Excerpts & Chronology
FROM CHAPTER ONE:
BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
1905–1917
When the fierce and extraordinary Ayn Rand was fifty-two years old, about to become world famous, and more than thirty years removed from her birthplace in Russia, she summed up the meaning of her elaborate, invented, cerebral world this way: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” It was a world in which no dictator, no deity, and no well-meaning sense of duty would ever take away the moral right of the gifted individual—Ayn Rand—to live according to her own high-wattage lights.
This was not the world she was born into. Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a Russian Jew, on February, 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, then the capital city of the most anti-Semitic and politically divided nation on the European continent. Later, she would say that she loathed everything Russian, and while this was not entirely true—she retained her appetite for Russian classical music and Russian sweets until the end of her life—she hated the passivity, brutality, and primitive religiosity of the Russia of her youth.
She had good reason for this. Her birth came barely three weeks after the brief but bloody uprising known as the 1905 Revolution, where, on a bright January Sunday morning, twelve thousand of Czar Nicholas II’s cavalrymen opened fire on thirty thousand factory workers, their wives and children, labor organizers, and students who had walked to the Winter Palace to petition for better working conditions and a role in the czar’s all-powerful government. The protest was led by a Russian Orthodox priest named Father Gapon, and many marchers were said to be praying as they died. The slaughter gave rise to days of rioting throughout the city and set the stage for the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, which would end not in the quick and brutal suppression of the rebellion’s leaders, as this one did, but in a revolutionary coup that would shake the world and mold Ayn Rand’s worldview.
Rand’s parents, who in 1905 were thirty-four and twenty-five and had been married for just nine months, could hear the gunfire from the windows of their new apartment above a pharmacy on Zabalkanskii Prospekt—the street on which, later that evening, the popular writer Maxim Gorky would hold a meeting of the city’s liberal intellectuals and announce, “The Russian Revolution has begun.” Rand’s father, born Zelman Wolf Zakharovich Rosenbaum but known outside the family by the non-Jewish variant of his name, Zinovy, was a pharmaceutical chemist and the manager of the shop downstairs. Her mother, a homely but self- consciously stylish woman named Khana Berkovna Kaplan, known as Anna, had been trained as a dentist but had stopped practicing after her marriage and pregnancy.
By the time Ayn Rand was born, Zabalkanskii Prospekt and the streets around it were calm again. It was an illusory calm: all over Russia and the vast Russian territories to the south and east, massive labor strikes, anti-czarist peasant insurrections, and anti-Jewish violence were erupting. This would continue, in waves, until 1914, when World War I briefly united the nation against the Germans, and would grow yet more explosive from 1915 to 1919, when the country was war torn and starving. Meanwhile, Marxist political organizations, their leaders in and out of exile in Siberia and Europe, gained a following.
In these years, it was dangerous to be a Jew. As the economy deteriorated and the czar grew more repressive, the brunt of popular anger often fell upon Russia’s five million Jews. At Czar Nicholas II’s court, as elsewhere in Europe, Jews had long been identified with the supposedly pagan notions of a money economy, urbanization, industrialization, and capitalism. Given traditional Russian fear of modernity and fierce anti-Semitism, Jews were ready-made scapegoats onto whom the czar, the landowners, and the police could easily shift workers’ and peasants’ resentment for their poverty and powerlessness. . . .
It was in this volatile and often frightening atmosphere that Rand grew up. She was the eldest of three daughters of this upwardly mobile pharmacist and his religiously observant, socially ambitious wife; Anna would later appear in her daughter’s novels as a series of superficial or spiteful characters. When Rand was two and a half, her sister Natasha was born; when she was five, her youngest and favorite sister Eleanora, called Nora, entered the family.
By the time Nora was born, in 1910, Zinovy had advanced to become the manager of a larger, more centrally located pharmacy. The Zabalkanskii drugstore, along with one a few streets away, in which the young chemist had worked before his marriage, were owned by Anna Rosenbaum’s sister, Dobrulia Kaplan, and her husband, Iezekiil Konheim; the new store, called Aleksandrovskaia, belonged to an affluent and professionally distinguished German Lutheran merchant named Aleksandr Klinge. Klinge’s shop faced Znamenskaya Square on the Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s resplendent main thoroughfare, built extra wide by Peter the Great to accommodate his cavalry and canons against the insurrections of the eighteenth century. Zinovy, now newly established among the Jewish bourgeoisie, moved his wife and daughters into a large, comfortable apartment on the second floor, adjoining the pharmacy. Another one of Anna’s sisters and her husband, a prosperous medical doctor named Isaac Guzarchik, settled with their two daughters on the floor above. There the family lived until they fled the starving city for the Crimea in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution.
Intelligent, self-directed, and solitary from an early age, Rand must have been a difficult child to raise in the first decade of the twentieth century. In spite of the era’s violence and turmoil, the ambience was Victorian: the fashions were for frills, family loyalty, and the feminine arts, all of which went utterly against her grain. Some of her earliest memories were of being unreasonably treated in such matters by her mother, who was the dominating personality in the household and even at times “a tyrant.” In one memory, during the family’s move to the Nevsky Prospekt apartment, Rand and her younger sisters were sent to stay with a neighboring aunt and uncle, perhaps the Konheims. When they returned to Rand’s new home, she asked her mother for a midi blouse like the ones she’d seen her cousins wearing. Anna Rosenbaum refused. She didn’t approve of midi blouses or other fashionable garments for children, Rand recalled fifty years later. Anna was serving tea at the time, and—perhaps as an experiment— Rand asked for a cup of tea. Again her mother refused; children didn’t drink tea. Rand refrained from arguing, although even then the budding logician might have won the argument on points. Instead, she asked herself, Why won’t they let me have what I want? and made a resolution: Someday I will have it. She was four and a half or five years old, although all her life she thought that she had been three. The elaborate and controversial philosophical system she went on to create in her forties and fifties was, at its heart, an answer to this question and a memorialization of this project. Its most famous expression was a phrase that became the title of her second nonfiction book, The Virtue of Selfishness, in 1962.
Rand’s first memory is worth describing here. The future author of Atlas Shrugged, a novel whose pulse is set by the rhythms of a great American railroad, recalled sitting at a window by her father’s side, aged two and a half, gazing at Russia’s first electric streetcars lighting the boulevard below. Her father was explaining the way the streetcars worked, she told a friend in 1960, and she was pleased that she could understand his explanation. Although she did not know it then, the American company Westinghouse had built the streetcar line, in a gesture to the city’s workers from the embattled czar. Such seeming coincidences—this one suggesting that even as a young child she showed an affinity for the bright beacon of American capitalism—abound in Rand’s life, and later became the threads from which she and her followers would spin her legend.
Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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"THE PAGE 99 TEST"
"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." –Ford Madox Ford
[With thanks to James McGrath Morris, author of Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (HarperCollins, 2010)]
[In We the Living, she had focused on young people and on events she had actually lived through because she knew she wasn’t yet ready to create a world; now she was ] . . .
. . . ready. Her first novel had been a practice drill, a preparation for this one. By the summer of 1936, she said, she had earned the right to put her affirmative vision of what it means to be an individualist—i.e., a champion of the sovereign, self-determining individual--down on paper. She began to construct an outline of characters and events that she thought were intrinsically important. The novel’s working title was Second-Hand Lives, but it would become famous as The Fountainhead.
As she pondered the egoistic, single-minded, hot-blooded character of Howard Roark, whom she was consciously molding into her ideal man, the first notes of marital discord between her and O’Connor sounded. He was far from sexually dominant, or even highly sexed. He had limited ability to discuss ideas with her. By all accounts—and there were many people who knew and loved him—he was sweet, gallant, stoical, funny, emotionally inexpressive, easily led and profoundly passive. Professionally, he had found little to occupy him in New York and was dependent on Ayn. Although he auditioned for parts in plays, the only roles he is known to have been offered were parts in his wife’s productions and related dramas. He took odd jobs, but quit them, apparently at her behest; selling shoes, for example, which he did for a few weeks in 1943, didn’t fit her romantic image of him. He decorated their apartments inexpensively and, according to visitors, imaginatively and beautifully. As teenagers, he and his brothers had cooked meals and done housework during their mother’s illness, so it didn’t seem unnatural that he and Nick should now take over many household chores to give her time to write As she became better known, he joked that he was “Mr. Ayn Rand.” But it was not a joke. Without paid employment, his working-class values sometimes troubled him. If the situation had occurred four or five decades later, “there would not have been so much hurt pride,” his niece Mimi later said. It’s difficult to know whether his financial dependency troubled Rand, since now and in the future she did not complain. Neither did he. He seemed to lack the drive and focus to begin a new career, and by 1936 she was the sole breadwinner.
For the first time, they began to lose their tempers with each other. A quiet man in the best of times, he withdrew from conversation. She was brimming with new ideas about the psychology of individualism, Americans’ sorry slide toward collectivism, and the many political and, now, architectural texts and periodicals she was reading. She craved intellectual.
Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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CHRONOLOGY OF AYN RAND’S LIFE AND WORK
April, 1904 Rand’s parents, Ana Berkovna Kaplan and Zelman Wolf Zakharovitch (Zinovy) Rosenbaum are wedded in St. Petersburg Choral Synagogue
February 2, 1905 Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a.k.a. Ayn Rand, is born in St. Petersburg, the eldest of three girls
February, 1917 The “democratic” Revolution begins
October, 25, 1917 Vladimir Lenin stages a one-day coup and begins the Russian Revolution
August, 1918 Rand and her family flee to Yevpatoria, in the Crimea. Rand discovers Plato, Aristotle, Victor Hugo, Cyrano de Bergerac, and the American Declaration of Independence
Summer –Fall 1921 Rand and her family return to St. Petersburg. Rand enters St. Petersburg University for a three-year term in history and philosophy
1924 Rand enters graduate program at the State Technicum for Screen Arts
January-February, 1926 Rand flees St. Petersburg for Berlin, Paris, and La Havre, where she sails for New York. Her first glimpse of the New York skyline looks to her like “the finger of God.”
February-August, 1926 She stays with her mother’s cousins in Chicago, then travels west to Hollywood and finds work with Cecil B. DeMille
April 15, 1929 Rand marries Frank O’Connor
March, 1931 She becomes a U.S. citizen
1932 She sells a screenplay called “Red Pawn” to Universal Pictures
1934 Rand’s stage play, “The Night of January 16th,” is produced in Hollywood and optioned by a Broadway producer. Rand and O’Connor move to New York
1935-36 “The Night of January 16th” opens and runs from September to April
April 7, 1936 Rand’s first novel, We the Living, is published by Macmillan
1938 Anthem is published in England under the title Ego
February, 1940 Rand’s theatrical adaptation of We the Living, titled The Unconquered, opens on Broadway and closes after five days
Fall, 1940 Rand sets aside work on The Fountainhead to campaign for Wendell Willkie
May 7, 1943 The Fountainhead is published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company
November, 1943 Rand and O’Connor relocate in southern California. Rand begins writing the first draft of a screenplay of the movie, The Fountainhead
July, 1944 Rand joins producer Hal Wallis as a staff writer. She and O’Connor move into a house designed by Richard Neutra
July, 1946 The first American edition of Anthem is published by Pamphleteers
October, 1947 Rand testifies before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee
July, 1949 The Fountainhead, starring Gary Cooper, opens
March 1950 Rand, age 45, meets Nathaniel Branden, age 19, a student at UCLA
October, 1951 O’Connor and Rand move permanently back to New York, following Nathaniel Branden
October 10, 1957 Random House publishes Atlas Shrugged.
January, 1958 The Nathaniel Branden Institute opens
January, 1962 Rand and Branden launch The Objectivist Newsletter (later, The Objectivist)
August, 1968 Rand ends her relationship with Nathaniel Branden and the Nathaniel Branden Institute closes
October, 1971 The Ayn Rand Letter begins a five-year history
April, 1974 Rand and her youngest sister Nora are reunited in New York
November 7, 1979 Frank O’Connor dies
March 6, 1982 Ayn Rand dies in New York City and is buried in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY OF AYN RAND'S BOOKS
Anthem (England: Cassell, 1938; New York: Signet, 1995).
The Art of Fiction, edited by Tore Boeckmann (New York: Plume, 2000).
Atlas Shrugged, (New York: Plume, 1999).
Ayn Rand’s Marginalia, edited by Robert Mayhew (Irvine, CA: Second Renaissance Books, 1995).
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966; New York: Signet, 1967).
The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from Her Unpublished Fiction, Leonard Peikoff, ed. (New York: New American Library Books, 1984; New York: Signet, 1986).
For the New Intellectual, (New York: Random House, 1961; New York: Signet, 1963).
The Fountainhead (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943; New York: Plume, 1994).
The Illustrated Fountainhead (Irvine, CA: Ayn Rand Institute, 1998).
Journals of Ayn Rand, David Harriman, ed., Dina Garmong, trans. (New York: Dutton, 1997; New York: Plume, 1999).
Letters of Ayn Rand, Michael S. Berliner, ed., Dina Garmong, trans. (New York: Dutton, 1995; New York: Plume, 1999).
The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York: Signet, 1971).
The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet, 1971).
Russian Writings on Hollywood, Michael S. Berliner, ed., Dina Garmong, trans. (Los Angeles: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1999).
The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, 1963; New York: New American Library, 1964).
The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, essays by Ayn Rand and others, Leonard Peikoff, ed. (New York: New American Library, 1989; New York: Meridian, 1990).
Three Plays (New York: Signet, 2005).
We the Living, (New York: Signet, 1995; originally New York: Macmillian, 1936).
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