Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  Columns II and III of the actual student records do not provide any detailed information for the “number of hours” of student attendance in “lectures” or “practical studies.” In fact, the only writing in those columns is a few check marks, which indicate at the very least that Rand had attended the requisite number of lectures and/or fulfilled the requisite number of hours in “practical study.”

  Of course, Britting’s implicit corroboration of my point—that “professors lectured mainly from their own published writings” and that Rand spent time “studying these texts”—only reinforces my thesis that she was, in fact, schooled in the dialectical methods endemic to the published works and spoken lectures of her Russian teachers.

  I suspect that Britting is less interested in establishing these kinds of influences; his book, Ayn Rand, suggests that Rand was sui generis. He stresses that Rand “had studied philosophy, but—with the exception of Aristotle—found it unhelpful in defining her values. The philosophy she sought was not in the university, but was a growing body of knowledge within her—a philosophy of which the first written glimmers had begun to appear in her diary seven years earlier” (Britting 2004, 24). There is nothing here that contradicts my historical thesis in Russian Radical. The influence that I posit is methodological, not substantive. In her courses and in their accompanying textbooks, Rand would have been intellectually primed with the methodological idea that issues and problems must be grasped in the wider context of relationships within the system they constitute—and across the dimensions of time (inclusive of their past, present, and potential future implications). This attention to the “art of context-keeping” is key to a dialectical methodological orientation, key to the Silver Age into which Rand was born, key to the works and lectures of virtually all of Rand’s identifiable professors, and key to Rand’s own philosophical approach.

  Column IV of the Rosenbaum student records lists the “grade received” for the test (or final examination). In this regard, I should note, once again, that there is still no documentation in the dossier to confirm Rand’s statement that she graduated with “highest honors” (see Branden 1986, 54; cf. Britting 2004, 24). As I indicated in my “Rand Transcript” article, academic performance was usually assessed as “pass or fail, with a ‘retake’ option for those students who received failing grades” (363–64, in this edition). The student records show grades of “satisfactory” or “very satisfactory” or “studied” or “received credit for” or “fulfilled the requirements of” the courses in question. It is quite possible that “very satisfactory” might be interpreted as “honors,” but it is not the equivalent of graduating with the “highest honors.” This remains unconfirmed.

  Column V provides spaces for the signatures of official signatories. In my 1999 study, I had indicated that officials at the Ayn Rand Institute, who had first discovered Rand’s student records, noted that the signatures on the transcript were illegible.5 University archivists confirmed this, but the newest group of documents that I and others have examined reveal a few details that were not previously disclosed. However, I can confirm once again that the signature of Rand’s philosophy professor, Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky, is not to be found. As I argued in “The Rand Transcript”:

  [T]he signatures next to each listed course were not necessarily or ordinarily those of the teacher. In most, if not all, cases, the signatures were of the rector, or the vice-rector, or the dean of the social sciences, or the department chair. (During the period in question, the school moved to unite the social sciences and the humanities. Prior to 1922, the Rector was V. M. Shimkevich, while the dean of the Social Sciences was N. S. Derzhavin. There were many other officials who would have acted as official signatories on the document.) Given this fact, even legible signatures, analyzed by handwriting experts, would not necessarily yield more information on the specific teacher of each course. (364, in this edition)

  At the time, I stated that “a more detailed examination of the university archives might reveal additional information both about the courses offered and the professors who taught them,” and that such an “investigation awaits the attention of future scholars” (364, in this edition).

  Now in possession of this material, I can corroborate, indeed, that the bulk of these signatures are illegible, and that the signatures “were not necessarily or ordinarily those of the teacher.” Research assistants in St. Petersburg examined several additional publications that list university professors and did an even more thorough comparison of the surnames listed in these publications with the signatures that could be deciphered in the Rosenbaum dossier. But the very poor legibility of these signatures, the presence of abbreviated signatures, mere initials, or scribbled flourishes makes it impossible to come to any definitive conclusions about the signatories.

  In addition to the kinds of official signatories I have mentioned above, those signatories listed are more typically deans, “examiners” (rather than lecturers, teachers, or professors), or other educational associates who had the authority to sign in an official capacity.

  Given Lossky’s banishment to the university annex (the Institute for Scientific Research), he could not have provided a signature in such an official capacity. It appears that the “official signatory” for the Lossky course (Course #7) on the “History of Worldviews (Ancient Period)” was most likely Ivan Abramovich Borichevsky. In previous studies, I have described Borichevsky as one of those amateur Marxist professors who supplanted such purged “old world” non-Marxist scholars as Lossky (“Rand Transcript,” (365, in this edition). Borichevsky would have been fully acceptable to university officials as an appropriate signatory. How ironic, in fact, that a newly appointed hack Bolshevik professor, whose “embarrassing mistakes … were the subject of the students’ ridicule” (82, in this edition), would be the signatory for the great Lossky’s course. In retrospect, it is an ultimate insult, an ugly vestige of the Bolshevik era, which is now forever etched into the written record.6

  In this connection, there is another problem with the Rosenbaum file: poor dating, at least for the first seven courses listed. Column VI shows dates in the traditional day-month-year format (usually rendered as number-Roman numeral-4-digit year). Such dates were usually certified after the fact—in some instances, much later. The Borichevsky signature, for example, is dated as 23 II 1923 (23 February 1923), but my former examination of the early placement of this course in Rand’s transcript (#7, as indicated in “Rand Transcript,” 366, in this edition) locates it in the Spring 1922 semester. The inaccurate dating of the first seven courses is implicitly acknowledged by an illegible signatory who certifies the credit earned for the earlier courses in question on 3 March 1923. The certification of the copy is etched vertically in the otherwise blank Column VII, stretching across the earlier entries, with three lines written horizontally below that vertical writing, within the column—“Check by Chief of the chancellery”—followed by the signature. Since Course #7 is included in this certification, I believe it supports my previous analysis of the transcript.

  It is possible that some of the examiners listed throughout the transcript were also among Rand’s lecturers. A poorly legible signature for Rand’s course in “Logic,” for example, might be the last name of Ivan Ivanovich Lapshin prior to his arrest and exile (with Lossky) in August 1922; Lapshin, however, was in a precarious situation with Soviet authorities. (In Sciabarra 1999c [“Rand Transcript,” 365, in this edition], I had suggested that he might have taught Course #3.) But a competing record card for those first courses, which is in even poorer condition, lists the name of V. Serebrennikov in place of Lapshin (perhaps yet another “cleansing” of the record). The “bureaucratic mess that was Leningrad State University in the 1921–24 period,” as the researchers describe it, might be partially to blame for these various confusions. But, as we have seen, the need to pass a Bolshevik “political correctness” test in order to be an official signatory introduces additional problems for the authenticity
of the record.

  In any event, other examiners, deans, or official signatories are semilegible, and possibly include such names as Magaziner, Radlov, Kutishchev, Zelenko (whom I mentioned as Rand’s possible teacher of Courses #19 and #21), and Grevs (whom I also mentioned in Sciabarra 1999c as among Rand’s probable history professors), as well as A. Larond for French. Other names are even less legible, but we can guess: the name Solntsev appears, but is crossed out, replaced with a surname that appears to be Kulisher (written above the deleted entry); [M. V.] Serebriakov; N. Botkina-Vraskaia (twice); K. Adrianova (or, perhaps, Adriasova or Abriasova or Abriakova or Adriakova); S. Teplov or S. Ya. Teplov; possibly E. A. Engel; Presniakov;7 an abbreviation that might be Shchip or Tsip or Schep, which might refer to F. I. Shcherbatskoi; an abbreviation of “Iv. K li.,” who might be a member of the Science Academy named I. I. Konrad; Piren or Tren; Mikhailova; A. Tsel, which might be Tsvikida; A. Kuprianov or Kuprianova; V. Ivash (might be Ivashin or Ivashev); Agenov; and N. Gredeskul for Course #2, the “History of the Development of Social Forms” (or “Institutions”).8

  Gredeskul is of some interest. Like other intellectuals and writers of his generation, he expressed a Silver Age fascination with Friedrich Nietzsche. As Mikhail Agursky (1994, 263–64) tells us:

  Nikolai Gredeskul … a professor of social science and former Rector of Kharkov University, was a founder and prominent member of the Cadet Party. He, too, quickly accepted the October Revolution as a Russian national revolution. In his zeal he joined the Bolshevik Party and became a Marxist philosopher. In 1926 he published a book, Russia, Before and Now (Rossia prezhde I teper), in which he confessed his fascination with Nietzsche, claiming that the bourgeoisie abuses Nietzscheanism. Meanwhile, “Superman, if one looks only at his internal meaning … is a man of superior will and superior doubts … in this internal meaning [the image of Superman] is glorious to a proletarian, not at all so to a bourgeois.”

  That’s actually a quoted passage from a Gredeskul essay on dialectics, entitled “Is It the Fate of Natural Science to Be Mechanistic or Should It Become Dialectical?” (“Byt’li estestvoznanin mekhanicheskim ili stat’ dialekticheskim?”). Russian archivists have also documented that Gredeskul’s daughter Ludmila was a student who had attended the Stoiunin gymnasium—the school Rand herself attended as a girl, which was founded by N. O. Lossky’s in-laws, and in which Lossky himself taught.9

  N. O. LOSSKY, REVISITED

  On the issue of Lossky, a few curiosities remain. One is rooted in material from Rand’s notebook for the novel We the Living (which, in draft, she had entitled “Airtight”). As Shoshana Milgram (2012, 4) tells us:

  In the “Airtight Notebook,” Ayn Rand listed among the proposed characters a professor, who was to represent the best of the old world. In part I, chapter 4, she wrote, but crossed out, a description of such a professor:

  “Beauty is the sublime individual experience,” lectured a professor of Esthetics with a graying beard and childishly clear, blue eyes to a crowd of sheepskin coats and leather jackets, who blew on their frozen hands in an auditorium that had not been heated.

  Milgram continues: “The professor, who explicitly connects beauty with individualism, is distinguished (‘graying beard’) and youthfully innocent (‘childishly clear, blue eyes’).”10 In her “second attempt to describe the aesthetics professor, in the first draft of chapter 6 of part I,” Rand writes:

  Professor Leskov had the blue eyes of a child, the blond beard of a Greek statue, the sunken chest of a consumptive and the chair of the History of Esthetics at the State University of Petrograd. His lectures were held in the largest auditorium, but he still had to turn his eyes, occasionally, down to the floor, in order not to miss any of his audience: for part of that audience had to sit on the floor in the aisles. No auditorium had ever been large enough for Professor Leskov’s lectures. There were few red bandannas in his audience, and few leather jackets. Professor Leskov had never been known to explain the Venus de Milo by the state of the economic means of production in ancient Greece. He was known to speak Latin better than Russian, to talk of each masterpiece of art since the beginning of history tenderly and intimately, as if children of his mind, and to shrug in surprise when his learned colleagues in the Scientific Academies of Europe called him great. He spoke his lectures fiercely and solemnly, as if he were delivering a sermon, and the silence of his auditorium was that of a cathedral. (5)

  Milgram explains that in the early drafts of the novel, Kira finds “spiritual support” in the Leskov character (6), an intellectual of the pre-Bolshevik era, whose classes were “extraordinarily popular,” except for those communist students who “would have to go elsewhere” for their dose of Marxist aesthetics (5). But once “Rand changed Kira’s major subject from history to engineering,” the Leskov character was less relevant. For a variety of reasons, Milgram argues, the introduction of this character “would have been to start a trail the novel was not designed to travel” (6).

  Milgram’s points are intriguing. Over the past year, in communication with N. O. Lossky’s grandchildren Alexis and Marie (son and daughter of the late historian Andrew Lossky) and Nicolas (son of the late theologian Vladimir Lossky), I have ascertained that the great professor had blue eyes. In fact, Marie Lossky observes that even in an “oil-paint portrait of [her] grandfather,” which she owns, N. O. Lossky is depicted with “medium brown/auburn hair, graying beard, and piercing blue eyes” (personal correspondence, 16 June 2005).11

  Moreover, as my previous studies suggest, Lossky had been under severe stress from Soviet authorities due to his own fervent anticommunism; he had also been very sick with a gallstone illness, and suffered from jaundice for a period of time. Having just emerged from that lengthy illness around the time that he had most likely taught Rand in Course # 7, he had indeed lost weight—which may have given him the appearance of having a “consumptive chest.”

  A 1922 black-and-white photograph of Lossky (see fig. 13), recently recovered from the file the GPU kept on him while he was under investigation for anti-Soviet activity, provides further evidence of his blue eyes, auburn hair, and graying beard. (This photo would have been taken a few months after he taught Course #7.)

  It should be noted too that many former students of Lossky have attested to both his fierceness and solemnity—which were on display in lectures that typically concluded with his own passionately stated perspective on the issues. Indeed, his voiced “contempt for dogmatic, simplistic, Marxist-Leninists” is partially what got him into trouble with the State Scientific Council, chaired by M. N. Pokrovsky, who was the best-known Marxist historian of the 1920s and the Deputy Commissar (the #2 position) of Narkompros, the “Commissariat of Enlightenment,” which formulated principles of educational policy (69, 80–81, in this edition).

  In the light of Rand’s descriptions of “Professor Leskov” from her early drafts of We the Living, this information on Lossky’s physical appearance is important. As Scott McConnell (2012, 45) emphasizes, We the Living was Rand’s most autobiographical novel, and “some of the characters … were inspired by or modeled on actual people and names in Russia.”12 With a parallel between their physical descriptions and their anticommunism, and with that none-too-subtle-sounding parallel between their names, could Rand have used Lossky as a model for Leskov?

  CONCLUSION

  Back in 1999, I wrote:

  Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical proposed a daring idea—that Rand had absorbed a dialectical orientation from her teachers. Because there was not much archival information available at the time that I authored my book, I was compelled to “combine significant factual evidence with a certain degree of reasonable speculation” (63, in this edition). The recovered transcript provides more persuasive evidence of Rand’s exposure to some of the finest dialectically oriented Russian scholars of the Silver Age. Many of these scholars I had previously identified and discussed in Russian Radical as among Rand’s most probable teachers. We now have a clea
rer picture of the high caliber of Rand’s education; indeed, the quality of her undergraduate coursework was on a par with current doctoral programs in the social sciences—minus the dissertation requirement.

  Most importantly, the transcript strengthens the central historical argument of Russian Radical, a thesis quite apart from the question of whether Rand studied with Lossky, or with any other particular scholar. Ultimately, it is the content and method of her education that matters. Indeed, “[w]hether she was reading her Marxist texts or attending the lectures of her non-Marxist professors, Alissa Rosenbaum was fully exposed to the dialectical methods distinctive to Russian thought and scholarship” (76, in this edition). We now have more credible evidence than ever in support of this contention.…

  While we will never be completely sure just what Rand learned from her studies, we are now in a better position to understand, at the very least, what Rand studied. On the basis of the transcript, I reaffirm my deeply held conviction that Rand was educated in the methods of dialectical inquiry, and that this sensibility informed her entire literary and philosophical corpus. (“Rand Transcript,” 378–80, in this edition)

  In the most recently discovered archival materials, I see nothing that undermines my historical thesis from Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical—ten years after it was first proposed.

  This essay first appeared in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7, no. 1 (2005): 1–17.

  APPENDIX III

  A CHALLENGE TO RUSSIAN RADICAL—AND AYN RAND (2013)

  In the years since the publication of Russian Radical and the two studies included here in the second edition of this book—my essays “The Rand Transcript” and “The Rand Transcript, Revisited”—not a single dissenting commentary appeared on the subject of Rand’s education,1 until a 2012 published essay by Shoshana Milgram, Rand’s newest “authorized” biographer.2