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Ayn Rand. Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Читать онлайн.Название Ayn Rand
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780271063744
Автор произведения Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
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.
Not long after her arrival in America, Alissa Rosenbaum renamed herself Ayn Rand. In her early writings, she engages in a concerted effort to understand and critique polarities she had confronted in the Russia of her youth. She focuses primarily on the dialectical unity of religion and statism. She gropes toward a philosophical synthesis that rejects faith and force, but integrates the splits within human existence, between mind and body, fact and value, theory and practice.
NOVELIST AND PHILOSOPHER
Rand was once asked if she was primarily a novelist or a philosopher. In typically dialectical fashion, she responded, “Both” ([1961] 1992T):
In a certain sense, every novelist is a philosopher, because one cannot present a picture of human existence without a philosophical framework; the novelist’s only choice is whether that framework is present in his story explicitly or implicitly, whether he is aware of it or not, whether he holds his philosophical convictions consciously or subconsciously. (New Intellectual, vii)
Rand’s literary and philosophical goals were