We the Living....Instant thoughts

“We the Living” is a book I started with some trepidation…I had read “Atlas Shrugged”, arguably Ayn rand’s most well known book and had found the characters to be artificial…the heroes seemed to be almost Nietzschean in nature, almost supermen in everything – looks, wealth, will, the works, and I have always found black and white characters a turn off precisely because they do not exist in reality….

I picked up “We the Living” because the title held a sort of hold on me and because I liked the premise of the novel, the fight of the individual and of individualism against the might of the state which seeks to make you just a spoke in the wheel. Holding one’s life to be something precious and something unique is to me one of the highest expression of life that one can aspire to and nowhere is this tested more than under a totalitarian state. In this case, the questioning for each individual comes in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, when an old world crumbles and a new one is attempted to be built.

Ayn Rand is a person who is considered a prime mover of the “Objectivism” movement wherein it is believed, in a nutshell, that a man should exist only for his own good, that each individual has a will which is uniquely his own and should not be considered a property of anyone, be it the government or the society. This is something which most of us believe today without actually knowing about “Objectivism” but we must consider that she wrote this book in the early 1930s when socialism (the Bolshevik variety), along with its ideology of man being no more than an apparatus of the state and living for the sake of the state only, held a powerful influence over the world with the “Ten days that shook the world” only a decade old.

Ayn Rand’s Objectivism‘s objectivism had always seemed a bit dubious to me as sometimes it can border on what can simply be termed as extreme selfishness. In her later years, she once said to a graduating class of the West Point that "I can say—not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and aesthetic roots—that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.” A person who can say that keeping a straight face and actually believing it would in my view, be incapable of writing a book that looks at the world from both side of the lens with equal sympathy.

So as I said, it with some hesitation that I started on “We the Living” and when I finished it, I realized that however polemical her views became later, at the time of writing this book, they were certainly in the area where her characters had shades of gray and consequently are much more approachable….

I had expected an anti-communist tirade, I found anger against the people who worshipped communism as a religion and gave up thought for the sake of survival but at the same time I found sympathy for the revolutionaries who fought for a good cause and later realized that they had created a monster even worse than the one they destroyed. Men like Andrei Taganov and Stephan Timoshenko are men to be admired and pitied at the same time because as Stephan said to Andrei in the book “there is no place in the world for men like you”. Men whom the revolutions of the world uses for its own means, using their courage and their idealism in the time of infancy and throwing them on the fringes when the new world is created. Ayn Rand shows sympathy at the destruction of the idealist who kills himself rather than keep looking at the world he helped create. Stephan Timoshenko might be a minor character but for me, he says some of the most beautiful and important lines in the book during his conversation with Karp Morozov, lines which Boxer, the donkey in “Animal Farm” might have said or Rutherford in “1984” might have said.

If there is sympathy for men like Andrei Taganov, through Kira Argounova, Ayn Rand constructs the whole thread of the book. There is a common storyline which is familiar; the heroine giving up herself to the villain to save the hero. But here comes the beauty of the story; what if, by the end of the story the line between the villain and the hero blurs to such an extent that they become interchanged? What happens then to the moral decision of Kira, the heroine and what happens to the ‘villian’, Andrei Taganov and indeed to the ‘hero’ Leo Kovalensky?

Amid the changing moral and political landscapes of a nation which has just undergone the greatest revolution the world has ever seen, the lives of these characters is played out. The central character is of course, Kira Argounova and the central theme, her indomitable urge to live, live as in a verb and not a noun, her refusal to accept an authority higher than herself. Her idealism in her love for Leo is something similar to Andrei’s idealism in his cause and even though their idealisms are on opposite spectrums, early on, they recognize the common intangible root that binds them. Leo is a character who would have achieved greatness in another place but here is crushed and broken by a state which assumes supremacy in your mind and if denied, would kill if necessary. Andrei is one of those men, which every revolution produces and then discards when the revolution takes on the character of that which it has overthrown.

There are other important characters which define the tone of the book: the doomed love of Irina Dunaev and Sasha (Irina’s last words to Kira and Irina and Sasha’s last journey together is among the most poignant moments in the book), Vassili Dunaev and his stubborn refusal to bend to the new regime at all costs, the Argounova family (minus Kira) who do bend, Comrade Sonia, Comrade Pavel, Victor Dunaev, Karp Morozov as the inevitable offspring of a revolution gone wrong – the inevitable pious parasites.

What makes the characters believable and realistic is the fact that they act all too humanely and have the inevitable human weaknesses. The raw need to survive awakens different facet of a person which stays hidden under ‘normal’ circumstances and it is here that the characters can be sharply delineated from each other. Some people break, some bend and some die on their feet. But the fact that the strongest character in the book, Kira, is shown to be flawed is reason enough to feel empathy with the characters around her. The fact that Kira effectively destroys the man who loved her in order to save a man who perhaps only cherished her as a possession shows that like Andrei, Kira too was fighting for a cause that was flawed from the start. And for all the idealism of the pair, the fact that they were both giving their life and soul for a cause that had no use for them afterwards brings out the human in them.

The ending is fitting. An individual can almost never stand upto a state and hope to win (as Kira said to Leo at the end – “it was me against fifty million, I lost”). Yet as we see from survivors from the horrors of history, for the best women and men, there is a part of them which cannot be touched, which they can always hold out against all assaults. The only way to deal with them is to destroy them. Kira might not have been successful at the end in escaping but she was victorious against the state; they could not convert her, she lived on her terms and she died on her feet. Andrei killed himself when he realized that the key to survival is to become a lie to himself. Leo broke and let himself be twisted by the state and the society and became one of the lice, in Stephan Timoshenko’s words. Hence all the characters are doomed in the end but some go down fighting but victorious in themselves.

I have come to believe the Russian revolution to be the most important event of the 20^th century (along with the tragic dismemberment of Palestine in Middle East for the evils of Nazi Germany in Europe), primarily because it created a wave of change among people all over the world by its very occurrence, leading to many movements – women, minority, third world liberation movements etc, the effect of which are still felt today. I believe that the capitalism as it existed then would not shed its most exploitative features easily if it was not for the spur lent to people’s movement by the very existence of a people’s republic in the Soviet Union.

However when you read Gorky’s ‘Mother’ and Nikolai Ostrovsky’s “How the Steel was tempered” and then Ayn Rand’s “We the Living” and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”, one realizes the complexities that arise when people interpret an earth shaking event as the Russian Revolution. On one hand is man’s constant struggle to fight against all forms of oppression and on the other hand is man’s inevitable nature to control and his hunger for power. Every revolution starts with an idealism but the man or the group which wins is usually the one which does not have qualms in employing the same methods to annihilate its enemy as the oppressor had used to oppress before, therefore betraying the ideals. It’s a vicious cycle which has been seen again and again in history and its inevitable that the Kiras and the Andries will always fight on and succumb or be destroyed. They are unfortunate children of history and sometimes all we can do is cry for them and cry for what might have been.

The greatest strength of the book is its ability to put a human face to an event that has usually been interpreted in terms of dates and battles and a few principal characters. It is a requiem for lives lost by the women and men caught on the wrong side of history and how they fought or gave up. It is a story as old as history perhaps but a story which told repeatedly never loses its urgency of emotion.

Finally, as Ayn Rand points out, the book is not specifically about Soviet Union, though the setting is used, but about any totalitarian state which seeks to completely control the lives of its citizens. It is important to understand this while we read the book – the book is as much about the past as about the future and the present. Change some settings and events and you can have the Kremlin, the Washington DC, the New Delhi of today. That is what makes this book so important and what according to me, makes this Rand’s best novel.

For people who have read the book, check this link out. It’s an imagined conversation held with Kira and it’s an engaging piece of discussion, a discussion that goes, in many ways, to the heart of the book’s plot and its ideas.