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his looks that I liked enormously.” He had a sharp, intelligent, purposeful-appearing face, a graceful, slender body, a thick shock of hair, and light gray eyes. As with Cyrus, Hugo’s Enjolras, and Prime Minister Kerensky, “the quality I liked about him most was arrogance,” she later said. He was “like some fantastic aristocrat” in his consciousness of his attractiveness to women, his desirability, and his sense of his own worth. She learned that he shared her political views; he had once hidden in his apartment students who were being hunted by the Soviet police, or GPU, an act of bravery that she would later confer on Kira’s cousin Irina Dunaeva in We the Living.

On some of their few dates, they bought cheap seats at operettas in the silver-and-peach grandeur of the Mikhailovsky Theatre, probably including Rand’s lifelong favorite, Emmerich Kálmán’s Die Bajadere (1921). As the two sat “solemn, erect,” the Viennese music seemed to laugh and the settings bring to life a 1920s European bar and the spirit of contemporary German cabaret, as Rand noted in We the Living. Lev Bekkerman was Rand’s first flesh-and-blood infatuation, and she fell “madly and desperately” in love with him.

The love affair didn’t end happily. Rand was open, possibly too open, about her feelings. She pursued him, and he didn’t like it. “I knew he didn’t like it,” she would later say. He continued to see other girls, and after a few weeks, he stopped asking her out. When they met, usually because the resourceful Rand had found out where to find him on a particular evening, he pointedly ignored her. Still, until she left the country in 1926, she continued to see him at occasional social gatherings. In 1924, he contracted tuberculosis and traveled to the Crimea to be treated in a state-run sanatorium, much as We the Living’s Leo would do. In 1933, by which time Rand had established herself as a Hollywood screenwriter and was married, she learned from her cousin Nina that Lev, too, had married, divorced, and married again, each time to an unappealing, frowsy, ordinary woman. She was shocked by this, she said in 1960. “The whole issue [of Lev] … is still an unfinished story in my mind. My only explanation [for his choice of partners] … would be what I wrote about Leo in We the Living, that it was deliberate self-destruction, deliberately consigning himself to mediocrity, because [whatever] higher values [he possessed] were not possible there,” amid Russian Communist repression. In May 1937, during the height of the Stalinist Terror, Lev was put to death under a Soviet statute that mandated the execution of black marketers and perpetrators of terrorist acts against the state; he had been accused of plotting to blow up tanks in the Leningrad factory where he worked. She never learned of his death, but it’s not hard to imagine the fictional Leo Kovalensky ending his life in much the same way, had Rand’s heroine Kira only survived to witness it.

In a haunting irony, Rand herself might have been present for Lev’s death if, in 1922 or 1923, he had reciprocated her feelings for him; much later she said that she would almost certainly have remained in Russia had her first love loved her, too. “I would have stayed … and I would have died there,” she told a friend.

Exactly how this early romantic disappointment affected her life and work is hard to gauge. By the time she spoke about it with someone who recorded her remarks, she had been married for thirty years and was engaged with a much younger man in a long-term love affair. But in a letter from 1927, her mother reminded her that during those years she had spent hours in her bedroom, “yelling in despair.” In a chronological list of music she loved, her favorite piece for the year 1924 was “Simple Aveu,” by French composer Francis Thomé, the only melancholy music on the list. Lev’s rejection may help to explain why, after We the Living’s Kira, Rand’s heroines would tend to be romantically and sexually submissive hero-worshipers, while Rand herself remained aggressive in pursuit of anything she wanted, including