Introduction

In a general sense the revolutionary epics of Sholokhov and Aleksey Tolstoy explore revolutionary experience in terms, respectively, of instinct and ideas. Both epics end on a note of optimism for the future that subsumes that their heroes, or principal figures, have undergone some fundamental change in their lives as a consequence of revolution and civil war. If the political implications of this change seem obscure in the case of Grigory Melekhov, they are explicit in the case of Roshchin, Dasha and Katya. Renewal of hope may seem instinctive in Grigory Melekhov's repudiation of his past, his hereditary Cossack militancy, and in his reassumption of a parental role. Such renewal seems to be motivated by ideological fiat in Aleksey Tolstoy's happy ending.

After the adoption of Socialist Realism as the official doctrine for Soviet literature at the First Congress of Soviet writers in 1934, optimism about the outcome of the revolutionary process as depicted in literature became mandatory. Tragedy and revolution became officially incompatible. A concept of ‘optimistic tragedy’ can be seen to absolve Soviet writers of the need to examine the full tragic implications of human mortality. No work of the 1930s in Soviet literature accomplishes this task better than How the Steel was Tempered (Kak zakalyalas' stal') (1934) by Nikolay Ostrovsky (1904–36). Although only the first part of this two-part novel is concerned, strictly speaking, with the events of the civil war in the Ukraine, as a whole the novel is designed to show how the revolution fundamentally changed the life of its youthful hero, Pavel Korchagin, making him physically its victim while fortifying and guiding his spirit in a manner admirably suited to the concept of ‘optimistic tragedy’.