Nostalgia as a source of myth-making in Ayn Rand's novel “Atlas shrugged”

The recent social and political situation in the USA has caused a noticeable rise in interest in Ayn Rand, the Russian-born American writer. She has become especially popular among neoconservatives of president Trump’s time due to the problems she raises, like market economy and government controls. But such popularity results also from the techniques Rand uses to render her vision and assessment of these problems, i.e. her ideology. The most evident among them is her masterful, literarily expressive, myth-making. Rand’s kind of myth-making is a manifestation of popular literature; therefore, the current article regards Rand’s major novel Atlas Shrugged as its sample, which due to its nature lets Rand realize her purpose - to bring her ideology home to a considerable number of readers. Atlas Shrugged reflects Rand’s assessment of the state of things in the US on her arrival after being driven out of Soviet Russia by a hatred of communism. Finding the reality different from the cherished vision of the USA from Soviet Russia, she sets out on creating two diametrically opposite myths - a critical one about the current reality under President Roosevelt and a nostalgic-idyllic one about the “Golden Age” of American history, thus constructing a major popular mythologeme of the struggle of good against evil. As methodology for the analysis Retrotopia by Z. Bauman and Mythologies by R. Barthes have been taken. In his work, Z. Bauman presents a new vision of nostalgia - as utopia directed backwards to the past, which turns it into “retrotopia”. R. Barthes discloses the techniques of creating popular myths resulting in “the ideological abuse”. So, the works help to show how Rand creates her myths about the present and the past of the USA by removing certain historical facts from their real-life contexts, and how these deformed images meet the nation’s longing for an idyllic life. It is remarkable that a certain similarity that can be traced between Rand’s nostalgia for an idyllic free-market America and the historical narrative underlying President Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” allows regarding the Rand phenomenon in the context of the present-day political situation in the USA.