We the Living: The First American Novel on Soviet Russia, the Soul of “Any Dictatorship,” and Its Aftermath in the Cold War

Abstract

Russian-born American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905–1982) is one of the most important contributors to political thought in the US. However, contrary to her long-lasting popularity historiographical research on the polarizing writer has not taken shape until the last decade. “The mere mention of Ayn Rand’s name in academic circles can evoke smirks and a rolling of the eyes,” summarizes Chris Matthew Sciabarra such defensive demeanor in his study The Russian Radical: “Most often she is dismissed, without discussion, as a reactionary, a propagandist, or a pop-fiction writer with a cult following. The fact that her work appeals to the young seems proof that her ideas are immature or simplistic.” Such hasty yet prevailing conclusions – repeatedly affirmed by distorting accounts that, by now, even attribute a destructive force of global proportions to the name Ayn Rand – have long prevented the scholarly engagement with a body of work that also, among other aspects, belongs to the history of communism and anti-communism in the United States. Born to a middle-class Jewish family in 1905, Alisa Rosenbaum had witnessed the October Revolution as a young girl, and had spent the first years of the Soviet reign studying at Petrograd State University. At the age of 21, she had the opportunity to visit relatives abroad, upon which she never returned. After her arrival in the US in 1926, she took the pen name Ayn Rand. She began a stunning literary career, which eventually lead to the publication of her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, published in 1943 and 1957 respectively. Both of them sold several million copies each, and obtained the status of “stubborn bestsellerdom” in the US, because the writer “had a grip on some key components of the national fantasy life, not least because the novels were her fantasy life too,” as Judith Wilt once remarked. Because of her fiction’s recurring theme–individualism–and due to her political activities and involvements, Ayn Rand is usually considered to be a foremost anti-communist author. In the 1940s, she was close to activists on the political right who fought against a socialist