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We the Living, Kira, unlike Rand herself, did not escape communism. Rand wanted to show how dictatorship thwarts escape, crushes values, crushes life itself. Escape from such a system is a fluke, in Rand’s view. Totalitarianism necessarily perpetuates an “airtight” environment of brutality and repression; spiritual and physical death are its essential by-products.¹⁸

      A “NIETZSCHEAN” PHASE?

      In 1936, We the Living was issued by Macmillan in a limited edition of three thousand copies. It was not reissued until 1959, after Rand had established herself as a best-selling author. In the second edition, Rand made several revisions, which she described as “editorial line-changes.” In the original edition, Rand claimed that her writing “reflected the transitional state of a mind thinking no longer in Russian, but not yet fully in English.”¹⁹ Hence, she wished to correct “awkward” and “confusing” formulations.

      However, a number of scholars have reviewed Rand’s modifications and concluded that these were not strictly linguistic. The most compelling case is offered by Ronald Merrill, who argues that Rand excised those references in the first edition which implied an endorsement of Nietzsche’s ethical principles, that the weak may be sacrificed for the sake of the strong. The second edition reflects the attitudes of the more mature Rand.²⁰

      In the first edition, there is a scene in which Kira and Andrei debate the meaning of communism. Andrei assumes that Kira admires the communist ideal, but rejects its methods. But she surprises him. She states: “I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believes one’s right, one shouldn’t wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them. Except that I don’t know, however, whether I’d include blood in my methods.”²¹

      Andrei retorts, “Why not? Anyone can sacrifice his own life for an idea. How many know the devotion that makes you capable of sacrificing other lives? Horrible, isn’t it?”

      “Not at all,” Kira answers. “Admirable. If you’re right. But are you right?” In the second edition, Rand has removed this entire exchange. Kira merely states, “I loathe your ideals.” She keeps her own counsel concerning his methods.

      The conversation between these two characters continues in the first edition, when Kira argues that there are things which are sacred to the individual that cannot be touched by the state or the collective. Andrei rejects Kira’s claims, declaring “that we can’t sacrifice millions for the sake of the few.” Kira answers:

      “You can! You must. When those few are the best. Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it? What is the people but millions of puny, shrivelled, helpless souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their mildewed brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than justice for all. Because men are not born equal and I don’t see why one should want to make them equal. And because I loathe most of them.” [Emphasis added except in fifth sentence.]

      In the revised edition, Kira states:

      “Can you sacrifice the few? When those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What are your masses but millions of dull, shrivelled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can’t treat them as if they were. And because I loathe most of them.” [Emphasis added except in the fourth sentence.]

      In the original passage, Kira has contempt for the masses and is inclined to see them destroyed. In response to Andrei, Kira shows an unquestioning resolve to side with the exalted few in any conflict with the “puny, shrivelled, helpless” masses. She rejects the credo of “justice for all” when it becomes a euphemism for any attempt to make all human beings metaphysically equal.

      In the comparable passage from the 1959 revised edition, Kira expresses a similar contempt for the masses. But here, Kira’s language is less vitriolic. She answers Andrei with a question, not a protest. She rejects those who would attempt to achieve metaphysical egalitarianism through the injustice of granting values to those who have no right to them. Yet in both editions of the novel, Kira follows her exchange with Andrei by stating: “I don’t want to fight for the people, I don’t want to fight against the people, I don’t want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone—to live!” Even Ronald Merrill agrees that in this belief, Rand’s Kira has moved away from a stark “Nietzschean” ethos. Merrill argues that Kira’s sentiment foreshadows Rand’s mature Objectivist position. In fact, Merrill believes that Rand’s conception of egoism developed largely as a reaction to the Nietzschean orientation of her youth.

      Stephen Hicks, in a review of Merrill’s book, argues that Merrill’s conclusion is premature, since only a full disclosure of Rand’s early journals will settle the issue of her alleged Nietzschean phase. Rand finished her novel in 1933, and published it in 1936. Hicks argues correctly that there is evidence in one of her published journal entries that Rand rejected the “Nietzschean” ethos as early as 1934. In this entry, foreshadowing the character of Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead, Rand condemns those who would achieve power through the masses. If Rand had rejected Nietzsche in 1934, it is likely that she would have revised those passages which could have been interpreted as Nietzschean, before the book was actually published.²²

      Hicks states further that Rand may have allowed Andrei to set the terms of the debate, much as the communist state sets the terms for each of the characters in We the Living. Rand had not yet constructed a full theoretical response to the ethics of altruism, and Kira reflects this void. Having fully developed her own rational egoist ethic in later years, it may have been easier for Rand to eliminate the ambiguous passages, rather than to have provided a full philosophical explanation of their actual meaning.²³

      There may be some merit to Merrill’s contention that Rand went through a “Nietzschean” phase, but I tend to agree with Hicks that the evidence for such a provocative thesis is inconclusive. However, there are two important issues which must be emphasized because they shed much light on Rand’s attitudes toward the Nietzschean worldview:

      First, in my discussion of the Silver Age of Russian philosophy, it was clear that Russian writers had stressed the Dionysian aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. Rand was probably exposed to this particular interpretation of Nietzsche from a very early age. Though Rand was most impressed by Nietzsche’s critique of altruism and Christianity, she concretized his grand, abstract metaphors with her own images. Despite her initial attraction to Nietzsche’s work, Rand necessarily rejected his Dionysian impulses. And though she continued to draw from Nietzschean imagery as late as The Fountainhead, she was probably already moving away from Nietzsche as early as her student years.

      Second, and more important, Rand was moving toward a nondualistic philosophical framework. While she was exploring the philosophic identity of religion and communism, she was also beginning to see that both forces perpetuated a social dualism that forced the individual to choose between two sides of the same false coin.

      In the religious realm, the fraud was obvious to Rand. For instance, in 1934 she wrote a play, Ideal, which depicted religion as causing hypocrisy and opposing integrity. Religion, for Rand, divorces ideals from life on earth, by viewing “this world [as] of no consequence.” An evangelist in Ideal proclaims: “Whatever beauty [the world] offers us is here only that we may sacrifice it—for the greater beauty beyond.”²⁴ Religion tells people that beauty is unreachable and that nobility emerges from the sacrifice, not the achievement, of values.²⁵ It condemns people for not achieving unreachable ideals, ideals they do not really wish to attain because their very realization would demand self-annihilation.

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