Ayn Rand and the World She Made

by Anne C. Heller

  “On the shore of empty waves”: These are the opening lines of Alexander Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman,” which takes its name from the Etienne Falconet statue of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg’s Senate Square. In the poem, “he” is the czar Peter (1672-1725), and the empty waves represent the desolate spot on which he chose to build St. Petersburg (St. Petersburg, pp. 3-7).

  a “city of stone”: WTL, pp. 23839.

  “to astonish Russia and the civilized world”: St. Petersburg, p. 9.

  “St. Petersburg was … a vast, almost utopian, project”: Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), p. 10.

  broad squares of St. Petersburg: Bruce W. Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War 19181921 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 34.

  Temperatures stood at twenty or thirty degrees below zero: A Peopie’s Tragedy, p. 307

  Six million Russians: Red Victory, pp. 38–39.

  shortages of food: Red Victory, p. 32.

  railway system had long since broken down: A Peoples Tragedy, pp. 282–83.

  Crime was rampant: St. Petersburg, p. 197.

  Czarist “Black Hundreds”: A Peoples Tragedy, p. 277.

  retreated from the advancing Germans: A History of the Jews, pp. 423–24; Salo W. Baron, The Russian Jew under the Tsars and Soviets (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 188–95. Under pressure from Russia’s war allies and bankers, the czar’s ministers had abolished the Pale of Settlement in August 1915 (Bruce W. Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon:The Russians in War and Revolution [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986], p. 143), but I refer to it here for the sake of convenience.

  welcomed temporary German occupation: A History of the Jews, pp. 423–24; Russian Jew, pp. 188–95.

  as were most Russian Jews: A History of the Jews, p. 452.

  Short for her age: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”

  She assigned herself a new task: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”

  The job of the adolescent: Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet, 1971), p. 28.

  her first close friend: Olga was born on January 5, 1903. She is listed as a member of AR’s 1915–16 Stoiunin class (fond 148, inventory 1, file 420, pp. 1–2 in the Central Historic Archive of St. Petersburg). She also attended the school during the 1916–17 academic year, according to research by Chris Sciabarra (“The Ayn Rand Transcript,” p. 6).

  a cultured heiress: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, quoting I. V. Hessen, p. 33. I am indebted to Boyd’s book and to Vera, by Stacy Schiff, for much of the information about Olga’s family.

  advocacy of political rights for Jews: The adult AR promoted a view of herself in which she was indifferent to her Jewish background. This is unlikely, as I try to show later. Yet it’s doubtful whether she could have befriended a Russian Orthodox girl whose family wasn’t pro-Semitic; Russian anti-Semitism was too pervasive and too deep. Olga’s father, like her grandfather, was an active champion of Russia’s Jews; according to biographer Boyd (Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, p. 27), V. D. Nabokov was “the most outspoken defender of Jewish rights among all Russian gentiles trained in the law.” Olga’s famous brother Vladimir married a Jewish St. Petersburg girl three years older than AR, whom he met in exile in Berlin (Vera, pp. 9–11, 13–14).

  Olga’s father, V. D. Nabokov: Lionel Kochan, ed., The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 17.

  a member of Rand’s class since 1915: Central Historic Archive of St. Petersburg, fond 148.

  looked after by footmen: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, pp. 48–90.

  paid many visits to the family home in 1917: The quoted material is based on Dr. Sciabarra’s personal correspondence with Helene Sikorski in 1996, in which Mme. Sikorski recalled her sister’s “dear” friendship with AR in 1917 (“The Ayn Rand Transcript,” p. 6).

  “vast”: WTL, p. 45.

  “stately granite mansion”: WTL, p. 21.

  “a maid in black”: WTL, p. 45. In AR’s handwritten first draft of WTL, when Kira Argounova pretends to ask a militiaman for directions home, she asks for Morskaia [sic] Street, where the Nabokovs lived; noticing her slip, perhaps, AR crossed out “Morskaia” and wrote in “Mioka,” the street on which the fictional Argounovas have an apartment (Ayn Rand Papers, LOC, Washington, D.C., box 26, folder 4, p. 152/22). In her first draft, she also wrote that the Argounovas left St. Petersburg for the Crimea in the fall of 1917, as Rand believed the Nabokovs did. The Rosenbaums left in 1918 (Ayn Rand Papers, LOC, box 26, folder 1, p. 7).

  frustration with her daughter’s gracelessness: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”

  She and Olga “conversed endlessly”: “The AR Transcript,” p. 6, citing Helene Sikorski’s correspondence.

  Rand wanted a republic: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”

  Rand’s tendency to argue: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”

  International Women’s Day march: Details of events from February 23 to March 3, 1917, are based on A People’s Tragedy, pp. 307–45; Red Victory, pp. 38–39; Passage Through Armageddon, pp. 320–45.

  one hundred thousand hungry, war-weary workers: A People’s Tragedy, p. 308.

  recklessly shouting, “Down with the czar!”: Red Victory, p. 33.

  stood on their apartment balcony: TPOAR, p. 18; and AR, p. 14, based on material in the Ayn Rand Papers. (In AR:SOL, p. 38, Paxton writes, “She saw red flags rise up on the streets. Armed Cossacks appeared and one man descended from a horse. He walked into the crowd, raised his sword, and brought it down.”)

  ceded his right of succession: Nabokov wrote Mikhail’s abdication letter with the help of another lawyer, Baron Boris Nolde (A People’s Tragedy, p. 345; Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, p. 129).

  Russia cheered the fall of the czar: A People’s Tragedy, p. 346. Alexander Blok, the man who AR would later tell friends was her favorite poet, wrote to his mother, “A miracle has happened!” (A Peoples Tragedy, p. 351).

  a period of unparalleled excitement: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”

  “synchronized with history”: Stephen Cox, Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Ayn Rand,” Gale Literary Databases, volume 279, “American Philosophers, 1950–2000,” Philip B. Dematteis and Leemon B. McHenry, eds. (California State University, Northridge: Gale Group, 2003), pp. 255–72.

  “flare up and fume”: Red Victory, p. 43.

  stockpiling cash: AR, p. 16.

  one of the happiest summers of Rand’s childhood: AR, p. 14.

  was reading Ivanhoe: Chronology, Michael S. Berliner, The Letters of Ayn Rand(NewYork: Dutton, 1995), p. xix.

  “need, not achievement, is the source of rights”: “Check Your Premises: Is Atlas Shrugging?” The Objectivist Newsletter, August 1964 (vol. 3, no. 8), p. 29.

  confer equal rights on Jews: Jews in Soviet Russia, p. 5.

  granted basic freedoms: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, p. 126.

  began to ration bread: A People’s Tragedy, p. 358.

  running on a promise to end the war: A People’s Tragedy, pp. 457–58.

  sure his troops could defeat the radicals: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, p. 132, citing V. D. Nabokov.

  Then, to worldwide dismay: A People’s Tragedy, pp. 483–94.

  spent the rest of his life: In 1918, Kerensky fled to Paris and then, in 1940, to the United States. For many years he divided his time between Paris, New York City, and northern California, where he was a fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Though AR lionized him in 1917, she later viewed his performance as prime minister as having been weak and unprincipled (Ayn Rand, “Cashing In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’” in For the New Intellectual [New York: Signet, 1963], p. 25). He would be Russia’s last prime minister for seventy-four years, until the election of Boris Yeltsin in 1991.

  Rand kept a diary: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”

  God was obviously an invention: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”

 
she burned it: In “Ayn Rand’s Life;” AR is quoted as saying that she kept her diary for a year, then burned it. JB quotes AR as recalling that she kept the diary through mid-1921 and burned it as she and her family were returning from the Crimea to St. Petersburg (AR, p. 18).

  People have a right to live for themselves: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”

  “Whoever tells you to exist for the state is, or wants to be, the state”: The Phil Donahue Show, broadcast from Madison Square Garden, May 1979.

  she began making notes for We the Living: She began making notes in 1929 (EOWWTL, p. 3).

  As scholars have noted: A People’s Tragedy, p. 129.

  referred to her own novels as anti-Communist propaganda: Letter to Gerald Loeb, August 4, 1944 (LOAR, p. 157).

  viewed national politics as a morality play: In Politics and the Novel, Irving Howe writes, “In 19th-century Russia, the usual categories of discourse tend to break down. Politics, religion, literature, philosophy—these do not fall into neat departments of the mind. Pressed together by the Tsarist censorship, ideas acquire an extraordinary concentration; the novel, which in the West is generally regarded as a means of portraying human behavior, acquires the tone and manner of prophetic passion. … Where ideas cannot be modulated through practice, they keep their original purity.” Howe quotes Nikolai Chernyshevsky as saying, “Literature in Russia constitutes almost the sum-total of our intellectual life” (Irving Howe, “Dostoevsky: The Politics of Salvation,” Politics and the Novel [New York: Columbia University Press, 1957], p. 51).

  no copies and few accounts of these exist: AR:SOL, p. 38.

  immigrated via Constantinople: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, pp. 133–40.

  Rand never saw any of them again: Author interview with AR’s friend, the author JKT, May 21, 2004. It was in 1962, when JKT was soliciting AR’s advice about whether to interview Vladimir Nabokov for a New York City radio program she hosted, that AR first mentioned her friendship with Olga. Chris Sciabarra unearthed many details of that friendship in 1998 (“The Ayn Rand Transcript,” p. 6).

  consciously initiated the Red Terror: A People’s Tragedy, p. 525. Figes also observes that at the beginning of the Red Terror, Jews were strongly identified with the targeted middle class and that “the words ‘burzhooi’ [Russian for “bourgeois”], ‘speculator,’ ‘German’ and ‘Jew’ were virtually synonymous” (p. 523).

  Rand was in the store: TPOAR, p. 21.

  began to read the novels of Victor Hugo: “I discovered Hugo when I was thirteen, in the stifling, sordid ugliness of Soviet Russia,” she wrote in an introduction to the Lowell Bair translation of Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three (New York: Bantam Books, 1962); her introduction is reprinted in Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet, 1971), p. 160.

  only novelist she ever acknowledged: Ayn Rand, lecture on “The Art of Fiction,” January—June 1958, New York, private notes courtesy of John Allen.

  Anna would read aloud: Ayn Rand, “Victor Hugo Allows a Peek at Grandeur,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1962, p. 12.

  The first one of his novels she read: WIAR, p. 158.

  she retained traces of the plotting techniques: For an excellent discussion of Hugo’s influence on AR, see Shoshana Milgram’s “We the Living and Victor Hugo” in EOWTL, pp. 223–56.

  “greatest novelist in world literature”: Ayn Rand, introduction to Ninety-Three, The Romantic Manifesto, p. 154.

  spent in search of rationed millet, peas, and cooking oil: 100 Voices, NR, p. 14; WTL, p. xv.

  forced to walk all the way from Leningrad: JH, “Conversations with Ayn Rand,” p. 32; details provided in a telephone interview with author, December 13, 2004.

  she told another friend: TPOAR, p. 30.

  robbed by a gang of bandits: EOWTL, p. 61.

  Zinovy managed to safeguard his savings: TPOAR, p. 30.

  “not of Russia nor the horrors”: EOWTL, p. 243; TPOAR, p. 30.

  where a number of Zinovy’s cousins practiced medicine: Issues of the Russian Medical List, 1905–08, 1910, 1916, and The Directory of the St. Petersburg Merchant Administration, 1901, 1906–11, 1915. These cousins included Iosif Wolfovitch Rosenbaum, a pharmacist in Rostov; Feiga Aronovna Rosenbaum, a dentist in Poltava; and Leia Jankelevna Rosenbaum, a dentist in Odessa.

  she believed that Olga and her family had left the country in 1917: BB reports on p. 27 of TPOAR that the Nabokovs left Russia in 1917, presumably based on AR’s belief that this was so.

  found a small, damp, unheated house in which to live: TPOAR, p. 30.

  opened a pharmacy: AR, p. 17.

  looted and shut down: Red Victory, p. 477; A People’s Tragedy, p. 717.

  Rand remembered the terror of the Red Army: Ayn Rand, “The Lessons of Vietnam,” in Leonard Peikoff, ed., The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (New York: New American Library, 1989), pp. 138–39.

  The family lived “on a battlefield”: “Ayn Rand,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, pp. 255–72.

  attended a private girls’ school: From the Crimea Department of the State Archive of the Ukraine, Simferopol, fond 72, inventory 1, file 15, pp. 3–7, and fond 72, inventory 1, file 160, pp. 159, 160, 170.

  free of the Communist curriculum: The Russian Radical, p. 72.

  expected to “be against” Aristotle: BBTBI.

  She also studied political economy: Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “The AR Transcript, Revisited,” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Fall 2005, pp. 4–14, based on research provided by the author.

  introduction to the Declaration of Independence: Robert Mayhew, Ayn Rand and “Song of Russia”: Communism and Anti-Communism in 1940s Hollywood (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2005), p. 72.

  America’s constitutional guarantee: AR, p. 18.

  “I cried my eyes out”: TPOAR, p. 36.

  learned the play by heart: Shoshana Milgram, “Three Inspirations for the Ideal Man,” EOTF, p. 189.

  caused her mother to complain: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”

  This was in the late spring of 1921: AR graduated from secondary school on June 30, 1921 (Petrograd State University Archives, fond 7240, inventory 5, file 3576; personal file of the student A. Z. Rosenbaum.

  loaded everybody into French and British ships: Red Victory, pp. 448–49.

  set sail from the docks at Yevpatoria: Red Victory, pp. 448–49.

  he promised, they would reclaim their business: TPOAR, p. 38.

  mock trials, burnings, and hangings: TPOAR, p. 37.

  one classmate’s father was summarily and publicly shot: TPOAR, p. 37.

  five billion of these rubles: To the Bolsheviks, the disappearance of money was a sign that the social order was nearing full Communism (Steve H. Hanke, Lars Jonung, and Kurt Schuler, Russian Currency and Finance [New York: Routledge, 1993]).

  “first adult novel”: “An Illustrated Life.”

  Rand admired feudalism: “An Illustrated Life.”

  By age thirty: “An Illustrated Life.”

  gifted at teaching: TPOAR, p. 38.

  they had lost their gamble: AR’s grandmother, Rozalia Pavlovna Kaplan, may have died at about this time, since AR’s grandfather Berko Itskovitch Kaplan was the only grandparent listed in official documents as a member of the Rosenbaum household after their return to St. Petersburg. What happened to the Rosenbaum and Kaplan uncles, aunts, and cousins who remained in Brest-Litovsk is unknown, but, as Germany temporarily acquired most of the Russian Pale by virtue of the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, they may have become German citizens and perished in the Holocaust.

  There’s no better description: In 1960–61, AR told BB, “And then we started back for Petrograd, and the way we traveled was exactly described in We the Living…. I mean the conditions and the trains and the bundles” (EOWTL, p. 50).

  The audience for her plays and stories would be immense: Shoshana Milgram, “Ayn Rand as a Public Speaker: A Philosopher Who Lived on Earth,” Objectivist Conference, Boston, July 7, 2006.

  smaller by two
-thirds: Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Commune, ch. 2, and A History of the Russian Civil War, pp. 466, 493–94.

  inhabited by a sign painter: AR, p. 20; EOWTL, p. 49.

  Zinovy obtained a position in a cooperative pharmacy: AR, p. 20.

  “wouldn’t do anything”: EOWTL, p. 57.

  She began to refer to her husband: TPOAR, p. 135.

  traveled the city by tram: It appears that Anna Rosenbaum had to prove to Petrograd State University administrators that she was capable of supporting her daughter before AR could be admitted (the Central Historic Archive of St. Petersburg, fond 7240, inventory 5, file 3576).

  earning much-needed money: EOWTL, p. 76; “AR in Russia.”

  Anna marveled at her daughter’s ability to choose: EOWTL, p. 76.

  “You and I have our love of work in common”: “AR in Russia.”

  Zinovy was placed in charge of keeping house: McConnell, “Recollections of AR I.”

  This division combined the old disciplines: The Russian Radical, pp. 75–76, and “The Ayn Rand Transcript,” pp. 3–19.

  She declared a major in history: Petrograd State University Archives, fond 7240, inventory 5, file 3576; personal file of the student A. Z. Rosenbaum.

  She took ancient, medieval, Western, and Russian history: “The Ayn Rand Transcript,” pp. 10–19.

  She read Hegel and Marx: Nathaniel Branden, Judgment Day (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), p. 88.

  He “gives me the feeling”: Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto, p. 43.

  a decree was issued: “Novelist Tells of Russia in Lavery’s Suit,” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1951, p. 18.

  If a young man, he said: “Ayn Rand as a Public Speaker,” July 7, 2006.

  the freedom to think: FTNI, p. 127.

  she felt real love for him: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”

  disapproved of his wife’s working for the Communists: TPOAR, p. 44.

  Anna was a little “pink”: 100 Voices, NR, p. 11.

  “You must see clearly”: “Ayn Rand in Russia.”

  “She spoke about him with more respect”: author interview with JMB and Dr. Allan Blumenthal, March 23, 2004.

  the crucial role that work and money play: A People’s Tragedy, p. 772.