Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [20]
A few years after starting her diary she burned it; by then, keeping a written record of ideals that clashed with the official Bolshevik party line was perilous, even for a child. Much later she said that she used this diary to work out her views on popular ideas and maxims of the time, such as that people should “live for the state” or “live for others,” specifically for the poor. It will come as no surprise to Rand’s readers that, even then, she didn’t like the sound of living for someone else. She remembered picturing her beloved heroes—Cyrus, Thunder, perhaps Kerensky—being forced to set aside their noble ideals and dashing temperaments to serve and obey proletarian “non-entities,” as she called them, simply because those nonentities were illiterate and poor. Never! People have a right to live for themselves, she decided, transforming her native sense of entitlement into an integrated “sense of life.” The unique rights of individuals, especially gifted individuals, would become a fundamental building block of—and point of contention about—her novels of ideas, starting with We the Living. Later, she would often say, “Whoever tells you to exist for the state is, or wants to be, the state.”
Long before she began making notes for We the Living, she reached another conclusion: that political and philosophical ideas, especially those that are heroically clothed and set in large-scale social novels, have the power to shape perceptions and change the world. As scholars have noted, novels and poems have been a surrogate for banned political speech in Russia. Literature as a subversive force is a peculiarly Russian notion, one that was widely celebrated during Rand’s youth. As Lenin was consolidating power in 1917, he invoked not only Karl Marx but also, more tellingly, the works of Ivan Turgenev (Fathers and Sons), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Poor Folk), Maxim Gorky (The Mother), and especially Nikolai Chernyshevsky (What Is to Be Done?) as inspiration and grounds for action. Lenin said that Chernyshevsky’s novel, a nineteenth-century tale of superhuman sacrifice in the service of a coming revolution, converted him to Communism at age fourteen, and he named his own seminal revolutionary tract What Is to Be Done? in tribute. It’s little wonder, then, that Rand once referred to her own novels as anti-Communist propaganda, or that she henceforth viewed national politics as a morality play whose theme is individual freedom in contest with overt or hidden mob force.
She continued to write stories, though no copies and few accounts of these exist. She would have needed the company of her heroes that fall and winter, because she was losing her only friend. In late November, Olga’s father, who was plotting a final legislative challenge to the Bolshevik usurpers, sent his wife and children south, to the Crimea, near Yalta, an area that was still free of Communist control. Within weeks, he and his liberal colleagues were rounded up, briefly jailed, and threatened with death. He escaped and joined his family. In 1919, the Nabokovs immigrated via Constantinople to Europe and the West. Rand never saw any of them again.
The worst was yet to come. In a campaign of class warfare waged by an ascendant Lenin against the middle class to pacify the poor, Rand’s father’s pharmacy, along with many of the city’s factories, banks, shops, and offices, was raided, stamped with a red seal, and shuttered. Lenin called this “looting the looters.” By encouraging acts of proletarian plunder and retribution against the city’s bourgeoisie, Lenin’s new government consciously initiated the Red Terror. Twelve-year-old Rand was in the store on the day Bolshevik soldiers arrived, brandishing guns. The anger, helplessness, and frustration she remembered seeing in her father’s face remained with her all her life; the tenacity she