Audiovisual Companion
to my Spring 2021 seminar on
Nietzsche and Modern Literature

Roderick T. Long


Nietzsche (center); Mann (upper left); Gide (upper right); Lawrence (lower left); Rand (lower right)



WEEK NINE:


Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil 7-9

BW, p. 392: Here’s a picture of the Sipo Matador plant to which Nietzsche refers: the white one on the left, climbing up and encircling the darker one on the right:



In this passage, Nietzsche essentially admits that the “higher men” he idolises are parasites on society. If one were to be struck positively by Nietzsche’s portrait of noble individualism, but at the same time were to find such parasitism unattractive and ignoble, one would have to develop Nietzschean ethics in a different direction from Nietzsche’s own; I think both Lawrence and Rand can be seen as attempting precisely this.

BW, p. 394: Here Nietzsche confirms that master-moral and slave-moral values often coexist nowadays within the same moral consciousness.

BW, p. 395: Nietzsche’s stress on what kind of person over what kind of action is one of the respects in which he fits (albeit not always comfortably) within the tradition of virtue-ethics.

BW, p. 396: Kaufmann’s footnote 6 is important and useful here, even if he does strain rather hard to make Nietzsche look good.


Lawrence: Women in Love chs. 31-32

ch. 31: Loerke and Gudrun are fans of Goethe – as are most of our authors. Nietzsche, Mann, and Gide all revered Goethe; Rand said little about him, but her few remarks were all positive. Lawrence was the only one of our authors to dislike him; so Loerke’s and Gudrun’s enthusiasm for him is no doubt meant as a bad sign.

Gerald is marked for his fate from his very first introduction (WIL, ch. 1), where he is described as being “pure as an arctic thing.”

ch. 32: The novel ends in unresolved debate between Ursula and Birkin.


Lawrence: Political Ideas in 1915

A sample of Lawrence’s political thinking around the time he was writing The Rainbow and Women in Love. Lawrence shares Nietzsche’s antipathy to democracy, though his insistence on gender equality is un-Nietzschean. But is it really gender equality if men’s and women’s authority are assigned to separate spheres? At any rate, he is on record elsewhere as endorsing male dominance.


Lawrence Speaks!

Here’s a rare recording of Lawrence reading aloud one of his poems (with seriously creepy animation – better to listen without watching!):



And here’s a recording of his widow Frieda – the model for Ursula, though her German accent may distance her from Ursula for us – also reading some of his poems:




Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morals, Preface & Book I

BW, p. 452: Nietzsche describes his writing of Human, All-too-human in Sorrento; here it is:



The Genealogy itself was written in Sils Maria, Switzerland:



Poor Nietzsche – just one hideous location after another.

p. 454: The Paul Rée mentioned here is the same one with whom he was yoked to the chariot bearing Lou Salomé and her whip (as shown previously).

pp. 480-482: This section on birds of prey, lightning, and free will is one of the most important in the book.

The opening verses of the song “Madame Guillotine” (from the Scarlet Pimpernel musical) capture what Nietzsche means by ressentiment:

I know the gutter, and I know the stink of the street;
kicked like a dog, I have spat out the bile of defeat.
All you beauties who towered above me,
you who gave me the smack of your rod –
now I give you the gutter,
I give you the judgement of God!

Vengeance victorious!
These are the glorious days ....




Larry Gonick, in his Cartoon History of the Universe, seems to have read The Genealogy of Morals.


Nietzsche focuses on examples from German, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit; but examples in English of class terms becoming moral terms include “lady” and “gentleman,” as well as “villain” (originally “villein,” meaning a serf) and “base.”

You can see the meanings beginning to shift in a line like Shakespeare’s “be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition.”


Hugo: The Man Who Laughs

While Nietzsche’s remarks about Victor Hugo are uniformly negative, Hugo does seem to have anticipated Nietzsche’s conception of ressentiment in the two chapters I’ve given you from The Man Who Laughs. (These passages will also be a major influence on Rand.)


Magee: “Wagner Reevaluates His Values”

p. 192: “standing on the shoulders of giants”: for an entertaining book-length attempt to trace the origin of this quotation, see Robert Merton’s On the Shoulders of Giants.


Randwriting

A sample of Rand’s handwriting:




Rand and We the Living

It was a world of irresistible gaiety. It was made of the music that tinkled arrogantly against crystal ovals of brilliance strung across the vast solemnity of the ceiling – music that danced defiantly on the soft, faded elegance of velvet drapery and on the stern white marble of glistening walls – music that surged upward through the stately grandeur of the opera house, carrying, in its rise, the laughter of a weightless exultation. It was made of graceful bodies whirling in effortless motion on a stage held in light rays, of silk gowns and radiant smiles and gleaming top hats – against the backdrop of a huge window which framed the painted image of lighted streets and the skyscrapers of a foreign city, sparkling and beckoning in the distance.

Beyond the walls of the theater – beyond the reach of the operetta – was a city of unending grayness: the grayness of crumbling buildings and crumbling souls, of stooped shoulders and bread lines and ration cards, of chronic hunger and chronic despair and the odor of disinfectants, of steel bayonets and barbed wire, and marching feet moving in a grim parade of death to sudden arrests in the night, of weary men crushed to their knees under waving flags and clenched fists. Only the flags and the fists relieved the grayness: the fists were stained, by a different dye, the same red as the flags. The city was Petrograd. The year was 1922.

A slender young girl with large eyes sat high in the last balcony of the opera house, leaning forward tensely, listening to the meaning of the most ecstatic sounds she had ever heard. The bright notes sparkling and leaping in the air around her and the reckless gaiety of the scene spread out on the stage below, were carrying a message to her, and a promise. They told her there was a sunlit, carefree world – a world of unobstructed action, of unobstructed fulfillment – somewhere beyond the dark night and the darker horrors, and it waited only for her to claim it.

She listened with grave solemnity to the promise – and she gave a promise in return: that if she could not be the physical citizen of that glittering world, she would be its spiritual citizen. She took her oath of allegiance, with passionate dedication – with the gay score of an operetta as the holy bible on which she swore – an oath never to let the reality of her true homeland be dimmed by the gray exhaustion of a life lived under the alien weight of the ugly, the sordid, the tragic; to hold the worship of joy as her shield against the sunless murk around her; to keep burning within her that fuel which alone could carry her to the world she had to reach, the fuel which had kept her moving through her seventeen years: the sense of life as an exalted, demanding, triumphant adventure.

– Barbara Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand?* (writing about Rand while heavily imitating Rand’s own writing style)

* Barbara Branden wrote two biographies of Rand – a short, purely adulatory one as part of Who Is Ayn Rand? in 1962 when she was part of Rand’s inner circle, and a longer, more mixed one, The Passion of Ayn Rand in 1986 after she had broken with Rand.


The “modern” in “Nietzsche and Modern Literature” can refer simply to a certain (not very well-defined) chronological period, or it can refer more specifically to the (perhaps not much better defined) artistic and literary movement known as modernism. Mann, Lawrence, and Gide, are widely regarded as being part of modernism; Rand usually isn’t. Indeed, Rand’s comments on literary modernism are generally hostile, and she looked back with nostalgia to 19th-century Romantic authors like Hugo and Schiller. Yet on the other hand, some of her favourite authors are modernists (e.g., Henrik Ibsen, Maurice Maeterlinck) or proto-modernists (e.g., Dostoyevsky); and given that she claimed to despise libertarianism, despite herself being a libertarian by every reasonable definition, her proclaimed disdain for literary modernism likewise doesn’t settle the question of her relation to the movement.

In Inclusion in the Modernist Canon: The Potential of Ayn Rand, Anna Dye argues that Rand’s work counts as part of the modernist tradition. Modernism, she maintains, is above all a “reaction to the modern,” to “change in everything from industry to philosophy.” Literary modernism is characterised by a “search for essential meaning” to “replace ... old customs and beliefs”; a “fear to lose the individual within the mass”; a focus on “the outcast man”; an “emphasis on the city” as “a new and dominant part of modern life”; a concern with the “perceived mechanization of production”; an exploration of “overt sexuality and eroticism ... unchecked by moral stays or cultural mandates”; and a stylistic experimentalism with “new twists on characterization and structure.” By these standards, Rand’s work fits well, since its “themes ... are dystopic and illustrate a lost and confused world,” featuring “outcast main characters”; its forms “deviate from the traditional romantic style” by “including ... unique characterization” and “allocating a long passage to a single soliloquy”; her “motivation is a reaction to the modern phenomenon of socialism”; and she devoted an entire novel to the subject of modernist architecture.

As noted, Rand’s novels tend to feature long philosophical speeches by the characters. (This is truer of The Fountainhead than of We the Living, and still truer of her final novel, Atlas Shrugged.) This no doubt owes much to the novelists who influenced her, like Chernyshevsky and Dostoyevsky. (Dostoyevsky’s famous “Grand Inquisitor” fable is actually part of a 15-page speech given by one of the Brothers Karamazov to another, in the middle of a conversation.) But Zarathustra is surely an equally important influence. (Rand’s later habit, in her nonfiction, of quoting her fictional characters as though they were independent authorities likewise mirrors Nietzsche’s practice with Zarathustra in his post-Zarathustra writings.) Plus Rand’s style of novel-writing is heavily influenced by 19th-century drama; two plays she was especially fond of, both of which feature long speeches with heroic-indivisualist content, are Ibsen’s Enemy of the People and Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

Rand’s fiction is commonly read through the lens of the philosophical system she developed in her later nonfiction essays. I specifically don’t want to do that. (Compare Magee’s complaint [Tristan Chord, p. 99] that Wagner’s operas are too often treated as the application of a Wagnerian “system” – though in Wagner’s case, unlike Rand’s, the system did come first chronologically.) Rand’s later system was arguably in large part an attempt to reverse-engineer the vision she’d first developed in her fiction, and there’s no reason to think she had privileged authority about how to do that. (I’ve argued elsewhere that Rand’s later attempts to construct foundatons to undergird the philosophy implicit in her novels actually end up grounding an importantly different perspective.) Our concern is not with Rand the philosopher-as-essayist-and-system-builder, but with Rand the philosopher-as-novelist-and-playwright, when the potential development of her philosophy was still open – when she still had “chaos within her” (in Nietzsche’s sense), before her ideas had calcified into the dogmas of an intellectual sect.

If Mann and Gide form a natural pairing for the first half of the course, Lawrence and Rand form a natural pairing for the second. Mann and Gide both express an attraction toward, combined with a fear of, a slide into Dionysian deacadence; thus both are conflicted in ways that Lawrence and Rand aren’t. Mann and Gide, despite their share of detractors (both faced death threats for their political stances), nevertheless both also received recognition from the literary establishment during their lifetimes (including the Nobel Prize), while the critical response to Lawrence and Rand during their lifetimes was mostly hostile. (At the time of Lawrence’s death he was still widely dismissed as a pornographer and a fascist. Lawrence’s posthumous reception has improved far more than Rand’s has; 90% of what’s written about Rand today is either absurdly exaggerated hagiographic praise from her disciples or absurdly exaggerated sneering contempt from her critics. Still, that’s an improvement over thirty years ago, when the percentage was more like 99%.)

Mann’s and Gide’s characters seldom seem to need to work for a living, as their authors indeed did not; by contrast, unlike Mann and Gide, who were both independently wealthy, Lawrence and Rand both had to work to support themselves, and their characters (even those who are independently wealthy) usually work too, and their work is indeed central to their stories. Rand is also like Lawrence in combining feminist and antifeminist strands; both authors conjoin a commitment to (some sort of) male dominance with an admiration for strong, independent women.

There are important differences, to be sure. Lawrence had a hostility to industrial civilisation and a fondness for the primitive that was alien to Rand; no Lawrence protagonist would ever praise a natural landscape by calling it “almost artificial,” as Kira does in We the Living. Lawrence was also enthusiatsically Dionysian in a way that Rand never was, even in her earliest and most Nietzschean writings (ler alone in her later writings, where she explicitly declares herself Apollonian and anti-Dionysian).

Like all of the books we’re reading in this class, We the Living has had a number of covers over the years. Here are two of the most evocative:



And here, by contrast, is one current cover:



Okay, I get it, it’s barbed wire. Not the kind they actually used in the 1920s, though (which the lefthand picture above features), but the modern kind. In any case, it doesn’t seem like a lot of artistic inspiration went into this.

Several of Rand’s books have been adapted for the screen, but We the Living (the only unauthorised adaptation) is generally agreed to be the best of the movie versions – even if the 40-ish Fosco Giachetti is rather too old to play Andrei, who’s supposed to be a college student around the same age as Kira and Leo. (The other two stars, Alida Valli and Rossano Brazzi, later moved to Hollywood; their best known roles were in The Third Man and South Pacific respectively. Alida Valli was born with the much longer name of Baroness Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein-Frauenberg; “Alida Valli” was her stage name, which Hollywood producers later shortened simply to “Valli” to make her seem more exotic.) Here’s a trailer:



The film was made, in two parts, in Italy under the Fascist government during World War II, without Rand’s permission or involvement; the film was permitted by the censors on the grounds that it was anticommunist propaganda, only to be subsequently banned on the grounds that it was also antifascist propaganda. Or so runs the official story; but others have cast doubt on parts of that story. We report, you decide.

In any case, once Rand got her hands on the film and secured the rights, she edited it, combining the two parts back into one, deleting artistic choices she disagreed with, and either deleting or dubbing over bits of profascist or antisemitic dialogue. (The DVD includes some of the deleted scenes.) The original, continuous, unedited version in its original form would be valuable for students of film history, but Rand’s estate, with its famous opacity, is unlikely ever to release it. (The edited version is temporarily unavailable now also.)

Another film from the same era, Ninotchka, shares a common sensibility with We the Living even though it is a comedy. In the film, Greta Garbo plays a kind of female version of Andrei: a stern Soviet official who gets seduced by western values. (One might even describe her arc as a transformation of an Andrei into a Kira.) Rand was conflicted about Ninotchka; she described it as an “excellent movie ... brilliantly done” (and of course it starred one of Rand’s favourite actresses), but she felt that Soviet oppression was too serious a subject for comedy, comparing it to a hypothetical movie set in a Nazi death camp, in which “some good-natured guard or torturer from the camp finally escaped from Germany.” (Ayn Rand Answers, p. 142) Nevertheless, Ninotchka shares a spiritual kinship with We the Living – not just in being anticommunist, but in the way in which it is anticommunist. The Soviet Union is condemned not so much for jackbooted oppression as for hostility to private happiness; like We the Living, Ninotchka, with its references to silk stockings and silly hats, celebrates the sacred value of the frivolous – also a Nietzschean value (see, e.g., Zarathustra I.7), though not a Wagnerian one. The longing for the sparkle and glamour of “abroad” amidst the crowded drabness of Soviet life is the same in both; and the fact that the Russian agents at the train station initially mistake a Nazi German envoy for the Soviet Russian one they’re supposed to be meeting echoes Rand’s theme of the essential identity of Communism with Nazism (a theme that will be revisited in The Fountainhead). Also like We the Living, Ninotchka condemns not only the Communist period in Russia but the Tsarist period as well (as represented by the Grand Duchess Swana, Ninotchka’s romantic rival).

Here’s Ninotchka before she gets “corrupted” by her stay in Paris:



– and here’s Ninotchka afterward:



Speaking of silk stockings, Ninotchka was remade in the 1950s as a musical called Silk Stockings. It was dreadful (IMHO). There was a whole trend in the 1950s of taking classic movies from the 1930s and 40s and remaking them as technicolor musicals, and they were all generally dreadful. I could go on a whole rant about this.


Rand: We the Living, I.1-14

I.1: Like most of the fiction we’re reading in this course, We the Living is partly autobiographical. Ayn Rand’s family, like Kira’s, fled St. Petersburg for Crimea when the Revolution came. She would later describe her time in Crimea:

I was in my early teens during the Russian civil war. I lived in a small town that changed hands many times. When it was occupied by the White Army, I almost longed for the return of the Red Army, and vice versa. ... There was not much difference between them in practice, but there was in theory. The Red Army stood for totalitarian dictatorship and rule by terror. The White Army stood for nothing; repeat: nothing. In answer to the monstrous evil they were fighting, the Whites found nothing better to proclaim than the dustiest, smelliest bromides of the time: we must fight, they said, for Holy Mother Russia, for faith and tradition. (Voice of Reason, p. 138)


The “Makhno” to whom Rand refers in the stopped-train passage is Nestor Makhno (1888-1934), the Ukrainian anarchist leader whose militia fought against both Tsarists and Bolsheviks in the civil war; his ashes are buried in Père Lachaise in Paris:



Makhno incidentally figures as a hero in several of Michael Moorcock’s science-fiction novels (The Steel Tsar, Breakfast in the Ruins, and the Between the Wars tetralogy).

The stopping of Kira’s train is based on an even more exciting incident in Rand’s life. On their journey through Ukraine to Crimea, Rand’s family had to leave their train because someone had blown up the tracks. Making their way by horse-drawn cart, they were stopped by bandits, forced to get out, and then robbed at gunpoint. The thirteen-year-old Rand, expecting she might die, drew inspiration from her favourite literary character, Enjolras in Hugo’s Les Misérables – the “marble lover of liberty” who “had but one passion, the right: but one thought, to remove all obstacles.”

Standing with the other passengers, her back to the bandits’ guns, her body trembling under her rough sweater and old black skirt, the night stretching bleakly around her, she wondered if she would die. If it is the end – she thought – still, I have had something great in my life. I have had the image of Enjolras. If I’m going to be shot, I’ll think of him at the last, I’ll think of how he faced death. I want to die as well as he did. I want to be worthy of him. I want to die in my kind of world.

After what seemed an eternity of time, the passengers were ordered back into their carts, and allowed to continue their journey. (Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, p. 30)


“NEP” (which we’ll see more about later) stands for the “New Economic Policy” introduced by Lenin in 1922. Prior to 1922, the Soviet government had attempted to run the country as a pure command economy (sometimes called “War Communism”), with all enterprises directly owned and controlled by the state, and with money and prices abolished. Faced with widespread economic hardship (scholars debate the extent to which this was caused by War Communism as opposed to other factors, such as the civil war), Lenin replaced War Communism with the New Economic Policy, which introduced a mixed economy with some room for private enterprise and a price system. Stalin abolished the NEP in 1928, in favour of a system intermediate between NEP and War Communism.

The “Little Apple” (“Yablochko”) song sung by the soldier on the train – also called the “Russian Sailors’ Dance” – is one whose tune you’ll probably recognise, even if you don’t know it by either of those names:



I.2: Rand says in the foreword to We the Living that Kira’s family bears “no resemblance” to Rand’s. This is manifestly untrue; however, Rand may have said this in order to make it more difficult for Soviet authorities to identify her family. (This is the same reason she changed her name from Alisa Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand – so that her outspoken anticommunist views in the U.S. would not get her family back home into trouble.)

Rand’s mother Anna Rosenbaum was the basis for Kira’s mother Galina Petrovna Argounova; her father Zinovy Rosenbaum was the basis not for Kira’s father, but for Kira’s uncle, Vasili Dunayev. Rand’s beloved sister Nora became Kira’s cousin Irina Dunayeva; Kira’s sister Lydia was based very slightly on Rand’s other and less beloved sister, the fashion-conscious classical pianist Natasha, although Rand noted that Natasha, unlike Lydia, was “not religious nor mawkish.”

Natasha, Nora, Ayn (Alisa)Zinovy, Ayn (Alisa), Natasha, Anna, Nora


But Kira’s family differs from Rand’s in a couple of crucial respects. One is that Rand’s family was Jewish while Kira’s is not. Rand may have changed the Jewish background to make her protagonist’s family, and thus their experience, more “typical”; but she identified very little with her Jewish heritage, and identifiably Jewish characters rarely appear in her fiction.

Another is that Kira’s family were considerably wealthier, before the Revolution, than Rand’s were. The Rosenbaums were relatively prosperous, but they lived in an apartment above the family pharmacy, whereas the Argounovs lived in a mansion on swanky Kamenostrovsky Street. I’m not sure why Rand made that choice, unless it’s just in order for them to lose more from the Revolution.

Rand did not get along well with her mother. A telling anecdote:

When Rand was five or so, she recalled, her mother came into the children’s playroom and found the floor littered with toys. She announced to Rand and Rand’s two-and-a-half-year-old sister, Natasha, that they would have to choose some of their toys to put away, and some to keep and play with now; in a year, she told them, they could trade the toys they had kept for those they had put away. Natasha held on to the toys she liked best, but Rand, imagining the pleasure she would get from having her favorite toys returned to her later, handed over her best-loved playthings, including a painted mechanical wind-up chicken she could describe vividly fifty years later. When the time came to make the swap and Rand asked for her toys back, her mother looked amused, Rand recalled. Anna explained that she had given everything to an orphanage, on the premise that if her daughters had really wanted their toys they wouldn’t have relinquished them in the first place. (Anne Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, pp. 7-8)


Congratulations, Mom, you just created Ayn Rand.

When Kira and her family disembark, they arrive in Znamensky Square – today Vosstaniya (“uprising”) Square, as Rand notes – which formerly had a statue of Aleksandr III. Here’s how it looked in Rand’s day:



They then travel on Nevsky Prospekt toward the Admiralty tower. Here’s the street (Nevsky Prospekt) with the Admiralty tower in the distance:



I.3: Here’s Kamenostrovsky Street, where the Argounovs formerly lived:



“people expected a dinosaur to stretch its head out”: Rand and her sister Nora were great fans of The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel about a secret land of surviving dinosaurs hidden in the jungles of South America. The sisters used to run around pretending to be pterodactyls; they called themselves Dact I and Dact II. (I’ll let you guess which one was Dact I.)

I don’t know whether she had a chance to see the 1925 film (an enormous influence on King Kong eight years later):





The role of the fictional Viking as an inspiration for Kira is obviously based, at least in part, on the role of Enjolras as an inspiration for the young Rand (see above); but the Viking is a rather more Nietzschean symbol than Enjolras. Another possible source of inspiration is another of Rand’s childhood favourites, Cyrus Paltons, the hero of Maurice Champagne’s Mysterious Valley; it’s been pointed out that “Kira” is the Russian feminine version of “Cyrus.” (However, “Kira” also echoes another Randian favourite, “Cyrano”; and as we’ll see, Rand does draw a connection between Kira and Cyrano.) (No, she doesn’t give Kira an enormous nose.)

A more specifically Viking-like inspiration for Kira’s Viking, and also a possible inspiration for the description of Kira as a Valkyrie earlier in the chapter, is Fritz Lang’s 1924 screen adaptation of the Sigurd/Siegfried legend, which was one of Rand’s favourite movies. Rand explains: “Although I dislike that particular legend (and it is quite a malevolent-universe one), this is as near to a perfect movie as anyone has yet produced.” (Objectively Speaking, p. 12.) She expresses particular admiration for the Valkyrie character: “Brunnhilda, the villainess, should have been the heroine of the story and is its best character – she should have been Siegfried’s woman – not the little clinging vine [= Gudrun/Kriemhild] whom he chose.” (Quoted in Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living, p. 111) It’s perhaps appropriate that Rand is buried in Valhalla, New York.

Here’s a clip of Siegfried vs. Fafner from the Lang film. The special effects for the dragon may not look impressive by our standards, but for 1924 they were pretty amazing; unlike the dinosaurs in the aforementioned Lost World, Fafner wasn’t a stop-motion miniature – it was a full-scale real-time 60-foot mechanical dragon. (Also, the realistic-looking forest is fake; it was all filmed on a soundstage.)



And here’s Lang’s Brünnhilde, surely the model for the description of Kira as “a Valkyrie with lance and winged helmet.” You can tell that she and Siegfried are meant for each other; they have the same hairdo:



Lang’s Nibelungen is often described as being based on Wagner’s Ring, but while there’s certainly some Wagnerian influence, its main sources are the original Germanic and Icelandic legends (and it actually follows the Germanic version more closely, whereas Wagner’s version more closely follows the Icelandic).

The script for Fritz Lang’s two-part Nibelungen film epic (first half Siegfried or Siegfried’s Death, second half Kriemhild’s Revenge) was written by his wife, Thea von Harbou; the Lang-Harbou team were responsible for a number of other classic movies, most notably the science-fiction masterpiece Metropolis:



The couple broke up partly – though not solely – because Harbou was willing to continue working under the Nazis and Lang wasn’t, though the extent of her sympathy with Hitler’s regime remains a matter of dispute.

In the past I’ve wondered whether this scene from Mike Grell’s Warlord (v. 1, #12) was inspired by the ending of Kira’s Viking story:



The figure of a sympathetic Viking would recur in Atlas Shrugged with the character of Ragnar Danneskjöld, who echoes the historical Vikings in both name and profession.

Re the young Kira’s refusal to “play with a crippled relative”: I’ve discussed Rand’s attitude toward people with disabilities elsewhere.

The information that Kira “climbed to the pedestals of statues in the parks to kiss the cold lips of Greek gods” is probably inspired by an incident in Henry Sienkiewicz’s 1895 Quo Vadis, one of Rand’s favourite novels, in which a slavegirl similarly kisses a sculpture representing her master, with whom she is secretly in love:

Eunice stood on the stool, and, finding herself at the level of the statue, cast her arms suddenly around its neck; then, throwing back her golden hair, and pressing her rosy body to the white marble, she pressed her lips with ecstasy to the cold lips of Petronius. (Quo Vadis, ch. 1)


We’ll see more about Petronius later on.

One of the models for the “Song of Broken Glass” was reportedly the Drdla Serenade (no, it doesn’t fit what I imagine either):



Another was the “Shimmy” song from Bajadere, for which see later.

I.4: Here’s the Summer Garden (with some of those kissable statues) where Viktor takes Kira. She will later make an appointment with Andrei there that he will not keep.



Leo Kovalesnky (though we don’t learn his last name until later) is based on Lev Bekkerman, a man Rand had been dating before her escape from Russia; unbeknownst to her, he was eventually executed under Stalin for “counter-revolutionary activities” (which could mean anything):



I.5: I’d thought I’d forgotten almost everything from my one year of Russian in college, but it turns out that I’d remembered enough to be really helpful in tracking down some of these Russian songs. Here’s the student song, “Swift as the Waves Are the Days of Our Life”:



And here’s the Communist anthem, the “Internationale”:



The imagery of “priests carrying swords” that the music evokes in Kira is likely a nod to the character of Cimourdain, a priest turned icy revolutionary, in another of Rand’s favourite novels, Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three. Moreover, Kira’s reaction to the “Internationale” – her contrast between the inspiring music and the (for her) uninspiring lyrics – mirrors precisely what Rand says about Hugo generally and Ninety-Three specifically: that Hugo “never translated his sense of life into conceptual terms,” and hence “the characters’ speeches are not expressions of ideas, but only rhetoric, metaphors and generalities. ... The emphasis he projects is not ‘What great values men are fighting for!’ but: ‘What greatness men are capable of, when they fight for their values!’” (Romantic Manifesto, pp. 157-159) The way that Gauvain, the hero of Ninety-Three, is torn between his two steely, ruthless, incorruptible father-figures, Cimourdain the revolutionary and Lantenac the aristocrat – both presented as admirable, albeit flawed – may have served as a model for the way that Kira is torn between her two love interests, Andrei Taganov the revolutionary and Leo Kovalensky the aristocrat. (Ironically, another thinker who took inspiration from the figure of Cimourdain was the young Josef Stalin, who while studying for the priesthood was disciplined for daring to read Ninety-Three.)

Rand’s description of the Soviet education system in this book is strikingly similar to the description of the Nazi education system in School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis (1938) by Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika.

I.6: In this chapter, Leo Kovalensky says: “if I were given a choice – of all centuries – I’d select last the curse of being born in this one,” and “if I weren’t curious, I’d choose never to be born at all.” Andrei Taganov, by contrast, says: “if I had a choice, I’d want to be born when I was born, because now we don’t sit and dream, we don’t moan, we don’t wish – we do, we act, we build!”

While Andrei is supposed to be the more misguided of the two men in general (being a fervently Communist character in a fervently anti-Communist novel), Rand portrays his attitude toward life as at least in this respect stronger and healthier (in Nietzschean terms, and Randian ones too) than Leo’s.

In the original draft of We the Living, a character named Professor Leskov would have appeared at this point in the book. Here’s a deleted passage:

“The spirit of beauty is higher than the spirit of religion. It is the triumphant hymn of man to his own sacredness. It is the sublime claim of a god-like being to transcend all gods.”

Professor Leskov had the blue eyes of a child, the blond beard of a Greek statue, the sunken chest of a consumptive and the chair of the History of Esthetics at the State University of Petrograd. His lectures were held in the largest auditorium, but he still had to turn his eyes, occasionally, down to the floor, in order not to miss any of his audience; for part of that audience had to sit on the floor in the aisles. No auditorium had ever been large enough for Professor Leskov’s lectures. There were few red bandannas in his audience, and few leather jackets. Professor Leskov had never been known to explain the Venus de Milo by the state of the economic means of production in ancient Greece. He was known to speak Latin better than Russian, to talk of each masterpiece of art since the beginning of history tenderly and intimately, as if children of his mind, and to shrug in surprise when his learned colleagues in the Scientific Academies of Europe called him great. He spoke his lectures fiercely and solemnly, as if he were delivering a sermon, and the silence of his auditorium was that of a cathedral. ...

Kira sat on the edge of a bench in the front row. Sometimes, the childish blue eyes roving over the auditorium stopped for a short second on the wide, gray ones under strange, broken eyebrows.
(quoted in Essays on We the Living, p. 5)


Rand dropped the character once she decided to make Kira an engineering student, rather than a humanities student as Rand herself had been.

Chris Matthew Sciabarra argues, in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (2nd ed.), that Leskov was based on one of Rand’s own professors, Nikolai Lossky (1870-1965). Shoshana Milgram argues, in “The Education of Kira Argounova and Leo Kovalensky” (in Essays on We the Living, 2nd ed.), that Leskov is based instead on a different one of Rand’s professors, Aleksandr Vvedensky (1856-1925). We report, you decide. (Though I have to say that Lossky looks more like Rand’s description of Leskov than Vvedensky does; and the name “Lossky” sounds more like “Leskov” too, FWIW. In an upcoming (2021) issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Sciabarra plans to present further evidence on behalf of Lossky.)

Nikolai LosskyAleksandr Vvedensky


In addition to passages Rand cut from her drafts, there are also passages from the first published edition that Rand cut when the book was reissued. In her introduction to the second edition of We the Living, Rand describes the revisions she made to the first edition as “merely editorial line changes.” This is manifestly untrue; some of the changes are quite substantial. The most famous change comes in this chapter, in Kira’s conversation with Andrei:

We the Living: Original 1936 Text We the Living: 1957 Revision
“Haven’t you ever wanted a thing for no reason of right or wrong, for no reason at all, save one: that you wanted it?” “Haven’t you ever wanted a thing for no reason save one: that you wanted it?”
“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, as so many of our enemies do, that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods.”

“I loathe your ideals. I admire your methods. If one believe 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.”

“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?”

“Admirable. If you’re right. But – are you right?”
“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, as so many of our enemies do, that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods.”

“I loathe your ideals.”
“Don’t you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worth leaving alive?” “Don’t you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it?”
“Don’t you know,” he asked, “that we can’t sacrifice millions for the sake of the few?”

“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 under foot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it? What is the people but millions of puny, shriveled, 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 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.”
“Don’t you know,” he asked, “that we can’t sacrifice millions for the sake of the few?”

“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.”
“You have a right to kill, as all fighters have. But no one before you has ever thought of forbidding life to those still living.” “You may claim the right to kill, as all fighters do. But no one before you has ever thought of forbidding life to those still living.”



The alterations Rand made reflect her move away, in the 1940s and 50s, from her so-called “Nietzschean period” in the 1920s and 30s. This is not to say that all Nietzschean influence ceased in the later period – we’ll see that it didn’t when we get to The Fountainhead – but there are four “Nietzschean” ideas that pop up in her early writings that she explicitly rejects in her later ones, namely:

a) Innatism: treating superior character traits as largely inborn, and so necessarily restricted to a few, rather than something open to anyone to achieve.
b) Immoralism: treating those of superior character as exempt from ordinary moral rules.
c) Political elitism: more specifically, treating those of superior character as having the right to rule and dominate those of inferior character.
d) Subjectivism: an emphasis on will over reason, and on sheer personal preference over moral principle.


We’ll come back to this list later. For now, notice how these ideas are endorsed in Kira’s original speech, but removed or severely moderated in the revised version. (There’s controversy as to how far the early Rand’s expression of these four Nietzschean themes is literal as opposed to metaphorical. We’ll come back to that issue too.)

Rand’s revisions did not expunge all traces of her early admiration for rule and domination, however. We’ve already seen (in II.3) that when Kira was watching a play about “humble, kindly peasants cringing under a whip,” she “sat tense, erect, eyes dark in ecstasy, watching the whip cracking expertly in the hand of a tall, young overseer.” (In the same chapter, Kira’s “aristocratic ... conviction that labor and effort were ignoble” also clashes with Rand’s later ideas.)

Here Kira says: “one shouldn’t wait to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them.” In a note in her private journal in 1946, Rand writes less favourably about the kind of person who “decides that he is so sure of what is right and that he is capable of deciding it, while others are not, that he must force it on those inferior others ....” While sympathising with the “natural impatience of the intelligent man who can’t bear to see things done wrong,” she insists that using force against inferior minds places them, wrongly, in the “class of non-rational beings,” since “they can exist or be happy only on the basis of whatever rationality they possess”:

To accept or obey blindly is the only original sin for man .... Within the specific sphere of his own action, his job, his life, his active concerns, he must understand what he is doing to the best of his intelligence; in fact, it is his moral law and the essence of his nature not to touch that which he cannot judge firsthand, not to act without intelligence. ... To force [a lower intellect] against his wishes or understanding into some wonderful atomic factory where his limited skill can be used to best advantage (by the master’s decision) .... is forcing him into a subhuman state. (Journals, pp. 495-497)


(Certainly Rand remains some sort of elitist in her later years – but not a political elitist in the sense defined above.)

And Rand’s general judgment on Nietzsche, during her post-Nietzschean period, was as follows:

Nietzsche has certain very attractive, very wise quotations purported to uphold individualism with which one could agree out of context. But excepting his general “feeling for” individualism, I would not consider Nietzsche an individualist; and above all, he is certainly not an upholder of reason. ... I don’t want to be confused with Nietzsche in any respect. (quoted in Essays on We the Living, p. 237)


Compare these lines from the 19th-century individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker:

Nietzsche says splendid things, – often, indeed, Anarchist things, – but he is no Anarchist. It is for the Anarchists, then, to intellectually exploit this would-be exploiter. He may be utilized profitably, but not prophetably.


Incidentally, Kira’s assertion that “no one before [the Communists] has ever thought of forbidding life to those still living” seems to forget – well, slavery for example.

I.7: Lydia plays Chopin; no piece is specified. One of Rand’s favourite Chopin pieces was the Butterfly Etude:



– but that sounds too sprightly for Rand’s description of music “delicate as rose petals falling softly in the darkness.” This Chopin Nocturne fits the description a bit better:



Andrei takes Kira to the Mikhailovsky Theatre, which still looks much as Rand describes it:



The opera is Verdi’s Rigoletto, based on a play by Victor Hugo. The “challenge of youth and laughter” that the Duke of Mantua sings is the aria “Questa o quella”:



I.8: One feature of Hugo’s novels is that the chief antagonist is rarely a pure villain. In Les Misérables, for example, Jean Valjean’s chief adversary is not the vile Thénardier, but rather the noble but misguided Javert. For all Nietzsche’s dislike of Hugo, this is another point in common between them; recall Nietzsche’s observation that in Homer both the Greeks and the Trojans are “good.”

Rand follows this same approach, probably via influence from both Nietzsche and Hugo. While there are plenty of vile characters running around in the background, the chief conflicts in her novels are usually between heroes and almost-heroes. This chapter traces Andrei’s background, and along with it Pavel Syerov’s background as well, thereby showing us Andrei’s preparation for becoming a noble and therefore primary antagonist, and Syerov’s preparation for becoming a despicable and therefore merely secondary antagonist. While We the Living is a decidedly anti-Communist novel, Andrei’s background portrays what Rand sees as the best aspects in Communism.


I.9: Kira’s argument against believing in God – that “whoever places his highest conception above his own possibility thinks very little of himself” – is perhaps an echo of Nietzsche’s “If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god? Hence there are no gods.” (Zarathustra II.2)

Pravda (“Truth”) was the official Communist newspaper for the duration of the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviet Union it split into two, both of which still exist – one run by the Communist Party and one not. The Krasnaya Gazeta (“Red Gazette”) was another Communist newspaper; it continued in print until 1939.

I.10: Here’s the building at Gorokhovaia 2 – formerly the headquarters of the secret police (GPU), today the State Museum of Russian Political History:



I.11: It’s ironic that Rand’s contemptuous description of Soviet-approved foreign novels in which “a poor, honest worker was always sent to jail for stealing a loaf of bread,” etc., actually describes pretty well one of her favourite novels, Hugo’s Les Misérables. But Rand’s admiration for Hugo was based on the heroic “sense of life” she found in his novels, not on his explicit ethical and political themes, which were altruistic and egalitarian. Remember Rand’s contrast between the music and the lyrics of the “Internationale.”

The association of Leo with the statue of Apollo recalls Kira embracing statues of Greek gods in I.3. (Note also that it’s a statue of Apollo, not Dionysus.)

Leo quotes Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Oscar Wilde, and whistles “God Save the Tsar,” which is this:



The reference to the “whip he had been born to carry” is another instance of Rand’s early Nietzschean themes, specifically Innatism and Political Elitism.

Irina’s watching the same movie twice just to see one shot of the New York skyline is autobiographical on Rand’s part.

Here’s an excerpt from Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky, one of Rand’s favourite composers. The tune is also famous for its use as the song “Once Upon a Dream” in the Disney version(s).







On the Marinsky theatre, more soon.

I.12: Kira’s “kicking little icicles that clinked like glass” recalls the Viennese singer (in I.3) who “kicked the crystal goblets and set them flying in tingling, glittering splinters” while performing the “Song of Broken Glass.” This passage functions almost as a Wagnerian leitmotiv. (Musical leitmotivs, whether of real or fictional msusic, are a recurring thing in Rand’s fiction; there’s another in Atlas Shrugged, tying Dagny’s first and last appearances together.)

Here’s the Nikolayevsky Station that Kira and Leo visit:



“John Gray was brave and daring ....”: Michael Berliner, in his “Music of We the Living,” tracks down most of the real-life music that Rand refers to in the book, but “John Gray” seems to have eluded him. In contrast to other cases, he does not identify its composer; he also says that there are “no standard lyrics to this song,” and in evidence he offers the “cowboy” lyrics, which are completely different from those Rand cites.

But I’ve managed to track down some more info, thanks to the internet and a hazy memory of college Russian, and in fact the song Rand referred to has a known composer, and seems to have canonical lyrics as well; the “cowboy” lyrics, as we’ll see, are a red herring.

The composer is Matvei Blanter (1903-1990), one of the Soviet Union’s most popular composers, who wrote “John Gray” (“Dzhon Grei”) in 1923. And the lyrics, by Vladimir Mass (1896-1979), are the ones Rand cites. Here’s a link to a page with the song’s Russian lyrics, naming Blanter and Mass, followed by a copy of the original sheet music likewise featuring Blanter’s name.

And here’s the song itself:



This is clearly the version Rand discusses (even if the vaudeville style of performance is, I suspect, not what she had in mind). The tune matches her description, and as for the words, one doesn’t need much familiarity with Russian to identify “Kat skazala nyet!

Here are a couple of instrumental versions; the first one does a particularly good job of capturing the “sad gaiety” and “abrupt, hysterical frivolity” of which Rand speaks:





(It’s funny how Rand thinks the “John Gray” song sounds so foreign and un-Russian, since to me it sounds utterly Russian, or possibly Russian-Jewish. If any music can express “sad gaiety,” it’s Russian-Jewish music.)

What about the “cowboy” lyrics that Berliner cites? It turns out that they come from a completely different song, with not only different words but different music. The song’s lyrics may mention a “John Gray,” but its title is “In a Far-off Southern Land” (“V Stranye Dalëkoi Yuga”). I haven’t been able to track down any author for the song. But here it is:



As you can see (well, hear), while the two songs have some musical similarity – enough to suggest the possibility of influence (though the direction of influence can’t be determined without knowing the date of “In a Far-off Southern Land”) – the tunes aren’t the same (and to my ear, that of “John Gray” is the more complex and sophisticated of the two).

Incidentally, I’ve long suspected that We the Living’s “John Gray” inspired Atlas Shrugged’s “John Galt” (and likewise that We the Living’s “Café Diggy-Daggy” inspired Atlas’s “Dagny”).

Other musical pieces mentioned in this chapter include “Your Fingers Smell of Incense” ...









and the “Destiny Waltz”:



I.14: Marisha plays Chopin’s “(Little) Dog’s Waltz,” also known as the “Minute Waltz” (“minute” in the sense of “small” – the idea that it’s supposed to be played in exactly one minute is a myth).



I can’t embed “The Fire of Moscow,” but you can hear it here.

Here’s an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (this is also the vampire theme from the original 1931 Dracula movie):




Nietzschean Tune of the Week

Here’s “Im Mondschein auf der Puszta” (“In Moonlight on the Puszta”). The Puszta is a grassy steppe in Hungary.




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