Finally finished late last night. I know Rand is controversial because of her political leanings, but in this book anyway it seems clear to me that her point of view is that the rights of the individual supersede the rights of the state. I agree with her there. The view that man only exists to serve the state (communism) is truly terrifying.

My favorite character was not Kira, it was Andrei. I think Kira loved him and did not realize it. She could only think of Leo, who proved himself unworthy of her love and sacrifices on his behalf. Andrei was by far the better and more honorable man, despite being a communist, and truly loved her. I was sad over what Andrei decided to do, but understood. What else can you do when everything you valued and trusted your life to turns out to be false? Kira has the same situation (Leo) and takes the opposite step--toward life and survival. Yet it ends the same for both of them.

Probably not the best thing to read if you are already depressed!

Dec 19, 2024: EDIT —
Still my most favorite book — ever. Still tell everyone I love about this book. Still utterly and unexplainably in love with this book.

Surprisingly, I DNFR “Atlas Shrugged”, though I have no complaints on it and was simply too caught up with life and school to finish it, it didn’t “wow” me nearly as much as this book has.

No one knows about this book, really. It’s like a special little golden nugget I can gate keep.

“Really Dani? Ayn Rand wrote your all time favorite book ever? Of all writers?”

“I mean, she’s cool and all, but to say she’s the author of a book you don’t shut up about?”

Yes, precisely. Surprising to some; maybe. And that only makes it more special. You don’t expect it.

My only complaint in this — the lack of love this book gets — is due to it, not many print versions of it exists. I actually despise the 75th version of this book, and it’s the one I read and have. There’s only like 2 other prints (that are easily obtainable online and affordable) and the prints are “meh”. Small, hate the “compact size” of it. Whatever. The story was worth it.

Nov 9, 2022: EDIT —
I really love this book. A lot. LOL

Aug 26, 2022: EDIT —
Just here to say and emphasize how much I deeply loved this book, I finished it over a month ago and still feel the deep, painful attachment to it. Good god, I sit and look at quotes from the book and still fall more and more in love with this book. I may even say this is my all time favorite book ever.. I truly believe so.

JULY 17, 2022 —
Okay, deep breathes now. I need to remind myself that this story is "fiction", and I quote because everything about it is so true and raw, incredibly historically accurate of Lenin/Stalins communist USSR; but Ayn's characters are fiction..(I find myself reminding myself for hours after finishing this book.)

I'll keep this short and simple. Rand does something many do not. She captures Communism in the emotional, physical and daily light - not in its fact to fact stoic manner.
When you read about communism, especially Russian communism, you don't see how this political ideology affects people emotionally. You don't see how it destroys a family structure from the inside out. You don't see the betrayal in humans, the mistrust, the anger. You don't see the death, not the physical death where a corpse is involve, but the death of ones ambition, ones mind, ones personality, ones love and faith - something we humans NEED to survive and be.. human. Ayn captures this is such a manner, I found myself breathless reading her book, closing it and trying to take in the air around me. Because it hurts to know that despite the fictional characters, in the millions that suffered communism, many were bound to have a similar story.

I fell in love with Andrei. Never have I ever believed I could see the view point of a Communist and defend one against myself so badly as I have with this character. For Ayn Rand to show the human, the essence of why one has resulted in such a powerful position and defend a collective ideology that omits free speech and still love the character, is nothing short of phenomenal. Ayn did something I have never seen before.

Who is this book for?
If you are not from a Communist background and want to see what its like to live under a communist regime, if you want to touch up on your history, if you are a self proclaimed twitter communist and think you know what communism is, or simply, if you want a beautiful story that'll break your heart for days, this is the book for you.

My first foray into Ayn Rand (I have chosen to read her four major works in chronological order). The pages drip with her horror at the changes wrought by the Russian Revolution, and you cannot blame her for feeling the way she does. To watch as talented, successful, intelligent people were marginalized from society and education and the government and commerce in a sick and destructive pattern of retribution, only to find themselves replaced with people as callow and impecunious as they were accused of being must have been sickening. She definitely makes you sympathize with the situation. But it is harder, somehow, to sympathize with her characters. The protagonist, while she has big questions and big goals, and you want to root for her, somehow foreclosed my unqualified support for her because she was so disengaged, somehow, from her fellow man and family (except for her self-destructive passion, not clear if it's love, for her husband).

We The Living is an amazing and timeless book. As I was reading it, being an involuntarily former citizen of former Soviet Union, I could completely relate to the non fictional events in this novel. As I was telling my dad about this book, he could relate to the events and as per stories that he told me many years ago, I saw that this applies to anyone at any given time that has ever lived and experienced living under tyrannical regime. While we, me and my family, lived in USSR, I always thought of it and not able to express it, which I have recently and later being in the United States, that in Soviet Union people did not live, they merely survived. We survived by being able to feed our family and barely getting through life. We survived by keeping our mouths shut and not letting even a joke or an innocent comment slip away from a very young age. We survived by not letting others know how we truly feel. We just survived. We The Living, we have not lived, we just survived and in this historic fiction Ayn Rand describes just that. Of course there are multiple philosophical examples of different personal traits of some of the people, by giving examples of one over the other, but the main underlining topic is that We The Living are merely surviving.

The book starts out with the family of has been class or basically the people who worked hard, made some decent living for themselves and the loved ones coming back to what used to be their home, Petrograd. There are mutliple examples how people worked hard for what they had, but once the fare and equal revolution came, they lost all that was earned threw the sweat of their braw. The uncle of the main character for example, Kira's uncle Vasilii, had to work hard, away from relatives and friends, in order to become someone and make a great living for his family, but once the revolution came, he was considered an exploiter of the working class. Such were the times and such was the "revolution". Take something from someone who has it and worked for it and share it to everyone who has not, basically make everyone poor and starving. not for long, since the promises of greater future are always made. The promises is the key word!! Promisses without greater future in sight is what it was and always would be. Through the series of events and meeting up with family who have stayed in Petrograd through and through, Argunov family realizes that life as they knew it is no longer the same. The jobs are all soviet or if they are not, it costs you more to live to pay for anything and everything. The so called equal society is no longer equal, but just the master has changed and thy master is the Communist Party. Party members as we find out can do no wrong, unless they do not agree with other party members and those who had ideals to build something realize that what they built might not be what reality creates it to be. The theories and ideals are not reality and as we see through the novel, even some who thought that they are doing something historical and amazing face the cold facts, the reality can never deliver the ideals that are part of their revolution. Czar was not good to the people, but then the people who overthrew the Czar for the “greater good” are doing things via party for the greater good that benefits them, individual them, meanwhile preaching of the party and its principles. A valid example of how it did happen and how it would happen in any situation is in this book, because an individual no matter how he/she talks and expresses their outward feelings will always do what is best for that individual first and that is the nature of the human, hence does not coincide with any ideals or theories.

The main character of the story is a young girl, Kira Argunov, with great love, but even then she is faced with tough decisions, on the daily basis and trying to build the future that is out of her hands. Her life is not what she wants it to be or what she hopes to make of it, but the society as she knows it and she sees is not life, but survival to pretend to live and the gray numbers of the living are moving through “life” as it is provided to them by the new post revolutionary outcome. The point in this novel is simple; the life is no longer a choice of an individual, but of the masses, for some. Yes, of course for some, since there are some who choose to avoid the “law” and there are some who believe that they are above it, as we find out. It is a fictional novel with very realistic situations to display the chain of events that take place.

Besides being a sad and even a tragic novel, it is a book that is impossible to put down. I am not a fast reader, but I read this one faster than some of the smaller books and enjoyed every second of it. The book teaches you and tells the story at the same time. There are two parts and the second part starts off with something I was not even aware of. The city that the book describes and the story takes place in, Petrograd, which was former St. Petersburg, which became later, knows as Leningrad, then Stalingrad and eventually for many years Leningrad again until the end of former Soviet Union, is actually man made. No, not that man built it as the building and roads, but the entire city built literary from start to finish on the swamp. There was nothing there and then there was a city. No legends, no stories, no prior history until it was there and a city rose up from nothing to perfectly built and manmade. The background of the city, that part in itself, is extremely interesting part of history that is worth learning in itself, besides all the other historic and fictional events that took place. I believe that it impossible to praise this book enough, because it is an amazing story and history lesson. It is also an amazing example of how a society can take a downfall for the sake of ideology and theory, and not a very good theory, but believing that the human nature can do something and change for the “greater good”. Fantastic book and I highly recommend it to everyone.

Po te jesh ende gjalle...dhe po te mos kesh harruar

I know Ayn Rand has some v bad views and politics etc but this book is so well written and so harrowing I wanted to puke several times and I did cry many times. It’s a men are trash Soviet revolution edition..

I loved Rand's Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Anthem so reading this and not being completely enthralled by it, as I was her other books, was disappointing for me. Unlike her later stories, the plot here often feels like a soap opera rather than literary fiction. There is a serious story to be told and parts of it are executed in classic Rand fashion, but more often than not you can tell she was a first-time writer learning how to tell a story. Good, but not nearly on the same level as her other fiction.

We the Living: http://readwithstyle.wordpress.com/20...

We the Living by Ayn Rand is not another book about the communist rule in the USSR. It is not another propaganda or criticism. It is merely a novel about the Man against the State, about the continuous human struggle for individual happiness and satisfaction against the artificially installed responsibility towards society, about dictatorship whether it is in Soviet Russia or in Nazi Germany.

Ayn Rand (Alisa Rosenbaum) is one of the most influential American writers and philosophers. Born in Soviet Russia, she emigrated in 1925 to the USA. We the Living is published in 1936, followed by The Fountainhead and her masterpiece Atlas Shrugged. Rand is famous for her philosophy objectivism, which encompasses the following postulates: 1) reality exists regardless of consciousness; 2) individuals connect with reality through sense perception; 3) the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the achievement of one’s happiness or rational self-interest; 4) laissez faire capitalism is the only social system, which values individual rights and is consistent with this philosophy; 5) art is the transformation of one’s metaphysical ideas into a physical form, which can be comprehended and responded to.

Rand’s philosophy is largely influenced by her background: she spent her first 20 years in the USSR. In We the Living she depicts the Soviet reality after the 1917 Revolution, where human individuality is suppressed in favor of the greater social good. People are supposed to be equal (for those of you having never lived in a communist regime that means equally poor and deprived) yet some are more equal than others (if you know what I mean). Kira Argunova, the protagonist, is born in bourgeois family, which is a subject of constant suppression by the ruling communist regime. She is expelled from university, where she studies engineering, she has to pretend to believe in and love communism in order to receive the food coupons, and she is forced to live in poverty. Kira falls in love with a revolutionist, but she loses the war against society – at the end Leo’s mind is corrupted; he becomes a faithless hopeless alcoholic. Andrey, her communist friend, is disillusioned by the discrepancy between communist theory and practice in the USSR. At the end Kira decides to flee her home country only to realize she can never escape the regime.

Read more: http://readwithstyle.wordpress.com/20...

This book helped clear up some of Rand's religious philosophy. At one point, the Heroin asks a friend if he believes in God. When the friend answers no, she says that was the right answer, because if you believe in God then you don't believe in life. She goes on to explain that when people believe in God they believe in something higher than themselves that they can never achieve, and she doesn't want to believe that there is something she can never achieve. I found her reason for being an atheist ironic.

Είναι σαφώς page-turner, ασχέτως που τελευταία γυρνάω τις σελίδες πολύ αργά (it's not you, Ayn Rand, it's me). Κατά τα λοιπά, δεν μπορώ να πω ότι εντυπωσιάστηκα. Συμπαθητική ιστορία, πολύ μέτρια η απόδοση. Θα του έβαζα ένα τίμιο 6/10 νομίζω.

წიგნში პოსტ-რევოლუციური საბჭოთა რეალობაა ასახული სხვადასხვა პერსონაჟების მაგალითზე, რომელთა აბსოლუტური უმეტესობაც გატყდა და დაკარგა სიცოცხლის გაგრძელების აზრი, შეურთდა კოლექტივიზმს და “უტოპიურ” სოციალისტურ წყობას, მაგრამ მეორეს მხრივ არის კირა არგუნოვა ვინც ინდივიდუალიზმისა და დასავლური ღირებულებებისკენ ისწრაფვის.

რენდის პირველი რომანია სადაც ობიექტივიზმის ნიშნები ჩანს, თუმცა “პირველწყარო” და შემდეგ უკვე მისი ფილოსოფიის დაგვირგვინება “ატლანტმა მხრები გაშალა” ბევრად მასშტაბური ტექსტია რა თქმა უნდა.

This is the most interesting and heartbreaking novel I've read in a very long time. I have thoroughly enjoyed anything I've ever read by Ayn Rand. Not because of her life philosophy, but because of her strong characters. This book is no different. However, it is set in 1920's communist Russia rather than 1940's United States like the others I've read. I have about 100 pages left to read, and I can barely bring myself to finish. I know it is all going to end badly. For everyone. And, unbeknownst to the author when she wrote this book in the 30's, communism would continue to rule with its heavy, deadly fist until the mid 1990s.