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Nikolai Alekseevich Ostrovsky (1904–1936) was a Soviet writer and participant in the Civil War.
At the age of fifteen, Ostrovsky joined the Komsomol and immediately went to the front as a volunteer. "It happened that together with the Komsomol ticket we... received a rifle and two hundred cartridges". A young fighter with boundless energy, he quickly became an organizer of the Komsomol in the units of the Red Army. After a severe back injury, Nikolai Ostrovsky returned to a full life. He entered the Kyiv electrotechnical school, then a technical school, and worked as an assistant electrician. Young Ostrovsky always sought to be where he was most needed by his Motherland. On a Komsomol construction site for a railway line in Kyiv, Nikolai caught a severe cold and fell ill with typhus. At the age of eighteen, Ostrovsky was declared disabled but continued to work diligently.
His autobiographical novel "How the Steel Was Tempered" (1934) was written while Ostrovsky was confined to bed. It became the autobiography of the writer. Ostrovsky's severe condition did not prevent him from creating the most famous and widely read work of Soviet literature. The events of the novel unfold against the backdrop of the Civil War (1917–1922); it depicts the establishment of socialism in the country and the restoration of the national economy. The main character, Pavel Korchagin, became an example of courage and the strength of the human spirit for many generations.