Who is he, the protagonist of Nicholas Ostrovsky, “How Steel was tempered,” is a model of male resistance and an example to follow or the one who crossed off everything human to survive to survive? Depends on what era the reader met with the work and from what angle he looked at the hero.
More recently, the Steel Young man was an example for young readers. Uneducated, drunk from school, the son of a cook, gets closer to the Baltic Bolshevik Zhukhrai, which gives the young man a semantic platform. The ideology of a merciless struggle with the bourgeoisie falls on the protest teenage psyche, forever closing the topic of searching for oneself and growing up. The young republic uses the hero, demanding dedication and offering only monstrous poverty in return, and he chooses the only way to maintain self -esteem – to give himself all himself to the holy idea without a trace, “so that it is not painfully painful …”.
Any masochist, despite the sacrifice, enjoys, if not from suffering, then from moral superiority over those who cannot sacrifice so much and so suffer. Convision sounds from
the hero of the hero to the working narrow -fly, who does not want to ruin health in inhuman conditions, her own girl and other “unconscious element”.
Someone can envy such conviction and the immortal formula in which the decision sounds to devote the life of the struggle for the happiness of all mankind. But the steel character, translated by young generations as an example of male persistence, from the point of view of psychology, is not a sign of personal integrity, as the builders of communism saw, but a manifestation of rigidity, rigidity, immaturity and black and white view of the world.
What was given to us for the manifestation of almost holiness – the ability to endure all the hardships of the ministry – in fact, a dissociative protective mechanism that allows you to cleanse everything human: the ability to be afraid, experience, feel cold, hunger, pain. There is nothing heroic about this, this is one of the ways of the psyche to adapt to the unbearable conditions of being.
Pavel Korchagin today
The life of young people is now more prosperous and lighter, less polar and demanding on the manifestation of heroism than when Nikolai Ostrovsky wrote “How Steel was tempered”. They have conditions for reflection, gradual personal ripening, choosing personal meanings and social positions. Therefore, for young people, Korchagin is no longer a role model.
But for the older generation, he, I believe, is still a hero. The heroic ability to expose in hardships and troubles, the habit of enduring, suffering, renegading pain and their human needs firmly entered them. Moreover, these suffering is often easily eliminated, they no longer save the life of life, they do not serve any high goal, but they are familiar and unconsciously repeated.
Any unshakably convinced person who replaced thoughts, doubts and the search for meaning to formulas and simple answers, ready to uncompromisingly fight those who have opposite views, carries the features of Pavel Korchagin. It remains only to hope that he will not again become a symbol of the new time.