Vera’s younger sister Nina Guzarchik was the leader of a group of intellectual young people who called themselves “Uno Momento” and sometimes gathered for parties in the Guzarchik apartment. At one of these Rand met a handsome, brooding boy with whom she fell in love, the third great event of these years. His name was Lev Bekkerman, and not only did he resemble a fictional character (Cyrus), he would also become one (Leo Kovalensky, Kira’s dissolute lover in We the Living). An engineering student at St. Petersburg Technical Institute, he was four years older than she was, and, unlike the fictional character Leo, he was Jewish. “The first time I saw him, I remember being very startled by how good-looking he was,” she recalled when she was fifty-five. “It was his looks that I liked enormously.” He had a sharp, intelligent, purposeful-appearing face, a graceful, slender body, a thick shock of hair, and light gray eyes. As with Cyrus, Hugo’s Enjolras, and Prime Minister Kerensky, “the quality I liked about him most was arrogance,” she later said. He was “like some fantastic aristocrat” in his consciousness of his attractiveness to women, his desirability, and his sense of his own worth. She learned that he shared her political views; he had once hidden in his apartment students who were being hunted by the Soviet police, or GPU, an act of bravery that she would later confer on Kira’s cousin Irina Dunaeva in We the Living.
On some of their few dates, they bought cheap seats at operettas in the silver-and-peach grandeur of the Mikhailovsky Theatre, probably including Rand’s lifelong favorite, Emmerich Kálmán’s Die Bajadere (1921). As the two sat “solemn, erect,” the Viennese music seemed to laugh and the settings bring to life a 1920s European bar and the spirit of contemporary German cabaret, as Rand noted in We the Living. Lev Bekkerman was Rand’s first flesh-and-blood infatuation, and she fell “madly and desperately” in love with him.
The love affair didn’t end happily. Rand was open, possibly too open, about her feelings. She pursued him, and he didn’t like it. “I knew he didn’t like it,” she would later say. He continued to see other girls, and after a few weeks, he stopped asking her out. When they met, usually because the resourceful Rand had found out where to find him on a particular evening, he pointedly ignored her. Still, until she left the country in 1926, she continued to see him at occasional social gatherings. In 1924, he contracted tuberculosis and traveled to the Crimea to be treated in a state-run sanatorium, much as We the Living’s Leo would do. In 1933, by which time Rand had established herself as a Hollywood screenwriter and was married, she learned from her cousin Nina that Lev, too, had married, divorced, and married again, each time to an unappealing, frowsy, ordinary woman. She was shocked by this, she said in 1960. “The whole issue [of Lev] … is still an unfinished story in my mind. My only explanation [for his choice of partners] … would be what I wrote about Leo in We the Living, that it was deliberate self-destruction, deliberately consigning himself to mediocrity, because [whatever] higher values [he possessed] were not possible there,” amid Russian Communist repression. In May 1937, during the height of the Stalinist Terror, Lev was put to death under a Soviet statute that mandated the execution of black marketers and perpetrators of terrorist acts against the state; he had been accused of plotting to blow up tanks in the Leningrad factory where he worked. She never learned of his death, but it’s not hard to imagine the fictional Leo Kovalensky ending his life in much the same way, had Rand’s heroine Kira only survived to witness it.
In a haunting irony, Rand herself might have been present for Lev’s death if, in 1922 or 1923, he had reciprocated her feelings for him; much later she said that she would almost certainly have remained in Russia had her first love loved her, too. “I would have stayed … and I would have died there,” she told a friend.
Exactly how this early romantic disappointment affected her life and work is hard to gauge. By the time she spoke about it with someone who recorded her remarks, she had been married for thirty years and was engaged with a much younger man in a long-term love affair. But in a letter from 1927, her mother reminded her that during those years she had spent hours in her bedroom, “yelling in despair.” In a chronological list of music she loved, her favorite piece for the year 1924 was “Simple Aveu,” by French composer Francis Thomé, the only melancholy music on the list. Lev’s rejection may help to explain why, after We the Living’s Kira, Rand’s heroines would tend to be romantically and sexually submissive hero-worshipers, while Rand herself remained aggressive in pursuit of anything she wanted, including men.
Just as she loved military marches and light Italian opera, Rand developed a passion for the elaborately staged Viennese and German operettas that, for a brief period, the Bolshevik government made available and affordable in state-run musical theaters such as the Mikhailovsky. She waited in line for hours each Saturday morning to buy cheap tickets for the back row of the fourth and highest balcony. During her first two years at the university, “I was there every Saturday,” she recalled. But soon an even more alluring opportunity arrived: to see the masterful, thrillingly melodramatic new silent films directed by D. W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Cecil B. DeMille. She and her family had been attending Russian-made movies since 1913. As a nine-or ten-year-old, she had even composed two childish film scenarios, one of them about a woman who has to choose between her husband in prison and her child; in a decision that reverberates eerily down the years, precocious young Rand’s heroine chooses the husband. (The child lived anyway, she said, so there was “a happy ending.”)
Starting in 1923, however, during the NEP period, sophisticated American and European films began making an appearance in small, inexpensive, privately run theaters on the outskirts of the city. She took full advantage of them, seeing more than one hundred movies, some three or more times, in the years before she emigrated. “It was almost as if I had a private avenue of seeing the world outside,” she later said. She loved the tangled plots, glamorously costumed stars, and exotic settings of movies like Intolerance, Lucrezia Borgia, and The Isle of Lost Ships. Her favorite film was Joe May’s 1921 melodrama The Indian Tomb, starring Conrad Veidt as Prince Ayan, a nefarious Bengali maharaja who bribes a yogi to capture and kill his wife’s lover, a British army officer played by Paul Richter. A British architect (Olaf FØnss) and his wife (Mia May) track Prince Ayan and foil his murderous scheme. The film ends with an elaborate, triumphant chase scene in the Bengal mountains. If this sounds suspiciously like the story line from Maurice Champagne’s The Mysterious Valley, Rand never noted the resemblance and perhaps was never conscious of it.
Veidt, a German Jew, became her favorite movie actor until she encountered Gary Cooper in the late 1920s. Veidt was a screen idol in Russia, and Rand’s infatuation with him brought out a trait that was present from early childhood: intellectual possessiveness. When people she didn’t know or like spoke admiringly of Veidt, she felt anger, she recalled. She had chosen him; other people weren’t worthy of him. Not for her was “a heart like a pavement, trampled by many feet.”