Future Projects:
“The Fountainhead” (2005)

The first novel of world fame of the Russian Jew Alisa Rosenbaum, daughter of a St. Petersburg pharmacist, who immigrates in 1925 form Soviet Russia in order to turn, according to millions of Americans, into the most influential thinker of the past century. Under the pseudonym Ayn Rand Rosenbaum writes 4 novels and 6 collections of essays. Establishes a school of Philosophy – objectivism. Her masterpiece “Atlas Shrugged” (1957) of which 300 000 copies are sold annually in the United States ranks in popularity after the bible. Her books have come out in a printing of 20 million copies and are translated into 16 languages. The printing of “The Fountainhead” alone is over 5 000 000 copies.

The “Fountainhead” (1943), is her most controversial novel. With it she lays the foundations of her unique style: a combination of the philosophical novel with a romantic love intrigue. The “Fountainhead” tells the story of the hopeless battle of an architect, Howard Roark, whose integrity is unshakable as granite, and a hopeless love – the love of a refined and beautiful woman, passionately in love with Roark, but married to his worst enemy. That is why, perhaps, the rough-copy title of the novel had been “Second-Hand Lives”. Rand changes the title to “The Fountainhead” after having written the novel, changing its accent: like the book itself, the title also favors not the villains but the creative protagonist who uses his first-rate intellect turning it into the source of his achievements.

The “Fountainhead” is a novel about architecture, morality and integrity. It describes how fanatically a furious, clinging to the status quo society, can reject the great creator. The novel’s main idea is that the mediocre mass tries to squash the gifted individual, yet the greater the pressure on him, the higher he carries his head. The protagonist, Howard Roark, expelled from Stanton University, is an architect-innovator who struggles against the archaic style of the thirties, it being absurd in the age of the skyscrapers. Rand’s protagonist designs buildings of steel and glass while New York is being built up with hundred-story palaces with antique porticos. Roark rises up against all champions of the status quo
(not only in architecture) while his main enemy is a well-known architectural critic and leftist sociologist, according to whom only the expensive facades with colonnades embody the real American spirit of social justice and antique heroism.

In the character of Roark the author for the first time promotes her idea of the ideal person.
Through her protagonist Ayn Rand sets individualism against collectivism, the personal “I” against the impersonal – not in politics but in the human soul. Thus she puts forth one of the most challenging ideas in art literature – the human ego is the main source of human progress.

Bulgaria definitely needs a book like the “Fountainhead”. At least in order to discover its own protagonist.