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SYNTHESIS IN RUSSIAN CULTURE

      In her autobiography The Italics Are Mine (1992), Nina Berberova, one of the most important writers in twentieth-century Russian literature, describes a struggle that is at once profoundly personal and profoundly suggestive of the Russian character. She describes “one of the most important themes of [her] inner life,” as she aims for the “fusing of opposites” in her very being:

      All dualism is painful for me, all splitting or bisecting contrary to my nature.… My whole life has been the reconciliation within myself of the old dichotomy.… [D]iverse and often contrasting traits fuse in me. Long ago I stopped thinking of myself as being composed of two halves. I feel physically, that a seam, not a cut, passes through me, that I myself am a seam, that with this seam, while I am alive, something has united in me, something has been soldered, that I am one of many examples in nature of soldering, unification, fusion, harmonization, that I am not living in vain, but there is sense in that I am as I am, an example of synthesis in a world of antitheses. (23–24, 36)

      No theme has been more central to the history of Russian thought than this struggle against dualism. It emerges from a desire to transcend the dichotomies that fragment human existence: spirit versus flesh, reason versus emotion, the moral versus the practical. This yearning to achieve synthesis in the human condition was fully absorbed by Ayn Rand and became one of the earmarks of her Objectivist philosophy.

      Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum,¹ in St. Petersburg on 2 February 1905, during the Silver Age of Russian cultural history. Though she later attributed much of Russia’s cultural brilliance to its Westernized elements, she reveled in the beauty of the epoch:

      As a child, I saw a glimpse of the pre–World War I world, the last afterglow of the most radiant cultural atmosphere in human history (achieved not by Russian, but by Western culture). So powerful a fire does not die at once: even under the Soviet regime, in my college years, such works as Hugo’s Ruy Blas and Schiller’s Don Carlos were included in theatrical repertories, not as historical revivals, but as part of the contemporary esthetic scene.²

      Rand’s recollection reflects her abiding contempt for the specifically “Russian” aspects of the culture. By emphasizing the achievements of the period as distinctly “Western,” Rand disowned the Slavic mysticism and collectivism that she considered characteristic of the Russian psyche. This fact is crucial to our understanding of Rand’s early intellectual development. It helps us to grasp why Rand could never admit that she was a child of her Russian past. For Rand, Russian culture meant hatred for the individual and the rational mind. Russian thought stressed emotion and intuition, not logic and reason; it rejected individualism and embraced communal organicism as expressed in the concept of sobornost’ (conciliarity);³ it was antimaterialist and, above all, anticapitalist. Each aspect of this Russian totality was a natural extension of the other. In Rand’s view, the rejection of reason required the renunciation of individual freedom, material wealth, and capitalism. When Rand tied her defense of the free market to her celebration of the free mind, she was establishing an inseparable link between reason, freedom, individualism, and capitalism, all elements that were absent from the Russian culture that she despised.⁴

      Tatyana Tolstaya (1991) echoes much of Rand’s own view of the constituent elements in the Russian psyche:

      In Russia, in contrast to the West, reason has traditionally been seen as a source of destruction, emotion (the soul) as one of creation. How many scornful pages have great Russian writers dedicated to Western pragmatism, materialism, rationalism! They mocked the English with their machines, the Germans with their order and precision, the French with their logic, and finally the Americans with their love of money. As a result, in Russia we have neither machines, nor order, nor logic, nor money. (6)

      It was perhaps in reaction to this Russian hostility toward reason and individualism that the mature Rand seemed to overemphasize the rational and individuating aspects of human nature.⁵ But inherent in Rand’s view is an integration of reason and emotion, individual and community. By explicitly rejecting conventional rationalism and atomistic individualism, Rand implicitly affirms important elements in the Russian critique of “Western” dualism.

      This is not to say that the struggle against dualism is an exclusively Russian project. To distinguish between Russian and Western culture does not imply that each is hermetically sealed from the other. The history of Russian philosophy is replete with intermingling between Russian and European, especially German, thought. What has emerged, especially since the time of Peter the Great, is a complex amalgam of multiethnic and Western influences. Many Russian thinkers in fact were schooled in European universities; they absorbed the integrated constructions of such Western philosophers as Aristotle, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, among others.⁶

      THE CHARACTER OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY

      One of the most startling characteristics of Russian philosophy has been its nonacademic, noninstitutional orientation (Edie, Scanlan, and Zeldin 1965, ix). Until the end of the nineteenth century, most creative Russian thinkers worked outside the university. Even Vladimir Solovyov, the father of systematic Russian philosophy, withdrew from academia at an early point in his life, because of serious disputes with government authorities (Kline 1967, 258).

      Russian thought has always been human-centered, intimately connected to the literary arts, and immoderately passionate (ibid.). In fact, most of the great Russian thinkers—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak, Gogol, Blok, Bely, and Solovyov—were literary artists and social critics, whose zeal was partially responsible for their exclusion from academic life.

      Russian philosophy throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was considered suspect by the government. In fact, philosophy as a separate discipline was banned from the Russian university curriculum for considerable periods. And until 1889, only the study of certain Platonic and Aristotelian texts was permitted (ibid.).

      The lack of formal philosophical instruction led to the genesis of informal intellectual groups during the 1830s. Many university students studied German metaphysics and French social theory in such group settings. They rejected the view of philosophy as pure contemplation and saw it as a tool in the struggle for truth, justice, and freedom. The whole notion of philosophy as a strictly theoretical discipline is alien to Russian culture. Marxists would later emphasize the unity of theory and practice, but such a social commitment has always been deeply ingrained in the Russian psyche (Copleston 1986, 1). As Kline (1967) explains: “The Russian intelligentsia subordinated theoretical truth (istina) to practical truth-justice (pravda). Russian thinkers were engaged in the ‘quest for truth-justice’ (iskaniye pravdy)” (258).

      This integration of the theoretical and the practical suggests a dialectical theme in Russian philosophy. In the 1840s, Russian intellectuals were deeply influenced by the Idealism of Schelling, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. In particular, Hegel’s impact on Russian intellectual life was immeasurable. Even Hegel’s dialectical language found a home in Russia. Hegel stressed Aufhebung, a process in which one evolutionary state is transcended and abolished, while being simultaneously absorbed and preserved in the motion of the succeeding state. In Russian, the Hegelian Aufhebung is captured by the term snyatiye, which connotes “sublation,” “cancellation,” the “raising to a higher level,” and “preservation” (Edie, Scanlan, and Zeldin 1965, xii). The Hegelian domination of Russian philosophy set the stage for a Marxist infusion in the 1890s and beyond.

      THE SLAVOPHILES

      The movement toward dialectical transcendence of opposites is manifested especially in the 1840s in Khomyakov’s critique of Western religion. Alexey Khomyakov embraced the Slavophile devotion to Orthodox Christianity and personal mystical experience. He viewed Russian Orthodoxy, with its Byzantine roots, as the reconciliation of Catholicism and Protestantism. N. O. Lossky, Rand’s teacher and author of the indispensable History of Russian Philosophy, explains that for Khomyakov, “the rationalism of Catholicism which established unity without freedom gave rise, as a reaction against it, to another form of rationalism—Protestantism

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