养成阅读英文电子书的习惯，让自己徜徉在英语书的海洋里！
书籍英文名：How The Steel Was Tempered
书籍中文名：钢铁是怎样炼成的
书籍作者：尼古拉·奥斯特洛夫斯基 Nikolai Ostrovsky
书籍简介: How the Steel Was Tempered is Nikolai Ostrovsky’s epic semi-autobiographical novel, the only book he ever completed before his life was cut tragically short by illness at the age of 32 in 1936. Ostrovsky was a teenage soldier in the Red Army during the Civil War, before continuing his work in the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) and frequently appeared in Soviet magazines and on radio.
Through its hero, Pavel Korchagin who begins the story as a boy slaving in the kitchens of a railway station restaurant in wartorn Tsarist Ukraine, the book follows not just Korchagin’s developing life but also the development of socialism from the ashes of the First World War, through the triumph of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution to the launch of the Soviet Union’s planned economy at the end of the 1920s. In work and war Korchagin’s view of life is described by Ostrovsky’s brilliant and famous words:
“Our dearest possession is life. It is given to us but once. And we must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live, that dying we might say: all my life all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world – the fight for the Liberation of Humankind.”
Despite the fact that Ostrovsky’s novel is one of the worlds most popular, having been printed in many millions of copies in many languages and many countries, it has naturally never been accepted as a great literary work by bourgeois critics. Its subject and its immortal message that the working class and oppressed can and must seize and consciously shape their own destiny shines through the pages and years as powerfully as ever, meaning it cannot be a great work of art for these people. How the Steel Was Tempered does not have literary conceits or difficult to understand passages, but this is not to say it is not well written, nor that its descriptions are not artistic.
Frequently dismissed as a mere propaganda novel, How the Steel Was Tempered certainly has a forceful message, but this is not the cynical work of some hack. Struck down by a terrible degenerative disease that claimed the use of his limbs and sight, and with enormous effort, Ostrovsky continued his fight for the liberation of humankind through his novel, much of it written agonisingly with the aid of a stencil. Like Nikolai Ostrovsky, Pavel Korchagin does not let anything crush his spirit and retains his positive outlook on life until the end.
《钢铁是怎样炼成的》讲述保尔·柯察金出生在乌克兰的舍佩托夫卡城，他和母亲、哥哥生活在一起。他们和大多数人一样生活得很贫穷。保尔因报复凶狠的神甫的虐待，被学校开除了。为了生活，保尔只好去火车站的食堂做童工，在那里，他看到了社会中更多的丑恶和不平。一九一七年沙皇被推翻了，红军来到了保尔的家乡。在老布尔什维克朱赫来的引导下，年轻的保尔逐渐成长起来。他冒着危险救出被捕的朱赫来，并被哥萨克匪兵毒打，关进了监狱……在苦难中成长起来的保尔参加了红军，成为一名优秀的侦察兵，后在著名的英雄布琼尼率领的骑兵部队中英勇作战。他因负伤回到地方，担任共青团的工作。他忘我地投身到为巩固苏维埃政权的建设和斗争中。在严寒的西伯利亚修筑铁路时，保尔的旧伤复发，差点儿死去。出院后，保尔已不能正常工作，他很痛苦，身体每况愈下，以至双目失明。他始终顽强地与病魔斗争，并用笔写下了光辉的人生。
