Ayn Rand in Illustrations
by Yevgeniy Fiks
“Ayn Rand in Illustrations" examines the uncanny resemblance between Ayn Rand’s aesthetics and that of Soviet Socialist Realist Art. For each of these drawings, sections of Rand’s prose (as they appear on
the page in the artist's copy of Atlas Shrugged, including the page number) are combined with images of Soviet Socialist Realist paintings and sculptures, found in art books and magazines.
Author Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, better known in the US as Ayn Rand, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1905. As a teenager, Rand saw the Russian Revolution unfolding from her bedroom window on the city’s largest avenue Nevsky Prospect. Shortly thereafter, her father’s pharmacy was nationalized and her family’s hardships began. According to Rand, she had rejected the Revolution from the outset and spent her teens and early twenties in a self-imposed "internal emigration," finding escape in 19th century romantic literature. Rand left Russia for the United States in 1926, when the aesthetics that became later known as "Socialist Realism" were just in the process of
formation.
The Capitalist utopia of Ayn Rand and Communist utopia of Stalin become symbiotic and interchangeable in this project. The two ideologies rely on the same approach of representation through propaganda, idealization, romanticization, glorification, etc. "Ayn Rand in Illustrations" exposes the mechanics of Rand’s aesthetics and that of Socialist Realism indiscriminately. Through the juxtaposition, Socialist Realism and Ayn Rand effectively cancel each other: while Socialist Realist imagery become possible illustrations for Ayn Rand, Socialist Realist Art appears to be only useful today as illustrations for Ayn Rand's writings.
