Why do I keep reading her? Anthem (read), Fountainhead (read), We the living (an abortive attempt, too boring, Bulgakov said it all much more convinsingly), Atlas shrugged (in progress). I want to understand the ideology of people who led us into the current mess – mastermind of the latest financial crisis Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand’s circle. Plus reading her is like looking at the Snow Queen’s mirror distorting a real beauty and trying to reconstruct the initial image, related to the real one as a portrait by Picasso's relate to Corot's portrait.
Dostoevsky has created a distorted world as well, but ugly Dostoevsky wrote difficult stories about poor - in wealth and in spririt - people, while ugly Rand wrote ugly stories about ugly people.
And the most ironic thing about Rand's books that they are a negative of a socialist realism photo – she sings about the industry and technology as opposed to human feelings reminding me of:
По небу
тучи бегают,
дождями
сумрак сжат,
под старою
телегою
рабочие лежат.
И слышит
шепот гордый
вода
и под
и над?
"Через четыре
года
здесь
будет
город-сад!"