ANTHEMAYN RAND
A R
(February , —March , )
Born in Russia, Ayn Rand is most
known for her arch-American, best-
seling novels T F
() and A S ()
— as wel as for originating the philo-
sophical system of Objectivism.
Set in a totalitarian future, A
() is a poeticaly essentialized story
portraying the unpardonale crime of
the hero: his quest to think and live for
himself. A is a secular hymn
to the crucial role that reason, volition
values and individuality — in short,
an’s o — play in human life.
How exactly does A differ in
form from her other fiction? In contrast
to her three novels’ literary aproach
of “Romantic realism,” she described
A as a “dramatic fantasy” —
and, even more intriuingly, she once
classified it as “a poem.”
But while the whole novela’s text
clearly is in prose and not in meter
(the defining characteristic of poetry) ,
I can easily agree that Anthem should
be rea as a poem: it should be slowly
savored, even read aloud, for its highly
stylized, semi-Bilical lanuage and its
ethereal, non-literal storyteling.
So, in designing my book, I decided
to take this poetic bal and run with it:
I used a number of design devices to
“force” the reader to take the text in more
slowly — and thus make this glorious
story last a little longer.
—K N
A T B
ANTHEM
AYN RAND
Ayn Rand once said that her novela
A, written in the summer of
, was like “the preliminary sketches
which artists draw for their future big
canvases. I wrote nte while working
on e ountainea — it has the same
theme, spirit and intention, although in
quite a diff erent form.”
A freely distribut Able P df eb OOK
www. KlAusn Ordby.c Om
februA ry 2 2013
Versi On 1.1
