Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (19 page)
As a graduating senior, Alissa Rosenbaum escaped the student purge. On 15 July 1924, she received her diploma, having successfully completed the University of Leningrad’s requirements for a social science degree.
68
But she was deeply scarred by the reign of terror the Communists had inflicted on students and professors, on family and friends.
COMING TO AMERICA
In the days following her graduation from Leningrad University, Alissa Rosenbaum, with a degree from the department of social pedagogy, was more than qualified to lecture in history. Her family was starving, and her mother
Anna
, who was working as a language teacher in several Leningrad high schools, managed to get Alissa a job. She worked as a tour guide and lecturer at the
Peter and Paul Fortress
. Instructing tourists on the horrors of czarist Russia and on the fortress’s history, Alissa spoke “to excursion groups—to silent rows of peasants and workers.” She hated her job, but she was thankful that it helped pay for food and clothing.
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Yearning to leave Russia and join her American relatives in Chicago, Alissa began the difficult process of trying to secure a passport. Her mother made several inquiries regarding the rules and regulations governing foreign travel. Letters were exchanged, couched in euphemisms intended to avoid arousing suspicion. The mail was interminably slow. Alissa would be allowed to leave Russia only on the condition that she return. A letter was required from her relatives, confirming that she was only visiting, and that they would be responsible for her financial welfare. After months of waiting, Alissa received her Russian passport in the fall of 1925. She traveled
to Latvia, only to risk the denial of her visa by the U.S. consulate. After she swore that she intended to return to Russia to marry, the consulate gave her permission to enter the United States. She traveled to Berlin and Paris, where she boarded a French steamer bound for New York. In mid-February 1926, she arrived.
70
She was twenty-one.
Alissa had left Russia because she believed that the rule of force was destroying all that was good in human beings.
71
She had an undiluted hatred for the communist system, which stayed with her for the rest of her life. In later years, this anticommunism led her to cooperate with the
House
Un-American Activities Committee as a friendly witness in the “Hearings Regarding Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry.” She had written a well-received
“
Screen Guide for Americans
” (1947), which had described how communist propaganda could be fought; however, Rand’s cooperation with the committee was a source of great personal consternation. As a civil libertarian, she believed that it was improper for a government agency to engage in the ideological exposure of communists. But she had hoped that the HUAC would offer her a public forum in which she could voice her opposition to communist tyranny; in the end, she thought that she had probably made a mistake.
72
And yet, very few passages in Rand’s novels can convey the genuine pain she felt on the day of her testimony, thinking back to her experiences in the Soviet Union. On 20 October 1947, speaking before the HUAC, Rand, now
a successful novelist and screenwriter, criticized the movie,
Song of Russia
, because it painted a false portrait of Soviet life. In an episode immortalized in
Lillian Hellman
’s
Scoundrel Time
, Congressman
John McDowell
ridiculed Rand’s contention that nobody smiled in Russia. Rand explained that Russian life was not prosperous, open, or pleasant. She attested to the food shortages, the fear of state terror, the tyranny of the secret police. She testified:
It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship.… [The Russian people] try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don’t know who or when is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, where there is no law and any rights of any kind.
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But in climbing out of Russia’s ideological quagmire, Rand could not rid herself of every last drop of her past. For even though she rejected the mystic, collectivist, and statist
content
of
Russian philosophy
, she had adopted its
dialectical
methods.
Living in the United States, she began to articulate the organic principles that were necessary for the achievement of a genuinely
human
existence.
Not long after her arrival in America, Alissa Rosenbaum renamed herself Ayn Rand. In her early writings, she engages in a concerted effort to understand and critique polarities she had confronted in the Russia of her youth. She focuses primarily on the
dialectical
unity of
religion
and
statism
. She gropes toward a philosophical
synthesis
that rejects faith and force, but integrates the splits within human existence, between mind and body, fact and value, theory and practice.
NOVELIST AND PHILOSOPHER
Rand was once asked if she was primarily a novelist or a philosopher. In typically dialectical fashion, she responded, “Both” ([1961] 1992T):
In a certain sense, every novelist is a philosopher, because one cannot present a picture of human existence without a philosophical framework; the novelist’s only choice is whether that framework is present in his story explicitly or implicitly, whether he is aware of it or not, whether he holds his philosophical convictions consciously or subconsciously. (
New Intellectual
, vii)
Rand’s
literary
and philosophical goals were
internally related.
She could not pursue her literary project without gradually articulating a philosophical framework. And she could not apply her
philosophy
without
expressing its values concretely in stories, screenplays, dramas, and novels. Thus Rand transcended the dualism between philosophy and art, social thought and entertainment. As she stated in a journal entry dated 4 May 1946, she had no interest in presenting newly discovered knowledge “in its abstract, general form.”
1
She wished to apply her knowledge “in the concrete form of men and events, in the form of a fiction story.” Such a fusion of the abstract and the concrete led Rand to wonder if she represented “a peculiar phenomenon.” Like Nina
Berberova
and other Russian writers, Rand believed, with no show of modesty, that she had achieved “the proper integration of a complete human being” (xiv).
Rand’s goal in writing was “the projection of an
ideal man
.” This literary portrayal was, for her, “an end in itself—to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.”
2
But the “ideal man” was not a pure abstraction. He had to be related to “the conditions which make him possible and which his existence requires.”
3
By defining the values such an ideal man would have and by delineating the social conditions that would make it possible for him to exist and flourish, Rand slowly moved from best-selling novelist to public philosopher. She shifted from the specifically anticommunist political themes of her first novel,
We the Living
, to the broad metaphysical and
epistemological
themes of
Atlas Shrugged
.
She eventually boasted that she was “challenging the cultural tradition of two-and-a-half-thousand years.”
4
Her formal philosophy, “untainted by any Kantian influence,” aimed to reconnect the elements in human existence “which
Kant
had severed.”
5
DIGESTING THE PAST
There is no evidence to suggest that Rand explicitly criticized the works of Russian philosophers. No
journals
from her Russian period are extant, and the journal entries currently available date a full dozen years after her university encounters with Lossky. But in the late 1920s and
early
1930s, Rand drew from her own experiences in Russia to compose a number of short stories and plays. Many of these unpublished stories appear in
The Early Ayn Rand
, among them, “Good Copy,” “Escort,” “The Night King,” “Her Second Career,” and “The Husband I Bought.”
6
This last tale of unrequited love was based on Rand’s first
romantic
experiences in Russia with a man who was probably exiled to Siberia.
7
In 1931–32, she wrote a film treatment and screenplay called “
Red Pawn
,” which dealt specifically with the evil of Soviet
communism
.
Of greater philosophical importance, however, is the secondary theme of this work. For the first time, Rand dealt with “the philosophic identity of Communism and
religion
.”
8
In Rand’s Russia, religion offered the only organized opposition to the Bolsheviks. Religion was viewed as communism’s natural enemy. Whereas communism was atheistic and materialistic, religion celebrated God’s existence and human spiritual redemption.
Rand examined this opposition between two dominant Russian cultural forces and refused to accept their apparent hostility as evidence for their mutual exclusivity. She recognized that something fundamental united the communists and the believers. Tracing their essential similarities became one of Rand’s earliest philosophical preoccupations.
For Rand, communism was a secular substitute for religion. Like the Church before it, communism subjugated the individual to an allegedly higher power. In this respect, religion and communism were
identical.
The main difference between them was their respective agencies of domination. For believers, it was God; for the communists, it was the state.
9
Though Rand had not yet mastered English, she created tantalizing images in “Red Pawn” to dramatize the organic conjunction of religion and communism. Much of the movie action is situated on Strastnoy Island, a “bit of land in the Arctic waters off the Siberian coast.”
10
In the czarist days, a monastery occupied the island. But since the Revolution, the monastery had been converted into a Soviet prison.
11
Rand writes that the island’s library occupied the former chapel of the old monastery. In the library, a sacred mural remained, depicting
Christ’s
walk to Golgotha. But above the mural, the communists had scrawled, in red letters, “Proletarians of the World Unite!” Red flags were sketched into the raised hand of St. Vladimir. A hammer and sickle were superimposed on Moses’ tablets. The fresh paint dripped down the chapel walls.
Tall candles in silver stands at the altar had to be lighted in the daytime. Their little red flames stood immobile, each candle transformed into a chandelier by the myriads of tiny reflections in the gilded halos of carved saints; they burned without motion, without noise, a silent, resigned service in memory of the past—around a picture of Lenin.
12
Others would have seen the superimposed communist symbols as a defilement of a
Christian
sanctuary; Rand saw an organic conjunction of corresponding worldviews. Her mixture of religious and communist images suggests that the two cultural forces had interpenetrated one another, serving similar goals, if not the same master.
W
E THE
L
IVING
Comparable imagery is evident in Rand’s first published novel,
We the Living
.
In a passage ultimately deleted from the original 1936 edition, Rand presents a fairy tale about a mighty Viking who is hated by both the King and the Priest.
13
While the King despises the Viking for his refusal to bow to royal authority, the Priest hates the Viking because he “looked at heaven only when he bent for a drink over a mountain brook, and there, overshadowing the sky, he saw his own picture.”
14
The enraged King promises his royal subjects a material reward for the Viking’s head. Similarly, the Priest assures his parishioners that their sins will be forgiven if they kill the Viking. When the Viking embarks on a quest for the sacred city, however, his anticipated triumph prompts his adversaries to be more conciliatory. The King offers the Viking a royal banner to plant in the sacred city. The Priest offers the Viking a temple banner. But the Viking refuses to take either. For on the mast of his ship “was his own banner, that had never been lowered.” He conquers the sacred city, and toasts, “To a life … which is a reason unto itself.” Rand writes: “A Viking had lived, who had laughed at Kings, who had laughed at Priests, who had laughed at Men, who had held, sacred and inviolable, high over all temples, over all to which men knew how to kneel, his one banner—the sanctity of life” (180).