MARINA DEL REY, CA -- A young individualist writer trapped in Soviet Russia survives spiritually by watching Hollywood movies and dreaming of freedom. She records her admiration for such movies and their stars in two booklets, which are then lost to the world for nearly 70 years.
     The young writer, Alisa Rosenbaum, soon would flee Russia and become Ayn Rand, best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
     Now available for the first time in English are these Russian writings, "Pola Negri" and "Hollywood: American City of Movies," which are published in Russian Writings on Hollywood, released today.
     Ayn Rand's tribute to her favorite actress, Pola Negri, was published in the Soviet Union without her byline in 1925. The piece was found in Miss Rand's estate papers in 1995. The second booklet, which was pirated by a Soviet publisher in 1926, is the 20-year-old Ayn Rand's reverential description of early Hollywood. The essay was discovered in the St. Petersburg Public Library in 1994.
     Along with these two essays, Russian Writings on Hollywood contains Miss Rand's "movie diary," a detailed log of the films she watched while in Russia, and a list ranking her favorite actors of the time. Later in Hollywood, Miss Rand became acquainted with some of these actors, including Gary Cooper, who starred in the Hollywood movie version of The Fountainhead, and Gloria Swanson.
     Miss Rand's books continue to sell more than 500,000 copies per year. In the recently completed Modern Library/Random House poll, readers named Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead the two best novels of the 20th century. A 1991 joint survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club declared Atlas Shrugged second only to the Bible as the most influential book in Americans' lives.