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apply her philosophy without expressing its values concretely in stories, screenplays, dramas, and novels. Thus Rand transcended the dualism between philosophy and art, social thought and entertainment. As she stated in a journal entry dated 4 May 1946, she had no interest in presenting newly discovered knowledge “in its abstract, general form.”¹ She wished to apply her knowledge “in the concrete form of men and events, in the form of a fiction story.” Such a fusion of the abstract and the concrete led Rand to wonder if she represented “a peculiar phenomenon.” Like Nina Berberova and other Russian writers, Rand believed, with no show of modesty, that she had achieved “the proper integration of a complete human being” (xiv).

      Rand’s goal in writing was “the projection of an ideal man.” This literary portrayal was, for her, “an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.”² But the “ideal man” was not a pure abstraction. He had to be related to “the conditions which make him possible and which his existence requires.”³ By defining the values such an ideal man would have and by delineating the social conditions that would make it possible for him to exist and flourish, Rand slowly moved from best-selling novelist to public philosopher. She shifted from the specifically anticommunist political themes of her first novel, We the Living, to the broad metaphysical and epistemological themes of Atlas Shrugged. She eventually boasted that she was “challenging the cultural tradition of two-and-a-half-thousand years.”⁴ Her formal philosophy, “untainted by any Kantian influence,” aimed to reconnect the elements in human existence “which Kant had severed.”⁵

      DIGESTING THE PAST

      There is no evidence to suggest that Rand explicitly criticized the works of Russian philosophers. No journals from her Russian period are extant, and the journal entries currently available date a full dozen years after her university encounters with Lossky. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Rand drew from her own experiences in Russia to compose a number of short stories and plays. Many of these unpublished stories appear in The Early Ayn Rand, among them, “Good Copy,” “Escort,” “The Night King,” “Her Second Career,” and “The Husband I Bought.”⁶ This last tale of unrequited love was based on Rand’s first romantic experiences in Russia with a man who was probably exiled to Siberia.⁷

      In 1931–32, she wrote a film treatment and screenplay called “Red Pawn,” which dealt specifically with the evil of Soviet communism. Of greater philosophical importance, however, is the secondary theme of this work. For the first time, Rand dealt with “the philosophic identity of Communism and religion.”⁸ In Rand’s Russia, religion offered the only organized opposition to the Bolsheviks. Religion was viewed as communism’s natural enemy. Whereas communism was atheistic and materialistic, religion celebrated God’s existence and human spiritual redemption.

      Rand examined this opposition between two dominant Russian cultural forces and refused to accept their apparent hostility as evidence for their mutual exclusivity. She recognized that something fundamental united the communists and the believers. Tracing their essential similarities became one of Rand’s earliest philosophical preoccupations.

      For Rand, communism was a secular substitute for religion. Like the Church before it, communism subjugated the individual to an allegedly higher power. In this respect, religion and communism were identical. The main difference between them was their respective agencies of domination. For believers, it was God; for the communists, it was the state.⁹

      Though Rand had not yet mastered English, she created tantalizing images in “Red Pawn” to dramatize the organic conjunction of religion and communism. Much of the movie action is situated on Strastnoy Island, a “bit of land in the Arctic waters off the Siberian coast.”¹⁰ In the czarist days, a monastery occupied the island. But since the Revolution, the monastery had been converted into a Soviet prison.¹¹

      Rand writes that the island’s library occupied the former chapel of the old monastery. In the library, a sacred mural remained, depicting Christ’s walk to Golgotha. But above the mural, the communists had scrawled, in red letters, “Proletarians of the World Unite!” Red flags were sketched into the raised hand of St. Vladimir. A hammer and sickle were superimposed on Moses’ tablets. The fresh paint dripped down the chapel walls.

      Tall candles in silver stands at the altar had to be lighted in the daytime. Their little red flames stood immobile, each candle transformed into a chandelier by the myriads of tiny reflections in the gilded halos of carved saints; they burned without motion, without noise, a silent, resigned service in memory of the past—around a picture of Lenin.¹²

      Others would have seen the superimposed communist symbols as a defilement of a Christian sanctuary; Rand saw an organic conjunction of corresponding worldviews. Her mixture of religious and communist images suggests that the two cultural forces had interpenetrated one another, serving similar goals, if not the same master.

      WE THE LIVING

      Comparable imagery is evident in Rand’s first published novel, We the Living. In a passage ultimately deleted from the original 1936 edition, Rand presents a fairy tale about a mighty Viking who is hated by both the King and the Priest.¹³ While the King despises the Viking for his refusal to bow to royal authority, the Priest hates the Viking because he “looked at heaven only when he bent for a drink over a mountain brook, and there, overshadowing the sky, he saw his own picture.”¹⁴

      The enraged King promises his royal subjects a material reward for the Viking’s head. Similarly, the Priest assures his parishioners that their sins will be forgiven if they kill the Viking. When the Viking embarks on a quest for the sacred city, however, his anticipated triumph prompts his adversaries to be more conciliatory. The King offers the Viking a royal banner to plant in the sacred city. The Priest offers the Viking a temple banner. But the Viking refuses to take either. For on the mast of his ship “was his own banner, that had never been lowered.” He conquers the sacred city, and toasts, “To a life … which is a reason unto itself.” Rand writes: “A Viking had lived, who had laughed at Kings, who had laughed at Priests, who had laughed at Men, who had held, sacred and inviolable, high over all temples, over all to which men knew how to kneel, his one banner—the sanctity of life” (180).

      This tale was but another symbolic way for Rand to say that statism and religion are at war with the sovereign individual. The King, a symbol of statism, is no different from the Priest, a symbol of religion; both are fundamentally opposed to the independent Viking who refuses to worship either.

      Rand wrote We the Living, originally entitled, Air Tight: A Novel of Red Russia, between 1930 and 1933, “to get Russia out of her system.”¹⁵ Far simpler in its structure than her later novels, We the Living offered, in Rand’s view, the most classic plot progression of any of her works. Moreover, it was, Rand said, the closest to an autobiography that she would ever write.¹⁶ Despite differences between Rand and the main character, Kira Argounova, Kira is clearly a stand-in for Rand. In fact, throughout her fiction, it was never Rand’s custom to distance herself from the views of her central protagonists. In this sense, they are all Rand.

      Kira is a young engineering student enrolled at Petrograd University. The novel chronicles her personal struggle under the harsh conditions of Soviet dictatorship. The plot centers on a fatal romantic triangle between Kira and the two men who love her. Kira falls in love with a counterrevolutionary, Leo Kovalensky. When Leo develops tuberculosis, Kira becomes the mistress of a heroic communist revolutionary, Andrei Taganov, in order to gain access to food and money for Leo’s welfare.

      Andrei is a virtuous, if misguided, character—much more admirable than Leo, Kira’s true love. Andrei epitomizes the idealism of the revolution, refusing to be corrupted by the growing tyranny of the regime. But the regime is corrupt, and it gradually destroys the best of its citizens. In the end, Kira is alienated from both men. Leo becomes a self-destructive alcoholic, and Andrei, confronting the utter bankruptcy of his ideals, commits suicide. With nothing left for her in Russia, Kira attempts to escape across the border, but is shot by the border patrol and left to bleed to death in the

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