Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (76 page)

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 clearer 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

In “The Education of Kira Argounova and Leo Kovalensky,” which constitutes
chapter 4
of the expanded second edition of
Robert Mayhew
’s edited collection
Essays on Ayn Rand’s “
We the Living
”
(Mayhew 2012), Milgram (2012) focuses on the education received at
Petrograd State University
by two central characters in Rand’s first novel,
We the Living
.
³
Many of the characters and events depicted in the novel were drawn from Rand’s personal experiences in the early days of Soviet communism; in the foreword to the 1959 edition of
We the Living
, Rand explains that the book “is as near to an
autobiography
as I will ever write” (
We the Living
, xviii).

In many ways, Milgram’s essay constitutes a simple thought experiment. She proposes various hypotheses about Rand’s education as alternatives to those offered by me—and by Rand herself—and thinks through some of the consequences. In my view, the experiment is unsuccessful.

It should be noted that Milgram largely confirms my findings. She points out, for instance, that the list of Rand’s university courses that I provide “correspond[s] to what can be found in the Ayn Rand Special Collections at the Ayn Rand Archives” (2012, 108n23).
⁴
She states,

Chris Matthew Sciabarra has written two articles about the transcripts, the first based on a transcript that supplied only the names of courses, and the second incorporating information from additional transcripts [both of which now appear herein in the second expanded edition of
Russian Radical
—CMS].… He had previously written about Ayn Rand’s
education
in
Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical
… which contained information about [Professor Nicholas Onufrievich] Lossk[y]
⁵
and speculations about his contact with, and impact on, the young Ayn Rand. His articles itemize the courses listed on the transcript;
his articles and book offer information about the curriculum and the faculty, and attempt to explain the discrepancies between the information in Ayn Rand’s anecdote and the facts about Lossk[y]. His work refers to important sources of information about Russian universities (including
Russka filosof
, which provides information about the professors, the courses, and sometimes even the times and locations of classes and of the professors’ office hours) and about … Lossk[y] (including his … memoirs, some of his philosophical writings, and
Bibliographie des oeuvres de Nicolas
Lossky
, established by his sons B. and N. Lossky …). Sciabarra was also in contact with Lossk[y]’s family and with [Helene] Sikorski, the sister of Vladimir Nabokov and of Ayn Rand’s childhood friend, Olga. (108 n. 23)