroh Raion, Rivne Oblast) in the Volhynian Governorate (Volhynia), then part of the Russian Empire, into a Ukrainian working-class family. He attended a parochial school until he was nine and was an honor student. In 1914, his family moved to the railroad town of Shepetivka (today in Khmelnytskyi Oblast) where Ostrovsky started working in the kitchens at the railroad station, a timber yard, then becoming a stoker's mate and then an electrician at the local power station. In 1917, at the age of thirteen he became a Bolshevik party activist. At the same period he contracted ankylosing spondylitis, which would later blind and paralyze him.

According to the official biography, when the Germans occupied the town in the spring of 1918, Ostrovsky ran errands for the local Bolshevik underground. In July 1918 he joined the Komsomol and the Red Army in August. He served in the Kotovsky cavalry brigade. In 1920 he was reportedly wounded near Lviv and contracted typhus. He returned to the army only to be wounded again and was demobilized on medical grounds. However, in the autobiography written by Ostrovsky himself, he does not mention that he had served in the Red Army.