Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [21]
Although Lenin and the early Communists weren’t overtly anti-Semitic, Jewish merchants were targeted as scapegoats of the new regime, just as they had been in the old one. The government inflamed popular envy of Jews by euphemistic references to the “bourgeoisie,” and Jews were left especially vulnerable to robbery and violence. It’s likely that Zinovy’s and Anna’s St. Petersburg relatives, including the Konheims and Rand’s grandfather Kaplan, also lost their businesses, livelihoods, and life’s work at this time. Still, like others, the Rosenbaums couldn’t believe that the Bolshevik regime would last. In spite of nationalizations, economic conditions didn’t improve for the poor and working class, and support for Communism was eroding quickly in the city. Armies were massing against Lenin in the south. The Rosenbaums decided to wait it out, believing that the Bolsheviks would be routed, although with each passing week mob justice became more ruthless and food and other necessities more difficult to find.
The Stoiunin school continued to hold classes. Rand attended until the end of the 1917-18 term. Without Olga, however, she was again alone, with no one to talk to about the excruciatingly painful events going on around her.
It was at about this time that she began to read the novels of Victor Hugo, the only novelist she ever acknowledged as having influenced her work. Her mother made the introduction; in the evenings, Anna would read aloud from Hugo’s works, in French, to Rand’s grandmother Kaplan, while Rand listened from her bed. Hugo, the foremost Romantic writer of the nineteenth century, was a master of epic melodramas featuring solitary, larger-than-life heroes and psychologically misshapen villains in what were typically scorching critiques of French society and government. The first one of his novels she read was The Man Who Laughs, then Les Misérables. In these and her other favorites, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Ninety-Three, the author excoriated kings and queens, the French Revolution and street violence, while also projecting emotional nobility and human grandeur. His preoccupations could hardly have been more pertinent to Rand’s situation, and his insights must have deepened her understanding of revolution. She relished his intricate plots, inspiring themes, and outsized characters, and she fell in love with one of his most radical inventions: Enjolras, the high-minded, again implacable young revolutionary leader in Les Misérables, who would serve as a model for both the handsome aristocrat Leo Kovalensky and the Communist Party hero Andrei Taganov in We the Living. In each of her published novels except Anthem (1938), she retained traces of the plotting techniques and stylistic sleights of hand she learned from Hugo. Her love of his work stayed with her. At age fifty-seven, after everything else in her life had radically changed, she called him the “greatest novelist in world literature.”
By late summer of 1918, the Rosenbaums had had enough. Under threat of a new order compelling them to share their living space on less than equal footing with former servants, factory workers, and soldiers; with whole days now spent in search of rationed millet, peas, and cooking oil; and with the terrifying knowledge that what the revolutionaries regarded as their and their neighbors’ “hoarded” savings had become the object of systematic official searches, they gathered their belongings and departed. Still expecting the regime to collapse, they thought they would be away from home for six months; they were gone for three years.
As We the Living opens in 1922, the Argounov family is wearily returning to a dreary, disease-ridden St. Petersburg from the Crimean peninsula, now also in Bolshevik hands. But in 1918, when the Rosenbaums fled south, the Crimea