We the Living (2 page)

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 conditions 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.

For those readers who have expressed a personal curiosity about me, I want to say that
We the Living
is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write. It is not an autobiography in the literal, but only in the intellectual, sense. The plot is invented; the background is not. As a writer of the Romantic school, I would never be willing to transcribe a “real life” story, which would amount to evading the most important and most difficult part of creative writing: the construction of a plot. Besides, it would bore me to death. My view of what a good autobiography should be is contained in the title that Louis H. Sullivan gave to the story of his life:
The Autobiography of an Idea.
It is only in this sense that
We the Living
is my autobiography and that Kira, the heroine, is me. I was born in Russia, I was educated under the Soviets, I have seen the conditions of existence that I describe. The particulars of Kira’s story were not mine; I did not study engineering, as she did—I studied history; I did not want to build bridges—I wanted to write; her physical appearance bears no resemblance to mine, neither does her family. The specific events of Kira’s life were not mine; her ideas, her convictions, her values were and are.

 

—Ayn Rand
New York, October 1958

PETROGRAD SMELT OF CARBOLIC ACID.

A pinkish-gray banner that had been red, hung in the webbing of steel beams. Tall girders rose to a roof of glass panes gray as the steel with the dust and wind of many years; some of the panes were broken, pierced by forgotten shots, sharp edges gaping upon a sky gray as the glass. Under the banner hung a fringe of cobwebs; under the cobwebs—a huge railway clock with black figures on a yellow face and no hands. Under the clock, a crowd of pale faces and greasy overcoats waited for the train.

Kira Argounova entered Petrograd on the threshold of a box car. She stood straight, motionless, with the graceful indifference of a traveler on a luxurious ocean liner, with an old blue suit of faded cloth, with slender, sunburned legs and no stockings. She had an old piece of plaid silk around her neck, and short tousled hair, and a stockingcap with a bright yellow tassel. She had a calm mouth and slightly widened eyes with the defiant, enraptured, solemnly and fearfully expectant look of a warrior who is entering a strange city and is not quite sure whether he is entering it as a conqueror or a captive.

Behind her was a car overloaded with a freight of humans and bundles. The bundles were wrapped in bed-sheets, newspapers and flour sacks. The humans were bundled in ragged overcoats and shawls. The bundles had served as beds and had lost all shape. Dust had engraved wrinkles on the dry, cracked skin of faces that had lost all expression.

Slowly, wearily, the train pulled to a stop, the last one of a long journey across the devastated plains of Russia. It had taken two weeks to make a three days’ trip—from the Crimea to Petrograd. In 1922 the railroads, as well as everything else, had not as yet been organized. The civil war had come to an end. The last traces of the White Army had been wiped out. But as the hand of the Red rule was bridling the country, the net of steel rails and telegraph wires still hung limply, out of the hand’s grasp.

There were no schedules, no time-tables. No one knew when a train would leave or arrive. A vague rumor that it was coming rushed a mob of anxious travelers to the stations of every town along its way. They waited for hours, for days, afraid to leave the depot where the train could appear in a minute—or a week. The littered floors of the waiting rooms smelt like their bodies; they put their bundles on the floors, and their bodies on the bundles, and slept. They munched patiently dry crusts of bread and sunflower seeds; they did not undress for weeks. When at last, snorting and groaning, the train rumbled in, men besieged it with fists and feet and ferocious despair. Like barnacles, they clung to the steps, to the buffers, to the roofs. They lost their luggage and their children; without bell or notice the train started suddenly, carrying away those who had crawled aboard.

Kira Argounova had not started the journey in a box car. At the start, she had had a choice seat: the little table at the window of a third-class passenger coach; the little table was the center of the compartment, and Kira—the center of the passengers’ attention. A young Soviet official admired the line that the silhouette of her body made against the light square of a broken window. A fat lady in a fur coat was indignant that the girl’s defiant posture somehow suggested a cabaret dancer perched among champagne glasses, but a dancer with a face of such severe, arrogant calm, that the lady wondered whether she was really thinking of a cabaret table or a pedestal. For many long miles, the travelers of that compartment watched the fields and prairies of Russia roll by as a background for a haughty profile with a mass of brown hair thrown off a high forehead by the wind that whistled outside in the telegraph wires.

For lack of space Kira’s feet rested on her father’s lap. Alexander Dimitrievitch Argounov slumped wearily in his corner, his stomach a shelf for his folded hands, his red, puffed eyes half-closed, drowsing, jerking himself up with a sigh once in a while when he caught his mouth hanging open. He wore a patched khaki overcoat, high peasant boots with run-down heels and a burlap shirt on the back of which one could still read: “Ukrainian Potatoes.” This was not an intentional disguise; it was all Alexander Dimitrievitch possessed. But he was greatly worried lest someone should notice that the rim of his pince-nez was of real gold.