Ayn Rand is not an author to be taken lightly. I read Fountainhead when I was thirteen, and Atlas Shrugged when I was fourteen. I found Fountainhead wierdly appealing because Howard Roark was so carefree and so different and not like any character in any other book I had read. also, I loved the character of Ellsworth Toohey [ if that was his name ]. Terribly ordinary, even meek to look at; and enfant terrible critic. But apart from that, the other characters were very, very interesting. They had such large egos and so many insecurities, just like all of us. It was good.
But not so with Atlas Shrugged. I found the male character and the female character repetitive, after Fountainhead, and if the main characters are weak, nothing else can save it . the story was good, though I feel that Rand could have put forward her ideas in a different, more interesting, fresher way.
You are all welcome to your opinions on that one:P
So it was with some trepidation that I began to read We, the People, fearing that I may only find, say, Howard Roark in a new avatar.
Not so.
Broad range, the story is of the condition of the people in newly, Red, newly Soviet Russia, 1922. Kira Argounov, a girl of eighteen, her fervently Catholic elder sister Lydia, and her parents arrive on the train from the Crimea to Petrograd. Quickly classified as 'bourgeois', the much hated formerly well off class, they are given the worst quarters, they pay the highest rents, and are denied jobs in favour of the 'Great Proleteriat' people, ie the former peasants, who happen to apply for the same job. The book is a chilling, crushing overview of Communist Russia, where every man is 'comrade' to another, but is not a friend. People babble frightened compliments to the Soviet Government but dream of a magical land called 'abroad'. Every word, everywhere is heard, and mercy does not exist. Children are taught to betray family members as part of the Pioneer spirit. Everyone is paid the same, but not everyone starves. A loaf of bread is fifty thousand roubles, and rising every day. The narrative touches a cold, hard spot somewhere inside of you and you begin to identify with, sympathize, suffer and exult with the characters on a never - before scale.
Kira Argounova is a completely un - girly, un - streetsmart, idealistic young girl of eighteen when she returns to Petrograd with her family, where her father had once ben a wealthy textile merchant. Now they are reduced to bottling sachharine tablets [ "Sugar is bourgeois, comrade"] and selling home - made soap, to live. Kira is completely contemptuous of Communism and Communists and does not bother to hide her opinion. The following excerpt illustrates her opinion:
Kira: What is the state but a service and a convenience to a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn't it be preposterous to claim that men exist for the sake of their plumbing and not the plumbing for the men?
Kira, to the amazement and distress of her entire family, rejects the respectable options open to women, and decides on learning to be an engineer, as her dream has always been to grow and build aluminium bridges. Somewhere along the way she mets a revolutionary on the run,Leo Kovalensky, in an awkward situation, and they fall quickly and unconditionally in love; their love for freedom and respect for the individiual human spirit draws them together. Kira also meets a highly placed Communist oficer, Andrei Taganov, who takes a long, long time to fall in love with Kira, but once he does, falls completely for her.
The story is too complex to go into here, in short it is this: Leo being the son of a now - dead famous revolutionary, is faced with rejection everywhere, and, as he slowly realizes that he is living on Kira's salary, he loses his self - respect, and finally, his spirit is broken. He develops acute tuberculosis and is only hope is to be sent south, to a nursing home, to heal. Faced with callousnes and indifference from all quarters, Kira is forced to approach Andrei for money, offering her body to him in exchange. He accepts readily, being desperately in love with her. Leo is sent south and stays away for 8 months. When he returns, he is cynical, has lost all ideals and sets up a private business. For various reasons, he is arrested by Andrei and sentenced to death. Kira, driven almost mad now, rushes to Andrei and tells him the cold, hard truth - the only time she ever spent with Andrei was only for the sake of Leo and nothing else.
Andrei, bewildered, quietly gets Leo out of jail and commits suicide in the face of this truth. Leo, a bitter, cynical man now, leaves Kira and decides to go abroad where the good life is, and leave the ill - fated USSR far, far behind. Kira now returns home, broken by Leo's betrayal and decides to try to escape abroad herself. Having no money, she decides to risk an escape on foot across the snowy, godforsaken plains across the border of Russia, into Latvia. She dresses all in white to avoid being spotted and begins on her journey. A stray shot of a border guard, who thinks he spots a movement on the horizon, find its mark, and Kira dies, slowly, on the white snow, as the first tongues of flame shoot across the sky. It is dawn. She dies, knowing that she is dying, but happy, because, as she reflects, all that she had ever wanted, she had got, and when she died, she would die like a virgin - physically, yes, but with a firm and unbroken spirit, just the same as when she came to Petrograd so many years ago.
