The sexual relationships in We The Living primarily revolve around those between Kira and Leo and Kira and Andrei. (Although there are subplots concerning sexual relationships with other characters, such as that between Irina and Sasha and Pavel Syerov and Comrade Sonia.) Here I will go over those two major relationships in the novel.
Kira meets Leo randomly after she left her cousin Victor on a park bench. Victor had made his own sexual advance on Kira in the park, which she had rebuffed. I’m assuming first cousin marriage was not considered incest or taboo in this time and place. Being from the Southern United States, this is also not unheard of in my own culture, although the science seems to indicate this is not a good idea. http://gap.med.miami.edu/learn-about-genetics/have-questions-about-genetics/if-cousins-get-married-are-they-at-risk-of-having-children-with-genetic-con
For no good reason that I can discern, Kira had gone on a carriage ride with Victor, even though she clearly dislikes him. I found this a little perplexing, since I don’t know what would motivate Kira to do this. She clearly doesn’t care about pleasing her family. All I can guess is that she went out of sheer boredom at spending another evening with her family. Kira and Victor eventually end up at a park.
Kira is making her way home after Victor’s failed romantic overture at the park when she accidentally wanders through the section of town where women in the local sex industry are on the street looking for customers. Leo has gone there looking to hire a sex worker, and mistakes Kira for one. Kira experiences “love at first sight” when she sees Leo. She goes with him, apparently intending to have sex with Leo:
“’Why are you looking at me like that?’ he asked. But she did not answer. He said: ‘I’m afraid I’m not a very cheerful companion tonight.’
‘Can I help you?’
‘Well, that’s what you’re here for.’ He stopped suddenly. ‘What’s the price?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t much.’
Kira looked at him and understood why he had approached her. She stood looking silently into his eyes. When she spoke, her voice had lost its tremulous reverence; it was calm and firm. She said: ‘It won’t be much.’
‘Where do we go?’
‘I passed a little garden around the corner. Let’s go there first -for a while.’” (Pg. 61)
Sex for money, or for other reasons besides sexual pleasure, comes up several times in the novel. Later in the story, Kira offers herself to a random wealthy man for money to get Leo medical care. When she tells him how much she needs, he tells her other sex workers don’t make that much in an entire career. (Pg. 226) In the end, Leo becomes a gigolo. A major subplot is the relationship of Kira’s cousin Victor to Marisha, Kira’s communist neighbor. Marisha is in love with Victor because she was a lower-class person before the civil war, but remembers how her mother used to clean the house of an aristocrat with a good looking son that she fell in love with. Victor reminds her of that good looking aristocratic son. Victor pretends to be in love with Marisha so that he can marry her for status in the communist party. This is a sort of parallel to Kira pretending to love Andrei. In the case of Kira, her actions would generally be regarded as noble, or at least, excusable under the circumstances. In the case of Victor, his actions would generally be seen as ignoble.
Leo eventually realizes Kira is not a sex worker, but he is as fascinated by her as she is by him. They agree to meet again at the same location in a month. The month passes and they meet for the second time. Leo kisses the palm of her hand, and they agree to another meeting in a month. Leo then unexpectedly shows up at Kira’s school a few days or weeks later, and they have a more intimate encounter under a bridge, by a river. They agree to meet in a week, and when that rendezvous occurs, Leo tells Kira he is leaving the country by boat. Kira agrees to go with him, and they have sex for the first time on the boat. The boat is stopped by a military patrol led by Stepan Timoshenko, one of the good communists in the novel. Timoshenko lets Kira go, and also manages to get Leo released a few days later. Soon after that, Kira’s family finds out she’s been sleeping with a man out of wedlock and kicks her out of the house. (Although Kira intended to live with Leo, regardless.)
Around that time in the novel, background is given on Leo’s childhood and adolescence. We learn that his first sexual encounter was at sixteen with an older, married woman. Leo had numerous other sexual relations with women in his late teenage years. The end of the flashback to Leo’s backstory ends with what I thought was a rather curious description of him:
“The revolution found Admiral Kovalensky [Leo’s father] with black glasses over his unseeing eyes and St. George’s ribbon in his lapel; it found Leo Kovalensky with a slow, contemptuous smile, and a swift gait, and in his hand a lost whip he had been born to carry.”(Pg. 139)
In my previous blog entry on We The Living, I noted this “rulers and ruled” idea running through the novel, and this is another example of it. Rand does not seem to present this attitude of Leo in a negative light. She seems to present it as desirable or virtuous, which, again, seems incongruous in comparison to her later works. Also note that this aspect of Leo’s personality plays into Kira’s earlier interest in a fictional young overseer in a play who is whipping the serfs. (Pg. 47-48) Kira likes men who use a certain level of physical force on others, and Leo is the type who likes to use that physical force.
At this point I will note my own evaluation of Leo, which is that I do not care for him. He sounds like he was a womanizer before he met Kira. He never asks Kira to marry him, while Andrei asks her to marry him the first time they have sex. In the end, he becomes a gigolo and gives up Kira for a life of being a male sex worker. The whole point of “We The Living” is that life is unbearable under Communism, but I don’t consider Leo’s way out of a corrupt system to be particularly noble. Andrei had the right idea when he put a bullet in his own brain.
If I knew a woman in real life who was in love with a guy like Leo, I’d have to ask the question: “Why?” What did he have going for him, other than his looks? He’s a womanizer, an alcoholic, and believes he has a right to order his social inferiors around. I have to think Leo would end up cheating on Kira under capitalism, as much as communism. Kira seemed to think she could “save” Leo, like he was her “project boyfriend”. Near the end, when it is clear that Leo is dead in spirit, if not in his actual physical body, Kira has the following thoughts:
“He had left home often and she had never asked him where he went. He had been drinking too often and too much, and she had not said whether she noticed it. When they had been alone together, they had sat silently, and the silence had spoken to her, louder than any words, of something which was an end. He had been spending the last of their money and she had not questioned him about the future. She had not questioned him about anything, for she had been afraid of the answer she knew: that her fight was lost.” (Pg 439)
Soon after that, during their breakup scene, Kira says the following:
“She turned and looked at him calmly, and answered: ‘Only this, Leo: it was I against a hundred and fifty million people. I lost.” (Pg. 443)
These scenes present strong evidence that Kira believed that her love could save Leo. The desire to fix men is a common attitude of women, especially young women. I also think it’s a mistake. With that said, a reader needs to keep in mind that both of these people are about eighteen years old, so there is possibly a “maturity factor” at play here, for both of them. Although, even at eighteen, I was not a hard-drinking, womanizer with a desire to dominate others, so is it just a matter of immaturity?
The other major sexual relationship in the novel is between Kira and Andrei. With one exception, I like everything about Andrei, on a personal level. He lives in spartan living quarters. (I’m a fan of minimalism and living on as little money as possible.) He’s studying to be an engineer. He tries to eliminate “sentiment” and just be his work. (That can be taken too far, but it’s better than the hordes of teenagers who sit around playing X-Box and smoking pot all day.) To me, this character is a sort of “proto-Hank Reardon”. Even though he has a somewhat “monkish” exterior, when Andrei falls for Kira, he falls hard. Unlike Leo, Andrei knows how much he loves Kira, and isn’t afraid to say it:
“‘Because, no matter what happens, I still have you. Because, no matter what human wreckage I see around me, I still have you. And -in you- I still know what a human being can be.’
‘Andrei,’ she whispered, ‘are you sure you know me?’
He whispered, his lips in her hand so that she heard the words as if she were gathering them, one by one, in the hollow of her palm: ‘Kira, the highest thing in a man is not his god. It’s that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence…’” (Pg. 335)
This scene happens in the last third of the novel, when Andrei is beginning to doubt what he has believed. The doubt comes from what he sees as the corruption of the other communists around him, like Pavel Syerov, but it also comes from his affair with Kira. For the first time in his life, he is in love with a woman, and it is someone that he knows opposes communism. He is honest enough to express a level of vulnerability and doubt that most people would lack the self-confidence to do. Like I said, there is a lot to like here, but he’s also a communist and a member of the secret police. (That’s a pretty big “but”.)
Ayn Rand did everything she could to make this character sympathetic, and she succeeded for me. At one point, Rand describes the following scene, soon after Andrei and Kira have sex for the first time:
“The street light beyond the window made a white square and a black cross on the wall above the bed. Against the white square, she could see his [Andrei’s] face on the pillow; he did not move. Her arm, stretched limply against his naked body, felt no movement but the beating of his heart.” (Pg 233)
For Rand, nothing is an accident. The symbol of a cross on the wall above the bed seems like a reference to the crucifixion story in the Bible. Andrei is almost “Christ-like”. When I say that, I mean in the sense of total devotion to someone or something, even at great cost, which is what I think the story in the Bible means to the modern mind. Near the end, after Andrei learns why Kira was really with him, and he has saved Leo from being shot as an illegal speculator, Leo says he isn’t happy that Andrei saved him. Andrei asks “Why?”, and Leo says the following to Andrei:
“Do you suppose Lazarus was grateful when Christ brought him back from the grave -if He did? No more than I am to you, I think.” (Pg. 421)
Again, an explicit reference to Andrei as Christ in the Bible.
Andrei gives every penny he earns to Kira after they start their affair. (He believes she’s using it to support her family, but she’s actually using it for medical treatments for Leo. This is why Kira is pretending to be in love with Andrei.) Later in the novel, after Andrei learns the truth, he risks everything to save Leo out of love for Kira. This is reminiscent of Sydney Carton from “A Tale of Two Cities”, who goes to the guillotine during the French Revolution to save the husband of the woman he loves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Carton
Kira’s relationship with Andrei is interesting. She initially encounters him at her engineering school, where Andrei is a student, and also an officer of the branch of the GPU at the university. She is at a meeting of students to elect student council members. During the course of that, the “Internationale” is sung:
“For the first time in Petrograd, Kira heard the ‘Internationale.’ She tried not to listen to its words. The words spoke of the damned, the hungry, the slaves, of those who had been nothing and shall be all; in the magnificent goblet of the music, the words were not intoxicating as wine; they were not terrifying as blood; they were gray as dish water.
But the music was like the marching of thousands of feet measured and steady, like drums beaten by unvarying, unhurried hands. The music was like the feet of soldiers marching into the dawn that is to see their battle and their victory; as if the song rose from under the soldiers’ feet, with the dust of the road, as if the soldiers’ feet played it upon the earth.
The tune sang of a promise, calmly, with the calm of an immeasurable strength, and then, tense with a restrained, but uncontrollable ecstasy, the notes rose, trembling, repeating themselves, too rapt to be held still, like arms raised and waiving in the sweep of banners.
It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was the song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength.
Everyone had to rise when the ‘Internationale’ was played.
Kira stood smiling at the music. ‘This is the first beautiful thing I’ve noticed about the revolution.’ she said to her neighbor.
‘Be careful,’ the freckled girl whispered, glancing around nervously, ‘someone will hear you.’
‘When this is all over,’ said Kira. ‘when the traces of their republic are disinfected from history -what a glorious funeral march this will make!’
‘You little fool! What are you talking about?’
A young man’s hand grasped Kira’s wrist and wheeled her around.
She stared up into two gray eyes that looked like the eyes of a tamed tiger; but she was not quite sure whether it was tamed or not. There were four straight lines on his face: two eyebrows, a mouth, and a scar on his right temple.
For one short second, they looked at each other, silent, hostile, startled by each other’s eyes.
‘How much,’ asked Kira, ‘are you paid for snooping around?’
She tried to disengage her wrist. He held it: ‘Do you know the place for little girls like you?’
‘Yes -where men like you wouldn’t be let in through the back door.’
‘You must be new here. I’d advise you to be careful.’
‘Our stairs are slippery and there are four floors to climb, so be careful when you come to arrest me.’
He dropped her wrist. She looked at his silent mouth; it spoke of many past battles louder than the scar on his forehead; it also spoke of many more to come.
The ‘Internationale’ rang like soldiers’ feet beating the earth.
‘Are you exceedingly brave?’ he asked. ‘Or just stupid?’
‘I’ll let you find that out.’
He shrugged, turned and walked away. He was tall and young. He wore a cap and a leather jacket. He walked like a soldier, his steps deliberate and very confident.
Students sang the ‘Internationale,’ its ecstatic notes rising, trembling, repeating themselves.
‘Comrade,’ the freckled girl whispered, ‘what have you done?’” (Pg. 73-75)
Through the course of the novel, their friendship grows, then Andrei suddenly starts avoiding Kira, and she cannot figure out why. As she grows more desperate to obtain medical care for Leo, she eventually seeks out Andrei, with the intention of asking him for money for Leo. (Andrei is unaware of Kira’s involvement with Leo.) When she goes to his apartment, Andrei confesses his love for her, and tells her he had to stop seeing her because he knew he had the power to force her to have sex against her will. As a member of the secret police, Andrei knew he could go to Kira’s house with his men, take her away, and rape her with impunity.
This actually happened in the Soviet Union. Lavrentiy Beria, head of Stalin’s Secret Police, would pick up women against their will, drive them to his house, and rape them. Women who refused were arrested and imprisoned. Women would also agree to sex to free family members. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria
Andrei also knew that Kira would despise him after that, which he couldn’t stand the thought of. To avoid the temptation, he decided to stop seeing her, and avoid her altogether. Andrei tells Kira he’d give her everything he has if he thought it would make Kira love him, but he knows she doesn’t because she hates everything he stands for. Kira realizes that if she pretends to be in love with Andrei she can get the money she needs to save Leo, so she lies and tells Andrei she is, in fact, in love with him, and they sleep together:
“’I can! I love you.’
She wondered how strange it was to feel a man’s lips that were not Leo’s.
She was saying: ‘Yes…for a long time…but I didn’t know that you, too…’ and she felt his hands and his mouth, and she wondered whether this was joy or torture to him and how strong his arms were. She hoped it would be quick.”(Pg. 233)
The exact nature of the relationship between Kira and Andrei eludes me in certain respects. She did feel affection and friendship for Andrei before she pretended to be in love with him. For instance, she worries about his welfare when he tells her he just got back from putting down a peasant rebellion in the countryside. Andrei says three Communists were killed by peasants, and Kira says:
“‘Andrei! I hope you got them!’
He could not restrain a smile: ‘Why, Kira! Are you saying that about men who fight Communism?’
‘But… but they could have done it to you.’” (Pg. 165)
It makes me wonder about how much she enjoyed sex with Andrei? Did she have orgasms with Andrei? There are scenes that seem to indicate she does not:
“His [Andrei’s] hands closed slowly, softly over her shoulders, so softly that she could not feel his hands, only their strength, their will holding her, bending her backward; but his lips on hers were brutal, uncontrollable. His eyes were closed; hers were open, looking indifferently up at the ceiling.” (Pg. 244)
But, later, when Kira is going to see Andrei, there is the implication that she likes the sex with him:
“…Her body felt pure and hallowed: her feet were slowing down to retard her progress toward that which seemed a sacrilege because she did desire it and did not wish to desire it tonight.” (Pg. 381)
What I got from this passage was that Kira did have orgasms from sex with Andrei, and even looked forward to it on occasion, but she felt guilty about it.
Also mixed in with Kira’s feelings towards Andrei appears to be a desire to punish him, or make him a sort of “stand-in” for the whole communist system that Kira, and those she loves, have suffered under. For instance, the first time Kira takes money from Andrei she seems to feel a bit of guilt:
“She wondered dimly how simple and easy it was to lie.
To Andrei, she had mentioned her starving family. She did not have to ask: he gave her his whole monthly salary and told her to leave him only what she could spare. She had expected it, but it was not an easy moment when she saw the bills in her hand…” (Pg. 235)
But, that moment of guilt quickly passes, as this passage goes on to say:
“…;then, she remembered the comrade commissar and why one aristocrat could die in the face of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics -and she kept most of the money, with a hard, bright smile.” (Pg. 235)
(The comrade commissar was an official in an earlier scene who refused to give Leo medical treatment, and mentioned something about how so many had died, so what was one aristocrat to the Soviet Union.)
In this scene, its like Kira felt momentary remorse at taking Andrei’s money under false pretenses, then she remembers that he has helped to bring about that system under which Leo and others would die, and she takes almost all of his money, as a sort of passive-aggressive punishment against him, as representative of the whole system.
It seems that Kira enjoys making Andrei suffer a little, as punishment, but it is a sort of cruelty, with occasional bursts of compassion. In one scene, Andrei is complaining about not being able to see Kira much. She has also told him never to come to her parent’s house, where he thinks that she lives, ostensibly because her family is uncomfortable with communists, but really so that he will not discover Leo:
“But he was smiling again: ‘Why don’t you want me to think of you? Remember last time you were here, you told me about that book you read with a hero called Andrei and you said you thought of me? I’ve been repeating it to myself ever since, and I bought the book. I know it isn’t much, Kira, but…well…you don’t say them often, things like that.’
She leaned back, her hands crossed behind her head, mocking and irresistible: ‘Oh, I think of you so seldom I’ve forgotten your last name. Hope I read it in a book. Why, I’ve even forgotten that scar, right there, over your eye.’ Her finger was following the line of the scar, sliding down his forehead, erasing his frown; she was laughing, ignoring the plea she had understood.”
Later in the same scene, Kira explains that she has come to see Andrei early because she cannot see him that night, as initially promised. Andrei is unhappy about it, thinking he will not get to have sex with her:
“ He was whispering, his lips on her breast: ‘Oh, Kira, Kira, I wanted you -here- tonight…’
She leaned back, her face dark, challenging, pitiless, her voice low: ‘I’m here -now.’
‘But…’
‘Why not?’
‘If you don’t…’
‘I do. That’s why I came.’
And as he tried to rise, her arms pulled him down imperiously. She whispered: ‘Don’t bother to undress. I haven’t the time.’” (Pg. 249)
A woman punishing a man with this sort of “passive aggressive behavior”, and/or cruel words that she knows will hurt him is fairly common in life. Women don’t typically use violence to get vengeance. They use manipulation combined with male sexual desire to give a man his comeuppance (real or perceived). For most men, there’s nothing more painful than a woman you’re in love with not responding to your love, or spurning your signs of affection with cruel words or actions. This behavior also shows up in a later novel of Ayn Rand’s very prominently. In “The Fountainhead”, the character of Dominique Francon pretty much makes a career out of using her beauty and the power of her sexuality to make men miserable, namely Peter Keeting and Gail Wynand, although they’ve both done things that merit disapproval. https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/fountainhead/character/dominique-francon/
Andrei and Kira’s sexual relationship is one of the few times I can think of that Rand shows sex from a male perspective. There are only two times that I can think of where she “gets in inside the head” of a male character, concerning sex. One time is Reardon in “Atlas Shrugged”. Reardon thinks about how he wanted to have sex with Dagny Taggart the first time he saw her on the train tracks. I think there were also some other times he thinks about sex with Dagny, but I cannot find the relevant passages now. (Something about how he felt when he would leave her body after an orgasm.) Andrei’s perspective on sex with Kira is also presented:
“He could forgive her the words, for he had forgotten them, when he saw her exhausted, breathing jerkily, her eyes closed, her head limp in the curve of his arm. He was grateful to her for the pleasure he had given her.” (Pg. 249)
In response to a papal declaration, “Humanae Vitae”, Rand delivered a speech called “Of Living Death”. The Pope’s encyclical concerned sex and procreation, and how good Catholics should view sex. During the course of the written version of her speech, Rand responded to a portion of the Pope’s encyclical that if a man viewed a woman as a mere instrument of his selfish enjoyment, instead of as a means for reproduction, then he would no longer love and respect her. In response to this, Rand said:
“I cannot conceive of a rational woman who does not want to be precisely an instrument of her husband’s selfish enjoyment. I cannot conceive of what would have to be the mental state of a woman who could desire or accept the position of having a husband who does not derive any selfish enjoyment from sleeping with her. I cannot conceive of anyone, male or female, capable of believing that sexual enjoyment would destroy a husband’s love and respect for his wife -but regarding her as a brood mare and himself as a stud, would cause him to love and respect her.” (“Of Living Death”, Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason: Essays In Objectivist Thought)
I was curious about how Ayn Rand viewed the male perspective on this. As a woman, it was going to be easier for Rand to present a female perspective, which is why I assume she usually did present sex from the female character’s viewpoint. Did she think that a rational man would want to be an instrument of his wife’s selfish enjoyment? Based on what is presented here about Andrei’s perspective on sex with Kira, specifically, his feeling grateful that he had given Kira pleasure, I think this must be what she thought was the rational male perspective. (This would make sense given her views on the “trader principle” of justice.)
The relationship between Kira and Leo and Kira and Andrei proved to be both entertaining, and enlightening. I recommend that you read the novel yourself, if you haven’t already.