Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (14 page)

In his analysis of the persistence of
fragmentation
, Lossky seems oblivious to institutional or historical explanations. Marx maintained, for instance, that it was the capitalist mode of production that made such fragmentation possible, and inevitable. And it was Lossky’s student, Ayn Rand, who proposed that social fragmentation was a constituent element of a broader systemic irrationality: statism.

The thought of N. O. Lossky was a fusion of complementary
organicist
and internalist tendencies in Russian and Western philosophy. Lossky’s
ideal-realism
exhibited a Russian proclivity to synthesize opposites and resolve antagonisms. He rejected the
dualistic
obsession with dichotomies of rationalism or empiricism, idealism or materialism, knowledge or existence. These alternatives were, for him, partial and incomplete. Like other thinkers in Russian philosophy, however, Lossky achieved the ultimate integration through a mystical Absolute. His system of hierarchical personalism embraced a vision of the world as an organic whole, a unity of
sobornost
’ achieved in God’s Kingdom of Harmony.

Ayn Rand’s philosophical project embodies this same struggle against dualities, the same powerful propensity toward synthesis. But although she appears to have inadvertently accepted her teacher’s formal dialectical insights, she adamantly opposed his mysticism.

3

EDUCATING ALISSA

In 1945, Rand wrote:

When I am questioned about myself, I am tempted to say, paraphrasing Roark [the protagonist of
The Fountainhead
]: “Don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.” It is the content of a person’s brain, not the accidental details of his life, that determines his
character
. My own character is in the pages of
The Fountainhead.
For anyone who wishes to know me, that is essential. The specific events of my private life are of no importance whatever. I have never had any private life in the usual sense of the word. My writing is my life.
¹

In this passage, Rand suggests that she is “tempted” to adopt an “
essence-accident
” distinction in the definition of her own life. The
essential
Rand is the
thinking
Rand. What she has written and what she thinks are what she considers most fundamental to answering the question, “Who is Ayn Rand?” The events and life
experiences
that shaped her thought are “accidental details” and “of no importance whatever” in grasping the significance of her character.

Although I perforce distinguish the
philosophy
from the philosopher, I believe that Rand’s self-portrait here verges on the reification of her intellect as a disembodied abstraction. One cannot focus exclusively on the philosopher’s character or, more important, on the philosopher’s body of work as if either were generated and developed in a vacuum. Rand herself often paid
close attention to context and history in the analysis of philosophical and cultural trends. And yet she paints an oddly flat portrait of her own being. By concentrating on her
ideas
to the exclusion of her developmental psychology, social interactions, and experiences, she achieves a one-sidedness that is in stark contrast to the richness and complexity of her own mode of analysis.

What Rand wished to emphasize was that
ideas mattered.
She never would have completely discounted the influence of social relationships on a person’s thinking. Nor was she apt to create a dichotomy between a person’s thought and emotions. But at times, she did exhibit a problematic tendency to view ideas as the sole means for understanding human behavior or for judging an individual’s moral worth. In her novels, characters often serve as embodiments of ideas; they are one-sided expressions of specific philosophic principles. In her theory of history, this tendency to emphasize the importance of ideas could translate into a crude form of philosophical determinism.

But within the present context, I cannot accept Rand’s self-evaluation. Her ideas cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of their historical context. That context includes some of her most important life experiences. Certainly Rand’s ideas are not knee-jerk, emotional responses to personal trauma. But an assessment of her philosophy and her place in intellectual history cannot be complete without a
contextual
and
developmental
foundation. Rand would be the first to admit that “the content of a person’s brain” derives from experiential, objective reality.
²
One can no more divorce experience from thought than one can separate body and mind. The two are inseparably linked. Emphasizing Rand’s ideas to the exclusion of her life experiences or, alternatively, Rand’s private life to the exclusion of her ideas, leads to a predictably distorted view of her historical significance.

Here I attempt to fill some of the major gaps in our knowledge of Rand’s formative years of development, perhaps to discover an experiential link between Objectivist philosophy and its Russian antecedents. There is not much information available on Rand’s education in Russia. I have been obliged to combine significant factual evidence with a certain degree of reasonable speculation.

THE
EARLY YEARS

In an early biographical essay, Barbara Branden portrays Ayn
Rand
the child exhibiting a desire to integrate facts and values. Echoing the yearning for
synthesis
ever-present in the Russian psyche, the young Alissa Rosenbaum learned to reject “any such inner dichotomy.”
³
Though Branden’s characterization was garnered from her subject’s mature self-reflections, it is
clear that the integration of traditional polarities was the leitmotif of Rand’s lifelong philosophical project. Rand argued that she had always held the same basic philosophic convictions from the time of
childhood
, and that it was only her applications and knowledge which expanded over time.
⁴

But as the young Alissa Rosenbaum, she
learned
to think with a rigorous methodology. She mastered the art of tracing philosophic interconnections. And she achieved these intellectual feats within the context of her growing passion for literary writing.

From her earliest school days in St. Petersburg, Alissa fell in love with arithmetic.
⁵
Her intelligence was manifested initially as she began to master the logic and precision of the
mathematical
sciences. However, she despised the rote learning and drill techniques of her early teachers. She read her textbooks, staying ahead of her lessons, never needing to invest great effort in the comprehension of any discipline.
⁶
In later years, Rand (1979bT) recalled that she would sit in the back row of the class and write short stories when she was bored with the subject matter. Disappointed with the tragic plots of Russian children’s books, Rand was writing screenplays from age eight and adventure novels from age ten.

With the first shots of World War I, Alissa’s universe was transformed dramatically. By 1916, under the mounting pressures of war, Petrograd was disintegrating. Starvation, inflation, labor strikes, crime, and czarist tyranny would bring forth the Russian Revolution. In February–March of 1917, Petrograd workers precipitated mass food riots.
⁷
Czarist troops mutinied rather than fire on their comrades. In retaliation the czar dissolved the Duma. But it was too late. In Petrograd two authorities were vying for political legitimacy: a Duma committee of liberal constitutionalists, and a Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. Under pressure from the Petrograd Soviet, the Duma committee established a provisional government headed by
Prince Lvov
.
Alexander Kerensky
, a moderate social revolutionary, was granted admittance to the government. Within three days,
Czar Nicholas
had abdicated (Palmer and Colton 1971, 781–92).

Alissa was dazzled by this popular revolt against the czar, and she was initially impressed by Kerensky’s republican impulses, but she rarely articulated her political attitudes in front of her family.
Zinovy
, Alissa’s father, a nonobservant Jew, tried to shelter his three daughters from the growing disorder; he strongly discouraged the discussion of politics at home. Only after the Revolution could no longer be ignored did he share his views with his family. It was only then that Alissa realized that her faith in the dignity of the
individual
reflected his own intense belief in the struggle for human
freedom
.
⁸
In her father Alissa had found a spiritual ally.

THE STOIUNIN GYMNASIUM

It was during this time that Alissa began more advanced gymnasium studies. There are no records of exactly where she undertook these studies,
⁹
but the circumstantial evidence suggests that in the academic year 1916–17, and quite possibly in 1915–16 and 1917–18 as well, she was enrolled in the gymnasium of
Maria Nikolaievna Stoiunina
.

According to Nicholas Lossky (12 February 1992C) this famous gymnasium for girls and young ladies was founded by Maria Stoiunina and her husband,
Vladimir Stoiunin
, for the distinctive purpose of furthering their “very much
avant-garde
ideas in the field of
education
for women.” As a secondary or middle school, the
Stoiunin Gymnasium
aimed to prepare female students for university instruction. It accepted girls from ages ten and eleven and brought them through a college preparatory program by age seventeen. Alissa, aged ten, could have entered the Stoiunin Gymnasium as early as the fall semester of 1915–16. One interesting piece of evidence to confirm her presence in this gymnasium emerges from her adult recollections. Barbara Branden, quoting from an interview with
Rand
, writes:

Alice did make one girlfriend, also a classmate, shortly after the February revolution [February 1917]. The girl was a sister of
Vladimir Nabokov
; her father was a cabinet minister in the Kerensky government. “She was very interested in politics, as was I, and this brought us together. It was a friendship based on conscious common interest.” … The two girls discussed their ideas on the revolution—the Nabokov girl defended constitutional monarchy, but Alice believed in a republic, in the rule of law. They exchanged political pamphlets which were sold on the streets of Petrograd but which were forbidden by their parents: they read the pamphlets secretly, and discussed them. The friendship lasted only a short time. The girl’s father, realizing that conditions were getting worse and that it was dangerous to remain, left Russia with his family at the end of the year. Alice never saw her friend again.
¹⁰

Presently in her eighties,
Helene Vladimirovna Sikorski
, sister of
Vladimir Nabokov
, confirms that both she and her sister, Olga, were enrolled in the Stoiunin Gymnasium during the period in question.
¹¹
Olga Vladimirovna
was born in January 1903 and Helene Vladimirovna in March 1906.
¹²
In 1915–16, Olga began studying at the Stoiunin school in the second class (for
children
aged twelve and thirteen). Helene began school the following year. Both of these sisters were in attendance at the Stoiunin Gymnasium in
1916–17. Although Rand was correct to note that the Nabokovs left Petrograd near the end of 1917, she was mistaken in thinking that they left Russia at this time. In fact, the Nabokovs left Petrograd in mid-November 1917, and Russia only in April of 1919.

Helene does not remember Alissa Rosenbaum, but she confirms that her sister Olga was deeply interested in politics at the time, favoring constitutional monarchy because she was influenced by her father’s opinions. Born in 1905, Alissa was a contemporary of both Nabokov sisters. In February of 1917, Olga was fourteen, Alissa was twelve. Though there was a two-year difference between Olga Nabokov and Alissa Rosenbaum, it is still quite possible that the young girls were indeed classmates. In 1921, Alissa entered college when she was sixteen, at least a year ahead of others in her class. This suggests that she was more advanced than other girls her age. At the Stoiunin Gymnasium, the school year lasted from mid-September to late May. Olga and Alissa were probably in the same class for at least three months in the spring semester and two months in the fall 1917 semester.
¹³

In later years, Rand never mentioned the name of the gymnasium in which she was enrolled. But some of her most vivid scholastic memories were of the academic year, 1917–18. She remembered that one teacher influenced her in classical language when she was twelve or thirteen years old. Alissa read
Pushkin
’s
Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse
and wrote a paper on the book’s characters. The teacher gave her a lesson in literary causality, teaching her to judge characters by specific incidents or actions.
¹⁴

Also in these years, Alissa began to formulate a conscious
philosophy
by “thinking in principles.” She questioned every idea she held. She attempted “to name her path, to grasp it, to conceptualize it, and, most important, to put it under her conscious control” (B. Branden 1986, 22). Alissa began to keep a personal journal and philosophical diary as she entered a period of self-critical, “wonderfully intense intellectual excitement” (ibid.).

While in school, Alissa studied the works of
Turgenev
,
Chekhov
, Tolstoy, and many of the classic Russian poets. She did not care much for Russian
literature
. Alissa’s mother,
Anna Rosenbaum
, who was a language teacher in several Petrograd high schools,
¹⁵
introduced her daughter to the works of the great French Romantic,
Victor Hugo
. Hugo’s heroic visions profoundly inspired Alissa. She credited Hugo as being the single greatest literary influence on her work (B. Branden 1986, 24).