- Rand, Ayn.
We the Living.
New York: Signet, [1936] 1959.
ISBN 0-451-18784-9.
-
This is Ayn Rand's first novel, which she described
to be “as near to an autobiography as I will ever write”. It is a dark
story of life in the Soviet Union in 1925, a year after the death of Lenin
and a year before Ayn Rand's own emigration to the United States from
St. Petersburg / Petrograd / Leningrad, the city in which
the story is set. Originally published in 1936, this edition was revised
by Rand in 1958, shortly after finishing
Atlas Shrugged. Somehow, I had
never gotten around to reading this novel before, and was surprised to
discover that the characters were, in many ways, more complex and
believable and the story less preachy than her later work.
Despite the supposedly diametrically opposed societies in which they
are set and the ideologies of their authors, this story and Upton
Sinclair's
The Jungle
bear remarkable similarities and are worth reading together
for an appreciation of how horribly things can go wrong in any
society in which, regardless of labels, ideals, and lofty
rhetoric, people do not truly own their own lives.
April 2005 