This was “the first most important event in my life socially, which made me see that it’s not significant why some people, who seem to be individualistic, get along with the crowd, and I don’t,” she later said. “I had thought she was a serious girl and that she was after serious things, but she was just conventional and ordinary, a mediocrity, and she didn’t mean anything as a person. It was really like a fallen idol.”
Rand wasn’t antisocial; she would have liked to have a friend. But her quick dismissals of people based on what she saw as fatal flaws in character or thinking would form a pattern in her life. In the face of disappointment, she was unable or unwilling to ask herself why a girl she had admired, for example, would give a silly or sentimental answer to a serious question. Could the girl have misunderstood what Rand was after? Could she simply have been startled? Could she have had an interesting reason for what she said? Rand did not ponder the context of the girl’s response, nor did she dig deeper to see what she could learn. People were either exceptional or ordinary, her kind of people or nonentities. Later, she would call herself a hero-worshiper, and it’s no accident that she spoke of this girl as “a fallen idol.” Her romantic tendencies caused her to overestimate some people and underestimate others. She rarely reconsidered. Her readings of people who disappointed her would only harden and darken over time.
Her ambitions were set. By her tenth birthday, she was writing novels at home and in school. At Stoiunin, she sat in the back of the class, a book propped in front of her to disguise what she was doing, and wrote. She finished four novels by the age of eleven, each of which featured a heroine who was exactly her own age. The surface similarities stopped there. Foreshadowing Dagny Taggart and Dominique Francon, these first heroines were tall and long-legged, with bobbed hair and blue eyes. One was named Thunder (“Rpom”). Another, from the same year—1915, the gruesome second year of World War I, when Russian military losses had already exceeded a million men and England was in danger of being invaded by Germany—was an English girl who argued her way into the British Royal Navy and single-handedly machine-gunned down the entire German fleet. Such lone heroism and unflinching use of violence are more familiar in boys’ stories than in girls’, but this was to be Rand’s pattern: to assume the preferences and prerogatives of the men of her time.
Cyrus’s influence can be seen in this story, of course, but so, perhaps, can that of Joan of Arc, whom Rand considered the most heroic woman in history. Why? Because she “stood alone against everyone, even to the point of death,” explained a longtime friend of Rand’s. Whenever necessary, so would Ayn Rand.
The child was aware that these early stories were “just for her;” she didn’t expect to publish anything until she was grown up, she said. But she did expect to publish. So by the age of ten she was pursuing what she already thought of as her future career. As her mother wrote to her many years later, “You [always] planned to be greater than Columbus.”
If Anna hoped that young Rand would make friends among the hand-picked students at Stoiunin, she was for the most part disillusioned. Rand stood on the outside of her peer group, proudly, bitterly, self-consciously alone. She hated the stocky shape of her developing body, which she felt didn’t accord with her essence, but she was proud of her mind. She told herself that she took life and ideas more seriously than the other girls and that her values, especially her all-consuming passion for Cyrus, were superior to theirs. She was “left strictly alone,” she said. In spite of her proud defiance, she was again desperately lonely. She longed to find her kind of people, and, for now, to do so meant she had to make them up in stories. And so emerged the three-dimensional world of Ayn Rand, where idealized characters take the measure of reality and often find it needs correcting.
*After coming to the United States, Rand referred to herself as Alice, the English equivalent of her name Alissa.
TWO
LOOTERS
1917–1925
There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter. … And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth.
—“Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,” 1969
Howard Roark, the flame-haired architect-hero of The Fountainhead, has often been compared to the famously willful American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Both were professional rebels; both were “faithful to the truth, though all the world should stand against” them, to quote Wright. But Roark’s original prototype may well be Peter the Great, the early-eighteenth-century Russian czar who, harnessing his own unbending will and limitless power, built the improbable city of Ayn Rand’s birth.
Some of the best-known lines in Russian poetry, memorized by Russian schoolchildren for the last 150 years, were written by Aleksandr Pushkin and describe Peter at the moment of his decision to raise St. Petersburg on a collection of frigid, barren islands on the Baltic seacoast near Finland: “On the shore of empty waves he stood, filled with great thoughts, and stared out.” Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the opening lines of The Fountainhead read, “Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked on the edge of a cliff. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water.”
In Rand’s first novel, We the Living, she describes St. Petersburg as a “city of stone,” which it is. Like her rock-jawed hero Roark’s sculpted glass and granite buildings, the city Rand grew up in was “not acquainted with nature,” she wrote in the early 1930s. “It is the work of man” and, moreover, “the work of man who knows what he wants.” The adult Rand admired, even lionized, men who knew what they wanted, though few she ever met would understand their objectives as well as she understood hers. And all her life she loved cities that were “not acquainted with nature,” especially New York, her home for her final thirty years.
The willful Peter paved the way for Catherine, his granddaughter by marriage, to embrace and celebrate everything European. What Peter wanted was “a window to the West”: a new capital city that would turn its back on the Mongol and Slavic traditions of central Russia and look toward Europe and its technical achievements. In building St. Petersburg as close as possible to Europe, his aim was “to astonish Russia and the civilized world” and to rival Paris, Amsterdam, and Venice. This he did: In the course of just twenty-five years, beginning in 1703, he created an astonishing eighteenth-century port city entirely of imported granite, marble, slate, and travertine. For Peter, as one historian has observed, “St. Petersburg was … a vast, almost utopian, project of cultural engineering to reconstruct the Russian as a European man.” To this end, he commissioned peasant workers from all over the empire; tens of thousands of them died of starvation, disease, and exposure to the cold. Even today, residents of St. Petersburg speak of their city as having risen on the bones of the dead. As Ayn Rand would demonstrate, though less violently, the utopian strain in the Russian imagination was harsh and rarely found expression without inflicting damage.
Peter’s project failed to Westernize Russia. Although generations of inhabitants of St. Petersburg, including Rand, learned to value Western attitudes and culture, Ukrainians, Turkmen, Mongols, and Russian yeomen and peasants remained uneducated and stubbornly provincial. An intractable tendency lay embedded deep in Russia’s heart: to hold fast to its semi-Asiatic, feudal, Byzantine Christian, anti-Western past. For the most part, Peter’s city remained an island of Western values in a sea of illiteracy, abject poverty, and daunting superstition. This was the Russia that Ayn Rand hated and that the Bolshevik Revolution would appeal to with promises of potatoes, collective power, and revenge.
In February 1917, the month of Rand’s twelfth birthday, statues and symbols of Peter still stood everywhere among the domed churches, granite palaces, and broad squares of St. Petersburg. But the capital’s neoclassical architecture could not mask a society in tatters. This was the third long winter of World War I, and the coldest winte
r on record in many years. Temperatures stood at twenty or thirty degrees below zero Fahrenheit for days at a time. The war was going badly. Six million Russians had been killed, captured, maimed, or wounded. Lacking uniforms, guns, ammunition, and rations, thousands of deserters poured into the city, looking for food and work. Even there, shortages of food and fuel were reaching a crisis point, especially for the lower and working classes, who lived on bread and stood in bread lines for hours, sometimes only to be turned away empty-handed. Because the nation’s railway system had long since broken down under the strain of troop transport, grain lay rotting in the southern provinces. Crime was rampant; curfews were set, but prostitutes, robbers, and murderers prowled Nevsky Prospekt after dark, making it unsafe for the Rosenbaums and other families to venture out.
Meanwhile, in the south and the Pale of Settlement, anti-Semitic bloodshed was on the rise. Czarist “Black Hundreds” groups roamed the countryside, spreading rumors that Yiddish-speaking spies and Jewish profiteering were responsible for war losses and shortages of goods. As the Russian army retreated from the advancing Germans, Russian troops were ordered to round up residents of Jewish villages in the Pale and herd them, under the lash, eastward to the Ukraine or Siberia. Many of these villages, including Brest, where the Rosenbaums’ extended family lived, welcomed temporary German occupation as “salvation.”
But scapegoating of Jews could no longer head off a political showdown. Given the nation’s battlefield losses, Czar Nicholas II, Peter’s great-great-great-great-grandson, was widely viewed as militarily and mentally incompetent, possibly traitorous, even insane. Revolution was in the air; the only question was whether it would be a relatively democratic revolution or one made brutal and tyrannical by the Bolsheviks.
The comfortably middle-class Rosenbaums probably didn’t go cold or hungry in the early months of 1917, though in years to come they would, but privation was all around them. For this reason and others, it was natural that Anna, Zinovy, and their daughters were hoping for a democratic change of government, as were most Russian Jews. For the first time in three hundred years, the reign of the Romanovs was poised to end. St. Petersburg’s European-educated liberal elite—a category that included many of Rand’s teachers as well as the father of a new friend she made that winter—were ready to take the reins of government. For in spite of the terrible hardships of war, the Bolsheviks had gained only a small, if concentrated, following among urban workers and the nation’s land-hungry former serfs and peasants. To the Rosenbaums’ relief and joy, the reform-minded liberal intelligentsia, whom Anna so admired, were leading the call for the czar to share power or step down.
Rand, at twelve, was just entering adolescence. Short for her age and squarely built, she was highly animated when excited and became fidgety, standoffish, and sullen when her family’s conversation turned from ideas and significant events to small talk. She already wore a look of luminous penetration in her large, dark, exquisite eyes. Stimulated by outward events and impatient to grow up, she assigned herself a new task: to examine her own ideas and beliefs just as rigorously as she examined those of others. This is what I think, she remembered saying to herself. Why do I think it? If her answer didn’t measure up—if it was based on what others believed or on a mistake in logic—out went the idea.
Later, after achieving fame as a novelist and a largely self-taught metaphysician, she called such thinking “pre-philosophy.” The job of the adolescent, she explained, is to integrate the likes and dislikes of childhood into a coherent if subconscious “sense of life,” which she defined as an implicit appraisal of the nature of the world. Is the world understandable or incoherent? Do people have the power of choice, or are they servants of destiny? Can a person achieve his goals, or is he helpless against the designs of an all-powerful God or a malevolent universe? Depending on how the child answers, he will become a self-assured creator or a passive social parasite. That Rand answered her questions with such an insistent affirmative, and devoted so many years to proving that lack of credence in the power and efficacy of individual will equals moral cowardice, provides a clue as to just how great she felt were the obstacles to having “what I want” as a child. Russian tradition and her family provided some of the resistance. The politics of the Russian Revolution produced the rest.
Now in her third year at the Stoiunin school, she got one thing she wanted very much: her first close friend, a slightly older girl named Olga Nabokov. Olga, also a student at the school, was one of five children of a wealthy and distinguished family that was known throughout Russia and Europe even before Olga’s older brother, Vladimir, began to publish poems and novels, including, in English, Lolita. Olga’s mother was a cultured heiress. Her grandfather had been the minister of justice under Czar Alexander III, and though a gentile, was asked to resign partly because of his outspoken advocacy of political rights for Jews. Olga’s father, V. D. Nabokov, was a jurist and a statesman, a member of the Russian army’s General Staff, and a founder of the Constitutional Democratic Party, which favored a parliamentary form of government and emancipation of the Jews. In 1917, he had a bird’s-eye view of the unfolding revolutionary drama from his ranking seat on the Duma, St. Petersburg’s on-again, off-again national legislative assembly whose power the czar periodically stripped away and then restored. In February 1917, the Duma was in session.
Olga had been a member of Rand’s class since 1915, but the girls seem to have become well acquainted only in their third tumultuous year. Olga lived with her family in a massive Florentine-style pink-granite mansion on Morskaya Street, not far from the czar’s Winter Palace and about a mile from the Rosenbaums’ store and apartment. To Rand and her mother and sisters, the Nabokovs’ glittering life, seen up close, must have been a revelation. In their mansion and at their estate at nearby Vyra, Olga and her siblings were looked after by footmen, coachmen, chauffeurs, a concierge, cooks, maids, butlers, governesses, and tutors. Many of Russia’s most admired poets and statesmen came and went as family friends. According to Helene Nabokov Sikorski, Olga’s younger sister, Rand paid many visits to the family home in 1917. Rand appears to have been thinking of the Nabokovs when, in We the Living, she gave Kira Argounova, her semiautobiographical heroine, a prerevolutionary home that was a “vast” … “stately granite mansion” … where, at night, “a maid in black fastened the clasps of [Kira’s mother’s] diamond necklaces” in preparation for parties “in sparkling ballrooms.” The fictional Argounovas’ former summer estate, set amid acres of well-tended gardens, near a fashionable resort, recalls the Nabokovs as well.
The unusual friendship between Rand and Olga must have pleased, if somewhat mystified, Anna, whose frustration with her daughter’s gracelessness didn’t diminish as Rand entered her teen years. And the friendship was a boon to Rand. In Olga’s company, the solitary girl probably felt as she did in Switzerland and Paris: This was where real people lived and where existence was exciting. She and Olga “conversed endlessly” about political ideas and events, Helene Sikorski remembered, with Olga bringing political bulletins from the family dinner table and Rand exercising, even then, her gift for ironclad analysis. Olga, echoing her father’s conviction that Russia wasn’t ready for a pure democracy, argued with Rand in favor of a constitutional monarchy, like that of England; Rand wanted a republic, she remembered, in which the head of state would be chosen for merit and there wouldn’t be a king. The future aficionado of the U.S. Constitution hadn’t yet studied American history (that would come in secondary school). But she had gathered impressions of America from family conversations, including the naming of the family cats, and from stories about a branch of Anna’s family that had moved to Chicago in the 1890s. With Olga, Rand’s tendency to argue “violently” and “at the slightest provocation,” which she knew to be socially “not right,” seemed to make no difference. If anything, her passionate opinions enhanced Olga’s and her pleasure in each other.
Though political change was in the air, it came as a shoc
k to almost everyone when, during the final week of February 1917, history galloped past its gatekeepers to a point of no return.
The February 1917, or “liberal,” Russian Revolution began with a shortage of bread. On February 23, several St. Petersburg bakeries ran out of flour and closed their doors. That afternoon a planned International Women’s Day march turned into a bread riot. The next day, male workers left their factories and joined the women in the streets. Before long, one hundred thousand hungry, war-weary workers, students, and soldiers collected at points outside the city and marched down Nevsky Prospekt, recklessly shouting “Down with the czar!” As in 1905, the Rosenbaums heard the insurrection from their windows; Rand later said that she and her sisters stood on their apartment balcony and watched as a line of mounted Cossacks fired warning shots above the crowd. Unlike in 1905, however, the czar didn’t react quickly or decisively. By February 28, his St. Petersburg garrison, haphazardly led and sympathizing with the protesters, turned their guns on their commanders. The next day, thousands of munitions workers armed themselves for combat. That’s when the Duma demanded, and got, the abdication of Czar Nicholas II. On March 3, Nicholas’s younger brother Mikhail ceded his right of succession, quietly signing an abdication letter written by Olga’s father. The Duma immediately installed a liberal Provisional Government, with V. D. Nabokov as its chancellor and Aleksandr Kerensky as its minister of justice, soon to be prime minister. For a brief period, the dashing and rhetorically gifted Kerensky became Ayn Rand’s second hero, after Cyrus.
All Russia cheered the fall of the czar. In the streets, shops, and cafés of St. Petersburg, people spoke jubilantly of coming political freedoms, economic revival, and an end to the war. Much later, Rand would remember this as a period of unparalleled excitement, hope, and happiness, both for her and for the country. It was the only time in her life, she said, when she was “synchronized with history.”
Ayn Rand and the World She Made Page 4