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By Root 1554 0

the key to electricity, a lost art of the “Unmentionable Times,” and the use and meaning of “I.” Although it is written in an approximation of Nietzschean aphoristic English, with biblical overtones, it neatly exposes the ultimate logic of totalitarianism: perfect conformity for perfect control. Rand’s purpose was to demonstrate that brainwashed slaves of the state cannot produce technological achievement—a theme she would revisit—and that only autonomous selves can fall in love. The choice of electricity to stand for individual accomplishment is interesting. In the Bible, God commands, “Let there be light.” With Thomas Edison’s invention of the electric lightbulb, the power of light was placed in human hands. In a sense, then, electricity made human beings deities, as Professor Bernice Rosenthal has pointed out. In fact, electricity was highly controversial in Russia during Rand’s childhood; people “either condemned or exalted it” for the reason that light belonged to God, observed Dr. Rosenthal. To seal the connection between God and the individual self, Rand makes her primitive society dimly aware of an “Unspeakable Word,” which in Jewish tradition is “Yahweh” and in Anthem is “I.”

That Equality 7–2521 happens to be twenty-one years old when he and Liberty take flight and give themselves new names—Prometheus (bringer of firelight) and Gaea (mother of the gods)—is interesting, given that that was the age at which Rand left Russia and adopted a new identity. In fact, she had conceived Anthem as a four-act play during her university years. Like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949), it appears to have been strongly influenced by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamiatin’s little-known dystopian novel We, written in St. Petersburg in 1920. We, the tale of D-503 and his forced choice between love for a female and loyalty to the all-powerful “One State,” was constructed as a series of diary entries, as was Anthem. It was censored by the Communist government, but it circulated samizdat style among artistic groups throughout the city. Rand would almost surely have encountered it in meetings of one of her writing clubs. Anthem also echoes H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, popular in turn-of-the-century Russia, and Stephen Vincent Benét’s “The Place of the Gods,” a short story that tracks a primitive future man as he stumbles upon a glittering twentieth-century city, which Rand read that summer in The Saturday Evening Post. This was the first time she had seen a science fiction or fantasy story in a mainstream American magazine, let alone a widely circulated, highly respected conservative magazine that paid authors exceptionally well. She wrote Anthem start to finish in three weeks, hoping to sell it to the Post.

Anthem has most often been compared to 1984, in which the hero, Winston Smith, also attempts to rediscover the lost world of the pre-totalitarian past. But unlike Equality 7–2521, Smith is captured and succumbs to torture. Rand admirers point out another, related difference. Although Orwell hated totalitarianism as both stultifying and evil, the novel treats it as a system that is practical and works; Oceana stands as a hyperindustrialized society containing such advanced technology that individual citizens cannot fight back against it. Rand concluded—long before most others—that totalitarianism doesn’t work, because the independent motivation indispensable to economic and social progress cannot survive in an atmosphere of intimidation, coercion, and lack of individually earned rewards. She regarded totalitarianism as both immoral and impractical and would go on to explain exactly in what ways the two are bound together in her fast-paced masterpiece of anticollectivism, Atlas Shrugged. Her insight was predictive, at least in the case of the former Soviet Union. When it came unglued in 1991, Western countries were surprised to discover in its fearsome military and industrial might a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Not much economic or technological progress had been made during Communism