Читать книгу Ayn Rand - Chris Matthew Sciabarra - Страница 15
ОглавлениеIn 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).
All of these significant intellectual events took place in Alissa Rosenbaum’s world of 1917–18, the very period in which she probably can be placed at the Stoiunin Gymnasium, with its rich, college-preparatory program. Alissa’s presence in this school has some importance. Maria Nikolaievna Stoiunina and Vladimir Stoiunin, the founders of the famous gymnasium, were the parents of N. O. Lossky’s wife. As his in-laws, they invited Lossky to teach at the gymnasium. He taught both logic and psychology to select classes of young women from 1898 through 1922. Usually, Lossky gave instructions to the graduating class, those who were at least seventeen, but it is not impossible that Alissa could have learned of the great Lossky while at the Stoiunin Gymnasium. It is not impossible that she could have enrolled in one of his college preparatory courses. It is certainly possible that in her typically disciplined manner, Alissa was charting a future educational direction which would include further study with the distinguished Lossky at Petrograd University.
THE CRIMEAN GYMNASIUM
Unfortunately, however, Alissa was living during a time when goals were not easily realized. In the aftermath of the October revolution, the Rosenbaum family was terrorized by the Bolsheviks. Zinovy’s pharmacy was nationalized, and his family’s situation grew worse by the day. Their savings dwindled. They had little to eat. The political climate in Petrograd was grave. With no end to food and fuel shortages, street violence, and sabotage, the Rosenbaum family, like the Nabokov family before them, fled to the Crimea.
Alissa continued her studies in the fall of 1918, while in the Crimea. Crimean schools were still beyond the ideological control of the Bolsheviks. Many of the instructors in Alissa’s gymnasium were “old-fashioned, pro-Czarist ladies,” who kept teaching despite the rise of communism (B. Branden 1986, 32). By this time, Alissa was expanding upon her own learning methods. Those principles, which seemed self-evident to her, were subjected to a more rigorous process of understanding and analysis. Barbara Branden writes that despite Alissa’s “remarkable memory, memory never was the tool she employed for learning” (ibid.). She was taught to use both inductive and deductive methods of analysis.
Following the pedagogical impulses of her mother Anna, Alissa tutored her classmates in geometry. Her mathematics teacher hoped she would become a professional mathematician. Though Alissa broadened her study of mathematics and logic, she knew that the study of pure method would not be sufficient. Always suspicious of the purely abstract, she exhibited a continuing desire to merge the theoretical and the practical, the technical and the artistic. She sought out the classics of foreign literature, works by Rostand, Hugo, and Sienkiewicz. She even enrolled in American history classes, an odd elective for a Russian. It was during this same period that Alissa became an atheist. Much like the victorious Bolsheviks, Alissa saw the concept of God as rationally unprovable and deeply degrading.16 But unlike the Russian Marxists, Alissa rejected both the God of Christianity and the equally mystical, collectivist, God-state of the Communists.
In the spring of 1921, as the Red Army solidified control of the Crimea, Alissa graduated from high school. In dire financial straits, Alissa and her mother Anna began teaching illiterate Red Army soldiers to read and write (B. Branden 1986, 38).
As material conditions grew worse in the Crimea, Zinovy decided to return to Petrograd with his family. It was a fateful decision, for instead of seeking exile from Russia, the Rosenbaums returned to a city firmly under Red control. Although Alissa would eventually emigrate to the United States, her mother and father would later be denied permission to leave the Soviet Union and would die during the siege of Leningrad (125, 375).
A REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION
Petrograd was a city that Alissa had loved. As she later wrote in We the Living:17 “It was St. Petersburg; the war made it Petrograd; the revolution made it Leningrad” (226). In her first novel, Rand wrote of Petrograd as a tribute to human achievement, even as she hinted at an underlying tragedy:
Cities grow like forests, like weeds. Petrograd did not grow. It was born finished and complete. Petrograd is not acquainted with nature. It was the work of man.… Petrograd’s grandeur is unmarred, its squalor unrelieved. Its facets are cut clearly, sharply; they are deliberate, perfect with the straight-forward perfection of man’s work.… Petrograd did not rise. It came to be at the height. It was commanded to command. It was a capital before its first stone was laid. It was a monument to the spirit of man. (229)
But Petrograd had changed, and its revolutionary transformation was no less visible in the area of university instruction. The Red government introduced sweeping educational reforms that reflected the changes that had taken place in the character of society.
In the days immediately following the Revolution, freedom of expression in the arts lasted for a while. Lenin was even prepared to allow the dissemination of works with which he disagreed. By 1918, a group of writers, poets, and artists had formed the Proletkult (Proletarian Cultural Movement) to encourage workers to develop a distinctively “proletarian culture.”
These agencies sought to attract people of pure proletarian class origins. In the beginning, they operated three hundred literary workshops with an enrollment of 84,000. At its peak in 1921, membership reached 500,000. But by 1922, following Lenin’s denunciations, the number of agencies had dwindled.18 The organization was effectively disbanded in 1923, its functions gradually absorbed by the trade unions and the “Commissariat of Enlightenment.”19
Lenin himself was rather suspicious of the Proletkult for two major reasons: First, it was a non-Party organ. Second, it advocated the creation of a new “pure” proletarian culture by suppressing every last remnant of traditional aristocratic and bourgeois culture. Lenin believed that such an ahistorical state-of-nature would be illusory; the Proletkult did not recognize the new society’s need to appropriate significant aspects of the existing culture.20 Though many bourgeois cultural trends were renounced as counterrevolutionary, it was clear that the new regime could not survive without absorbing some of the very values and institutions it abhorred. In the universities, this meant that many of the “old guard” or “bourgeois specialists” had to be employed during the transition to socialism—as long as they remained politically neutral (Fitzpatrick 1979, 3).
Though the Bolsheviks closed the ecclesiastical schools in 1917–18 (Zernov 1963, 206), many of the remaining religious and Idealist professors retained their university positions. A number of thinkers of the religious renaissance, such as Berdyaev and Bely, continued to deliver public lectures on theology, philosophy, and ethics (McClelland 1989, 261). Gradually, the regime began to establish its own network of ideological agencies. Philosophy was subordinated to social science. A national Philosophical Institute was created in the Academy of Sciences, on a level with the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of the Central Government, and under the supervision of the state authorities.
The Bolsheviks also began to formulate new principles of educational and arts policy set forth by Narkompros, the Commissariat of Enlightenment. Narkompros was headed by Anatoly V. Lunacharsky between 1917 and 1929. During the early years, distinct schools of thought united by their progressive and Marxist orientation, coexisted within Narkompros. The most progressive of these schools was the Petrograders. These anti-authoritarian educators advocated so-called activity methods of teaching, which included pupil-participation and informal student-teacher relationships within a less traditional, nonscholastic curriculum. Many hoped to integrate a Marxist emphasis on the polytechnical school (Fitzpatrick 1970, 29). The Petrograd educators were influenced heavily by Deweyite progressivism (30). But despite their best efforts, many academic institutions were not willing to cooperate with Narkompros. They wished to function with full autonomy, having struggled to attain such independence for many years in their opposition to czarist control. Narkompros asserted that it would defend the independence of scholarship, but in practice it aimed to limit the influence of professors who were anti-Bolshevik and non-Marxist (68). Apparently, in defending “Enlightenment,” “autonomy,” and “progressive education,” the Commissariat had become adept at using euphemisms to conceal its growing domination of intellectual life.
In actuality, the regime viewed academic freedom as a “bourgeois prejudice” (Sorokin [1924] 1950, 246–47). Private publishing houses were closing, hurt primarily by paper shortages. Initially, Petrograd seemed to escape the more severe censorship measures being implemented in Moscow. Despite its intention to preserve the utility of the “old guard,” while promoting the values of the new, the regime began to destroy a whole generation of intellectuals.
With the coming of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, the state simultaneously acted to check any revival of “bourgeois” values. The sovietization of Russian intellectual life meant greater administrative control over the universities through Narkompros, the trade unions, and the Communist Party organs (McClelland 1989, 261). During the early 1920s, however, academic institutions “underwent a period of wild experimentation and extreme anarchy.” Many of the older professors could not adapt to progressive methods; many of the newer professors lacked academic expertise. Indeed, the effects were disastrous for both instructors and pupils.21
In a far-reaching reorganization of university structure, Narkompros united the existing schools of history, philology, and law under a social science college, or fakul’tet obshchestvennykh nauk, within each university (Fitzpatrick 1979, 68). The new social science program aimed to introduce concepts of Marxist methodology and scientific socialism. Though the non-Marxist professors resented these innovations, they were not required to demonstrate proficiency in Marxist studies. In fact, many of them continued to teach courses that had a subtle anti-Soviet bias. A continued shortage of Marxist teachers led the Central Committee to abolish many of the social science colleges that had been established, though Petrograd University was unaffected by this policy change (69–71).
The Narkompros policy innovations fundamentally altered the organization of the university. The original university structure contained three major colleges (Kline, 20 October 1992C):
1. The istoriko-filologicheskii fakul’tet, or College of History and Philology, broadly defined to include philosophy.
2. The fiziko-matematicheskii fakul’tet, or College of Mathematics and Physics, which included geology, chemistry, and other hard sciences.
3. The iuridicheskii fakul’tet, or law school.
The new university structure placed the College of History and Philology under the social science banner. A leftist academician, N. Ya. Marr, brought to the newly organized social science college a greater emphasis on ethnology and linguistics studies. Archaeology and anthropology were also included. The law school was officially dissolved since it lacked Marxist professors. It continued to function unofficially, under the title of “former law department,” until its reestablishment in the autumn of 1926. Later, the economics department was absorbed by the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, and the social-pedagogical department was made part of the Herzen Pedagogical Institute (Fitzpatrick 1979, 72–73).
Within the social science colleges, the regime did not require the teaching of atheism, but instruction did have to be nonreligious. Marxist studies and politically correct textbooks were hastily introduced in the early 1920s. There was an emphasis within these Marxist courses on political economy and historical materialism. Students in the engineering schools and universities were required to spend four hours per week on these subjects.22 Petrograd University did not establish an official course on Party history and Leninism until the mid-1920s, when it was renamed Leningrad University.
There were other innovations. Lunacharsky required that students of proletarian descent graduate without examination. Special classes were organized for their instruction, but many of these pupils were ridiculed by established academics as “zero students” (Sorokin [1924] 1950, 226–27). The Soviets also lifted admission restrictions on women and Jews as early as 1918, and abolished tuition, all in an effort to democratize the student body.23 There was less emphasis on scheduled classes, periodic examinations, homework, and discipline. Without preparation or proper orientation to new pedagogical techniques, teachers were encouraged to adopt the “laboratory” and “project” methods (Shteppa 1962, 29). The chaotic results were predictable. In any event, most changes in academic policy were somewhat beside the point; the cataclysmic conditions throughout Petrograd had dramatically affected the quality of university life. As James McClelland (1989) writes:
The period from the fall of 1918 to the spring of 1921 was one of terrible material deprivation in central Russia and chaos, bloodshed, and fighting on the periphery. Universities and institutes remained open, but despite an initial flood on students taking advantage of the new open admissions policy, the number of those actively attending lectures soon dwindled to an abnormally low level. Some professors remained at their posts throughout the period, while many others fled, either in search of warmth and food or out of political sympathy for the Whites. (258)
There was one final innovation introduced into Petrograd University. Effective at the beginning of the academic year 1920–21, the length of a university education was reduced from five years to three.
As a young woman of sixteen, Alissa Rosenbaum took advantage of the new educational reforms. She did not have to face the institutional bias against women and Jews. She entered the university on 2 October 1921, in the three-year course of the obshchestvenno-pedagogicheskoe otdelenie, the Department of Social Pedagogy, which contained the historical and philosophical disciplines and was designed presumably to prepare students for careers as teachers of the social sciences.24
Nearly three years later, in May 1924, and two months prior to her graduation, the student purges began. The authorities began ruthlessly to expel and exile those students who could not prove their proletarian class background. A regime that had ostensibly dedicated itself to the democratization of education was now creating new distinctions and privileges. But the purge commission decided to pass over those students who were on the verge of graduating. Had the traditional five-year program still been in effect, Alissa would not have been a graduating senior, and as the daughter of a “petit-bourgeois” pharmacist, she would have been expelled, or worse. She later remarked that it was “sheer accident that I escaped that purge.”25
MAJORING IN HISTORY
Alissa was disgusted by the “mystical chaos” of Russian academic philosophy. She was uninterested in the study of Russian literature. She decided to major in history.26 She later wrote that her systematic study of history in college was crucial “in order to have a factual knowledge of men’s past.” She minored in philosophy, “in order to achieve an objective definition of my values.” Ultimately, Alissa discovered that she could learn history, but that philosophy “had to be done by me.”27
University life in those years was primitive. The school lacked heat and light. Reports of death by starvation, disease, and suicide proliferated. Students and professors met for lectures and discussions in cold classrooms, dormitories, and auditoriums illuminated by flickering candles (McClelland 1989, 260–61). For a period, some lectures were scheduled in the evening because professors were engaged in compulsory manual labor during the day, and students were struggling to earn a living (Sorokin [1924] 1950, 223).
Alissa’s university had become an intellectual battleground between the “old guard” and their Soviet antagonists. The social science college was, by far, the most conflict-ridden of the newly established schools. Older professors were the targets of growing academic repression (Fitzpatrick 1979, 68). The Party had allowed many of these professors to continue with their “bourgeois-objectivist” scholarship, but this period of coexistence between these groups ended once and for all in 1928–29, when many established scholars were purged from the Academy of Science for attempting to block the election of communist scholars. Many historians were arrested, exiled, or executed.28
In the early 1920s, the study of history was slowly supplemented by courses designed to increase politgramota or political literacy. Social science curriculums in the pedagogical institutes were modified to include new Marxist subjects and requirements. Hence, many of the history courses Alissa took initially were probably condensed to include themes in political economy, dialectical method, and historical materialism (Shteppa 1962, 29, 36). Among these courses were specific “Soviet subjects.” Rand recollected in 1971 that the ideological conditioning prevalent in U.S. educational institutions was mild in comparison to the ideological bludgeoning she had experienced (Rand 1971T). She proudly proclaimed that though there were only a very few good professors still actually teaching during this period, she remained stalwart and unaffected by the propaganda to which she was subjected (Rand 1974aT).
In We the Living, Kira, Rand’s fictional alter ego, is compelled to take Marxist lectures and courses not unlike those Rand herself had probably attended. These included courses on the history of communist philosophy and the doctrine of historical materialism. Rand lists lectures with titles such as “Marxism,” “Proletarian Women and Illiteracy,” “The Spirit of the Collective,” “Proletarian Electrification,” “The Doom of Capitalism,” “The Red Peasant,” “The ABC of Communism,” “Comrade Lenin and Comrade Marx,” and “Marxism and Collectivism,” and Komsomol discussions on the problems with the New Economic Policy (134). The endless attacks on individualism that Alissa Rosenbaum heard in lectures of this type led her to formulate a futuristic vision in which the word “I” is lost to a collectivistic world. This was the basis of her poetic novelette, Anthem, written in 1937.29
The predominance of propaganda in many of her courses did not make a high-quality education impossible. In retrospect, Rand recognized that it was under the Soviet educational system that she developed her method of “thinking in principles.” She stated that she “learned in reverse.” The system generated within her a deeply critical outlook which she carried into her adulthood. She grasped: “No matter what you are taught, listen to it critically, whether you agree or not. And if you disagree, formulate your reasons.… Under the Soviets … I learned a great deal, but only in that way.”30
Though Marxism had been a serious presence in her history and social science courses, it did not have a monopoly on the curriculum during this period. Most of the historians in the department were non-Marxist scholars who taught from texts that featured diverse historical methodologies.31 Yet between 1919 and 1925, general approaches to ancient, medieval, and modern history were underemphasized, and studies of “socioeconomic formations” became more prominent. Marxist historiography in the study of antiquity was evident in such works as A. I. Tiumenev’s Essays on the Socioeconomic History of Ancient Greece, published in three volumes between 1920 and 1923. Tiumenev’s books greatly influenced academic scholarship and university teaching during this period. In 1923, Tiumenev also authored Did Capitalism Exist in Ancient Greece? In that same year, V. S. Sergeev’s History of Rome appeared.
By contrast, several major works in medieval and early modern history were used that had a distinctly “bourgeois” orientation. Included in the history curriculum were such books as P. Vinogradov’s Book of Readings on the History of the Middle Ages, D. N. Egorov’s anthology The Middle Ages through Their Monuments, and D. M. Petrushevsky’s Essays on Medieval Society and State and Essays on the Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. The Soviets criticized Petrushevsky’s works for having little relation to established Marxist doctrine. In time, the curriculum was supplemented by texts that were much closer to the new spirit of Marxist historiography, including works by N. M. Pakul and I. I. Semenov on the Dutch and English revolutions (Shteppa 1962, 36–38).
General Russian history was taught with the assistance of S. I. Kovalev’s General History Course. However, the most important textbook in this period was written by M. N. Pokrovsky. Pokrovsky, in league with Lunacharsky and Krupskaya, formed part of the Bolshevik triumvirate in charge of Narkompros, between 1918 and 1929.32 His Russian History in Briefest Outline (Russkaia istoriia v samom szhatom ocherke), published in 1923, was a very popular text that earned Lenin’s praise. Pokrovsky’s history was profoundly Marxist in its orientation, containing much important material.
Thus, although Alissa was probably exposed to a variety of historical perspectives, her course of study was moving gradually in the direction of Marxist historiography. Even if she had rejected the materialist bias of the Marxist texts, she was learning typically dialectical modes of historical inquiry, which emphasized the interconnections between economic, political, social, and intellectual factors. However, as the scholarly atmosphere was chilled by Soviet repression, it is quite probable that most of Alissa’s teachers in the last year of her university education were at least pro forma Marxists, if not dogmatic Marxist-Leninists (Kline, 28 February 1992C).
Still, during the early Soviet period most of Petrograd’s historians were non-Marxist in their political orientation. Unfortunately, an exhaustive search of the Leningrad archives by the university archivists, N. T. Dering and L. V. Guseva, did not uncover any specific information on Alissa Rosenbaum’s coursework, grades, or teachers.33 Yet it is clear that Alissa would have encountered a history department dominated by some of the finest Russian scholars of the twentieth century.34 Among them were:
• L. S. Berg, the author of Theories of Evolution. Berg’s quasi-teleological approach emphasized that evolutionary changes had definite direction.
• Nikolai Ivanovich Kareev, who taught courses on the French Revolution, and authored a number of theoretical works attacking Marxism. Though Lenin had criticized him sharply, he was not dismissed in the early Soviet period.
• E. V. Tarle, who taught a Marxist historiography and surpassed even Kareev in importance in Petrograd’s history department.
• Sergei Fyodorovich Platonov, who specialized in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russian history and taught at Petrograd through 1925. Platonov offered a conservative-monarchist historical interpretation.35
Pitirim Sorokin, who received his doctorate from Petrograd University in 1922, also taught in the College of Social Sciences and in the Sociological Institute as a sociologist-historian. In later years, as a renowned Harvard sociologist, Sorokin spearheaded “creative altruism” as a means of conquering the human “predatory instincts” he had witnessed in the Soviet Union. Perhaps remembering him from Petrograd, Rand later derided Sorokin as “a thoroughly Russian mystic-altruist.”36
The Petrograd history department was also graced by the presence of the renowned Ivan Mikhailovich Grevs. Grevs was a specialist in medieval European history. He taught on the fathers of the Latin Church and the medieval humanists (including Dante and Petrarch). Grevs pioneered the seminar system and field trips in Russian higher education. He was a leading advocate for higher education for women.
Perhaps the most important historian in the department at this time was L. P. Karsavin, who was a student of Grevs (Zenkovsky 1953, 843). Until 1922, Karsavin was the chair of the department. As a history major, Alissa would have met with Karsavin in some formal or informal capacity, either as his student, or in search of course-selection advice and general curriculum guidance.37 Karsavin was well known in Petrograd intellectual circles. Along with Platonov, Tarle, and Grevs, Karsavin gave regular talks in public forums, such as the Petrograd House of Scholars, the House of Literary Men, and the Theological Institute. He also participated in the workers’ council of faculty members as a representative from the university, lecturing at gatherings of Red Army soldiers and workers’ clubs (Shteppa 1962, 24–28). Like his colleague, N. O. Lossky, Karsavin advocated a philosophy of history that was conjoined to a general Christian worldview (Copleston 1988, 56). As a historian of the Church, he specialized in the theology and mysticism of the Middle Ages. He was a speculative and religious thinker in the tradition of Solovyov. He built his system on a religious metaphysic (Lossky 1951, 299). Karsavin applied the doctrine of the coincidence of opposites to the issue of the Trinity. Like Hegel, he saw historical development as holistic and organismic, an immanent process of becoming. As Lossky explains, in Karsavin’s system,
The development of the subject is the transition from one of its aspects to another, conditioned by the dialectical nature of the subject himself and not by impacts from without. Karsavin rejects external relations in the domain of historical being. Every historical individual (a person, a family, a nation, etc.) is in his view the world-whole itself in some one of its unique and unrepeatable aspects; thus, the domain of historical being consists of subjects that interpenetrate one another and nevertheless develop freely, since each of them contains everything in an embryonic form, and there are no external relations before them. (307)
Karsavin and many of the other distinguished historians who taught at Petrograd perpetuated the Russian yearning for synthesis. Whether 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.
MINORING IN PHILOSOPHY
In addition to her studies in history, Alissa enrolled in several philosophy and literature courses surveying the works of Schiller, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevsky. She would recollect for Barbara Branden (1986) a special admiration for Dostoyevsky’s brilliant literary technique: “For a long time, I studied his plots carefully, to see how he integrated his plots to his ideas. I identified, in his work, what kind of events express what kind of theme, and why. He was very valuable for my subconscious integration concerning plot and theme” (45).
As if sensing a natural spiritual affinity between Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, Alissa moved on to the works of the famous German philosopher. She had first discovered Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra upon the advice of an older cousin. She was captivated by its exaltation of the heroic, its defense of the individual, and its dismissal of altruism as slave morality.38 But as she read further, Alissa was troubled by Nietzsche’s defense of psychological determinism. In her reading of The Birth of Tragedy, Alissa discovered that Nietzsche had embraced Dionysian, drunken, orgiastic emotionalism over Apollonian reason (B. Branden 1986, 45).
Certainly, this interpretation of Nietzsche was widespread throughout the Silver Age of Russian philosophy. The Symbolists, among others, celebrated Nietzsche precisely because he exalted a Dionysian cultic loss of self. Alissa would have been exposed to this particular Nietzschean theme in the work of Aleksandr Blok, one of her favorite poets. But she could have also incorporated such interpretations of Nietzsche from the lectures of Faddei Frantsevich Zielinsky, another social science teacher at Petrograd University and one of the greatest classical scholars of the twentieth century.
Zielinsky taught at the university from 1885 through 1921. Alissa may not have entered the university in time to register in one of his courses, but he had had a huge impact on many other Russian scholars and poets of his generation. Editor of the journal Vestnik vsemirnoi istorii (Herald of universal history), Zielinsky was a specialist on ancient Greece. He translated the works of Herodotus and Thucydides into Russian and wrote on Greek and Roman mythology.
Zielinsky viewed Nietzsche’s philosophy as “the last major contribution of antiquity to contemporary thought.”39 He believed that the resurgence of the Dionysian impulse was a necessary requirement to curb the “highly moralistic influence of Judaism in Christianity.”40 His celebration of the Dionysian was consistent with the views of other Silver Age thinkers who were integrating the works of Nietzsche with a mystical Christian worldview.
Alissa was probably among the last students at the university to study Nietzsche’s philosophy formally. Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, began a campaign to remove ideologically dangerous books from the People’s Libraries. Nietzsche’s works were foremost among the banned materials. They were removed from libraries in factories, trade union halls, and universities, and were placed on closed reserve in major research centers along with other “counterrevolutionary” tracts (Rosenthal and Bohachevsky-Chomiak 1990, xiii). In 1923–24, some of Nietzsche’s books were burned by the authorities.41 Apparently, where the Symbolists had recognized a cultic collectivism in Nietzsche’s work, the Soviet regime could see only a preoccupation with the heroic, creative, and the solitary.42
Alissa’s exposure to formal philosophy was probably limited to a few university courses. But included in nearly every history course she took, there was a significant dose of “intellectual” history. As a philosophy minor, she would have been required to take several courses offered by philosophy department faculty.43
Petrograd’s philosophy department was dominated by neo-Kantians, including Ivan Ivanovich Lapshin, Sergei Alexeevich Alexeev (who wrote under the name Askoldov), and Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedensky (B. Lossky 1991, 74–77, 89, 158 n. 116). Lapshin rejected metaphysical speculation, whereas Alexeev criticized the doctrine of dialectical materialism. These two thinkers were greatly influenced by their mentor, Aleksandr Vvedensky. An elderly master who survived the deportations and the purges, Vveden-sky taught from 1890 to 1925. He was a genuine Kantian, offering courses in logic, psychology, and the history of philosophy. As an exceptionally gifted teacher, Vvedensky touched the lives of many thousands of students who attended his lectures and were inspired by his ideas (Lossky 1951, 164). Among his students was N. O. Lossky. Vvedensky advocated a deontological morality, faith in God, the immortality of the soul, and the necessity of free will.
Yet it does not seem that Alissa had any extensive exposure to the teachings of Kantian philosophers at Petrograd University. Rand never mentioned Kantian philosophy as a subject she studied extensively in college, though she probably had light exposure to Kant’s ideas.44 Despite the presence of all of these world-renowned historians, philosophers, and scholars, Rand never publicly acknowledged the names of any of her teachers—except one. This is not atypical of Rand; in fact, in keeping with her own visions of self-creation, she concedes only a limited literary and philosophical debt to Hugo, Dostoyevsky, and Aristotle.45 The one teacher whose name she mentioned in any context, was Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky.
LOSSKY AND RAND
Any investigation of the links between Lossky and Rand is fraught with problems. It is almost impossible to establish with certainty the exact circumstances of their relationship. None of Rand’s early journal writings survived her Russian years. Rand burned her philosophic diaries and fictional outlines long before she came to the United States. She knew that if discovered, such writings would implicate her as an anticommunist (B. Branden 1986, 38). Very little of Rand’s American journals have been made public, and none of the published entries date prior to 1934. In any event, it is unlikely that the unpublished diaries of Rand would include extensive comments, if any, on Lossky.
The first mention of Lossky occurs in a single paragraph of Barbara Branden’s biographical essay, “Who is Ayn Rand?” This personal recollection is drawn from over forty hours of interviews that Branden conducted with Rand.46 Lossky is the only one of her professors whom Rand mentioned in these interviews. Branden nearly duplicates this Lossky reference from her early essay, in her best-selling, book-length biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand. Because of its historical importance, I quote this passage at length:
Despite her doubts about the value of formal philosophy, she chose as an elective a course on the history of ancient philosophy. The course was taught by Professor N. O. Losky [sic], a distinguished international authority on Plato. To her surprise, the course turned out to be her favorite. She was profoundly impressed by Aristotle’s definition of the laws of logic, and rejected completely, “the mysticism, and collectivism” of Plato.… Professor Losky [sic] was a stern, exacting man, contemptuous of all students, particularly of women. It was said that he failed most students the first time they took his examination, and that he was especially hard on women. In the spring, his students went to his home for their oral examination; a long line of them stood outside his study, nervously awaiting their turn. Alice had hoped that she would be questioned on Aristotle. But when she entered his study, he questioned her only about Plato. She had studied carefully, and she answered easily and precisely. After a while, although she had not stated any estimate, Professor Losky [sic] said sardonically: “You don’t agree with Plato, do you?” “No, I don’t,” she answered. “Tell me why,” he demanded. She replied, “My philosophical views are not part of the history of philosophy yet. But they will be.” “Give me your examination book,” he ordered. He wrote in the book and handed it back to her. “Next student,” he said. He had written: Perfect.47
There are only three subtle differences between this passage and the one that appears in “Who is Ayn Rand?” In the earlier biographical essay, Branden tells us that Lossky gave Alissa a “Perfect” grade, out of three possibilities: Perfect, Passing, or Failure. She adds that Lossky believed that female students “had no business in philosophy.” She also spells Lossky’s name correctly.48 None of these distinctions alters the essential intellectual chutzpa that Rand exhibited in her final examination session with the famed professor.
The authenticity of Rand’s reminiscences has been challenged in some respects by at least four scholars, three of whom are relatives of Lossky. Boris and Andrew, Lossky’s surviving sons, and Nicholas, his grandson, have all objected to the characterization of N. O. Lossky as contemptuous of female philosophy students. They point out that their family has had a history of strong women, including Maria Stoiunina, who established the famous gymnasium for girls and young ladies, attended by Alissa Rosenbaum, and in which Lossky actually taught. One of Lossky’s female students during the Russian period of his life, Natalie Duddington, became a lifelong friend and the English translator of his important works. Andrew recollects that his father demanded a basic competence in the subject matter of his courses from both men and women, making no distinctions between them. His examinations were forthright, neither tricky nor especially difficult. The distinguished philosopher George Kline was a regular auditor of two of Lossky’s courses at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. He too vouches for the professor’s fairness and nonsexist attitudes. Kline enjoyed a friendly correspondence with Lossky and recalls that the professor “always treated his students with respect and kindness.” Lossky’s contempt was reserved only for dogmatic, simplistic, Marxist-Leninists who attacked speculative and idealist thought.49
As an expert in the history of Russian philosophy, Kline has also taken issue with the characterization of Lossky as a scholar of Plato. Lossky knew his Greek philosophy well and would have been more than qualified to teach a course on the ancients. But as a specialist in German philosophy from Kant to Husserl, N. O. Lossky published nearly three hundred works, and not one of them even mentions Plato in the title.
Some of the interpretive differences regarding Lossky’s attitudes toward female philosophy students can be attributed to subjective factors. The evidence indicates that Lossky was not unfair to his women students. However, it is impossible to grasp the mental strain under which Lossky lived in the 1921–22 academic year. This may very well have affected his demeanor and otherwise affable personality. Certainly it cannot be discounted that to a sixteen-year-old student, any professor in a bad mood could be the source of great personal consternation. It is also quite possible that as a fiction writer, Rand has merely embellished the story by intensifying the conflict between its major characters.50
But there is a greater problem of historical authenticity that requires some elucidation.
In 1920–21, Lossky was at the top of his profession. He had already published a number of significant philosophical treatises, and continued to lecture at the university, and at the Stoiunin Gymnasium. He succeeded in earning a few extra black bread rations by teaching an “Introduction to Philosophy” course in the National University, a school of adult education, in the Shlissel’burg district of Petrograd.51 He gave lectures on the subject of God in the system of organic philosophy to the Free Philosophical Association.
Lossky’s courses at the university were in the grand intuitivist tradition of philosophy he spearheaded. In 1916, he taught on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and on Leibniz. In 1917, he offered classes on the theory of judgments, and an introduction to philosophy. In 1918–19, he lectured on the problems of free will, the problem of the trans-subjectivity of sensory qualities, logic, contemporary epistemology, and an introduction to metaphysics. In 1919–20, Lossky again offered his course on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, followed in 1920–21 by a seminar on materialism, hylozoism, and vitalism from an antimaterialist perspective.52 None of his listed university courses dealt specifically with Plato, Aristotle, or the ancient philosophers.
More important, something happened in the summer of 1921 that would alter Lossky’s life forever, ending his illustrious career at the university and ultimately leading to his exile from the Soviet Union. In Moscow, a meeting of the State Scientific Council was called to discuss the future of university professors. The regime was becoming increasingly suspicious of those non-Marxist professors and intellectuals who had continued to oppose the Revolution. M. N. Pokrovsky chaired the meeting. The Council removed many of Petrograd’s privatdocents. Professor Lapshin was also barred from teaching. Only Aleksandr Vvedensky was allowed to remain.
When the Council addressed the issue of the celebrated Lossky’s presence at the university, they were compelled to censure him for his defense of the Trinity. But it was brought to the attention of Pokrovsky that Lossky, to his credit, had once been expelled from the Vitebsk Gymnasium for his propagandistic views in favor of atheism and socialism. The Council decided to remove him from his Petrograd teaching position, but allow him to serve in the Institute of Scientific Research, an annex to the university. Consequently, in 1921, Lossky—officially—taught no university courses.
Pitirim Sorokin, another of the ousted professors, knew that the autonomy of the university was being destroyed. Elected deans were replaced by Communists, and a Red student was given a special commissary position over the rector of the university. He observes that the research the barred professors conducted at the Historical and Sociological Institutes, kept them away from teaching responsibilities “where they would not be harmful to students” ([1924] 1950, 247, 284). With many Petrograd positions vacated, students were subjected to the amateur scholarship of newly appointed Bolshevik professors. One such professor, Borichevsky, taught a course in logic which competed with Vvedensky’s. Borichevsky’s expertise was limited to Spinoza, Epicurus, and materialism. His embarrassing mistakes in the presentation of Plato’s philosophy were the subject of the students’ ridicule. Sorokin adds that those professors who were barred from teaching were also barred from organizing special alternative courses.
When Lossky learned of his dismissal from the university, he was devastated. Around the middle of August 1921, he came down with a gallstone illness. The doctors prescribed bed rest, and between September and December, Lossky spent most of his time in convalescence. Around the Christmas holidays, his health began to improve. Undeterred by threats from the Bolsheviks or heckling by Komsomoltsy in the audience, Lossky joined Sorokin, Grevs, Karsavin, and others in public forums that praised Christianity and the Kingdom of God.
But in January 1922, Lossky experienced a relapse in his illness. He lost weight, developed jaundice, and was on the verge of having gallbladder surgery. In March, on the day of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, Lossky went with his wife to donate some of their valuables to the Church. From the moment of their sacrifice, Lossky (1969) writes, his jaundice and his illness were cured (215–16).
The Bolshevik leadership was becoming more fearful of the continued strength exhibited by prerevolutionary scientists, writers, and other public figures. On 16 August 1922, Lossky was summoned to the offices of the Cheka. He thought it was in response to a passport inquiry he had made to travel to Czechoslovakia. Instead, he was arrested, along with other Petrograd scholars, including Lapshin and Karsavin. Under forced interrogation, Lossky was compelled to agree that he had been involved in counterrevolutionary activities that were punishable by death. Under Bolshevik reprieve, partly due to Trotsky’s intervention, the sentenced intellectuals were released on the condition that they would leave the country at once. They could travel with small amounts of linen and clothing and were instructed to leave their books behind. By 15 November 1922, Lossky, his wife, three sons, and his mother-in-law, Maria Nikolaievna Stoiunina, boarded a German steamer. Stopping in Berlin, the Losskys applied for and received visas allowing them into Czechoslovakia on 13 December 1922.
So, the question is, How could Lossky have taught Rand if he was barred from teaching at the university, and if he was intermittently sick throughout the period, only to be exiled by the end of 1922? Could it be that the relationship between Lossky and Alissa Rosenbaum was a product of Rand’s imagination?53
An assessment of all the available evidence in this perplexing case is not as damning to the integrity of Rand’s recollections as might appear at first glance. There are two basic possibilities: (1) Rand mistook, hallucinated, or lied about her contact with the distinguished professor; or (2) Lossky may have taught a course connected to Petrograd University that was not fully documented by school or personal records.
Let’s consider the circumstances of both Rand and Lossky:
In 1961, when Rand had told her future biographer of her encounters with Lossky, she had already achieved a worldwide following. Though she was not taken seriously by many academics, it is unlikely that the mere mention of Lossky’s name would have created a stir of excitement in the United States,54 where, until the latter part of 1961, the elderly professor had been living in relative obscurity. In fact, as I indicated in Chapter 2, Lossky had entered a French-Russian nursing home by October 1961. He was weak and very ill until his death in 1965.55
But any fabrication on the part of Rand could have been easily debunked by a search of the historical record. Except for this brief passage in the 1962 essay, duplicated, for the most part, in Branden’s 1986 biography, the Lossky-Rand experience has not been written about or discussed in any interviews, public forums, articles, or books. Although Rand’s recollection of her final examination experience with Lossky is predictably self-complimentary, it was not Rand’s style to bolster her credentials by fabrication, name-dropping, or by acknowledging a professor whose religious philosophy she would have adamantly opposed.
Barbara Branden (1986) writes: “During the years of my friendship with Ayn Rand, I was always impressed with the range and exactitude of her memory” (13). Branden never found Rand to make a mistake about a date or time and could not imagine that Rand would have fabricated the Lossky experience.56 In fact, Branden claims that although Rand’s recollections of other teachers were partial and incomplete, Lossky remained “very memorable.”57 There were no other professors whom Rand acknowledged as having made an impact on her in any positive way.58 Furthermore, Branden argues, Rand seemed to know the ancient philosophers very well. What she gained from this single course was enormous.59
I find it very difficult to believe that Rand was mistaken or that she lied about her experiences with the celebrated professor. Lossky’s circumstances, however, are somewhat more complex. Though Lossky’s son, Boris, characterizes the relationship between his father and Rand as quite possibly historical fiction, he makes “an extenuating caution in this judgment.”60 Lossky’s appointment to the Institute of Scientific Research on the fringe of the university was different from most. The Council allowed Lossky to teach philosophical disciplines at the Institute with the provision that they not be tainted with spiritualist ideology. He could have lectured in logic, epistemology, psychology, and similar areas of study. Quite possibly among these other areas would have been a course in ancient philosophy, or a course in epistemology, surveying Plato, Aristotle, and other classical thinkers. Lossky would have lectured his students throughout the semester and followed the traditional procedure of testing his students’ proficiency by written and oral examination. In this manner, the students would have received credit for the course, even though it was offered at the annex (B. Lossky, 29 May–4 June 1992C).
But to speculate on Lossky’s activities at the Institute of Scientific Research poses a further problem: the courses are untraceable. Any such “elective” course, taught by a censured professor at the university annex, would not have received “official” academic visibility. Alissa Rosenbaum must have been aware of Lossky’s eminent reputation as an exceptional educator, since he had taught at the Stoiunin Gymnasium. She might have been pleasantly surprised to discover him at the Petrograd annex. She would have had to make a deliberate, conscious decision to enroll not merely in a philosophy course, but specifically in Lossky’s class. She would have needed permission to attend his lectures. The considerable effort she would have expended to arrange this suggests that she knew of Lossky’s reputation as a brilliant philosopher or, perhaps, as a dedicated anticommunist. Boris Lossky does not deny these possibilities. Unfortunately, there are no institute listings in the family “red book” of Lossky’s publication and pedagogical activities (B. Lossky, 27 October 1992C).
Another aspect of Barbara Branden’s passage might provide a clue to the peculiar circumstances surrounding Lossky and Rand. Rand’s recollections of her oral examinations in the spring indicate that she went to Lossky’s home, rather than to an office or university classroom. This would have been unusual, but entirely within the realm of possibilities, given the appalling conditions at the university and its related institutes. Boris remembers that there was an acute shortage of firewood. It was so cold at the university that the office ink would freeze up (B. Lossky 1991, 77). The general lack of fuel led his father to schedule a number of student meetings in the enlarged dining room of his residence. These meetings may have been more frequent due to Lossky’s illness, which kept him at home, intermittently, from the fall of 1921 through March of 1922. Final examinations were held in June. Boris Lossky recollects that several of his father’s students visited their home during the period in question to discuss philosophy. He does not remember seeing a long line of nervous students waiting outside his father’s study in the spring, nor does he remember Alissa Rosenbaum (B. Lossky, 29 May–4 June 1992C).
Aside from the unlikely possibility that Rand lied, one of the worst-case scenarios, then, is that she colored her recollections of the spring examination with a certain theatricality. There is another hypothesis that one could suggest: Rand may have remembered the examination incident perfectly, but not which professor was involved.61 But I doubt this, given Barbara Branden’s insistence that Rand’s recollections of Lossky were “very memorable.” This is not to imply that Rand could never make a mistake; there is evidence that Rand did not remember every detail and date correctly. For instance, in my discussion of her relationship with the Nabokov sister, I discovered that Rand was mistaken regarding the date of the Nabokovs’ departure from Russia. Boris Lossky also questions a number of Rand’s reminiscences. Having read Branden’s biography, he suggests for instance, that she slightly exaggerated the harshness of the 1917 Petrograd winter. He also notes some discrepancies in Rand’s recollections of particular dates caused by the differences between the “old style” and “new style” calendars.62
But discrepancies in dates or temperatures are minor compared to a mistake in the recollection of a human being. Given the extenuating circumstances surrounding Lossky’s annex activities, it is my conviction that Rand has accurately described an actual event. Though I cannot prove this judgment, I firmly believe that it is the best explanation of the facts. The evidence suggests that Rand genuinely appreciated the privilege of studying with such a distinguished scholar. She remembers that in her freshman year at Petrograd, “many students and professors were fairly open.” After the government crackdown, “all the better professors from prerevolutionary times were exiled to Europe.”63 Lossky was one of them. By another “accident” of historical circumstance, young Alissa Rosenbaum had been among the very last students taught by Lossky in his native land.
A REIGN OF TERROR
But Lossky was not alone in his fate. Academic freedom was slowly eradicated in the years after the Revolution. The government had created rabfaks (workers’ colleges), which offered workers a kind of general equivalency diploma in preparation for attending the university. The professors were told to pass these students even if they fell below established academic standards (Fitzpatrick 1979, 65).
This was not the only hardship university academics faced in Petrograd. Typhus, influenza, pneumonia, cholera, and starvation were becoming commonplace. Sorokin recalls that in the cafeterias of Petrograd, discussion was monopolized by reports of secret police arrests and executions. Some scholars chose suicide. Faculty meetings became ongoing memorials to the dead. The rector of Petrograd University asked his colleagues not to die so quickly because there was a lack of coffins and graves. In time, coffins had to be rented to transport bodies to the collective ditches. Sorokin ([1924] 1950) remarked: “Not even in death can we escape Communism!” (231).
In the face of such inhumanity, and in the aftermath of the NEP, new liberal scholarly journals were founded. Satirical writings, such as Zamiatin’s We, began to circulate. Monuments to socialism and to Marx were desecrated, and many people returned to the Church. The Central Committee of the Communist Party feared the “growing influence of a revitalized bourgeois ideology” and chose “to apply decisive measures of struggle against this evil.”64 The expulsion of the intellectuals was the first step in the ideological “cleansing” of Soviet education. In addition to Lossky, more than one hundred leading Russian intellectuals and philosophers were exiled, including Aikhenvald, Alekseyev, Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Frank, Gurvich, Ilyin, Izgoyev, Karsavin, Kistyakovsky, Kizevetter, Lapshin, Melgunov, Myakotin, Novikov, Osgorgin, Ovchinnikov, Peshekhonov, Prokopovich, Sorokin, Stepun, Stratonov, Troshin, Vysheslavtsev, Yasinsky, and Yuskova. Anti-Marxist philosophical activity was declared illegal.65
Academic independence at Petrograd University was suddenly crushed. University faculty meetings were forbidden, and noncommunist journals were suppressed. In the face of growing state repression, protest was both ineffective and dangerous. Alissa learned “that it was useless to attempt political protests in Soviet Russia.”66 At home, Alissa’s father, in league with other pharmacists, had attempted to reopen his chemist shop, only to face government nationalization of his business for a second time. The Rosenbaum family was starving.
Clashes between communist and noncommunist students became more violent. Eventually, a purge commission was established to remove nonproletarians from the student council and from the university at large. The student purge began in Alissa Rosenbaum’s senior year, two months before her graduation from the newly renamed University of Leningrad. She would reconstruct the atmosphere of the student purge in her novel, We the Living. In an effort to cleanse the university of “all socially undesirable persons,” the purge commission asked students to name the respective occupations of both parents before 1917, and from 1917 to 1921. Trade union and Communist Party members were saved from the wrath of the commission (We the Living, 198). In later years, Alissa recollected that “great numbers of students were sent to Siberia, young boys and girls I knew.”67
The excesses of this purge were later denounced by Party leaders. Several Leningrad professors petitioned the authorities for the successful reinstatement of fifty purged students. In their efforts to democratize the student body, the authorities had merely shifted the student population from the social science colleges to the engineering schools. Fitzpatrick (1979) explains that the purge had the effect of “removing a great many of the women who had entered higher education after the revolution, since most of the women were of ‘bourgeois’ origin. In 1923/24, 38% of all students in higher education were women; but in 1928, with a smaller total number of students, women made up only 28%” (99).
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.69
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.73
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.
