LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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