Later in the same year, 1914, she encountered a boys’ serial adventure story called The Mysterious Valley in one of the French children’s magazines her mother subscribed to. Written by Maurice Champagne, an author of children’s books, and illustrated by René Giffey, it was set in British-ruled India in 1911—contemporaneous with Rand’s time, but set in an exotic place, so the story’s heart-stopping action may have seemed plausible to her. As the tale opens, a dashing British infantry captain named Cyrus Paltons and four of his fellow officers have been snatched from the field by trained Bengali tigers and carried to a clique of bloodthirsty Hindu shamans in a hidden valley in the Himalayan Mountains of West Bengal—a beautiful valley with noticeable resemblances to the hiding place of the striking businessmen in Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. Cyrus, imprisoned with his peers deep in a cave beneath the valley floor, is brave, purposeful, and, according to Bill Bucko’s translation, “arrogant,” a characteristic that will become a marker for Ayn Rand’s future heroes. He is also handsome. The original pen-and-ink illustrations show him as, in Rand’s words many years later, “my present kind of hero: tall, long-legged, wearing soldier’s leggings but no jacket, just … an open-collared shirt, torn in front, open very low, sleeves rolled at the elbows and hair falling down over one eye.” Gripping the bars of a bamboo cage, he shouts defiant threats at the death-goddess-worshipping Hindus who surround him, while his friends cower in a corner. Meanwhile, a rescue team made up of two junior officers and a supremely rational French archaeologist track Cyrus and the others to the cave. After many brushes with gruesome forms of sacrificial death, Cyrus escapes and leads his friends, rescuers, and a beautiful young British woman (soon to be his wife) safely out of the valley. As they stand looking back from above, fires and a flood consume the valley and erase its bloodthirsty inhabitants from existence.
There are some remarkable things about The Mysterious Valley. Like Rudyard Kipling’s stories of the same period, it is a romance about civilization and its adversaries. But these are specifically death-worshipping adversaries, a theme Rand was to visit again and again. In her mature fiction and essays, death worship, or “whim-worship,” as she sometimes called it, is associated with antirationalism, anti-individualism, fascism, and collectivism of all kinds—most pointedly, in We the Living, with soul-destroying Russian Communism. The tale can also be read as subtly (but, to a Jewish child, compellingly) anti-Christian, since Kali, the death-dealing Hindu deity the shamans worship, demands a grisly and pointless living sacrifice of noble men. That these men, the story’s heroes, are members of the British upper class would have made it all the more enthralling to Rand. All things British were in fashion with Russians at the time, and Rand had additional reasons for admiring England. On vacation near the Crimean Black Sea a year or two before, she had found the perfect model for her lissome future heroines in a tall, fair, slender, tennis-playing older British girl she developed a crush on from afar. She never forgot this girl, whose name was Daisy, or lost her admiration for the girl’s type of long-legged beauty and fair-haired Anglo-Saxon glamour, which she later compared to that of a movie star. In the years before she had yet learned much about America, Britain came to symbolize the heroic virtues of her inner universe. It was her “ideal country” at the time, she later said.
Then, too, the British officers and the French archaeologist in The Mysterious Valley are unusually analytical for characters in a boy’s adventure story. At every impasse—in the face of terrifying perils—they pause to ask themselves and one another what is the most logical way to proceed. Their insistence on examining every alternative before unerringly deciding on the right one slows down the action comically at times. But the result is swashbuckling punctuated by practical puzzles, which the reader solves alongside the captives and their friends. It is unusual, and one can imagine the nine-year-old Rand—the person who would later describe reason as “one’s only source of knowledge” and “one’s only guide to action”—being as much engrossed by the logical conundrums as by the action itself.
But it was the sexually charged character of Cyrus who fixed the story permanently in her mind. She probably spent hundreds of hours poring over the drawings and descriptions of the dashing hero who for her became the equivalent of an adolescent heartthrob. He was her “exclusive love,” she said, from the age of nine until the age of twelve—that is, until the horrors of the October 1917 Revolution put an end to everyone’s daydreams. He provided an aspirational remedy for her sense of isolation. With Cyrus as her secret lover and perfect soul mate, she successfully moved outside the circle of others’ conventional reality. The parties and social successes that preoccupied her mother, sisters, and cousins were no longer a concern of hers, she later said. She had something better, something higher, something that none of them could see or share. In homage, she would name Kira Argounova, the protagonist of We the Living, for Cyrus, “Kira” being the feminine version of “Kirill,” which is the Russian variant of “Cyrus.” As a mature writer, she patterned her most explicitly erotic male characters after Cyrus, including Howard Roark in The Fountainhead and John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. In 1929, working at odd jobs in Hollywood, she married a studio actor who looked almost exactly as Cyrus did in the 1914 illustrations she remembered. As she approached adolescence, started school, and began to write, her feeling for Cyrus was of “unbearable intensity” and practically all-consuming. She worshipped Cyrus—and she also identified with him, just as she did with Catherine the Great. Her tendency to identify with men and male characters would have interesting implications for the adult Rand’s ability to write more persuasively from a male point of view than any female writer since George Eliot.
It appears to be no coincidence then that, like Catherine and Cyrus—and like Rand’s father during the impending revolution and like Jews throughout Russian history—her most famous fictional characters would be ostracized and even hunted down and punished, not for their faults but for their virtues.
In the summer of 1914, when Ayn Rand was nine and still reading The Mysterious Valley, a series of momentous events occurred, for her, for Russia, and for the European continent. As she and her family set out on their very first trip “abroad”—a word that soon would stir an echo of longing in middle-class Russians trapped by the revolution—the Austro-Hungarian emperor-in-waiting, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was about to ride into an assassin’s sights. His politically motivated murder would propel Europe into World War I. His killer was a Serbian nationalist who, maddened by the Austrian empire’s annexation of parts of the Slavic Balkans, ambushed and shot the archduke in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Russia was closely allied with its fellow ethnic Slavs in Serbia, and by the end of July 1914, Germany, Austria’s ally, had declared war on Serbia and Russia. Russia reciprocated. France and England entered the conflict on Russia’s side, and Turkey, Russia’s ancient enemy, eventually joined with Austria and Germany. Europe quickly became impassable, and, before the year was out, would be the scene of slaughter such as the world had never seen.
Of course, the Rosenbaums knew none of this in late May or early June, when they set off. With their governess in tow, they embarked on the kind of six-week idyll that every St. Petersburg family who could afford it took: the European tour. They traveled first to what was then the intellectual capital of Europe, Vienna. There, as it happened, they might have glimpsed some of the giants of the age who were in residence that summer: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arnold Schonberg—and also Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the architects of the coming revolution. Even Archduke Ferdinand was on hand, conducting official business before he headed off to Sarajevo. From Austria the Rosenbaums moved on to Switzerland and Paris. In a resort in the Swiss Alps, Rand found a rare playmate, an intelligent boy whose family was staying in the same hotel. Setting aside her aversion to exercise, she climbed hills with the boy, picked wild berries, and generally discovered a freedom in the outdoors that forty years later she would comme
morate in her descriptions of the happy childhood of Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged. As with everything Rand responded to passionately as a child, she remembered this boy; he later contributed to the character of Dagny’s childhood playmate, the copper scion Francisco d’Anconia. In Paris, Rand and her mother and sisters probably shopped for the season’s fashions, including clothes for Rand’s approaching first school term. Later, she would remember this summer abroad before the war as being what she had always thought existence would be like. This was where real people, intelligent people, lived. The trip confirmed her childish hatred of Russia.
While still on the Continent, the Rosenbaums learned that Russia was at war. They made a dash for London, where, since land travel had now become impossible, they and thousands of other stranded European travelers waited for ships to take them home.
In the few days Rand spent in the city on the Thames, the small, dark Jewish child glimpsed other willowy, fair-haired girls like Daisy, and one day, the story goes, strolling in the West End with her governess, she saw a poster for a theatrical production featuring a chorus of blond girls in plucky English pageboy haircuts. By her account, she went back to her hotel and began to write adventure stories about the girls—her first endeavor at writing. That evening, pencil to paper, she decided to become a writer. Although this memory may be apocryphal, in the service of the adult Rand’s legend, it has the ring of truth. The girls, pictured as bold, modern, beautiful, and vaguely Aryan, were the female counterparts of Cyrus, and his proper consorts. At the time, of course, wanting to be a writer wasn’t unusual for a girl of nine—especially a girl from St. Petersburg, where poets, novelists, and polemicists were celebrated. Whatever the timing, Rand’s decision lasted a lifetime; she very rarely changed her mind about anything important to her.
From the moment she began to regard herself as a future writer, Rand’s life had a purpose. Writing became an idée fixe that would see her through the next tumultuous years in Russia and feed a growing and finally passionate determination to escape and emigrate to America—like Britain, a free society that historically tolerated Jews.
The Rosenbaums sailed on a packed ship through the North Sea, but their fate would have been kinder had no ship been found to take them home. After 1914, the war created unimagined hardships for all Russians, but especially Russian Jews, and its toll in lives and penury led directly to the revolution. Among her family members on both sides, with a very few exceptions, only Rand would ever again leave Russia. By the time she did, she and those closest to her would be battered and starving. “The war marked the end of the world,” she told a friend much later.
By early August the family was safely home. But their home was in an altered city renamed Petrograd. The czar, mistakenly believing that St. Petersburg was a Germanic name, had ordered the official change to an eastward-looking Slavic variation, ending two centuries of proud, and productive, openness to the developing West.
That fall, as the imperial regime was hastily mobilizing its huge but badly prepared army to go to war against the modern, well-trained Germans, Rand entered school. Natasha and Nora stayed at home with the governess, while Rand began a classical course of study at a famous private girls’ gymnasium, or primary school, called Stoiunin. The choice of Stoiunin has all the earmarks of Rand’s mother’s preferences. It was fashionable with the city’s elite families, and its curriculum promised to encourage both intellectual and athletic development in girls. Off and on, for the next three and a half years, Rand profited from it and hated it.
The school was progressive and well run. Founded in 1889 by Madame M. N. Stoiunina, a renowned educational thinker and a friend of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s wife, and by her husband, V. J. Stoiunin, a noted teacher of Russian and a member of the scholars committee of the Ministry of Public Education, it was conceived as an exemplary school for the Stoiunins’ daughters and the daughters of their literary friends. Its purpose was to balance academic, artistic, and hygienic development. The tuition was steep, but money wasn’t enough to secure entry. Applicants had to pass rigorous entrance exams, and so the small student body was alert, well connected, and affluent—typically, better connected and more affluent than Rand’s family. The school had an extraordinary faculty, including, during Rand’s years there, the well-known literary critic V. V. Gippius, who had earlier been the headmaster of the Tenishev boys’ school, where Vladimir Nabokov was a student, and the famous philosophy professor N. O. Lossky, with whom Rand would later take a memorable class at the University of Petrograd. They tended to be prominent liberals who favored a democratic middle way between the czar and the burgeoning revolutionaries. The school was liberal, too, in its admission policies: Thanks to the Stoiunins’ government contacts, it sidestepped official quotas on Jewish students. Almost a third of Rand’s second-year class of thirty-nine girls was Jewish at a time when most Russian secondary schools were legally constrained to limit Jews to no more than 2 to 5 percent of students. By a decree of the academy’s governing council, each year two or three bright girls from very poor families were admitted and allowed to study at the expense of the trustees, though Rand wasn’t among them.
Stoiunin was renowned for an equally high level of teaching in the humanitarian disciplines and in the natural and mathematical sciences, which Rand was good at and liked. She remained a student there from 1914 until 1918, and she received a general education such as few American middle school students today can dream of. She studied French and German, mathematics, natural and physical science, European history, Russian language and literature, drawing and painting, and possibly music, medical hygiene, jurisprudence, gymnastics, and needlework. Russian Orthodox religion classes were mandatory and conducted by a priest; Jewish girls had to attend but didn’t have to participate. Although sitting through lessons in this “revoltingly dark,” “secret, superstitious, and unhealthy” doctrine must have been torture for her—especially in light of the horrific anti-Semitic violence that was then occurring throughout Russia, avidly supported by the church—in middle age she could still amaze her friends by correcting a mistaken recitation of a well-known Russian Orthodox prayer.
In 1958, while discussing the eponymous hero of Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, she wrote, “Any man [who has] a serious central ambition is more of an outsider in his youth than in later years. It is particularly in his youth that he will be misunderstood and resented by others.” A poignant remark, considering how much of an outsider Rand would remain.
By the time she entered Stoiunin, she was proudly and painfully conscious of her difference. She recalled having “a tremendous sense of intellectual power,” a conviction that she “could handle any [idea or task] I wanted to.” In one early experience at school, she remembered taking a field trip to the city’s zoological museum, a dusty repository of stuffed animals, snakes, and birds. The teacher asked the class of girls to choose a bird or an animal about which to write a story. Rand chose a stork perched on a sliver of rooftop with a hint of a chimney poking through and wrote her story about a girl who lived in a house that just happened to have a stork on top, “merely mentioning the stork.” The teacher was tickled, Rand recalled, and gave her a high grade. Later, the teacher confided to Rand that she had created the assignment because she thought the girls were too young to write convincingly about people. But as evidenced by her postcard collection, Rand’s eye was always focused on her fellow man.
In another school assignment, the girls were asked to write a few paragraphs about why being a child is such a joyous thing. Rand didn’t agree that it was joyous and shocked her classmates with “a scathing denunciation” of childhood, she recalled. At the top of the page, she copied quotations out of an encyclopedia from Descartes (“I think, therefore I am”) and Pascal (“I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise”) to make her point, which was that children couldn’t think as clearly as they would be able to once they had grown up and learned more. And what use was it, she asked, to play boring games and
read silly books while waiting? This memory formed the basis for a revealing flashback in her third novel, The Fountainhead (1943); there, a brilliant and exuberant little boy named Johnny Stokes humiliates the book’s archvillain, Ellsworth Toohey, by composing a masterly, rebellious grade-school essay on hating school, while Ellsworth sucks up to the teacher by pretending to love school. Toohey ends up envying and hating Stokes, as perhaps Rand felt that her fellow students envied her.
Rand was known as “the brain” of her class. But she had no friends. There was one girl, however, who struck her as interesting and whom she liked to observe. Self-confident, independent, and intelligent, the girl was a very good student and was also universally popular with the other girls. How did she do it? She didn’t seem to be making an effort to win people over. Rand imagined that she and the girl might become friends and was also curious to know what made the girl different from herself. Were social graces perhaps not a sign of shallowness or mediocrity? One day, she marched up to the girl and asked, awkwardly and bluntly, “Would you tell me what is the most important thing in life to you?” The girl, startled but willing, answered, “My mother.” Rand nodded and walked away. In her view, this was a ridiculous thing to say, and it disqualified the girl from further interest.
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 3