Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [53]
The setting is St. Petersburg, or Petrograd, in 1922 and 1923, years when Rand was a student at the university. The plot is simple. Eighteen-year-old Kira Argounova, returning from the Crimea with her now-impoverished bourgeois family, dreams of becoming an engineer and building American-style skyscrapers and aluminum bridges. Although her parents and sister think she is crazy, she enrolls in the city’s free State Technical Institute to learn engineering. One bitter winter night, walking in the city’s red-light district, she meets young Leo Kovalensky, the proud but world-weary son of a slain aristocrat, and his severe countenance reminds her of her childhood hero, a Viking. Seeing that he is in search of a prostitute she pretends to be one. This is an apt preamble, for Kira’s primary task now becomes to serve as a mirror for Leo’s noble qualities and to try to save him from himself. To her parents’ dismay, she moves in with him. He is a part-time student of philosophy and history at the University of Petrograd, just as Rand was during the same years. Because of his aristocratic background, he is barred from government office work—that is, from almost all work. He sweeps streets for kopeks to support Kira and himself and then, humiliated and defiant, joins a ring of black marketers and begins to drink heavily. When he shows symptoms of tuberculosis, Kira trudges to government offices, pleading with sullen workers-turned-commissars to send him to a state-run hospital; turned away by all, she devises another plan. She seduces young Andrei Taganov, a Bolshevik civil-war hero and campus GPU leader who has fallen in love with her during their heated ideological arguments at school. Richly paid by the Bolsheviks, he showers her with gifts and rubles, unaware that she is using the money to pay for Leo’s treatment at a private sanatorium in the Crimea. When Andrei finally learns the truth, the proud, honest, and until-now idealistic Communist is left to yearn for a love he cannot have.
To this point, the novel resembles the creaky movie scenario Red Pawn. But We the Living is, in a broad sense, a political novel. Like all of Rand’s books, it is about power. In her journals, she wrote that it was written to demonstrate “the rule of brute force and what it does to the best [people]” within a culture. “The individual against the masses—such is the real, the only theme of the book,” she noted to Jean Wick. Faithful to her monumental theme, she measures each of her characters against the backdrop of totalitarianism and an absence of personal power. Kira’s ex-socialite mother quickly joins a Red teachers’ union to achieve better living conditions for her family. Kira’s uncle Vasili—once a prosperous merchant, like Rand’s father and grandfather—proudly goes on strike and lets his capitalist skills dwindle with his spirit. Kira’s cousin Irina Dunaeva, an artist like Rand’s sister Nora, endures arrest and Siberian exile for the crime of hiding her anti-Communist boyfriend in her room. Irina’s brother, a villainous upstart named Victor, gains political power by turning his sister in. Irina’s crime is a clear remembrance of Rand’s Russian flame Lev Bekkerman’s youthful act of courage. In fact, We the Living can be partly seen as her attempt to come to terms with Lev, as well as a meditation on the psychological roots of the Russian Revolution.
In most respects, the beautiful, arrogant, sexually talented Leo Kovalensky is the fictional alter ego of the real-life Lev. In Rand’s notes for the novel, she describes him as “too strong to compromise but too weak to withstand pressure, [the kind of man] who cannot bend but only break.” When Kira first meets him, she finds him irresistibly “implacable” and spiritually defiant: he has a mouth “like that of an ancient chieftain who could order men to die” and eyes “such as could watch.” To the lovesick young woman, his haughty indifference to everything,