Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (72 page)

After 1923, the Marxist
Borichevsky
taught the course in logic—but his expertise was limited to Spinoza, Epicurus, and
materialism
. Given that Rand took this course early in her academic career, probably in the
fall of 1921, it seems certain that she studied with Vvedensky.
¹¹
It is of some interest that this was not the only course on logic that Rand ever took. After graduating Leningrad University, she entered a two-year program at the State Institute for Cinematography in Leningrad as a means of honing her writing craft for the screen. Screenwriting was not offered in the first—and only—year of the program in which Rand enrolled. But she did take courses in
art
history
, stage fencing, biodynamics, film makeup, social studies, dance, cinematography, and logic (Rand 1999, 10).

  
  5. French
Language
Rand had been exposed to the French language from a very young age, as her mother had insisted, since this would enable her to read many of the classics of modern literature in their original language, including the works of her beloved Victor Hugo. To take this elective was hardly a surprising choice for the young Rand, who probably sought college credit for a language in which she was already fairly proficient.

  
  6. Historical Materialism
A formal study of historical materialism was recommended for undergraduates. It was this course that probably led the mature Rand to reject “
dialectics
”—since the Soviets virtually
identified
the two concepts. For the Soviet
Marxists
of the period, dialectics
was
historical materialism, a study of the primacy of the economic forces in history and their predominating effects on other aspects of the social totality. The course would have examined the so-called “inexorable laws of historical development,” with an emphasis on the resolution of internal contradictions that would propel the world toward the triumph of communism.

  
  7. History of Worldviews (Ancient Period)
In her interviews with Barbara Branden (1986), Rand claimed that she had taken “an elective course on the history of ancient
philosophy
” with the distinguished
N. O. Lossky
, wherein she studied the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle (42). In
Russian Radical
, I argued that the relationship between Rand and Lossky was “of paramount historical importance because it was probably Lossky who introduced Rand to dialectical methods of analysis” (41). But the book raised some doubts about Rand’s claims. Because of these doubts, some critics dismissed my attempts to link Rand and Lossky, even though this dismissal damned the integrity of Rand’s recollections.

When it first came to my awareness that the Estate of
Ayn Rand
had secured a copy of the transcript, it was the possibility of a full resolution of the
Lossky
puzzle that most interested me. In my failed negotiations to secure a copy of the transcript from the estate, the ARI officials claimed that they could not identify any listed courses on the history of ancient
philosophy. I had hypothesized originally that such a course might be untraceable, since it may have been offered as an elective through the university’s annex, to which Lossky had been relegated in the 1921–22 academic year. But I was convinced that the ARI’s officials simply did not know what to look for in the transcript. When I finally received an official transcript copy from the Central State Archives, my suspicions were vindicated. The presence of this course—on the “History of Worldviews” or
Weltanschauungen
in the “Ancient Period”—constitutes further evidence in support of Rand’s memories of this period.

Moreover, growing evidence since the publication of
Russian Radical
has lent greater credence to my case for a Lossky-Rand relationship. For instance, I had examined, in that book, Rand’s discussion of the 1917–18 academic year, in which she befriended a classmate,
Olga Vladimirovna
, sister of the author
Vladimir Nabokov
. I discovered that the Nabokov sisters, both Olga and Helene, had attended the
Stoiunin Gymnasium
during the period in question. The gymnasium was founded in 1881 by
Maria Nikolaievna Stoiunina
and
Vladimir Stoiunin
, the parents of Lossky’s wife. Lossky actually taught classes in logic and psychology at the school from 1898 to 1922. It is now virtually certain that the young Rand learned of him while she studied at this famous school for young women.

At the time that I wrote my book,
Helene Sikorski
, Olga’s surviving sister, did not recall ever having met Ayn Rand. She later asked my forgiveness: “I am now 90 years old,” she said. It was only after the book was published that she “regret[ted] sincerely” the “delay” in her memory (personal correspondence, 3 January 1996). Before writing to me, she had corresponded directly with Boris Lossky, son of Nicholas Onufrievich. The Nabokov family had known the Losskys quite well, and remained in contact even after their departure from Russia in 1919. Boris explained to me that Helene remembered, quite “unexpectedly,” that Alissa Rosenbaum had, indeed, “returned for many visits” to the Nabokov mansion on Morskaya Street in St. Petersburg. Alissa conversed endlessly with Olga; both girls were “enraptured by the February revolution” of 1917. Helene did not quite grasp all the implications of these political subjects, but she remembered them—finally.

In my book, I give voice to Boris’s own doubts with regard to Rand’s overall recollections. When he ultimately accepted that the young Alissa had been friends with Olga Nabokov, he “wanted to call [my] attention to this fact,” since it was now “clear that the friendship of Rosenbaum and the Nabokov sisters [was] not an invention of Ayn Rand.” These young women had all studied “in the high school of my
grandmother Stoiunin,” Boris concluded unequivocally. And by implication, since Rand’s recollections of the Nabokovs were of an even
earlier
time period than her alleged studies with his father Nicholas, Boris seemed willing to give greater weight to the specific conclusions of my “creative work” on Rand’s college
education
(personal correspondence, 21 November 1995).

Helene wrote to me to reinforce Boris’s conclusions. She apologized again that she “did not recall in time that Ayn Rand was a dear friend of my sister Olga” (personal correspondence, 7 February 1996). She emphasized: “I remember A. Rosenbaum very dimly. It was in 1917 (I was just 11 years old). But both she and my sister were very excited and interested concerning the February
revolution
, which they both approved. But all these meetings ended in October 1917, when our family left St. Petersburg. I must confess that I never knew that this lady became a famous writer” (personal correspondence, 3 January 1996).
¹²

Given the intimate relationship of the Nabokovs and the Losskys, and Rand’s close friendship with Olga, it is, indeed, extremely likely that Rand learned of Lossky while in attendance at the school founded and operated by his in-laws, and in which he himself taught. That knowledge may have contributed to her selection of Lossky’s course in the Spring semester of her freshman year at Petrograd University.

The doubts that I raised concerning Rand’s attendance in this specific course centered on two important facts: that
Lossky
had been removed from “official” university teaching duties prior to his house arrest in August 1922, and his
exile
in November 1922, and that during the 1921–22 academic year, especially in the Fall semester, he was ill with a gallbladder condition. I speculated that
if
Lossky taught any college-level courses in the 1921–22 academic year, it would have had to have been offered in the Spring semester—since Lossky’s health improved dramatically in the winter—and it would have been a course taught from the university annex, the Institute for Scientific Research, to which Lossky was reassigned. Indeed, when
M. N. Pokrovsky
, of
Narkompros
(the
Commissariat of Enlightenment
), had barred Lossky from the premises of the university proper, he did not bar him from teaching university courses from the premises of the annex. The record shows that Pokrovsky sought to remove Lossky from the slate of his regular university duties, since Lossky had been engaging in wholesale attacks on the Bolsheviks and the materialists in each of his courses.
Konecny
(1994) clarifies some of these issues.
¹³
He tells us that Lossky had been quite angry at those boisterous radical students, who, he claimed, “were from another planet” (48). Still, says Konecny, Lossky “argued that
despite the ‘revolutionary fanatics’ who constantly corrected him during lectures, he was able to enrich the minds of many young students with the same material he had used for many years” (81).
¹⁴
Lossky was even able to give adult education lectures at the Petrograd People’s University.
¹⁵
These programs “were established at most universities in order to give the public an opportunity to attend free lectures by professors on a wide variety of topics” (82 n. 74). So, while Lossky may have been in danger of forever “forfeiting” his “right to teach [his] own material,” due to the demands of “the new Soviet curricula,” he continued to lecture with characteristic conviction (92).
¹⁶
Hence, though his Spring 1922 activities may have been “untraceable” in the Lossky family “red-book” of his official pedagogical activities, evidence of these activities exists somewhere in the university’s archives. Even Boris Lossky, who organized the family “red-book,” now believes that it is “perfectly possible” that his father taught this specific course on the history of ancient worldviews (interview, 9 January 1999).
¹⁷

In previous academic years, Lossky had offered courses on Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Leibniz, the theory of judgment, free will, trans-subjectivity, contemporary epistemology, metaphysics, and logic. He also taught introductory philosophy classes, and lectured on materialism, hylozoism, and vitalism.
¹⁸
None of his listed Petrograd courses in the family’s records dealt specifically with Plato, Aristotle, or ancient philosophy—the very subjects that Rand said she studied with him.

Though Lossky had been barred from teaching courses where his anti-materialist, anti-Bolshevik stance would be most obvious, he was not prohibited from teaching survey courses, like the one on ancient worldviews. Rand had probably studied (#3 and #4 above) with Lossky’s closest intellectual colleagues. Her presumed knowledge of the great Lossky from her experiences at the Stoiunin gymnasium made it even more likely that she would have sought him out at the annex on the strength of recommendation and recollection. (As Lossky’s mentor and the department chair, Vvedensky himself was known to recommend his colleague to students in their fulfilment of degree requirements.)

Any doubt that Rand actually studied ancient
philosophy
in college has now been erased. Given that this course on the history of worldviews in the ancient period was sufficiently early in Rand’s academic career to qualify as a Spring 1922 class, and that the Spring semester was the
only
period in which
Lossky
could have taught the class, I am convinced now more than ever of the accuracy of Rand’s
memory
.
¹⁹
That this course appears precisely where Rand said it would appear is further confirmation of the quality of her memory, which always impressed her
biographer, Barbara Branden (1986), for its “range and exactitude” (13). Since we can now confirm Rand’s recollections of the Nabokovs and of this specific course, it is no great stretch of the imagination to acknowledge the validity of her recollections of Lossky himself. The circumstances coalesce in time so distinctly that it is difficult to escape the natural conclusion: Rand knew Lossky and studied with him.

One very interesting clue concerning this case emerges from a perusal of Lossky’s bibliography. Unbeknownst to me at the time of writing
Russian Radical
, Lossky published in 1924, in Prague, only a year and a half after this university course, an article entitled “
Types of Worldviews
.” This article was subsequently expanded to an eight-four-page monograph of the same title, published in Paris in 1931. These titles are the only ones bearing the term “Worldviews” in the entire Lossky corpus. It is significant that they were published so close in time to a 1922 course that dealt with the same topic.
²⁰
In these articles, Lossky examined metaphysics as the central philosophical discipline, and classified metaphysical systems from the ancients to the moderns according to their materialist, spiritualist, and panpsychic premises. He ended with a critique of dualism, proposing an “organic ideal-realist” alternative as a “many-sided philosophical synthesis.” Lossky’s textual surveys of the history of philosophy often ended with his
dialectical
pronouncements, a technique that was typical of his lecturing—which is why he got into such trouble with the authorities. Kline reports that, in his courses in New York in the early 1950s, Lossky would present the systems of Plato or Kant or Hegel, and then, quite habitually, would add, “But
I
affirm that …”—a preface to his own perspective on the issues.

Ultimately, however, my insistence on the Lossky connection remains symbolic, for he was a paragon of all the dialectical tendencies in Russian thought, of the belief that “‘everything is immanent in everything’” (quoted in Scanlan 1998, 833).
²¹
He presented a
system
in his lectures and books, developing interconnections among metaphysics, logic, philosophical psychology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy of religion (834). This dialectical orientation was central to the Russian Silver Age, the period of Rand’s youth—from its neo-Idealists to its Nietzschean Symbolist poets to its Marxists. It was expressed by every major Russian thinker, from
Vladimir Solovyov
, who saw the world in terms of universal interconnections, to
Aleksandr Herzen
, who saw philosophy as an instrument of action.
²²
The Rosenbaum transcript makes clear that even if Rand had never met Lossky, she would have benefitted from a profoundly dialectical
education
. Indeed, this Lossky course was just the tip of the dialectical iceberg.