We the Living

This novel was published in 1936 and reissued in 1959.

Its theme is: the individual against the state; the supreme value of a human life and the evil of the totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it.

The story takes place in Soviet Russia. The excerpt below is the speech of Kira Argounova to Andrei Taganov, in the following context: Kira has been having a love affair with Andrei in order to obtain money to save the life of Leo Kovalensky, the man she loves;

Andrei, an idealistic young Communist, who is profoundly in love with her, was beginning to discover the importance of personal values, when, in the course of arresting Leo for a political crime, he learns the truth about Kira’s relationship to both of them.

“Go through the garrets and basements where men live in your Red cities and see how many cases like this you can find. He wanted to live. You think everything that breathes can live? You’ve learned differently, I know. But he was one who could have lived. There aren’t many of them, so they don’t count with you. The doctor said he was going to die. And I loved him. You’ve learned what that means, too, haven’t you? He didn’t need much. Only rest, and fresh air, and food. He had no right to that, had he? Your State said so. We tried to beg. We begged humbly. Do you know what they said? There was a doctor in a hospital and he said he had hundreds on his waiting list. . . .

“You see, you must understand this thoroughly. No one does. No one sees it, but I do, I can’t help it, I see it, you must see it, too. You understand? Hundreds. Thousands. Millions. Millions of what? Stomachs, and heads, and legs, and tongues, and souls. And it doesn’t even matter whether they fit together. Just millions. Just flesh. Human flesh. And they—it—had been registered and numbered, you know, like tin cans on a store shelf. I wonder if they’re registered by the person or by the pound? And they had a chance to go on living. But not Leo. He was only a man. All stones are cobblestones to you. And diamonds— they’re useless, because they sparkle too brightly in the sun, and it’s too hard on the eyes, and it’s too hard under the hoofs marching into the proletarian future. You don’t pave roads with diamonds. They may have other uses in the world, but of those you’ve never learned. That is why you had sentenced him to death, and others like him, an execution without a firing squad. There was a big commissar and I went to see him. He told me that a hundred thousand workers had died in the civil war and why couldn’t one aristocrat die—in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? And what is the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics in the face of one man? But that is a question not for you to answer. I’m grateful to that commissar. He gave me permission to do what I’ve done. I don’t hate him. You should hate him. What I’m doing to you—he did it first! . . . “That’s the question, you know, don’t you? Why can’t one aristocrat die in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics? You don’t understand that, do you?

You and your great commissar, and a million others, like you, like him, that’s what you brought to the world, that question and your answer to it! A great gift, isn’t it? But one of you has been paid. I paid it. In you and to you. For all the sorrow your comrades brought to a living world. How do you like it, Comrade Andrei Taganov of the All-Union Communist Party? If you taught us that our life is nothing before that of the State—well then, are you really suffering? If I brought you to the last hell of despair—well then, why don’t you say that one’s own life doesn’t really matter? . . . You loved a woman and she threw your love in your face? But the proletarian mines in the Don Basin have produced a hundred tons of coal last month! You had two altars and you saw suddenly that a harlot stood on one of them, and Citizen Morozov on the other? But the Proletarian State has exported ten thousand bushels of wheat last month! You’ve had every beam knocked from under your life? But the Proletarian Republic is building a new electric plant on the Volga! Why don’t you smile and sing hymns to the toil of the Collective? It’s still there, your Collective. Go and join it. Did anything really happen to you? It’s nothing but a personal problem of a private life, the kind that only the dead old world could worry about, isn’t it? Don’t you have something greater—greater is the word your comrades use—left to live for? Or do you, Comrade Taganov? . . .

“Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want—isn’t that life itself? And who—in this damned universe—who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want? Who can answer that in human sounds that speak for human reason? . . . But you’ve tried to tell us what we should want. You came as a solemn army to bring a new life to men. You tore that life you knew nothing about, out of their guts—and you told them what it had to be. You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every thought in the farthest corners of their souls—and you told them what it had to be. You came and you forbade life to the living. You’ve driven us all into an iron cellar and you’ve closed all doors, and you’ve locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it’s doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left—look!”