Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  And yet, very few passages in Rand’s novels can convey the genuine pain she felt on the day of her testimony, thinking back to her experiences in the Soviet Union. On 20 October 1947, speaking before the HUAC, Rand, now a successful novelist and screenwriter, criticized the movie, Song of Russia, because it painted a false portrait of Soviet life. In an episode immortalized in Lillian Hellman’s Scoundrel Time, Congressman John McDowell ridiculed Rand’s contention that nobody smiled in Russia. Rand explained that Russian life was not prosperous, open, or pleasant. She attested to the food shortages, the fear of state terror, the tyranny of the secret police. She testified:

  It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship.… [The Russian people] try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don’t know who or when is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, where there is no law and any rights of any kind.73

  But in climbing out of Russia’s ideological quagmire, Rand could not rid herself of every last drop of her past. For even though she rejected the mystic, collectivist, and statist content of Russian philosophy, she had adopted its dialectical methods. Living in the United States, she began to articulate the organic principles that were necessary for the achievement of a genuinely human existence.

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  THE MATURATION OF AYN RAND

  Not long after her arrival in America, Alissa Rosenbaum renamed herself Ayn Rand. In her early writings, she engages in a concerted effort to understand and critique polarities she had confronted in the Russia of her youth. She focuses primarily on the dialectical unity of religion and statism. She gropes toward a philosophical synthesis that rejects faith and force, but integrates the splits within human existence, between mind and body, fact and value, theory and practice.

  NOVELIST AND PHILOSOPHER

  Rand was once asked if she was primarily a novelist or a philosopher. In typically dialectical fashion, she responded, “Both” ([1961] 1992T):

  In a certain sense, every novelist is a philosopher, because one cannot present a picture of human existence without a philosophical framework; the novelist’s only choice is whether that framework is present in his story explicitly or implicitly, whether he is aware of it or not, whether he holds his philosophical convictions consciously or subconsciously. (New Intellectual, vii)

  Rand’s literary and philosophical goals were internally related. She could not pursue her literary project without gradually articulating a philosophical framework. And she could not apply her philosophy without expressing its values concretely in stories, screenplays, dramas, and novels. Thus Rand transcended the dualism between philosophy and art, social thought and entertainment. As she stated in a journal entry dated 4 May 1946, she had no interest in presenting newly discovered knowledge “in its abstract, general form.”1 She wished to apply her knowledge “in the concrete form of men and events, in the form of a fiction story.” Such a fusion of the abstract and the concrete led Rand to wonder if she represented “a peculiar phenomenon.” Like Nina Berberova and other Russian writers, Rand believed, with no show of modesty, that she had achieved “the proper integration of a complete human being” (xiv).

  Rand’s goal in writing was “the projection of an ideal man.” This literary portrayal was, for her, “an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.”2 But the “ideal man” was not a pure abstraction. He had to be related to “the conditions which make him possible and which his existence requires.”3 By defining the values such an ideal man would have and by delineating the social conditions that would make it possible for him to exist and flourish, Rand slowly moved from best-selling novelist to public philosopher. She shifted from the specifically anticommunist political themes of her first novel, We the Living, to the broad metaphysical and epistemological themes of Atlas Shrugged. She eventually boasted that she was “challenging the cultural tradition of two-and-a-half-thousand years.”4 Her formal philosophy, “untainted by any Kantian influence,” aimed to reconnect the elements in human existence “which Kant had severed.”5

  DIGESTING THE PAST

  There is no evidence to suggest that Rand explicitly criticized the works of Russian philosophers. No journals from her Russian period are extant, and the journal entries currently available date a full dozen years after her university encounters with Lossky. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Rand drew from her own experiences in Russia to compose a number of short stories and plays. Many of these unpublished stories appear in The Early Ayn Rand, among them, “Good Copy,” “Escort,” “The Night King,” “Her Second Career,” and “The Husband I Bought.”6 This last tale of unrequited love was based on Rand’s first romantic experiences in Russia with a man who was probably exiled to Siberia.7

  In 1931–32, she wrote a film treatment and screenplay called “Red Pawn,” which dealt specifically with the evil of Soviet communism. Of greater philosophical importance, however, is the secondary theme of this work. For the first time, Rand dealt with “the philosophic identity of Communism and religion.”8 In Rand’s Russia, religion offered the only organized opposition to the Bolsheviks. Religion was viewed as communism’s natural enemy. Whereas communism was atheistic and materialistic, religion celebrated God’s existence and human spiritual redemption.

  Rand examined this opposition between two dominant Russian cultural forces and refused to accept their apparent hostility as evidence for their mutual exclusivity. She recognized that something fundamental united the communists and the believers. Tracing their essential similarities became one of Rand’s earliest philosophical preoccupations.

  For Rand, communism was a secular substitute for religion. Like the Church before it, communism subjugated the individual to an allegedly higher power. In this respect, religion and communism were identical. The main difference between them was their respective agencies of domination. For believers, it was God; for the communists, it was the state.9

  Though Rand had not yet mastered English, she created tantalizing images in “Red Pawn” to dramatize the organic conjunction of religion and communism. Much of the movie action is situated on Strastnoy Island, a “bit of land in the Arctic waters off the Siberian coast.”10 In the czarist days, a monastery occupied the island. But since the Revolution, the monastery had been converted into a Soviet prison.11

  Rand writes that the island’s library occupied the former chapel of the old monastery. In the library, a sacred mural remained, depicting Christ’s walk to Golgotha. But above the mural, the communists had scrawled, in red letters, “Proletarians of the World Unite!” Red flags were sketched into the raised hand of St. Vladimir. A hammer and sickle were superimposed on Moses’ tablets. The fresh paint dripped down the chapel walls.

  Tall candles in silver stands at the altar had to be lighted in the daytime. Their little red flames stood immobile, each candle transformed into a chandelier by the myriads of tiny reflections in the gilded halos of carved saints; they burned without motion, without noise, a silent, resigned service in memory of the past—around a picture of Lenin.12

  Others would have seen the superimposed communist symbols as a defilement of a Christian sanctuary; Rand saw an organic conjunction of corresponding worldviews. Her mixture of religious and communist images suggests that the two cultural forces had interpenetrated one another, serving similar goals, if not the same master.

  WE THE LIVING

  Comparable imagery is evident in Rand’s first published novel, We the Living. In a passage ultimately deleted from the original 1936 edition, Rand presents a fairy tale about a mighty Viking who is hated by both the King and the Priest.13 While the King despis
es the Viking for his refusal to bow to royal authority, the Priest hates the Viking because he “looked at heaven only when he bent for a drink over a mountain brook, and there, overshadowing the sky, he saw his own picture.”14

  The enraged King promises his royal subjects a material reward for the Viking’s head. Similarly, the Priest assures his parishioners that their sins will be forgiven if they kill the Viking. When the Viking embarks on a quest for the sacred city, however, his anticipated triumph prompts his adversaries to be more conciliatory. The King offers the Viking a royal banner to plant in the sacred city. The Priest offers the Viking a temple banner. But the Viking refuses to take either. For on the mast of his ship “was his own banner, that had never been lowered.” He conquers the sacred city, and toasts, “To a life … which is a reason unto itself.” Rand writes: “A Viking had lived, who had laughed at Kings, who had laughed at Priests, who had laughed at Men, who had held, sacred and inviolable, high over all temples, over all to which men knew how to kneel, his one banner—the sanctity of life” (180).

  This tale was but another symbolic way for Rand to say that statism and religion are at war with the sovereign individual. The King, a symbol of statism, is no different from the Priest, a symbol of religion; both are fundamentally opposed to the independent Viking who refuses to worship either.

  Rand wrote We the Living, originally entitled, Air Tight: A Novel of Red Russia, between 1930 and 1933, “to get Russia out of her system.”15 Far simpler in its structure than her later novels, We the Living offered, in Rand’s view, the most classic plot progression of any of her works. Moreover, it was, Rand said, the closest to an autobiography that she would ever write.16 Despite differences between Rand and the main character, Kira Argounova, Kira is clearly a stand-in for Rand. In fact, throughout her fiction, it was never Rand’s custom to distance herself from the views of her central protagonists. In this sense, they are all Rand.

  Kira is a young engineering student enrolled at Petrograd University. The novel chronicles her personal struggle under the harsh conditions of Soviet dictatorship. The plot centers on a fatal romantic triangle between Kira and the two men who love her. Kira falls in love with a counterrevolutionary, Leo Kovalensky. When Leo develops tuberculosis, Kira becomes the mistress of a heroic communist revolutionary, Andrei Taganov, in order to gain access to food and money for Leo’s welfare.

  Andrei is a virtuous, if misguided, character—much more admirable than Leo, Kira’s true love. Andrei epitomizes the idealism of the revolution, refusing to be corrupted by the growing tyranny of the regime. But the regime is corrupt, and it gradually destroys the best of its citizens. In the end, Kira is alienated from both men. Leo becomes a self-destructive alcoholic, and Andrei, confronting the utter bankruptcy of his ideals, commits suicide. With nothing left for her in Russia, Kira attempts to escape across the border, but is shot by the border patrol and left to bleed to death in the snow. In a last shining moment, she sees that “Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.”17

  In We the Living, Kira, unlike Rand herself, did not escape communism. Rand wanted to show how dictatorship thwarts escape, crushes values, crushes life itself. Escape from such a system is a fluke, in Rand’s view. Totalitarianism necessarily perpetuates an “airtight” environment of brutality and repression; spiritual and physical death are its essential by-products.18

  A “NIETZSCHEAN” PHASE?

  In 1936, We the Living was issued by Macmillan in a limited edition of three thousand copies. It was not reissued until 1959, after Rand had established herself as a best-selling author. In the second edition, Rand made several revisions, which she described as “editorial line-changes.” In the original edition, Rand claimed that her writing “reflected the transitional state of a mind thinking no longer in Russian, but not yet fully in English.”19 Hence, she wished to correct “awkward” and “confusing” formulations.

  However, a number of scholars have reviewed Rand’s modifications and concluded that these were not strictly linguistic. The most compelling case is offered by Ronald Merrill, who argues that Rand excised those references in the first edition which implied an endorsement of Nietzsche’s ethical principles, that the weak may be sacrificed for the sake of the strong. The second edition reflects the attitudes of the more mature Rand.20

  In the first edition, there is a scene in which Kira and Andrei debate the meaning of communism. Andrei assumes that Kira admires the communist ideal, but rejects its methods. But she surprises him. She states: “I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one’s right, one shouldn’t wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them. Except that I don’t know, however, whether I’d include blood in my methods.”21

  Andrei retorts, “Why not? Anyone can sacrifice his own life for an idea. How many know the devotion that makes you capable of sacrificing other lives? Horrible, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all,” Kira answers. “Admirable. If you’re right. But are you right?” In the second edition, Rand has removed this entire exchange. Kira merely states, “I loathe your ideals.” She keeps her own counsel concerning his methods.

  The conversation between these two characters continues in the first edition, when Kira argues that there are things which are sacred to the individual that cannot be touched by the state or the collective. Andrei rejects Kira’s claims, declaring “that we can’t sacrifice millions for the sake of the few.” Kira answers:

  “You can! You must. When those few are the best. Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it? What is the people but millions of puny, shrivelled, helpless souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their mildewed brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than justice for all. Because men are not born equal and I don’t see why one should want to make them equal. And because I loathe most of them.” [Emphasis added except in fifth sentence.]

  In the revised edition, Kira states:

  “Can you sacrifice the few? When those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What are your masses but millions of dull, shrivelled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can’t treat them as if they were. And because I loathe most of them.” [Emphasis added except in the fourth sentence.]

  In the original passage, Kira has contempt for the masses and is inclined to see them destroyed. In response to Andrei, Kira shows an unquestioning resolve to side with the exalted few in any conflict with the “puny, shrivelled, helpless” masses. She rejects the credo of “justice for all” when it becomes a euphemism for any attempt to make all human beings metaphysically equal.

  In the comparable passage from the 1959 revised edition, Kira expresses a similar contempt for the masses. But here, Kira’s language is less vitriolic. She answers Andrei with a question, not a protest. She rejects those who would attempt to achieve metaphysical egalitarianism through the injustice of granting values to those who have no right to them. Yet in both editions of the novel, Kira follows her exchange with Andrei by stating: “I don’t want to fight for the people, I don’t want to fight against the people, I don’t want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone—to live!” Even Ronald Merrill agrees that in this belief, Rand’s Kira has moved away from a stark “Nietzschean” ethos. Merrill argues that Kira’s sentiment foreshadows Rand’s mature Objectivist position. In fact, Merrill believes that Rand’s conception of egoism developed largely as a
reaction to the Nietzschean orientation of her youth.

  Stephen Hicks, in a review of Merrill’s book, argues that Merrill’s conclusion is premature, since only a full disclosure of Rand’s early journals will settle the issue of her alleged Nietzschean phase. Rand finished her novel in 1933, and published it in 1936. Hicks argues correctly that there is evidence in one of her published journal entries that Rand rejected the “Nietzschean” ethos as early as 1934. In this entry, foreshadowing the character of Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead, Rand condemns those who would achieve power through the masses. If Rand had rejected Nietzsche in 1934, it is likely that she would have revised those passages which could have been interpreted as Nietzschean, before the book was actually published.22

  Hicks states further that Rand may have allowed Andrei to set the terms of the debate, much as the communist state sets the terms for each of the characters in We the Living. Rand had not yet constructed a full theoretical response to the ethics of altruism, and Kira reflects this void. Having fully developed her own rational egoist ethic in later years, it may have been easier for Rand to eliminate the ambiguous passages, rather than to have provided a full philosophical explanation of their actual meaning.23

  There may be some merit to Merrill’s contention that Rand went through a “Nietzschean” phase, but I tend to agree with Hicks that the evidence for such a provocative thesis is inconclusive. However, there are two important issues which must be emphasized because they shed much light on Rand’s attitudes toward the Nietzschean worldview:

  First, in my discussion of the Silver Age of Russian philosophy, it was clear that Russian writers had stressed the Dionysian aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. Rand was probably exposed to this particular interpretation of Nietzsche from a very early age. Though Rand was most impressed by Nietzsche’s critique of altruism and Christianity, she concretized his grand, abstract metaphors with her own images. Despite her initial attraction to Nietzsche’s work, Rand necessarily rejected his Dionysian impulses. And though she continued to draw from Nietzschean imagery as late as The Fountainhead, she was probably already moving away from Nietzsche as early as her student years.