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By Root 1520 0

sometimes called it, is associated with antirationalism, anti-individualism, fascism, and collectivism of all kinds—most pointedly, in We the Living, with soul-destroying Russian Communism. The tale can also be read as subtly (but, to a Jewish child, compellingly) anti-Christian, since Kali, the death-dealing Hindu deity the shamans worship, demands a grisly and pointless living sacrifice of noble men. That these men, the story’s heroes, are members of the British upper class would have made it all the more enthralling to Rand. All things British were in fashion with Russians at the time, and Rand had additional reasons for admiring England. On vacation near the Crimean Black Sea a year or two before, she had found the perfect model for her lissome future heroines in a tall, fair, slender, tennis-playing older British girl she developed a crush on from afar. She never forgot this girl, whose name was Daisy, or lost her admiration for the girl’s type of long-legged beauty and fair-haired Anglo-Saxon glamour, which she later compared to that of a movie star. In the years before she had yet learned much about America, Britain came to symbolize the heroic virtues of her inner universe. It was her “ideal country” at the time, she later said.

Then, too, the British officers and the French archaeologist in The Mysterious Valley are unusually analytical for characters in a boy’s adventure story. At every impasse—in the face of terrifying perils—they pause to ask themselves and one another what is the most logical way to proceed. Their insistence on examining every alternative before unerringly deciding on the right one slows down the action comically at times. But the result is swashbuckling punctuated by practical puzzles, which the reader solves alongside the captives and their friends. It is unusual, and one can imagine the nine-year-old Rand—the person who would later describe reason as “one’s only source of knowledge” and “one’s only guide to action”—being as much engrossed by the logical conundrums as by the action itself.

But it was the sexually charged character of Cyrus who fixed the story permanently in her mind. She probably spent hundreds of hours poring over the drawings and descriptions of the dashing hero who for her became the equivalent of an adolescent heartthrob. He was her “exclusive love,” she said, from the age of nine until the age of twelve—that is, until the horrors of the October 1917 Revolution put an end to everyone’s daydreams. He provided an aspirational remedy for her sense of isolation. With Cyrus as her secret lover and perfect soul mate, she successfully moved outside the circle of others’ conventional reality. The parties and social successes that preoccupied her mother, sisters, and cousins were no longer a concern of hers, she later said. She had something better, something higher, something that none of them could see or share. In homage, she would name Kira Argounova, the protagonist of We the Living, for Cyrus, “Kira” being the feminine version of “Kirill,” which is the Russian variant of “Cyrus.” As a mature writer, she patterned her most explicitly erotic male characters after Cyrus, including Howard Roark in The Fountainhead and John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. In 1929, working at odd jobs in Hollywood, she married a studio actor who looked almost exactly as Cyrus did in the 1914 illustrations she remembered. As she approached adolescence, started school, and began to write, her feeling for Cyrus was of “unbearable intensity” and practically all-consuming. She worshipped Cyrus—and she also identified with him, just as she did with Catherine the Great. Her tendency to identify with men and male characters would have interesting implications for the adult Rand’s ability to write more persuasively from a male point of view than any female writer since George Eliot.

It appears to be no coincidence then that, like Catherine and Cyrus—and like Rand’s father during the impending revolution and like Jews throughout Russian history—her most famous fictional characters would be ostracized and even