Who is he, the protagonist of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel «How the Steel Was Tempered» — a model of male resilience and an example to follow, or the one who split off everything human from himself in order to survive? It depends on the era in which the reader got acquainted with the work and from what angle he looked at the hero.
Until recently, the «steel youth» was an example for young readers. The uneducated son of the cook, expelled from school for pranks, becomes close to the Baltic Bolshevik Zhukhrai, who gives the young man a semantic platform. The ideology of a merciless struggle against the bourgeoisie falls on the protest teenage psyche, forever closing the topic of finding oneself and growing up. The young republic uses the hero, demanding self-giving and offering only monstrous poverty in return, and he chooses the only way to maintain self-respect — to give all of himself to the holy idea without a trace, «so that it does not hurt excruciatingly …».
Any masochist, despite the sacrifice he makes, enjoys, if not from suffering, then from moral superiority over those who cannot sacrifice so much and suffer so much. Condemnation comes from the lips of the hero against a narrow-gauge railway worker who does not want to ruin his health in inhuman conditions, his own girlfriend and other «irresponsible element».
What was presented to us as a manifestation of almost holiness is, in fact, a dissociative defense mechanism
Someone may envy such a conviction and an immortal formula in which the decision to devote one’s life to the struggle for the happiness of all mankind sounds. But the steel character, broadcast to the younger generations as a model of male resilience, from the point of view of psychology, is not a sign of personal integrity, as the builders of communism saw it, but a manifestation of rigidity, rigidity, immaturity and a black and white view of the world.
What we were given as a manifestation of almost holiness — the ability to endure all the hardships of service — is essentially a dissociative defense mechanism that allows us to split off everything human: the ability to be afraid, worry, feel cold, hunger, pain. There is nothing heroic in this, it is one of the ways of the psyche to adapt to the unbearable conditions of life.
Pavel Korchagin today
The life of the young is now more prosperous and easier, less polar and demanding for the manifestation of heroism than when Nikolai Ostrovsky wrote How the Steel Was Tempered. They have the conditions for reflection, gradual personal maturation, the choice of personal meanings and social position. Therefore, for young people, Korchagin is no longer a role model.
But for the older generation, I think he is still a hero. The heroic ability to endure in hardships and troubles, the habit of enduring, suffering, splitting off pain and their human needs has firmly entered into them. Moreover, often these sufferings are easily eliminated, they no longer save anyone’s life, they do not serve any lofty goal, but they are habitual and unconsciously repeated.
Any unshakably convinced person who has replaced reflections, doubts and the search for meaning with formulas and simple answers, who is ready to uncompromisingly fight those who have opposing views, bears the features of Pavel Korchagin. One can only hope that he will not again become a symbol of the new time.