Nikolai Ostrovsky

Nikolai Alekseyevich Ostrovsky (; ; 29 September 1904 – 22 December 1936) was a Soviet socialist realist writer. He is best known for his novel How the Steel Was Tempered.

Life Ostrovsky was born in the village of Viliya (today a village in Rivne Raion (until 2020 it was situated in Ostroh Raion), Rivne Oblast) in the Volhynian Governorate (Volhynia), then part of the Russian Empire, into a Ukrainian working-class family. He attended a parochial school until he was nine and was an honor student. In 1914, his family moved to the railroad town of Shepetivka (today in Khmelnytskyi Oblast) where Ostrovsky started working in the kitchens at the railroad station, a timber yard, then becoming a stoker's mate and then an electrician at the local power station. In 1917, at the age of thirteen he became a Bolshevik party activist. At the same period he developed ankylosing spondylitis, which would later blind and paralyze him. Hence Kyiv's Ostrovsky Park was renamed Mykola Zerov Park in 2020.

A monument to Ostrovsky in Shepetivka was dismantled in December 2022 after the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Information Policy had removed it from its list of "monumental art of local significance".

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