Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Rand, Ayn (Vol. 30) - Ben Belitt

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BEN BELITT

[Ayn Rand] has written a novel ["We the Living"] to make it finally plain that the Soviet state, as far as she has been able to discover, is not only a farce on the face of it but is likewise fostering a race of "crippled, creeping, crawling, broken monstrosities." Miss Rand is determined that her readers shall have nothing less than the whole truth. Kira Argounova, her protagonist, speaks for her on at least one occasion: "For one insane second Kira wondered if she could tear through the crowd, rush up to that woman [a visiting English trade-union delegate] and yell to her, to England's workers, to the world, the truth that they were seeking." We are left to assume that "We the Living" is the answer. (p. 523)

From the very outset [Kira's] attitude toward the experiment in which she shares is one of contempt and ridicule; she "loathes their ideals but admires their methods"—which would conceivably make her a mystic. Not many chapters on, she...

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1. Introduction
2. Harold Strauss
3. Ben Belitt
4. William Plomer
5. Lorine Pruette
6. Albert Guerard
7. John Chamberlain
8. Ruth Chapin Blackman
9. Granville Hicks
10. Helen Beal Woodward
11. Patricia Donegan
12. Gore Vidal
13. Nathaniel Branden
14. Bruce Cook
15. Gerald Raftery
16. Philip Gordon
17. Mimi R. Gladstein
18. KEVIN McGANN
19. Terry Teachout
20. DOUGLAS DEN UYL and DOUGLAS B. RASMUSSEN
21. Tamara Stadnychenko
22. Copyright

1. Ayn Rand