We the Living (1936). Content and Description

Having written and sold a screenplay, Red Pawn (1932), as well as a stage play, The Night of January 16th (1934), Rand completed her first novel, We the Living, in 1934. The U.S. publisher the Macmillan Company and the English publisher Cassells and Company did not publish it, however, until 1936.

A stage adaptation titled The Unconquered was performed on Broadway in 1940, and the novel was also filmed in Italy in 1942. Rand called this film “excellent” and praised especially the actor playing the role of Kira.

In short, the novel traces the intersecting struggles of three young people, Kira Argounova, whose family is returning to Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) when we meet her; Lev Kovalensky, an aristocrat also known as Leo, who has lost both his wealth and his status through the revolutions; and Andrei Taganov, an idealistic Communist Party member, against a system that preaches the credo that people should live for the state. As do her later fictions, this novel pits individuals, with their dreams and talents, against the crushing power of collectivism. Unlike later novels, such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, We the Living focuses more on character and plot and thus may be seen as her most successful novel in terms of its story and artistic coherence.

Rand has called We the Living the most autobiographical of her novels, in terms of its ideas, not in the facts of her life, although there are a few parallels. She and her young heroine Kira both accomplished those most difficult “coming of age” tasks under the new Soviet rule; both were from well-off families whose businesses were nationalized by the Communists; both fled with their families to Crimea, then returned to the newly named city of Petrograd; and both were ambitious, intelligent individualists. While Rand aspired to be a writer and a philosopher, her heroine, Kira, wanted to be an engineer and a builder of bridges.

From the novel’s first sentence, however, we sense the grimness in Kira’s new environment, which foreshadows her ultimate defeat. Moreover, by opening with “Petrograd smelt of carbolic acid,” Rand also signals the shabbiness of the new totalitarian state. Carbolic acid is used to kill lice; as such it symbolizes the poverty of the unclean, crowded masses. For a child of the upper middle class, as the young heroine, Kira, is, the contrast between her sweet accustomed life and these choking acidic fumes in the swarming gray city is palpable. When we first meet them, Kira and her family are crowded into the train.

However, Kira is the only one who seems impervious to the sadness of “humans . . . bundled in ragged overcoats and shawls.” In contrast to the weariness all around her, she stands “straight, motionless, with the graceful indifference of a traveler on a luxurious ocean liner.” In fact, her calm, composed indifference to even her own shabbiness is described as 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.” As with most of her idealized heroes, Rand describes Kira as straight, slim, and graceful. The warrior reference, together with several reminders of Kira’s gray eyes, can be read as an allusion to the Greek goddess Athena.

Traveling with her are her father, Alexander Dimitrievitch Argounov, who is weary but not ready to give up on life, believing that this Soviet regime cannot survive and he will, at last, be able to resume his life as a self-made entrepreneur. Kira’s mother, Galina Petrovna, covers the book she is reading so other passengers cannot see that it is written in French. In contrast, Kira’s older sister, Lydia, flaunts the fading remnants of her lost status, the lace at her throat, her darned silk gloves, and a bottle of perfume. Kira, Lev, and Andrei, plus family members, both immediate and extended, reflect many possible attitudes toward the new Soviet state.

Kira, for instance, is intent on her own goals and observations, with the confidence of the young that she can keep herself above the gray muck of everyday life. At one point, however, she tries to leave Soviet Russia with Lev, the handsome young aristocrat she falls in love with at first sight. Lev has nothing but arrogant contempt for his country’s new leaders; however, he is already in trouble with them. While Kira’s love for Lev is unshakable, her relationship with Andrei, the idealistic young Communist Party member, is far more interesting. While disagreeing on everything political, they seem destined to be friends, and he risks his own party standing to help her, and Lev, several times.

Kira’s cousin, Victor Dunaev, is a foil to all three main characters and the ultimate opportunist who will use every ounce of his considerable crowdpleasing charm to advance his own career. He betrays the woman he loves to marry someone more politically advantageous. As a party member from the ruined aristocracy, he must work doubly hard to prove himself loyal; he does this by betraying his own sister for hiding her counterrevolutionary lover from the state police. The young couple marry in the hope of being sent to the same prison in Siberia, at least.

When they learn that the marriage makes no difference and they are still being sent to prisons far apart, they make one last appeal to Victor to intervene. Despite the fact that people usually did not survive a 20-year prison sentence in Siberia, Victor refuses them even this one humble request that they be allowed to die together. After betraying them to gain his new standing in the party, he fears that any intervention on their behalf, no matter how small, would compromise his hard-won status.

While Kira doggedly pursues her dreams of love, she loses her chance of a career when children of all formerly upper-class citizens are expelled from the university. Then, Lev contracts tuberculosis and Kira has no money to send him to a private sanatorium; after fruitless months of trying to find him a place in a state-run institution, she fears he will die soon. In the meantime, Andrei has declared his love for her, and she, despite her respect for him, lies to him about her need for money to save her family from starvation.

She becomes Andrei’s mistress and uses the money he gives her to save Leo. When Leo returns, recovered in health but corrupted in spirit, it is in the company of an appalling and vulgarly pretentious but wealthy woman, Tonia, whose desire for Leo is not much of a secret. Leo is caught in a black-market deal with Tonia and her husband, Koko, involving another Communist Party member, Pavel Syerov, Andrei’s enemy.

In fact, in his cynical, self-serving black marketeering, Pavel is the perfect foil for the idealist Andrei Taganov. In a novel where the good are overwhelmed by the grim oppression and corruption around them, it makes perfect sense that Lev would be scapegoated and Andrei would rescue him for Kira’s sake, only to give up on his own dream of a life in a noble Soviet Russia with the woman he loves; Andrei commits suicide.

Released, Lev can no longer deal with the situation and leaves with Tonia, who can support him and get him out of Soviet Russia. His prostituting himself for Tonia is a far more corrupt version of Kira’s affair with Andrei, since it lacks both respect and the motivation of saving a loved one’s life. Kira is ultimately shot in her attempt to escape across the border in the frozen north. In her last scenes, we watch her struggle to keep walking through the blinding whiteness in the wedding gown she wore as camouflage against the white snow, while her heart’s blood seeps slowly into the precious lace and falls to the ground. Her last vision is one of her beloved Lev in a nightclub and she smiles “her last smile to all that could have been.” Perhaps it is the tragic nature of this story that lends it the literary structure that some find lacking in Rand’s later novels.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Bildungsroman (from Ger. Bildung, or “development,” and Fr. roman, or “story”) is the literary term for a novel of a sensitive young protagonist coming of age and finding her or his place in society. How does the story’s setting in the newly established Soviet system complicate Kira Argounova’s development?

2. Given that marriage is usually part of a character’s Bildung, especially that of a female protagonist, discuss the irony of the outfit Kira is wearing when she is shot. Look up the word irony in any good literary reference work or college Web site if you have any doubts about its meaning.

3. In “The Goal of My Writing,” from her nonfiction work The Romantic Manifesto (1969), Rand wrote, “The motive and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man.” Considering this: (a) discuss how each character meets or fails to meet this goal as an ideal character, and (b) discuss the three main characters, Kira, Leo (Lev), and Andrei—in terms of their hamartia, meaning “characteristics that help to cause the characters’ downfall,” often referred to as a “tragic flaw.” How does their hamartia contribute to each of their tragic fates?

4. Compare Kira to other Bildungsroman characters, such as Holden Caulfield of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye or Nick Carraway of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

5. Do Kira, Lev, and Andrei seem destined to be defeated? Why or why not?

 






Date added: 2025-01-09; views: 15;


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