Book Proposal for Critical Essays on We the Living

Essay 1: How Communism Destroys People’s Lives in Ayn Rand’s We the Living (50, 003 words)

Summary:

My opening essay analyzes how the book’s Soviet regime ruins the lives of We the Living’s characters in 50 ways. But, to save space, I will narrate just 5 of them.

One, Communists break characters’ lives by nationalizing their homes, stores, businesses, and bank accounts, then centralizing all large social supplies and provisions. Like food, housing, medical care, and higher education, which are all concentrated and distributed by state agencies.

Second, Marxists waste characters time – and damage their health – by making Russians queue-up in endless lines for barely edible food—mildewed millet, moldy flour, rancid sunflower seed oil, powdered eggs, rotten cabbage, dried herring, acorn coffee, coffee-ground pancakes, and crusty bread—in front of state agencies, communal kitchens, state co-operatives, and other provision centers. Where characters are forced to trade their ration cards for incredibly low-quality food that is always in short supply. As they wait in long lines, even on Saturdays, for the thin trickle of life that still drips from provision centers.

Third, the regime destroys people’s working lives by forcing characters to partake in State sponsored social activities for no pay, otherwise they are fired for disloyalty.

Besides subjecting characters to the dreaded reduction-of-staffs system, the fourth way the novel’s government destroys Russia’s social fabric is by replacing the bonds of family love with the ties of State loyalty. By forcing Russian parents to turn over their children to Soviet youth groups, like the Young Pioneers, for example, or the Teenage Komsomol, for instance. Thereby, brainwashing the next generation of robotic young revolutionaries. By not only forcing them to conduct physical cultural drills—singing, marching and playing drums—but also by distributing and discussing Soviet propaganda with them too.

The fifth way the book’s Soviet regime wrecks characters lives is by violating their privacy rights, even in their own homes, which they do by constantly moving strangers into people’s private flats. Designating that an Upravdom (a Soviet building manager) not only dictate to Soviet citizens how much square footage they are allowed to live in but a state official who continually enforces the State’s Domicile Norm, which stipulates that any apartment above the proscribed square footage will immediately have more people moved into it. Because its square footage is greater than the maximum allowed by law. Further, if characters find housing, the flats people move into often have no heat, no electricity, no water, no air conditioning, no telephones, burst water pipes, and leaky rooves.

* Other Topics (Essay 1):

To save space-and-time, I have bullet-pointed many other points my first essay makes. To show you how comprehensive it is. So, you better understand the scope, depth, and value of my 1st essay. Thus, the below topics-list, summarizes most of my 1^st essay’s remaining topics. Such as:

1. How the book’s different modes of transportation—trains, trams, cabs, sleds—cause gruesome accidents & long delays;
2. How the novel’s Soviets try to turn Russians into new men;
3. How Soviet peasant characters, especially hypothetical Ukrainians, protest the seizure of their crops by first locking Soviets inside their village barns. Then burning down those barns, with Soviet officials locked inside, singing peasant hymns to drown out their death screams;
4. How the book’s Soviets cause a wide-variety of diseases in the story (typhus, scurvy, glanders, and tuberculosis) by dirtying Russia’s cities-and-countryside. Then using a tarry carcinogen named Carbolic Acid to sanitize these diseases. Sadly, this chemical disinfectant also kills characters, too. By giving them cancer;
5. How the novel’s GPU requires travel permits, militia registration, and local taxes to be paid, for internal Russian travel. To suppress characters freedom of movement and residence. Not only in regard to travelling from the city to the country (and vice versa) but also to ensure that characters live where the government tells them to (closed vs open cities);
6. How the novel prepares characters to accept communism into their lives. By installing propaganda posters, State banners, and red slogans, all over Leningrad, depicting the glories of Russians who believe in, and act for, a collective workers paradise;
7. How We the Living’s propaganda department further brainwashes characters at school by making them study (and create scrapbooks) of Lenin;
8. How We the Living’s Communist state further propagandizes characters through Soviet cinema. By creating films that portray life to be happy & good in Soviet Russia, even though it was hopeless and doomed. Also, by staging Red ballets, such as The Dance of the Toilers, where fragile ballerinas wear papier-machete chains on their thin arms-and-legs—to symbolize their unlimited toil and absolute State submission;
9. How an orphan from a Soviet reformatory named Sasha Chernova, fights to improve the novel’s terrible working conditions by spurring workers to overthrow the Soviet government at their factories;
10. How, because the book’s Soviet government views private property as evil, they deliberately inflate characters rubles. Until, they are forced to sell (or trade) their family heirlooms for basic living materials, such as food, kerosene, and industrial goods;
11. How We the Living’s Soviet government disabuses land-hungry peasants of the foolish notion that the land is theirs; that the land belongs to the people who till it. Since, it doesn’t. Rather, peasants feel cheated and tricked when they learn that the Soviet Revolution does not provide peasants with their own land to cultivate, as promised. But rather that all land belongs to the state;
12. How the novel’s peasants are arrested or deported for having taken part in commerce. For having sold their grain on the open market. For farmers harvests are stolen by Soviet requisitioning detachments, especially if they discover that rather than fulfilling State agricultural quotas farmers try to sell their grain on the open market;
13. How requisitioning brigades steal peasant’s food to build up Soviet industry on their bones. Which, ultimately, causes the book’s peasants to hide, or steal back, part of their harvest every night;
14. How the book’s peasants “burn the local Karl Marx club [in the] Vasilkino, Svershkoe, and Petrovshino, [villages], assassinate twenty-six party members in outlying village districts, [raze] eight [communist] clubhouses, three [red] schools and [one] communal farm storehouse” (377, 378, 407). So, they can reclaim local administration of village affairs;
15. How the presence of an anarchist revolutionary named Nester Makhno—during a train ride from Crimea to Saint Petersburg—shows readers how Russia’s underground criminal networks also hated the Soviets. For Makhno, and his supports, the Makhnovists, called for the end of violent requisitioning of peasant food, the elimination of heavy peasant taxes, and the expulsion of brigades who were assigned to take peasant possessions. Accordingly, the Makhnovists banditry was directed against the government and officialdom rather than against Russian citizens;
16. How a GPU officer named Andrei Taganov uses his party card as a butcher’s knife. By executing crowds of thousands of starving peasants who besiege the barns where their stolen food is held. Where food detachments had stored the grain that had been taken from them. As a temporary staging point to transport that grain to urban areas and the army;
17. How this same GPU officer, Andrei Taganov, turns on communism. When he realizes that Marxism does not value human life. For Andrei is a tragic example of a man who is broken by the realization of what believing in Marxism really means. Since, after learning from Kira, that the individual is worthless before the state, Andrei questions and judges his Party. Then, after gathering sufficient evidence of Communism’s evil and his massive error, he breaks with Marxism;
18. How the book’s apartment buildings often collapse, without warning, all over the city, due to lack of Soviet upkeep. Since, houses in Saint Petersburg long in need of repair, crumble into a pile of dusted rubble. Horrifying workers when they return home from a long day of toiling for the state. Since, when they get home they see that their homes, together with their private property in them—which they worked hard to accumulate over a long time—vanishes in an instant;
19. How the book’s communist government makes characters trade their coupons for food, manufactured goods, and other items, they do not need, and do not want. (Like when Lydia takes soap and herring at a university co-operative even though she does not need these products);
20. How the novel’s Soviet Union exposes characters to diseases—typhus, scurvy, glanders, and tuberculosis—because they can’t keep their country clean. Causing characters to rub carnation oil, even kerosene, on their heads, bodies, and clothes, to ward away disease carrying lice;
21. How characters have to cope with lousy Soviet manufactured goods. Such as kerosene stoves that explode, matches that don’t light, shoes with cardboard soles, dim lightbulbs that burn out quickly, handkerchiefs that tear easily, clothes with missing sleeves, loose handles that fall off pots, and foreign objects baked into loaves of bread;
22. How the book’s Soviet government damages people health by making them stand in endless lines during deep winter. Where they are exposed to strong winds, freezing ice, blinding snow, cold sleet, driven rain, and large hail, in front of communal kitchens, university co-operatives, state offices, state hospitals, and other provision centers, in all-weather winter conditions. Waiting in lines that stretch around the corner. As the queue-up for hours, days even, waiting for their meager rations. Contracting frost bit, open sores, respiratory infections, joint pain, dry skin, sore throats, colds & flues, while they wait;
23. How the novel’s Soviet minders eliminate characters freedom of movement. Until, they can’t live, and travel, where they want. Instead, characters need to furnish travel permits on train rides, and secure permission, from multiple authorities, for any overnight stay, anywhere. (Especially, stays over 48 hours).For example, when the Argounova’s take a train from Crimea to Saint Petersburg, GPU agents kick open their train doors, several times night. Sternly ordering them to hand over their “travel documents.” Similarly, when Leo and Kira try to travel to a beach, they need to register their stay with the local militia department, and pay local taxes, to obtain permits as transient guests. Just to get permission for a one-night stay at a nearby beach town.We are also told that part of the reason why the authorities restrict characters ability to live and travel where they want, was “to limit the rural exodus of starving Ukrainian peasants who were fleeing from the countryside to the cities in search of food.”
24. How the book Soviet State banishes university students and alleged counterrevolutionaries to Siberia. (Like, Sasha, Irina, and other anonymous university students). Where 9 out of 10 prisoners, like them, die within a year of being imprisoned. Due to overwork, starvation, freezing, hunger, lack of medical attention, slow mistreatment, and treatable diseases (scurvy & ulcers). Since, when imprisoned, most prisoners undertake huge projects for the state that can only be carried out by penal labor. Projects like dam building, railway construction, bridge and road building, coal mining, and petroleum extraction.
25. How characters wages are automatically garnished (without their knowledge) for social insurance; membership dues for the Proletarian Society of Chemical Defense; taxes for Russia’s Red Air Fleet; and taxes to liquidate illiteracy.
26. How the book’s office managers will not hire the bourgeoise. Since, they remember that “when they had been jobless in the old days their bourgeoise brothers would not hire them.” Thus, to get revenge, these hiring managers tell hopeful job seekers, like Leo, that “No. They have no job opening. And none are expected.” They say this because they think “it will do bourgeoise people good to learn how it feels” to not be hired.Thus, the cruel refusal of even the right to make a living for characters with an aristocratic past shows readers how strongly former aristocrats are discriminated against. Ultimately, suffering from a frightful lack of work, simply because they are high-born;
27. How the book’s Soviet officials conduct nationwide purges of universities—like the Technological Institute, for example, or the Petrograd State University, for instance, or the Art Academy, case in point—by inventing purge questionnaires, which they distribute in schools and at work, asking Russians: if they are party members; if they are in a trade union; what their job is; what their parents background is; what they did before, during, and after the revolution? If these people where once wealthy, or highborn, or suspected of having the wrong social origins, they are gleefully tossed out of their studies and jobs, during the Great Purge of 1936;
28. How the book’s Soviet State purges Communist party members who had been in the party well before the 1917 revolution. Party members, like Stephan Timoshenko, Andrei Taganov, and Leon Trotsky, who dare to say that the Party has betrayed the principles of the original Marxist revolution. Thus, for whistleblowing, these revolutionaries are kicked as traitors. For standing on principle. For telling Soviet officials that “they’ve lost the battle, strangled the revolution, sold out the people, for power, brute power.” For saying, like Leon Trotsky did, that Russia has become “a degenerate workers state controlled by an undemocratic bureaucracy,” which would eventually be overthrown by another political revolution; by a representative “worker’s democracy.” And, from then on, “all decisions would be made democratically, according to workers principles of socialism;”
29. How party members also feel that Communism has deceived them. Because though they “joined the party to make a better world for poor, forlorn, people,” the positive changes promised to them by the original revolution are being betrayed. Since, the real beneficiaries of the revolution are not ordinary, everyday, characters like Stephan Timoshenko and Andrei Taganov. But, instead are cruel Soviet politicians, corrupt merchants, and other governmental minders, who betrayed the revolution in the name of enforcing it. Men, like Pavel Syerov, Karp Morozov, and Victor Dunaev;
30. How We the Living suggests the Soviet practice of slaughtering its own Red Army by placing a second secret police army behind it that would fire forward so nobody could move back. The novel suggests this by recounting two famous Russian land battles—the Battle of Petrovshino and the Battle of Samsonova—where thousands of Russian soldiers were also gunned down mercilessly by the people behind them. By Stalin’s own personal army that would rip the dog tags of off slain Russian troops. So, Russian’s did not know that their own troops were being murdered by their own soldiers;
31. How the book’s State Textile Trust makes clothes for characters. Like 3 dresses, with 6 print patterns, every poor woman who wants new State clothes must wear. Ultimately, making women – like Kira and Irina – lose all joy in their new garments, since they wear similar (or identical) dresses that thousands of other women already have. Making women feel like inmates of a huge orphanage, or asylum, because they all look the same;
32. How the novel’s government tears down symbols of a culture, faith, or belief, opposed to its own collectivist ideology. To this end, hundreds of the novel’s “churches are [either] destroyed,” or allowed to go into a state of collapse, since Christians believe in the sanctity of an individual’s soul. “Greek statues [are] destroyed” because Pagans believe in individual heroism, especially on the battlefield. Aristocratic “coats-of-arms” are ripped off their hinges and burned to ash because lords in an aristocracy respect their citizens individuality. The Czar’s “imperial eagle,” is removed from in front of his opera box at the “Mikhailovsky Theatre” because the Czars were much more tolerant of individual initiative;
33. How the novels closure of churches, mosques, and synagogues causes Christians, Moslems, and Jews, to be mocked and mangled. This also causes a deeply Christian character named Lydia Argounova to call the Soviets “sacrilegious apostates [who will all] burn in hell [because] they defy God!” Because they’ve “opened the sacred relics [to take] gold ikons,” religious heirlooms, and other historical treasures, from churches. Including church bells that are melted down for scrap metal, since Communists claim that the sound of bells ringing on Sundays disturbs the peace of atheists;
34. How characters are injured, maimed, or killed by dangerous transportation. For example, an anonymous peasant woman is decapitated when she falls asleep at night riding a train. Since, when sleeping, she slides off the hitch (or buffer) in-between cars, is pulled under the train, and is dragged, for a few minutes. Until her head is cut off. Similarly, a man named Mitya Vessiolkin cuts off one of his hands, when he tries to jump onto a moving tramway. Likewise, another man named Boris Koulikov “cuts off both of his legs, [when he] tries to jump into a tramway moving at full speed.” Kira, almost dies, twice. Once, when she is almost grinded off of a tram platform, by a passing truck. And, again, when she tries to leap onto Leo’s departing train, just as it is about to go into a tunnel. Evidently, Soviet citizens resort to these desperate measures to not only avoid waiting for weeks for a train to appear, but also because there are “no reliable schedules and time tables,” with the Soviets in charge;
35. How the book’s Russian government drives characters, like Leo Kovalensky, to be black-market food speculators. Since, they not only fire him from translating Russian books into English, French, and German but also because he refuses to teach English to Russian sailors of the Red Baltic Fleet, at nights, for no pay. How, though, after being fired, Leo clears bricks from collapsed houses, clears snow from the city’s streets, and constructs the pillars of a bridge, eventually even these low-level jobs dry up. So, because Leo is sick-and-tired of facing bared door after barred door when he looks for work—with the same response; no opening, no job, no work—eventually, Leo sells stolen State food to scores of shops all-across Russia. For all Leo cares about is giving himself and his girlfriend Kira a taste of wealth before he dies: “ ‘So they shoot food speculators? Why don’t they give us a chance at something else?’ ”;
36. How bribery, extortion, and corruption are common practices in We the Living. Since, Alexander bribes an apartment manager for housing; Kira bribes an Upravdom to get a tenant kicked out of her house; Karp Morozov bribes a Russian for space to run a black-market food store; and, a hiring manger asks Leo for a bribe in exchange for a translation job. Evidently, bribery, extortion, and Vzyatka, become everyday practices in We the Living. Since, survival, under Communism, requires lawbreaking. This is also why the novel’s Marxists steal State food from the State railway station—then sell it in an illegal food store—while high Soviet officials, like Pavel Syerov, escape punishment for their involvement;
37. How We the Living’s government muzzles the free press. By not only shutting down all non-Bolshevik newspapers but also by creating a placard newspaper know as The Wall Newspaper. This newspaper, which is posted on the wall of every workplace, faults, or praises, characters for their social (or anti-social) behavior. Since, this Wall Newspaper is the voice of social activity that gives constructive proletarian criticism on character’s social behavior. Awarding social credits for State approved behavior, and social demerits, for un-Marxism like conduct. (A high score leads to job security, at least for a while, while a low score gets characters fired);
38. How State informers vigilantly spy-on characters. So, they can trade information to the government for some type of reward. (Like more food, better treatment, or the permission to live alone, for example). So, to gather this data, citizen informants watch characters intently. Hoping to raise State alarm bells for their questionable wealth, doubtful conversations, and unusual actions. Often, denouncing characters, simply for having a bourgeoise bearing and attitude;
39. And, lastly, how the novel’s characters have no right to face an objective justice system, based on objective rules, and rational procedures. Instead, characters are subject to courts of class justice, where social revenge becomes the order of the day;

* Incomplete synopsis. Learn more, by reading Emre’s book.

Essay 2: How We the Living’s Soviet State Compels People to Work for Their Collectivized Government through Forced Social Activities (37, 918 words)

 Summary:

My second essay shows readers how the book’s Communist government forces characters to support the official Leninist Party line—regardless of their actual evaluation of Communism—so they can advance in the Soviets new red world. Ultimately, “wasting their time on stupid, hypocritical social activities [where they] humiliate themselves by playing up to the Red authorities” (Rand). By engaging in communal work programs, after-hours night classes—to teach illiterates—by managing club libraries, drawing propaganda posters, memorizing newspaper statistics, editing Soviet newspapers—like The Wall Newspaper—and by volunteering for the Marxist Circle. Similarly, characters are also expected to deliver lectures for the Komsomol, teach citizens about the responsible management of State food at the State Food Trust’s Educational Circle, and by partaking in various State marches, like a parade to honor a British Trade Unions, for example, or a procession to commemorate Andrei’s solemn state funeral, for instance.

If characters refuse to participate in these voluntary, after-hours, activities—as a mandatory State duty—they are fired from their jobs, for not properly supporting the Soviet Government. During a dreaded “reduction-of-staffs” clearinghouse procedure, which periodically purges employees who are not sufficiently loyal to—and enthusiastic for—the Soviet government. Thus, characters who refuse to donate their leisure time to the Soviet State (for free) are listed as unemployed bourgeoise. Because of which they are stripped of their food rations (their food cards are taken away); they are forced to shovel snow (in their old age); they are taxed much more than Soviet employees (for everything); and have to pay much more for apartment repairs, as well.

So, to ally their overwhelming fears: fear of starvation; fear of being suspected of disloyalty to the regime; fear of being informed upon; fear of being summoned by the GPU; people, like Alexander Argounova, take low-level Soviet jobs. So, they can get bread cards, lard, and sugar, which food rations they so desperately need. To feed themselves and their starving families. Thus, because Alexander works as a low-level Soviet book keeper on the Vasilevskiy island, he is now listed as a Soviet employee by his Upravdom. So, now he is entitled to State food rations. Because, now, Alexander is a Soviet employee who is no-longer suspected of being bourgeoise.

Another theme my second essay examines is how We the Living’s Soviet Union forces characters to focus on their immediate survival needs—not a long-range plan for their lives—by glorifying everyday Soviet toil. Until characters are unable to create a plan for their lives apart from party ideology and communal activity.

Thus, to ensure that Russians are busy focusing on their immediate survival needs—not on overthrowing the government—the book’s Socialist government clogs their citizen’s days with many different social activities. Activities that render characters far less likely to foment a counter-revolutionary rebellion. Since, the State not only keeps them busy with endless volunteer work but also feeds them mush, so they do not have the physical energy to attack the state. For it is a matter of self-protection for the party to force everyone to be totally absorbed with their daily survival efforts. By providing only a scintilla of food to keep their citizens barely alive.

My second essay also examines how We the Living’s collective government tries to forbid citizens from loving – and marrying – the petty bourgeoise. Counseling Russia to break off lovely romances with bourgeoise men and women by publishing magazine interviews that advise Russians that “true proletarians do not marry out of their class.” For the book’s collectivist government thinks that “individual love is a bourgeoise prejudice” that decreases the toiling masses overall devotion to the Soviet government. Accordingly, the novel’s characters, like Andrei Taganov, think that their love for bourgeoise people, like Kira Argounova, is somehow sullied, unclean, and shameful, when it is not. Thus, subjecting love (just like everything else) to the gray rot of Soviet dogma.

Further, my second essay explores how representatives of a dying old world—Alexander, Vasili, and Galina—are compelled to sever their ties to the Russian upper classes and to Orthodox religion. To adjust themselves to a new red culture typified by party activity and revolutionary ideology. By contrast, I also examine how the Argounova brothers refuse to turn over their life and work to the Soviet government. Since, these two brothers (Alexander & Vasili) do not want Russia’s government to take over and corrupt their identities at the workplace. Because they know full-well the lurking dangers of associating with dehumanized Marxists.

My second essay also examines how Stalin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was a temporary economic liberalization of Soviet Russia, begrudgingly adopted by the authorities, to make it easier for Russians to get food and manufactured goods. Since, even Soviet leaders are not immune from public opinion, especially if voiced by millions of Russians. So, to grant their citizens a slight reprieve from hardship & struggle, Stalin implemented the NEP in 1921. However, in the novel, we see how hypocritical the NEP is. Since, characters who represent the NEP, like a tricky merchant named Karp Morozov, grow rich by bribing officials, stealing food, and minting money for Soviet officials, such as Pavel Syerov.

Conversely, Russia’s NEP suppresses honest businessmen, like Alexander Argounova, by raising their taxes, soliciting bribes, and make them default on their loans, until they cannot compete with successful merchants under the NEP. Because they use pull, influence, and favor giving (blat) to navigate everyday life. Since, corrupt merchants who create a money-making machine for Soviet officials, like Karp Morozov, are allowed to operate, indefinitely. Not for any moral or ideological reason. But simply because they put more-and-more money into the wallets of crooked Soviet officials.

My second essay also examines how We the Living’s Marxist State features painting, photographs, statues, and busts, of Communist leaders, in gigantic size. Because in a collectivist dictatorship loving the chief is like loving the regime. So, to foster this total State loyalty, the book’s Soviet government displays prominent images of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Frederic Engels, Gregory Zinoviev, and Anatoly Lunacharsky.  Ultimately, placing their images in State offices, at job centers, at various open air markets—like the Alexandrovsky Market, for example, or the Kouznetzky Market, for instance—as well as in booths, kiosks, and makeshift stores, located on various streets, alleys, and promenades. To advertise for the regime. To assert the regime’s power. To shape a positive image for the regime that molds popular opinion in the dictator’s favor.

This essay also shows readers how a woman named Comrade Sonia “represents mob womanhood at its most dangerous,” since she wants to bring new life to men out of the ruins of students broken lives. For Comrade Sonia is the new Soviet woman of a new day, who controls most of St. Petersburg’s other women. Because she has 5 women’s clubs, 2 profunions, and the Zhenotdel—a section of the Communist Party dedicated to women’s affairs—under her thumb. Ultimately, prompting students, like Kira, to promote State Marxism by joining Marxist Clubs, Red Student Councils, and other forms of State power.

However, my second essay also shows readers how Comrade Sonia made a big mistake by trying to convince Kira that her highest loyalty should be to the group, not to herself. Since, Kira attends Petrograd’s Technological Institute to choose a profession that will make her happy because it answers the call of her own selfish-greatness. So, she chooses architecture, since it is the only profession for which she does not have to become a licensed state liar. Since, steel-is-steel.

Lastly, my second essay explores how We the Living's Soviet State creates satirical cartoons that lampoon Western figures who do not embrace Communism. Figures, like Neville Chamberlin, who opposed many Communist policies. Policies like nationalizing industries; overspending on social programs; increasing the power of trade unions, and more.

Evidently, since the novel’s Communist newspapers hate Chamberlin’s stances on their favorite pet projects, they mock him in print. Even though Chamberlin was in favor of many social policies that Russian Marxists should have supported. Policies like limiting the working hours of women and children laboring in factories; mandating that employers provide at least one week of paid vacation per year; and establishing a national system of unemployment benefits were workers receive temporary monies for their living expenses—food, clothing, and shelter—while they are laid-off and looking for work. Yet, because the novel’s Red State does not want to expose their citizens to classically liberal ideas that could cause workers to riot, they depict a steak-eating Neville Chamberlin “crushing the British proletariat,” by sitting on a “red-bloused” worker with his chair (196).

Ultimately, this ludicrous juxtaposition shows readers the hypocrisy, the double standards, and the systematic lies of the novel’s Soviet regime.

* Incomplete synopsis. Learn more, by reading Emre’s book.

Essay 3: The Longing of all Things Foreign in Ayn Rand’s We the Living: How Characters Want to Emigrate Abroad to Win Their Civil Freedom (27, 610)

Summary:

My third essay shows readers how Russia’s most intelligent, most moral, most able citizens (the nations top 10 percent) try to flee to a freer West. To nations like Germany, Latvia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova. So, characters can live for themselves, under classically liberal governments that leave people free to determine their own thoughts, beliefs, and action, for themselves. Without a Soviet government always telling Russians where they should live, what they should read, what they should write, what they should say, how they should think, and, basically, what they should be.

This, ultimately, is why characters, like Kira Argounova, Leo Kovalensky, Andrei Taganov (and others) either try to escape, secretly-and-hurriedly, in the middle-of-the-night, abroad a secret smugglers ships (Kira & Andrei) or think about defecting to Germany by being assigned to a foreign post in a Western country from which they will defect (Andrei & Kira); or try to escape, on foot, over the Latvian border (Kira); or try to leave Russia by taking a train to Baku, Azerbaijan (Irina & Sasha).

So, characters desperately flee Russia, in any way they can, since they want to live in a nation that is free from political imprisonment, slave labor camps, firing squads, mass-murder, food shortages, clothing shortages, endless lines, poor housing, phony trials, man-made famines, torture, the persecution of professional intellectuals and the clergy, together with the mind-numbing drudgery of their dreary existences.  So, they can escape the gloomy hardships of their dead-end Soviet lives.

My third essay also explains how the book’s characters try defect. So, they can choose and practice their own professions: a concert pianist for Lydia; a visual artist for Irina; a philosopher for Leo; a historian for Sasha; a civil engineer for Kira. Rather than suffering with thwarted careers and choked off minds. So, characters have the right to live and work for their own sake by choosing and working for their own goals.

My third essay also shows readers how characters want to flee to a freer West to escape being victimized by artificial man-made famines. Thus, to enjoy high quality material abundance, We the Living’s characters—my third essay shows—also long for Western-made manufactured goods, like lighters, lipstick, and lightbulbs; Western clothing goods, like sweaters, dresses, and nightgowns; Western cosmetics goods, like face powder, foreign lipstick, and French perfume; and, Western food goods like eggs, milk, butter, potatoes, cheese, and ice-cream.

My third essay also shows readers how We the Living characters readily consume Western culture at places like the European Rooftop Garden Hotel—where they enjoy rebel anthems, like the Song of Broken Glass—or how characters watch foreign films, like the Golden Octopus, in Petrograd’s theaters—to give them hope of leading a better life abroad—or, how characters observe European casinos and beer gardens, from a resort city on the Crimean Peninsula named Yalta—to see what it is like to live freely. For these western scenes not only grant characters spiritual release from the oppressive red world around them but these western venues also show characters that there is “a sunlit, carefree world out there,” somewhere beyond the dark night and darker horrors of Soviet Russia. Waiting for characters, like Kira, to claim it.

The final topic of my 3^rd essay relates to Kira’s long death march to freedom—when she tries to defect across the Latvian border—so she can be born into a new life. Not die in Soviet Russia. For only abroad can Kira conceive of a better life for herself.  Since, the concept ‘abroad’ is Kira’s mental escape, her emotional catharsis, her soul preserver and spiritual lifeline. For Kira thinks she will have a brighter future, a better tomorrow and a healthier life, if she undertakes a harrowing trek through the Pskov Oblast in northwestern Russia. To escape death in life. To escape a tyranny that destroys her health through mass slaughter and military aggression; to escape a corrupt criminal State, or kakistocracy, that is governed by its worst citizens. So, Kira can build a new, happier life, by charting her own course. By making her own future.

* Incomplete synopsis. Learn more, by reading Emre’s book.