We the Living

by Ayn Rand

She lay on the edge of a hill and looked down at the sky. One hand, white and still, hung over the edge, and little red drops rolled slowly in the snow, down the slope.

  She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little hole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity--did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

  She smiled, her last smile, to so much that had been possible.

  Afterword

  AS A YOUNGSTER, AYN RAND CONTINUALLY IMAGINED ideas for plays and novels to write when she grew up. Not a single one of her stories pertained to Russia, which she hated. It was something of a paradox to her, therefore, that she set her first novel in Soviet Russia.

  Part of the explanation is that, having finally escaped to the United States, she had to get Russia out of her system--by telling the world what was actually happening there. Her husband, Frank O'Connor, and his brother Nick urged her to write the novel. Both were horrified by her experiences in Russia, and they convinced her that Americans had no idea of the truth. A young Russian had said to her at a party in 1926, just before she left for America: "When you get there, tell them that Russia is a huge cemetery and that we are all dying." We the Living told them.

  Her novel, AR wrote on its completion, is "the first story written by a Russian who knows the living conditions of the new Russia and who has actually lived under the Soviets in the period described . . . the first one by a person who knows the facts and also having escaped can tell them."1

  Another part of the explanation for a Russian novel is that, being an immigrant and a beginner, AR did not feel ready yet for anything else. She did have in mind the idea for a novel set in an airship orbiting the earth, and she debated between the two projects. But the Russian novel had a great advantage: no research was necessary for We the Living; she already knew the background--whereas she did not know the conditions, the people, or the language well enough to do a story set in America (or in an airship).

  Further, since AR was only twenty-five in 1930, when she started the book, "I thought I was too young to write about adults."2 She was not yet ready to present her kind of hero or broad, philosophical theme--she had not defined her ideas fully enough or acquired the necessary literary skill--and the Russian story did not require these developments.

  The theme of We the Living--identified by AR in the Foreword--is indicated by its original title, Airtight, the meaning being that under dictatorship man cannot survive. Dictatorship, she writes in her journal, "crushes a whole country and smothers every bit of life, action, and air. . . . It makes the atmosphere choking, airtight. . . ."

  The plot of the novel occurred to her initially as a twist on a standard plot, the story of the virtuous girl who sells herself to a villain in order to save the hero, whom she loves. AR thought: Wouldn't it be interesting if "the man to whom the girl sells herself is not a villain but a hero--and the man for whom she makes her sacrifice is the villain in the end"? With this twist, the heroine's conflict deepens immeasurably, while the final tragedy becomes in a sense even greater for the "villain" than for the other two.3

  When she started to project the story, the first scene in AR's mind was the arrest scene, when Andrei, the GPU agent who loves Kira, comes to take Leo away to jail--and discovers that Kira is Leo's mistress. The drama of this kind of scene was AR's personal motivation to do the novel. She then constructed the story backward, by deciding what events had to be presented to lead to this climax.

  Several of the characters were suggested by people whom AR had known in Russia. Kira, of course, though not intended as a self-portrait, is AR intellectually and morally; she has all of AR's ideas and values. Irina is based on her youngest sister, Nora, who drew the very same kind of caricatures. Uncle Vasili was taken, in essence and appearance, from her own father. As to the two men, Andrei is a pure invention, but Leo is real; he is a romanticized version of the first man AR ever loved, a student she had met in college at the age of seventeen and gone out with many times. His name was Leo. She disliked the name, but felt that she had no choice about using it: in her mind, the character was inseparable from the man.

  I have often heard people argue about who is superior: Andrei or Leo (Kira is superior to both). Despite the book's hero-villain plot twist, there is no doubt as to AR's answer, which I heard her state on several occasions. Her favorite was Leo, not only for the personal reason mentioned but also for a philosophical reason: the fact that Leo, by conscious premises, is an egoist, an individualist, a man of arrogant self-esteem who lives for his values. Andrei, by contrast, is a man explicitly committed to the opposite ideas; he accepts the principles of selflessness and collectivism as his moral ideal, and then acts on them, down to spilling all the blood they require. Given the plot twist, AR worked hard to make Andrei as noble as possible; but his nobility exists basically on the subconscious level. It lies in his soul, his unidentified individualistic premises, which are at war with his actions and conscious viewpoint. AR judged people, essentially, by these last.

  When Andrei discovers his error, he commits suicide; he is totally honest. But the point is: what he discovers is that he gave his life to a lie. Leo knew better from the start (even if he breaks in the end).

  If Leo had been born in America, he would have become Francisco D'Anconia of Atlas Shrugged; that is, the measure of his heroic potential. In Russia, however, he is crushed. To the extent that an individual is rational, independent, uncompromising, passionate--to the extent that he tries to act according to his own mind and value judgments--his life under the rule of physical force becomes unendurable. The only answer he sees to his questions and ambitions is the muzzle of a gun. In principle, such a man has three choices.

  One is to commit suicide. This is the choice Andrei makes, when he grasps the depravity of his "ideal."

  Another is to attempt to make the clash between mind and force endurable by nullifying one of the two clashing elements, the only one in the victim's power: his own mind. This means: drowning his mind, and thereby losing the ability to know or care any longer what is being done to him. This is Leo's choice; it is living death, or drawn-out suicide, as against immediate self-destruction. In her journal, AR does not regard Leo's choice as evil. Rather, she describes him as a man who is "too strong to compromise, but too weak to withstand the pressure, who cannot bend, but only break."

  The third choice is that of Kira--to flee abroad. In real life the attempt to flee might well be successful, as it was in AR's own case. In the context of the novel, however, Kira had to die in the attempt. If the book's theme is the fate of the living under the rule of killers, there is no place for the accident of escape. The essence of such a political system is destruction, whether the individual is within the borders or trying to run across them.

  In her journal AR summarized, in characterological terms, the three forms of destruction depicted in the novel: "The higher and stronger individual is broken, but not conquered; she falls on the battlefield, still the same individual, untouched: Kira. The one with less resistance is broken and conquered; he disintegrates under an unbearable strain: Leo. And the best of those who believed in the ideal is broken by the realization of what that ideal really means: Andrei."

  AR finished We the Living in 1933. The principal reaction of the manuscript's early readers, she wrote in a 1934 letter, "is one of complete amazement at the revelation of Soviet life as it is actually lived."4 Almost sixty years later, I cannot resist adding, the grandchildren of such readers were still being amazed by Soviet life, this time as they watched it lead to the collapse of the entire Soviet structure.

  AR knew that the American public did not understand the nature of communis
m, but she did not know that she was trying to publish the truth at the start of the Red Decade, as it was later called. An anti-communist librarian had told her, when she was still working on the novel, that "the communists have a tremendous influence" on American intellectuals, "and you will find a lot of people opposing you." "I was indignant," AR recalled years later. "I didn't believe her. I thought that she is a typical Russian and is, in effect, panic mongering."5

  For nearly three years, We the Living was rejected by New York publishers. It was rejected by more than a dozen houses. A typical rejection said that the author did not understand socialism. Gradually, AR came to see how accurate the librarian had been. By 1936, she herself was writing to a friend that "New York is full of people sold bodies and souls to the Soviets."6

  At last the book came to Macmillan, whose editorial board was divided about it. One of the associate editors, who fought against the book "violently" (AR's word), was Granville Hicks. Several years later, Hicks admitted publicly that he had been a member of the Communist Party. After a bitter struggle Hicks was overruled by the owner of the company, an elderly gentleman who said that he did not know whether the book would make any money, but that it was important and ought to be published. (It is instructive to note that in 1957, the New York Times chose the same man, Granville Hicks, to review Atlas Shrugged for the Sunday Book Review.)

  We the Living did poorly at first. A year after publication, however, in 1937, thanks to word of mouth, the novel started to take off. But it was too late: Macmillan had set the book from type, not plates, and had destroyed the type in the first months. As a result, while the book was achieving great success in England, Denmark, and Italy, it went out of print in America, and had to wait a quarter of a century to reach its audience. In 1958, after the triumph of Atlas Shrugged, a new American edition was finally brought out by Random House; a year later, a mass-market paperback was published by New American Library.

  By now We the Living has sold over three million copies in the United States. To bring the book to a wider audience, AR in 1939 turned it into a play, which opened on Broadway under the title of The Unconquered. She did not think the book was "proper stage material," she said later, but she tried her best to adapt it--under impossible circumstances, with a producer (George Abbott) who fought her every step of the way, and a country full of acting talents afraid to come near anything so controversial. One famous actress, Bette Davis, read the script and declared that she loved it and would be honored to play the part of Kira. Her agent forbade her to do it, on the grounds that such an anti-communist role would destroy her career. This is a small indication of the country's intellectual state at the time--and of what AR was up against. The play closed after five performances.

  As to the pirated Italian movie of it, AR finally got hold of it some twenty years after its original release. Apart from a few scenes, she was very favorably impressed; she regarded Alida Valli in particular as ideal casting. Under her supervision, the two parts were condensed into a single, tightly focused three-hour film. In 1986 (four years after her death) the new version, in black-and-white with English subtitles, was finally completed and began a successful run in the U.S. In my own opinion, the movie is superior to the much more famous Hollywood movie of The Fountainhead.a

  In 1934, two years before the book was published, AR showed the manuscript to H. L. Mencken, the well-known individualist, who liked it. Thanking him for his interest, AR wrote back on July 28: This book is only my first step and above all a means of acquiring a voice, of making myself heard. What I shall have to say when I acquire that voice does not need an explanation, for I know that you can understand it. Perhaps it may seem a lost cause, at present, and there are those who will say that I am too late, that I can only hope to be the last fighter for a mode of thinking which has no place in the future. But I do not think so. I intend to be the first one in a new battle which the world needs as it has never needed before, the first to answer the many too many advocates of collectivism, and answer them in a manner which will not be forgotten.

  I know that you may smile when you read this. I fully realize that I am a very green, very helpless beginner who has the arrogance of embarking, single-handed, against what many call the irrevocable trend of our century. I know that I am only a would-be David starting out against Goliath, and what a fearful, ugly Goliath! I say "single-handed," because I have heard so much from that other side, the collectivist side, and so little in defense of man against men, and yet so much has to be said. I have attempted to say it in my book. I do not know of a better way to make my entrance into the battle. I believe that man will always be an individualist, whether he knows it or not, and I want to make it my duty to make him know it.

  Do we know it yet, even this late? Do we know the nature of a dictatorship as it grows ever more visible in the land of the free? If we do at all, it is thanks in large part to the works of Ayn Rand.

  --Leonard Peikoff

  Irvine, California

  December, 2008

  NOTES

  1 Letter to Jean Wick, March 1934.

  2 Recorded biographical interviews, 1960-61.

  3 Screen treatment for We the Living, 1947.

  4 Letter to Jean Wick, October 1934.

  5 Recorded biographical interviews, 1960-61.

  6 Letter to Gouverneur Morris, April 1936.

  a We the Living is still available on video from the Ayn Rand Book Store, 2121 Alton Parkway, Suite 250, Irvine, California 92606, USA.