by Ayn Rand
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Foreword
PART ONE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
PART TWO
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
Afterword
WE THE LIVING
published in 1936, was Ayn Rand's first novel, and it has gone on to sell nearly two million copies in the mass market edition.
The theme of We the Living is one of the most significant of our time--the struggle of the individual against the state. It portrays the impact of the Russian Revolution on three human beings who assert the right to live their own lives and pursue their own happiness. It tells of a woman's passionate love, held like a fortress against the corrupting evil of a totalitarian state, which demands from its citizens not independence but self-sacrifice.
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Copyright (c) Ayn Rand O'Connor, 1936, 1959
Copyright (c) renewed Ayn Rand O'Connor, 1964
Copyright (c) Eugene Winick, Paul Gitlin, Leonard Peikoff, 1987
Introduction copyright (c) Leonard Peikoff, 2009
Afterword copyright (c) Leonard Peikoff, 1995, 2009
All rights reserved
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Introduction
AS AYN RAND SAYS IN HER FOREWORD, We the Living is not a novel about Soviet Russia, which is only the backdrop of the story. The novel's events, characters, and outcome are selected not by their relation to history, but to philosophy, which means that the book's theme is universal. The theme is the evil of totalitarianism, a species of depravity not restricted to any country or century.
The basic cause of totalitarianism is two ideas: men's rejection of reason in favor of faith, and of self-interest in favor of self-sacrifice. If this is a society's philosophical consensus, it will not be long before an all-powerful Leader rises up to direct the faith and sacrifice that everyone has been extolling. His subjects cannot resist his takeover, neither by exercising their faculty of thought nor their passion for values, because these are the two priceless possessions they have given up. The end result is thought control, starvation, and mass slaughter.
Because of the Greeks' commitment to reason, worldly happiness, and (relative) freedom, the above causal sequence was absent for centuries from the West. Then Christianity took over, demanding of men--with full consistency for the first time--a life of faith and sacrifice. Although delayed by primitive technology, the result came soon enough: the infallible Pope, the plummeting life span, and the elimination of unapproved thought by the Inquisition.
The highest-ranking Christians in Europe were the first practitioners of Western totalitarianism. It was they who discovered the essence of a new kind of State, and offered it to the future as a possibility to consider.
At last, there was a Renaissance, and then the West's long struggle toward the Enlightenment with its commitment to reason and the pursuit of happiness, and its ridicule of Christianity. The result was the freest country in history, America. It did not last, however, because nineteenth-century intellectuals, followers of Kant, rejected the ideas of the Enlightenment in favor of new forms of unreason and unselfishness. Within only a few generations, cause led to effect: totalitarians of every stripe sprang up, each claiming this time to be secular and scientific even as all worked diligently to reproduce the medieval model.
Totalitarian states differ in every detail, but not in their nature and cause. And in regard to details, what difference do their differences make? What does it matter to the victims if the infallible leader claims messages from the supernatural or from an unperceivable dialectic? If he demands sacrifice for Corpus Christi or for the proletariat? If the people are made to raise their hands in prayer or their feet in goose steps? If the killer troops wear black gowns or red shirts? If those out of favor are ripped open by knives in Spain or left to freezing starvation in the gulags? States like these often pose as enemies of one another, but the pose is tactics, not truth.
An eloquent example of the truth is what happened to We the Living under Mussolini. During World War II, the novel was pirated by an Italian film company, which produced a movie version without the knowledge or consent of AR. Because of its length, the picture was released in 1942 as two separate movies, Noi Vivi (We the Living) and Addio Kira (Farewell Kira). Both were enormous popular successes. The fascist government had approved the movie on the grounds that it was anti-Communist. But the public, like the director, understood at once that the movie was just as antifascist as anti-Communist. People grasped AR's broader theme and embraced the two movies, in part as a way of protesting their oppression under
Mussolini. In a takeoff on the titles, people began referring to themselves as Noi Morti (We the Dead), and to Mussolini's economic policies as Addio, Lira. Five months after its release, the government figured out what everyone else knew and banned the movie. These events alone are eloquent proof that We the Living is not merely "about Soviet Russia."
Nor is it merely about Europe or about the past. Witness the rise, in the United States today, of the Fundamentalist right aiming to outlaw ideas and values that conflict with the Bible; and the rise of the environmentalist left turning religious, invoking reverence for Nature's Creator as the moral value mandating the end of capitalism; and, in more immediately practical terms, the eight-year rule of a "born-again" President, who shut down biological research he regarded as irreligious while claiming a message from beyond as a guide to foreign policy; and now his successor, of whom so far (2009) we know little, but whose campaign worked hard to prove that he is as devout as all the others. Will these developments, and many others like them, be united someday into an unstoppable religious juggernaut demanding of us the standard mind/self-emasculation, along with its standard political corollary? If it happens, its exponents are unlikely any longer to seize on economics or biology as their justification. As of now, it seems, we are headed back to the source: to the re-creation of medieval servitude--enforced by a much better-equipped secret police.
We the Living is a novel about the results of the freedom-erasing ideas you yourself probably accept. That is why it is relevant to you today. It is relevant because it tells you how to distinguish the poison the West is now greedily ingesting from the nourishment we desperately need. It is relevant because it is not about an ever-receding past, but about an ever-approaching future.
This book is not about your long-gone grandparents, but about your still-growing children.
--Leonard Peikoff
Irvine, California
December, 2008
Foreword
I HAD NOT REREAD THIS NOVEL AS a whole, since the time of its first publication in 1936, until a few months ago. I had not expected to be as proud of it as I am.
Too many writers declare that they never succeed in expressing fully what they wished to express and that their work is only some sort of approximation. It is a viewpoint for which I have never had any sympathy and which I consider excusable only when it is voiced by beginners, since no one is born with any kind of "talent" and, therefore, every skill has to be acquired. Writers are made, not born. To be exact, writers are self-made. It was mainly in regard to We the Living, my first novel (and, progressively less, in regard to my work preceding The Fountainhead), that I had felt that my means were inadequate to my purpose and that I had not said what I wanted to say as well as I wished. Now, I am startled to discover how well I did say it.
We the Living is not a novel "about Soviet Russia." It is a novel about Man against the State. Its basic theme is the sanctity of human life--using the word "sanctity" not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of "supreme value." The essence of my theme is contained in the words of Irina, a minor character of the story, a young girl who is sentenced to imprisonment in Siberia and knows that she will never return: "There's something I would like to understand. And I don't think anyone can explain it. . . . There's your life. You begin it, feeling that it's something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure. Now it's over, and it doesn't make any difference to anyone, and it isn't that they are indifferent, it's just that they don't know, they don't know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there's something about it that they should understand. I don't understand it myself, but there's something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What?"
At the time, I knew a little more about this question than did Irina, but not much more. I knew that this attitude toward one's own life should be, but is not, shared by all people--that it is the fundamental characteristics of the best among men--that its absence represents some enormous evil which had never been identified. I knew that this is the issue at the base of all dictatorships, all collectivist theories and all human evils--and that political or economic issues are merely derivatives and consequences of this basic primary. At that time, I looked at any advocates of dictatorship and collectivism with an incredulous contempt: I could not understand how any man could be so brutalized as to claim the right to dispose of the lives of others, nor how any man could be so lacking in self-esteem as to grant to others the right to dispose of his life. Today, the contempt has remained; the incredulity is gone, since I know the answer.
It was not until Atlas Shrugged that I reached the full answer to Irina's question. In Atlas Shrugged I explain the philosophical, psychological and moral meaning of the men who value their own lives and of the men who don't. I show that the first are the Prime Movers of mankind and that the second are metaphysical killers, working for an opportunity to become physical ones. In Atlas Shrugged, I show why men are motivated either by a life premise or a death premise. In We the Living, I show only that they are.
The rapid epistemological degeneration of our present age--when men are being brought down to the level of concrete-bound animals who are incapable of perceiving abstractions, when men are taught that they must look at trees, but never at forests--makes it necessary for me to give the following warning to my readers: do not be misled by those who might tell you that We the Living is "dated" or no longer relevant to the present, since it deals with Soviet Russia in the nineteen-twenties. Such a criticism is applicable only to the writers of the Naturalist school, and represents the viewpoint of those who, having never discovered that any other school of literature can or did exist, are unable to distinguish the function of a novel from that of a Sunday supplement article.
The Naturalist school of writing consists of substituting statistics for one's standard of value, then cataloguing minute, photographic, journalistic details of a given country, region, city or back yard in a given decade, year, month or split-second, on the over-all premise of: "This is what men have done"--as against the premise of: "This is what men have chosen and/or should choose to do." This last is the premise of the Romantic school of writing, which deals, above all, with human values and, therefore, with the essential and the universal in human actions, not with the statistical and the accidental. The Naturalist school records the choices which men happened to have made; the Romantic school projects the choices which men can and ought to make. I am a Romantic Realist--distinguished from the Romantic tradition in that the values I deal with pertain to this earth and to the basic problems of this era.
We the Living is not a story about Soviet Russia in 1925. It is a story about Dictatorship, any dictatorship, anywhere, at any time, whether it be Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or--which this novel might do its share in helping to prevent--a socialist America. What the rule of brute force does to men and how it destroys the best, will be the same in 1925, in 1955 or in 1975--whether the secret police is called G.P.U. or N.K.V.D., whether men eat millet or bread, whether they live in hovels or in housing projects, whether the rulers wear red shirts or brown ones, whether the head butcher kisses a Cambodian witch doctor or an American pianist.
When, at the age of twelve, at the time of the Russian revolution, I first heard the Communist principle that Man must exist for the sake of the State, I perceived that this was the essential issue, that this principle was evil, and that it could lead to nothing but evil, regardless of any methods, details, decrees, policies, promises and pious platitudes. This was the reason for my opposition to Communism then--and it is my reason now. I am still a little astonished, at times, that too many adult Americans do not understand the nature of the fight against Communism as clearly as I understood it at the age of twelve: they continue to believe that only Communist methods are evil, while Communist ideals are noble. All the victories of Communism since the year 1917 are due to that particular belief among the men who are still free.
To those who might wonder whether the con
ditions of existence in Soviet Russia have changed in any essential respect since 1925, I will make a suggestion: take a look through the files of the newspapers. If you do, you will observe the following pattern: first, you will read glowing reports about the happiness, the prosperity, the industrial development, the progress and the power of the Soviet Union, and that any statements to the contrary are the lies of prejudiced reactionaries; then, about five years later, you will read admissions that things were pretty miserable in the Soviet Union five years ago, just about as bad as the prejudiced reactionaries had claimed, but now the problems are solved and the Soviet Union is a land of happiness, prosperity, industrial development, progress and power; about five years later, you will read that Trotsky (or Zinoviev or Kamenev or Litvinov or the "kulaks" or the foreign imperialists) had caused the miserable state of things five years ago, but now Stalin has purged them all and the Soviet Union has surpassed the decadent West in happiness, prosperity, industrial development, etc.; five years later, you will read that Stalin was a monster who had crushed the progress of the Soviet Union, but now it is a land of happiness, prosperity, artistic freedom, educational perfection and scientific superiority over the whole world. How many of such five-year plans will you need before you begin to understand? That depends on your intellectual honesty and your power of abstraction. But what about the Soviet possession of the atom bomb? Read the accounts of the trials of the scientists who were Soviet spies in England, Canada and the United States. But how can we explain the "Sputnik"? Read the story of "Project X" in Atlas Shrugged.
Volumes can be and have been written about the issue of freedom versus dictatorship, but, in essence, it comes down to a single question: do you consider it moral to treat men as sacrificial animals and to rule them by physical force? If, as a citizen of the freest country in the world, you do not know what this would actually mean--We the Living will help you to know.
Coming back to the opening remarks of this foreword, I want to account for the editorial changes which I have made in the text of this novel for its present reissue: the chief inadequacy of my literary means was grammatical--a particular kind of uncertainty in the use of the English language, which reflected the transitional state of a mind thinking no longer in Russian, but not yet fully in English. I have changed only the most awkward or confusing lapses of this kind. I have reworded the sentences and clarified their meaning, without changing their content. I have not added or eliminated anything to or from the content of the novel. I have cut out some sentences and a few paragraphs that were repetitious or so confusing in their implications that to clarify them would have necessitated lengthy additions. In brief, all the changes are merely editorial line-changes. The novel remains what and as it was.