In the third year of the civil war in the Ukraine, a consumptive compositor puts a withered hand on a boy's shoulder and tells him there is going to be a pogrom. He asks whether the boy will help his comrades in this calamity or not. Half a page has already done two things. The class line inside the Jewish community is drawn, because the fourteen printers have struck repeatedly against an employer who is himself a Jew, and the strike is not forgotten because a pogrom is coming. And the pogrom is not a metaphor. The word appears eighteen times in Part One, and the novel goes through with it: the town, the bluff above the river, the three days, the men who proposed the thing to provide a little diversion. This is the book that taught a generation how to be a Bolshevik, written by a man who was blind and immobilised by the time he finished it. Part One carries Pavel Korchagin from a railway-town kitchen to the Red cavalry. The text is the Foreign Languages Publishing House printing of 1952, reproduced complete. That includes the publisher's own foreword, Nikolai Ostrovsky and His Novel, which is part of the document and is restored here. No translator is named on the copyright leaf and none has been invented. A new critical introduction, written for this edition, has been added.
