Like the narrative of his protagonist, Pavka Korchagin, the life of Nikolai Ostrovsky is a series of events that records his sincere attempts to emulate the Soviet notion of "building socialism" while continuously fighting a progressive disease and the disintegration of his body. Having begun as a soldier fighting for the Bolshevik cause in Polish- and German-occupied Ukraine, having been declared an invalid at the age of eighteen, and having spent almost the entirety of his adult life in hospitals and sanatoriums, Ostrovsky nonetheless achieved his greatest dream: he became a Soviet writer. The popularity of his one completed novel, Kak zakalialas' stal' (1932-1934, How the Steel Was Tempered; translated as The Making of a Hero, 1937), was overwhelming. It easily rivaled such socialist realist classics as Maksim Gor'ky's Mat' (Mother, 1906), Dmitrii Andreevich Furmanov's Chapaev (1923), and Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov's Tikhii Don (The Quiet Don, 1928-1940).

In 1934, shortly after the...