Reading How the Steel was Tempered, I am struck by the way the narrative takes a definite position—it is for us, children of the future!—without cloaking itself in the viewpoints of depicted characters or that of an active narrator. How unsophisticated and innocent it must seem to those acquainted with the “neutrality” of bourgeois fiction, which deviates from the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie only to relate the views of a character—who naturally lives in a different world.