We the Living

We the Living is the first novel published by the Russian-born American writer Ayn Rand, and her first public statement against communism. It appeared in 1936 and is set in post-revolutionary Russia between 1922 and 1925. In the foreword, the author noted that it was the closest she would ever come to writing an autobiography. The novel draws on her own experience: born in Saint Petersburg in 1905 to a bourgeois family whose property was seized after the 1917 Revolution, Rand emigrated to the United States in 1926, fearing for her safety because of her strong anti-communist convictions.

Rand began the book in 1929 under the working title Airtight and completed it in 1934. Despite the support of H. L. Mencken, who considered it a really excellent piece of work, several publishers turned it down until George Platt Brett of Macmillan agreed to publish it in 1936, a decision that was not free of internal controversy. The first American edition was not a commercial success; it sold out slowly and today is a rare book. It fared better in Britain and in some European countries. Rand's later success with Atlas Shrugged prompted a new edition in 1959, in which she made changes that have been debated for their philosophical weight, especially the removal of some Nietzschean phrases. Most readers today know this second version.

The protagonist is Kira Argounova, the younger daughter of a bourgeois family, an independent spirit with a will to match, who refuses every attempt, whether from her family or from the emerging Soviet state, to shape her to a pattern. After returning to Petrograd, her family must rebuild its life in a city marked by scarcity, endless queues and the confiscation of former property. Kira enrolls at the Technological Institute, hoping to become an engineer, and there meets Andrei Taganov, an idealistic Communist and officer of the GPU, with whom she forms a friendship based on mutual respect despite their political differences. Her bond with Leo Kovalensky, a man of free spirit, begins with passion and a shared disillusion with the regime, but it weakens under hardship and their differing responses to oppression.

The novel advances a clear thesis about the incompatibility between the individual and a state that demands collective sacrifice and suppresses personal ambition. It is also a portrait of everyday life under Soviet rule in the 1920s, with its humiliations, poverty and corruption. Its importance lies in being the first literary formulation of ideas Rand would develop in her major novels, and in offering a testimony of emigration and totalitarianism.