Pavel Korchagin, Soviet Huckleberry Finn

Whether seen from the red-hearted Soviet or the red-blooded American point of view, it’s probably sacrilegious to suggest that Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered is the Soviet Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But so be it: This post may just land the royal “we” in a frozen Siberian literary gulag, or back in Aunt Polly’s frigid civilized clutches.

Each novel represents the peculiar zeitgeist of its culture. And each is beloved by its readership (or was, in the case of Soviet readers).

First editions of Huckleberry Finn and Pavel Korchagin's adventures.

How the Steel Was Tempered’s iron-willed hero, Pavel Korchagin, struggles to shuck off the yoke of cultural imperialism, while Huck Finn escapes from both his drunken, abusive Pap and the insidious despotism of Aunt Polly. Korchagin survives torments as a child at the hands of blindered, stupid schoolmasters; as a menial employee at a railroad-depot cafeteria; as a Red Cavalry man fighting the Poles, the White Guard, Ukrainian bandits, Cossacks, Letts, Germans, and about everyone else; as a factory worker; as a hard laborer laying a railroad line in the midst of winter to save the whole city of Kiev from freezing due to lack of firewood; as a burgeoning Bolshevik battling the political stupidity of too many of his fellow Russians; and finally, as a 24-year-old combating the ravages of illness and wounds that eventually confine him to his bed — his body paralyzed, his eyes gone blind, and his soul frustrated to not be on the front lines of Communism.  Still, as Korchagin vows, “So long as my heart beats in my chest, no one will be able to tear me away from the Party.”

Pavel Korchagin, Red Cavalry hero.

Huck — as well as his partner on the raft, the escaped slave Jim — are both in search of freedom, that peculiarly American obsession, and something that Korchagin would not only never understand but likely despise. No doubt Korchagin would have written Huck off as one of the bourgeois and his search as selfish, petty, and not of assistance to the betterment of mankind — which is so far from the American mindset as to simply be incomprehensible.

Huck Finn, all-American rascal.

As Korchagin promises his mother in a statement that sums up his both his raison d’être and the theme of the novel, “I’ve given my word to keep away from the girls until we’ve finished with all the bourgeois in the world.” And while such a statement was the genesis for literature in Soviet Russia (maybe not great literature, but exceedingly popular and best-selling literature), it would have been a boat anchor of a plot in the USA. (And this, despite the alluring vision in the novel of that comrade-cum-vixen, Rita Ustinovich — the 18-year-old appartchik with the oh-so-modern bobbed raven-colored hair and suggestive khaki tunic and “narrow leather belt” who is so far removed from the Madonna–whore dichotomy of so much western bourgeois literature.)

Third printing title page.

First (left) and third printing.

How the Steel Was Tempered was indeed the fictionalized autobiography of Ostroksky, albeit carefully burnished by Soviet censors. And as with Huckleberry Finn and the fledgling American world, How the Steel Was Tempered was a novel that spoke to the Soviet psyche. Ostrovsky became a worker-hero of Soviet socialist-realism authors, just as Mark Twain was the personification of an American Homer: He was literary yet down-home; smart and at the same time, smart-assed. Huck Finn spoke to Americans while Ostrovsky’s Korchagin avatar became a cultural saint to the masses — and not just in the USSR, but also in translation behind the Iron Curtain, in communist China, and other politically enlightened countries.

The bedridden Nikolai Ostrovsky on the front lines of Soviet literature.

The powers that be in Moscow kept How the Steel Was Tempered eternally in print and translated it for the bourgeois English-speaking world in 1952 as part of the Foreign Languages Publishing House propaganda offerings. Several film versions were made over the years, starting in 1942, when Korchagin’s story helped keep the inspiration alive during the war years, and continuing with 1957’s Pavel Korchagin remake.

Korchagin comes to the big screen.

Huck Finn and Pavel Korchagin were worlds apart and likely would not have understood each other should they have ever met. Yet they both stood for the zeitgeist of their culture, and made for great stories on their own.