Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [275]
“pink” penetration in America: Ayn Rand and the Song of Russia, p. 75.
Matthew Josephson: Josephson’s book The Robber Barons (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962) set the tone for much 1930s writing about ruthless, greedy industrialists. Cited in John Chamberlain, A Life with the Printed Word (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1982), p. 47. It was a point of view that AR would attempt to refute in AS.
“Red Dawn”: Page Smith, Redeeming the Time (New York: McGraw Hill, 1987), p. 532. It’s not impossible that AR had heard this phrase in Hollywood and had named her screenplay Red Pawn as an ironic commentary on it.
the extent of the pro-Communist bias: BBTBI; by mid-1936, she was writing to Gouverneur Morris, “New York is full of people sold bodies and souls to the Soviets. The extent of it almost frightens me” (letter to Gouverneur Morris, April 14, 1936 [LOAR, p. 28]).
vowed to confront the messengers of collectivism: Letter to H. L. Mencken, July 28, 1934 (LOAR, p. 13).
began a program of extensive reading: The Library of Ayn Rand, pp. 34–51; “The Hero in the Soul Manifested in the World.”
the most persuasive: AR’s youngest sister, NR, who turned against AR in old age, didn’t think the novel was persuasive. In a 1997 interview, NR said, “I can’t admire this falsehood. Go ahead, judge me! She had just artificially constructed the whole thing while living in America, that’s all. She had made up all of our lives, do you understand?” (100 Voices, NR, p. 4).
“Russia is a huge cemetery”: TPOAR, p. 60.
“we are dying here”: Isabel Paterson, “Turns with a Bookworm,” New York Herald Tribune, June 29, 1941. In 1925, many Russians still believed that if Western countries only understood their plight, they would be rescued.
St. Petersburg, or Petrograd, in 1922 and 1923: The Argounovas’ fictional return to St. Petersburg takes place a year later than the Rosenbaums’ actual return in 1921. Kira Argounova is depicted as being a little more than a year older than AR at the time of the events of the novel; specifically, Kira is said to have been born on April 11, 1904, a few days before Anna and Zinovy Rosenbaum’s wedding on April 20, 1904. In the first typed draft of We the Living on file at the Library of Congress, AR originally made Kira her own age. “‘Born in 1905, eh?’ said the Soviet official” is crossed out, and “1904” is penciled in, presumably to avoid giving the impression that the novel was purely autobiographical. (Ayn Rand Papers, LOC, box 26, reel 17, p. 108, begun on April 18, 1933.)
she enrolls in the city’s free State Technical Institute: Lev Bekkerman was an engineering student at Petrograd Technical Institute from 1918 until 1925 (EOWTL, p. 54). In the novel, Leo Kovalensky is said to be a student of history and philosophy at Petrograd State University, otherwise known as St. Petersburg University, just as AR was.
son of a slain aristocrat: WTL, p. 62. Leo Kovalensky’s father, Admiral Leo Kovalensky, who AR suggests served heroically in World War I and was executed without a trial (WTL, p. 48), may be based on the husband of the woman who tutored AR in English in 1925, one Marie von Strachow. Her deceased husband had been an admiral; author correspondence with Michael Berliner, June 2, 2005.
just as Rand was during the same years: AR was a student of history and philosophy from 1921 until 1924. In an earlier draft of WTL, Kira Argounova was also a student of history.
campus GPU leader: The GPU, Russia’s secret police force, was the forerunner of the KGB.
“the rule of brute force”: Preface to WTL (written in 1958 and reprinted in the Signet edition, 1995), p. xv.
“The individual against the masses”: Letter to Jean Wick, October 27, 1934 (LOAR, pp. 17–19).
“too strong to compromise”: This description also characterizes AR’s father after 1921 (EOWTL, p. 23).
a mouth “like that of an ancient chieftain”: WTL, p. 61.
spiritual self-destruction: EOWTL, p. 54; BBTBI.
upholding values, even in the airtight atmosphere: AR’s circa 1930 working title for WTL was Airtight: A Story of Red Russia