Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America (Politics, Literature, & Film) 1793634777, 9781793634771

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Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand

POLITICS, LITERATURE, AND FILM Series Editor: Lee Trepanier, Samford University The Politics, Literature Film series is an interdisciplinary examination of the intersection of politics with literature and/or film. The series is receptive to works that use a variety of methodological approaches, focus on any period from antiquity to the present, and situate their analysis in national, comparative, or global contexts. Politics, Literature, & Film seeks to be truly interdisciplinary by including authors from all the social sciences and humanities, such as political science, sociology, psychology, literature, philosophy, history, religious studies, and law. The series is open to both American and non-American literature and film. By putting forth bold and innovative ideas that appeal to a broad range of interests, the series aims to enrich our conversations about literature, film, and their relationship to politics. Advisory Board Richard Avaramenko, University of Wisconsin-Madison Linda Beail, Point Loma Nazarene University Claudia Franziska Brühwiler, University of St. Gallen Timothy Burns, Baylor University Paul A. Cantor, University of Virginia Joshua Foa Dienstag, University of California at Los Angeles Lilly Goren, Carroll University Natalie Taylor, Skidmore College Ann Ward, Baylor University Catherine Heldt Zuckert, University of Notre Dame Kimberly Hurd Hale, Coastal Carolina University Sara MacDonald, Huron University Steven J. Michels, Sacred Heart University Andrew Moore, St. Thomas University Recent Titles Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America by Aaron Weinacht Out of the Gray Fog: Ayn Rand’s Europe by Claudia Franziska Bruehwiler Politics, Literature, and Film in Conversation: Essays in Honor of Mary P. Nichols edited by Matthew D. Dinan, Natalie Taylor, Denise Schaeffer, and Paul E. Kirkland Defenses Against the Dark Arts: The Political Education of Harry Potter and His Friends by John S Nelson Between Science and Society: Charting the Space of Science Fiction by Douglas A. Van Belle Pedagogic Encounters: Master and Disciple in the American Novel After the 1980s by Aristi Trendel Why Moralize upon It?: Democratic Education through American Literature and Film by Brian Danoff The Unknown Satanic Verses Controversy on Race and Religion by Üner Daglier Science Fiction and Political Philosophy: From Bacon to Black Mirror edited by Steven Michels and Timothy McCranor

Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand Russian Nihilism Travels to America Aaron Weinacht

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Excerpt(s) from ATLAS SHRUGGED: 35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION by Ayn Rand, copyright © 1957 by Ayn Rand; copyright renewed © 1985 by Eugene Winick, Paul Gitlin, and Leonard Peikoff. Used by permission of Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. From What Is to Be Done?, by Nikolai Chernyshevskii. Copyright © 1989 by Cornell University. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weinacht, Aaron, 1977- author. Title: Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand : Russian nihilism travels to America / Aaron Weinacht. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2021] | Series: Politics, literature, and film | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021031400 (print) | LCCN 2021031401 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793634771 (hardback) | ISBN 9781793634788 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Rand, Ayn. Atlas shrugged. | Chernyshevsky, Nikolay Gavrilovich, 1828-1889—Influence. | Chernyshevsky, Nikolay Gavrilovich, 1828-1889. Chto delatʹ? | Nihilism in literature. | Russian literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Rand, Ayn—Philosophy. | Objectivism (Philosophy) Classification: LCC PS3535.A547 A9438 2021 (print) | LCC PS3535.A547 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031400 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031401 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Tables

vii

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments xi Note on Transliteration

xiii

Introduction 1 1  Establishing the Nihilist Axiom: Rational Egoism in Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, and Rand

31

2  Heroism and the Creativity Principle as a Nihilist Tradition

55

3  Youth, Suffering, and the Man-God Problem

89

4  Love, Sex, and Relationships

121

Conclusion: The Nihilist Self in Context

143

Bibliography 155 Index 165 About the Author

167

v

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2

Fictional Characters and Creative Functions. Fictional Characters and Destructive Functions.

vii

62 63

List of Illustrations

Figure 3.1

Cover Image from Faith of the Fallen

ix

113

Acknowledgments

A number of institutions and individuals have contributed to this project. The block scheduling model at The University of Montana Western has been a great boon, as were internal grants of conference and research travel funding. Among my departmental colleagues who have assisted this project in various ways, particular thanks go to John Hajduk and Sean Eudaily. Thanks are also due to the Archives of the Ayn Rand Institute and to archivist Jeff Britting in particular. This project began life as a doctoral dissertation in history at the University of Kentucky. Particular thanks are due to Karen Petrone and Dan Rowland, Russian historians and graduate professors extraordinaire, for expressing interest in and support for the project that (very) eventually became this book. Thanks are also due to the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. The Journal granted permission to reprint an article that comprises much of chapter 1, and my analysis of what Ayn Rand brought with her from Russia has benefitted in many ways from its editor Chris Sciabarra’s longtime interest in that same question. Needless to say, none of the fine individuals mentioned here bear responsibility for any errors of fact or interpretation contained herein.

xi

Note on Transliteration

When citing Russian words contained in other English-language works, I have adhered to the spelling conventions followed therein. Otherwise, I have followed the Library of Congress system of transliteration.

xiii

Introduction

In October 1947, Ayn Rand née Alissa Rosenbaum, an expatriate Russian proponent of radical capitalism, testified as a friendly witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.1 The next year, Whittaker Chambers also testified before the HUAC, as part of the Alger Hiss espionage case that marked a high point in the history of American anti-Communism.2 A decade after testimonies that were indicative of their mutual anti-communism, Chambers reviewed Rand’s newly published magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. He did so in the pages of William F. Buckley’s National Review, a publication that became the bastion of a new American Conservative movement that was built on the twin pillars of anti-communism and free-market economics. In spite of the fact that communism and state-regulated economies were two of the critical whipping boys of Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s other writings to that point, Atlas Shrugged received a bona fide filleting from Chambers. Conjuring an Orwellian specter with the title “Big Sister is Watching You,” Chambers expressed amazement that “any ordinarily sensible head could possibly take it seriously,” amusement at a cast of characters whom he regarded as “operatic caricatures,” and concluded disgustedly that “Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.”3 Chambers saw Rand’s novel as a case of ridiculous dreaming that evinced too many similarities (e.g., materialism and dictatorial tendencies) to the communism it criticized. Atlas Shrugged was, in this view, unworthy of serious intellectual consideration.4 The novel’s author, for Chambers, was a tiresome autodidact, a dictator-like bringer of a new dispensation for whom the notion that someone could be simultaneously wrong and reasonable could only be absurd.5 In one sense, Chambers was right: Rand’s autodidactic attitude does flavor her work. That Rand regarded herself as sui generis6 is no reason for scholars 1

2

Introduction

to do so, however, which leads to the question of Rand’s Russian antecedents. This is the organizing question of the inquiry below. When one reads a novel produced in another time and place entirely, Russian radical Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s 1863 “nihilist” tract What Is to Be Done?, that ostensibly utopian socialist novel’s similarities to Atlas Shrugged are striking. In plot, character, and, most important, in philosophical conception and purpose, the two novels appear in many ways identical. This similarity, I argue, is not mere coincidence. And the more the argument of this book proves persuasive, the more it will require considering the possibility that the radical anti-statist, pro-free-market ideas of Ayn Rand have more in common with the ideas of nineteenth-century figures who have generally been connected with socialism, than they do with the conservative anti-communist and free-market ethos represented by Buckley’s National Review. Put another way, this book raises the possibility that Rand’s thought had more in common with nineteenthcentury Russian “nihilists” Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Dmitrii Pisarev than it did with American contemporaries whose bêtes noir were identical to her own.7 I address these and related questions, by arguing that Ayn Rand’s ideas form (1) a continuation of a Russian conversation that began in the 1860s and continued through the early twentieth century, and more specifically (2) that Rand’s philosophy is a conceptual and functional reproduction of the “nihilism” of the Russian 1860s. SOME REFLECTIONS ON HISTORIOGRAPHY This project is a simple exercise in noticing a historical connection that has gone mostly unnoticed. As such it will trace the history of an idea, or perhaps more accurately, a conversation about a set of ideas, across time between the 1860s in Russia and the mid-twentieth century in the United States. In addition to the inherent interest of noticing something new, this book’s thesis is historically significant in a number of ways. First, it addresses the historiographical need to look someplace other than the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution for the historical significance and legacy of nineteenth-century radicalism. Past accounts of Russian intellectual history in the nineteenth century have been dominated by the 1917 Revolution, both in the sense that the Revolution was the logical culmination of the history of nineteenth-century radicalism and that it forms a logical bookend, together with earlier events such as the 1790 publication of Aleksandr Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow and the 1825 Decembrist Revolt, for a neatly encapsulated era of Russian radical thought. Well-known examples of historical writing indebted to the above conceptions include Franco Ven-



Introduction 3

turi’s Roots of Revolution, Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s Road to Revolution, and Andrzej Walicki’s synthetic History of Russian Thought.8 Roots of Revolution remains perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the nineteenth century Russian radicals. Conceptually similar to Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s Road to Revolution—in that its premise is that all those radicals led to 1917—Roots of Revolution is encyclopaedic in its coverage and somewhat lacking in interpretive thrust.9 Put another way, Venturi is the place to go, if the question pertains to when exactly the group Zemlia y Volia (“Land and Freedom”) fissioned into Narodnaia Volia (“The People’s Will”) and the Chernyi Peredel, (“The Black Repartitionists”) but in terms of how exactly all these various movements and characters involved in them fit together into a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the collapse of the Russian monarchy and the Bolshevik takeover in 1917, Roots of Revolution and Road to Revolution promise a bit more than they can deliver. Roots of Revolution’s subtitle is A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, and overall, Venturi’s historical research seems to support the topic of the book’s subtitle quite a bit better than it supports the argument implicit in the book’s title. However, new directions in historical writing since the 1950s and 1960s suggest that it is neither feasible to pave the road to revolution solely with the persons of intellectuals, nor advisable to follow the model of the great Russian historian Martin Malia’s doctoral thesis, which he described as having been “exclusively devoted, in the scrupulous tradition of graduate-school training, to the verifiable description and delineation of Herzen’s ideas, without reference to much of anything else.”10 Andrzej Walicki’s excellent A History of Russian Thought is probably the best example of the pros and cons of Malia’s “describe and delineate” approach to the history of ideas. The book is an excellent textbook of Russian ideas such as Chaadaev’s metaphysics and the idealism of the early Solov’ev, but tends to limit itself to Malia’s “verifiable description and delineation,” without many forays into context other than references to a general revolutionary trend. Typical is Walicki’s comment that nihilism “was not a revolutionary movement; no doubt by its attacks on established authorities it helped to radicalize public opinion, but it did not advocate revolutionary methods of struggle or lead automatically toward revolutionary goals.”11 Occurring within a discussion of the principle of rational egoism, the subject of this book’s first chapter, Walicki’s comment suggests the extent to which the 1917 revolution has formed the raison d’ être for Russian intellectual history, as well as the point that A History of Russian Thought tends to be much better at explaining what Pisarev meant by rational egoism than at identifying its short- or longterm historical significance. This is simply to say that new

4

Introduction

treatments of nineteenth century intellectual history can justify neither the assumption that the point of studying intellectuals is that they were the major figures leading up to 1917 (as do Venturi and Yarmolinsky),12 nor to go over again what Chernyshevskii or Solov’ev said, since this would simply reiterate what Walicki has done perfectly well already.13 Isaiah Berlin’s writings on Russian intellectual history are an additional corpus of important works. Berlin tends to subscribe to the view that intellectuals were the main cause of the Revolution, arguing that “The single largest effect of the [intelligentsia] movement . . . was the Russian Revolution itself.”14 Berlin exhibits a keen interest in figures such as Tolstoi, Turgenev, Herzen, and Belinskii for their own sake, though; he weighs the relative merits and demerits of their insights into the human condition.15 This characteristic of Berlin’s essays illuminates his status as both a philosopher of history (as in his essay on Tolstoi, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” and Berlin’s writings on Vico) and a historian of ideas (as in his essays on Herzen and Belinskii). While Berlin’s approach to the history of Russian radicals is nuanced, 1917 still looms rather large in his thinking. Granting that the Revolution “did not follow the lines that [intelligentsia] writers and talkers had anticipated,” Berlin nevertheless argues that the birth of the intelligentsia in the mid-nineteenth century “set the moral tone for the kind of talk and action which continued throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, until the final climax in 1917.”16 Berlin was far too sophisticated a scholar to commit himself to an overly simplistic radical ideas—radical revolution paradigm. However, even for Berlin, 1917 remains the logical endpoint for study of nineteenth century radicals. Interestingly, Lenin himself co-opted nineteenth-century radicals as a legitimizing tradition—one underpinning his own views to a greater or lesser extent. In his 1897 article “The Heritage We Renounce,” for example, Lenin attacked the Populists (narodniki) in favor of peasant socialism and in particular N. K. Mikhailovskii, arguing that his own movement better represented the true “heritage” of 1860s radical thought than did the Populists.17 In 1902, Lenin reused Chernyshevskii’s book title, publishing his own What Is to Be Done?18 If Ayn Rand, that theorist of individualism and radical laissez-faire, reproduced essential characteristics of 1860s radicalism and is deserving of the title “latter-day nihilist,” as I shall argue, then this surely problematizes the extent to which Bolsheviks such as Lenin could claim the “heritage” of the 1860s as their own, uncontested. Leaving aside the question of whether she would have wanted it, Ayn Rand has at least as good a claim to the “heritage” of the Russian 1860s as the Bolsheviks. So if not just radical intellectuals, then who? One of the most important large-scale developments in Russian and Soviet historiography in recent decades has been the general dethroning of the thesis that the Revolution of



Introduction 5

1917 was the work of a few conspirators, who in a coup managed to impose their will on an unwilling population, and whose revolutionary state closely resembled an Orwellian dystopia, in the everyday experience of its citizens.19 This change in interpretation was coterminous with the rising prominence, since the 1970s, of social and cultural history. Such works have addressed the extent to which intellectuals failed to be the prime movers in the Russian Revolution. Laura Engelstein’s Moscow, 1905, for example, argues that the intellectual vanguard had a radicalizing function, but that their control of the revolutionary movement was less than total. While the Bolsheviks were influential in radicalizing workers, they neither controlled nor manipulated the action; ultimately, “intelligentsia militants did not have the power to control their constituency.”20 Carrying the point forward into the Stalinist era, Karen Petrone’s Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades concludes that Stalinist celebrations often failed to come off as planned, and that alcohol consumption, for example, often ranked higher on participants’ list of priorities than did celebration of the victory of socialism.21 These two books, then, nicely capture an overall historiographical trend in writing about Russia, which tends to move away from “great ideas” explanations for momentous historical events. Conclusions of the type reached by Engelstein and Petrone suggest that a rethinking of radical intellectual history prior to the Revolution is in order, given the waning of “top-down” explanations for the Revolution. Since the 1990s, the work of historians such as Jochen Hellbeck, Igal Halfin, and Yuri Slezkine marks something of a reassertion of the importance of ideas.22 But regardless, it no longer seems historiographically justifiable to cast the significance of nineteenth century intellectual radicals solely in terms of the extent to which they did or did not play a part in a scheme of progressive radicalization whose logical and/or inevitable culmination was the Revolution of 1917. Having situated the present inquiry as it pertains to the radicals and the Russian Revolution, I now turn to a narrower set of concerns: literature on Russian nihilism and on Rand herself. Freed from the need to portray the Revolution as the main reason one ought to study Russian intellectuals, historians have begun asking different questions about them, with Pozefsky’s look at “nihilism” in Russian culture in the 1860s being a good example.23 Pozefsky takes a semiotic approach to nihilism, looking at it as a set of cultural symbols and asking what the place of those symbols was in contemporary Russian culture. As a result of both his approach and his conclusions, Pozefsky will provide something of a model for this project—his methodology incorporates literature, archival records, and a theoretical perspective informed by a discursive approach to historical research. This book thus intends to do for the legacy of nihilism what Pozefsky has done for its significance at the time.

6

Introduction

Two of Pozefsky’s key theses regarding nihilism’s significance are as follows. First, he argues that the nature of nihilism was such that it became, between 1894 and 1917, “a kind of ideological yardstick against which intellectuals on the left often defined their own views.” Tellingly, the same judgment appears to be true of the contemporary American Left, whose response to Rand’s name can be termed “Pavlovian” with little exaggeration. Rand fans generally return the favor, it should be said. In Pisarev, Populists and Marxists saw an “individualism that bordered on hedonism.”24 Second, Pozefsky argues that “the interpretive key to nihilist writings lies not in a connection to the larger trajectory of the history of social thought but in the lived experiences of the nihilists themselves.” Pozefsky proposes this thesis in distinction to the work of Isaiah Berlin, Walicki, and Venturi, who have tried to assess intellectuals in terms of their impact on their descendants. He chooses instead to assess the impact of nihilism on its contemporaries, since Pisarev’s main legacy, the argument goes, was there, and not “on any lasting system of thought.”25 My argument therefore charts a sort of middle ground between Pozefsky and the older contingent of intellectual historians such as Venturi and Walicki: it contends that there is in fact a lasting legacy of nihilism that can be traced by the historian, but contends that that legacy was largely focused on asking interior questions about the character of the self, as opposed to some exterior-focused systematic political program. If nihilism left nothing resembling a philosophical “system” to its successors, one has to ask, what legacy did it in fact bequeath? Here, the literature on the Russian intellectual history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is instructive. In a discussion of the principle of zhiznetvorchestvo (roughly, “life-creation”), Irina Paperno argues that Russian modernists such as Bely and Briusov, drawing especially on the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev, were engaged in an attempt to fuse life and art into a “deliberate aesthetic organization of behavior,” so as to create an “aesthetic utopia.”26 This argument will merit much more attention in chapters to follow. Here, I simply note that the legacy left by the nihilists, documented by other historians through the Silver Age,27 and argued by me, in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, much more resembles something like Paperno’s “aesthetic utopia,” or “life-aesthetic,” than a philosophical “system” in a more traditional sense. So, to be convinced by Pozefsky’s assessment of the character of nihilism and its contemporary impact, is not to say that The Nihilist Imagination has said everything there is to say on the matter. Rather, the field for research into nineteenth century radicals is wide open, absent a revolutionary teleology. While Russian radicals have undergone periods of intense scholarly interest, this is not so much the case with Ayn Rand. To date, the main attempt to tie Rand to a Russian context has been the scholar Chris Sciabarra’s book



Introduction 7

Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical.28 While Sciabarra’s book title is broad, his main focus is on the much narrower claim that what Rand got from her Russian background was a pronounced distaste for dualist philosophy. In spite of their obvious differences, Sciabarra argues, Rand is united with Karl Marx in her rejection of the “mind-body dichotomy” and “Both Marx and Rand traced the interconnectedness of social phenomena, uncovering a startling cluster of relations between and among the institutions and structures of society.”29 Sciabarra concludes that Rand’s essential mode of argument is dialectical, as was Marx’s.30 Whatever the merits of this argument, it is certainly true that this is not all there is to be said about Rand and her Russian background, as Sciabarra himself acknowledges. Among the available scholarly avenues he sees, are “Rand’s literary method and its relationship to nineteenth-century Russian literature,”31 a line of inquiry to be pursued herein. Other scholarly treatments of Rand and Russia are few. These include an article by Russian intellectual historian Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, which argues that the New Economic Policy period (1921–1927) is the backdrop for Rand’s The Fountainhead, and that the “subtext” for Atlas Shrugged is “the collapse of the Russian economy between 1916 and 1921.”32 Rosenthal also makes the very useful point that Rand was responding to the Russian cultural trope of suffering, which will be a main topic of chapter 4. Like Sciabarra, Rosenthal notes that there remains quite a lot to be said regarding Rand’s Russian context. Two articles connecting Rand to the dissident Evgenii Zamiatin and a volume of essays edited by philosophers Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen more or less round out the literature on Rand that contains anything of much use regarding her background in Russia.33 Russian literature scholar Zina Gimpelevich argues that the similarities between Zamiatin’s We and Rand’s The Fountainhead make Rand’s familiarity with Zamiatin nearly certain; one Peter Saint-Andre penned an article for the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies that provides an overview of the literary connection between Zamiatin and Rand; philosopher Robert Hollinger argues that there are important parallels between Rand’s ideas and Dostoevskii’s “underground man,” both of whom view reality as “a stone wall, which one can either obey or futilely bang against.”34 Historian James Baker has written a rather general biography of Rand, which is mostly concerned with her American context. Baker’s book contains some useful observations about Rand’s personality, but not much by way of overall argument.35 The best extant scholarly work on Rand currently is the excellent but America-focused work of American historian Jennifer Burns, referenced previously. Given the general paucity of historical scholarship that links Rand to a Russian context, therefore, a project that attempts link Rand to the nihilists necessarily builds on previous

8

Introduction

insights as much as possible, but has nevertheless to chart a certain amount of terra incognita. REFLECTIONS ON METHOD, THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES What follows will address and justify in some detail the methodological and theoretical commitments that guide this project, in its capacity as an exercise in the “history of ideas.”36 Studying ideas is analogous to religion scholar Paul Griffiths’s view that his own field is more or less a “discipline in search of a subject.”37 Defining one’s subject is a problem any research should consider, but it does present some interesting challenges for the history of ideas. Military historians could argue about which events should be included in a narrative account of the commencement and cessation of hostilities in a factory town on the Volga River in the fall and winter of 1942–1943, but it is doubtful that any of them entertain ontological doubts about the Battle of Stalingrad.38 So, what is being studied here? One might argue, as historian A. O. Lovejoy might have, that there exists a sort of Platonist “form” of an idea, and the task of the historian is to decide how well real-life versions measure up to the ideal.39 This would mean positing a sort of “primordial nihilism” that Rand did or did not reproduce, to varying degrees. One might argue, with Quentin Skinner, instead, that historians of ideas ought to focus on the various contextually determined intentions that authors had in writing what they did.40 This would mean identifying what Chernyshevskii intended What Is to Be Done? to “do” or what meanings are “intended in” the text, and then asking whether or not the contexts Rand inhabited were such that they could produce similar intentions in and for Atlas Shrugged. Additionally, one might identify, as this work will do, a longrunning conversation in which ideas seem to both create and be created by context. Put it another way: sometimes I do things because of an idea I have. Other times, the things I do give me ideas.41 Here, it becomes necessary to consider commonplace notions such as “influence,” (i.e., “Pisarev was influenced by Chernyshevskii”), “indebtedness,” (“Rand’s Atlas Shrugged exemplifies an obvious ‘debt’ to What Is to Be Done?”), “antecedents,” “descendants,” and the like. Since the central goal of this project is to establish that the nihilist “influence” on Rand is sufficiently clear as to imply the need to rethink the nihilists’ historical significance, it would be wise to consider how to talk about “influence” when the characters in question were not contemporaries, and when Atlas Shrugged was written nearly one hundred years after Chernyshevskii’s novel. If one wishes to talk about Ayn Rand as a sort of latter-day “nihilist,” then this implies that an idea



Introduction 9

can, to a certain degree, be exported from context while remaining essentially consistent, since the world Rand inhabited was certainly not the same world inhabited by Chernyshevskii or Dostoevskii (or any of their fictional heroes, for that matter). This is the point at which historian John Toews’s concept “textual events” is useful, since I take it to imply both the important nature of particular texts and the acknowledgment that these texts have contexts that cannot be ignored. In a review of Martin Jay’s Marxism and Totality, whose subtitle “The Adventures of a Concept” informs my own approach to nihilism, Toews notes that [Jay] focuses on a number of textual events within the discourse of totality that Western Marxists had already selected as relevant to their own project or that had exerted an obvious impact on their intellectual formations. His aim is to show that, by the time of the emergence of Western Marxism after World War I, the concept of totality was already imbedded in a complex, inwardly differentiated discourse, providing various possibilities for creative appropriation.42

This statement neatly characterizes my own conception of how to talk about ideas in history. In it, one can see ideas envisioned as both affecting and being affected by, as having both a coherency over time, and as offering opportunities for reinterpretation by participants in intellectual discourse. I will, therefore, operate under the assumption that the following are valid: 1) That ideas can exhibit an inner logic or coherence such that they take on a degree of portability, either across time, or from their elaborators.43 This makes ideas into historical actors, and accounts for the law of unintended consequences. This seems important to do, since it is a fact of experience that ideas often exhibit effects unintended by anyone, much less their authors.44 2) That this initial assumption does not free the historian from the necessity of embedding an idea in its various contexts. 3) That the historian has to mediate between the meaning(s) of the text as it affects and is affected by the context, and between sides of what Donald Kelley calls the “I-O” (“Inside-Outside”) problem, where “intellectual history may be seen as the inside of cultural history, cultural history as the outside of intellectual history, and the challenge for the historian is to bring the two into alliance.”45 By way of example, this issue is at work in this book in the discussion of suffering and “original sin.” From an “Inside” point of view, any theoretical system purporting to reject the Christian God (or maybe any God) and achieve some kind of earthly perfection necessarily has to find a way to argue that belief in the value of suffering and the existence of original sin is illegitimate. The way in which this logic will play out however, will be determined by the “Outside,” in this case by the particularly Christian cultures Chernyshevskii and Rand lived in, and by the Christian take on suffering and original sin. In sum, this project

10

Introduction

will pay close attention both to what authors such as Chernyshevskii intended their ideas to do, and to the extent to which the nihilist nexus of ideas became a portable discourse capable of moving beyond original intent. In sum, my approach to the history of ideas will attempt to run a middle ground between the sides of Donald Kelley’s I-O problem, in that it will approach an idea as having both an internal (i.e., inner-logical) and an external (i.e., contextual) component that combine to produce the overall history of a discourse that can take into account the reality of context, authorial intent, and unintended consequences. As it pertains to the historiography, this means running a middle ground between the largely textual approach of a historian such as Walicki and the heavily social approach of a historian such as Engelstein, with the intention to alight somewhere in the middle, with Paperno and Pozefsky. The work of the late sociological theorist Philip Rieff also provides an important conceptual backdrop to this book. The latter nineteenth century, Rieff argued, occasioned important shifts in how the cultures of the West conceived of and interacted with the idea of the “Sacred.”46 Chernyshevskii and Pisarev’s enemies—Turgenev and Dostoevskii foremost among them— perceived that those “nihilists” intended the destruction of all that was formerly sacred. This is a nice conceptual and chronological fit with Rieff’s thesis that Nietzsche and Freud heralded a new era where authority that formerly resided in binding and culture-defining tradition relocated to the sovereign individual unbound by any such sacral context.47 Rieff’s analysis is also useful in a second and somewhat different way. His work provides the historian with rational (as opposed to aesthetic or visceral) grounds on which to reject the more radical implications of Foucault-style discourse analysis, while retaining those aspects of a discursive approach that seem justified by the evidence in question.48 Michel Foucault’s deep epistemological skepticism was always a Faustian bargain for historians. Hayden White, the recently deceased doyen of literary critics of historical practice, finally “came clean” about this in an acerbic footnote in The Practical Past. White expressed his faint hope that historians might gain some philosophical sophistication from engaging Heidegger’s parsing of the term “history,” but noted that the conceptual “clarification” that would undoubtedly ensue guaranteed that historians would ignore his suggestion. It is essential that “history” be left vague, in White’s view, since if we got clear on what the term “history” actually refers to, we could no longer maintain “the myth that the term ‘history’ designates something real.”49 In an important sense, however, my project in the history of ideas—tracing the intellectual lineage of nihilism—is consonant with a broadly Foucauldian approach wherein the line between text and context is not always clear.



Introduction 11

Literature in Russian society in the 1860s became sufficiently blurred with reality that much of the time it was difficult to tell the two apart.50 Witness the fact that police talked of Turgenev’s Bazarov as though he were a real person, that literary figures became role models worthy of imitation, and that the point of Pisarev’s “Bazarov” essay was to argue that the “new people” were in fact all “Bazarovs.” This merging of literature and reality, to create a discourse that was less “about” nihilism than it itself was nihilism, is surely a good fit for the heuristic notion of discourse that Foucault and White emphasized, in their various idioms. Further, as Irina Paperno, Olga Matich, and others have detailed, the Silver Age saw a concerted attempt—that had its roots in the 1860s—to fuse art and life into an “aesthetic utopia.” In Rand’s nonfictional essays, for her part, she continually refers readers to the behavior of her fictional characters, as though the true “reality” is best represented by the “subjective” experience of her fictional characters rather than the “objective” experience of nonfictional reality.51 Chernyshevskii takes great pains to point out how his “new people” are examples of how thinking people presently are, and how everybody will be in the future. The Chernyshevskiian imperative to readers? Life is a text: write yours well.52 The nihilist conversation in the 1860s, Rand’s conception of what she was doing, and the Silver Age aesthetics that provided something of a bridge between the two, certainly seem to call for a discursive approach, if any historical material ever has. Having argued that the tendency to interpret reality as discursively constructed is itself a historically contingent phenomenon, Rieff has provided rational grounds on which to reject a radical Foucauldian or White-ian skepticism. This refusal can then undergird an argument that the nature of the intellectual tradition analyzed herein requires both an adoption of a discursive approach and a rejection of its more radical implications. A prominent feature of nihilism is its attempt to fuse art and life, subjectivity and objectivity, text and context. Rand and the 1860s nihilists clearly saw these terms as describing two different things. Adopting a Foucauldian sort of claim that discourse “is” reality is thus to start from the premise that all of the historical subjects of this book were in some a priori sense mistaken about the basic state of the universe. This seems an ungenerous way to begin a research project into the history of ideas. Thus, I will be adopting what I take to be the practical relevance of discourse analysis for my historical subject matter, and avoiding its more radical philosophical implications that seem to prevent sources from speaking for themselves at all. This approach, I hope, will allow this book to interact constructively with relevant developments in historical theory, while at the same time avoiding theoretical commitments that are stronger that those borne out by the body of actual research.53

12

Introduction

To summarize the preceding methodological and theoretical reflections, then this book will account for the various social and cultural contexts within which the pertinent texts were produced. To fail to do so would be to fall into the old textualist fallacy identified by Quentin Skinner, for example, where the historical meaning of a text is taken to be something essential to and entirely within the text itself.54 I will also, however, be operating under the assumption that the exchange between text and context is two-way—that ideas themselves take on the role of active historical agents, in their own right. To support this approach, I submit not that ideas be treated in a contextual vacuum, so much as I argue that they can become part of that context as roving historical agents, “recurrent ideas” if you will, that acquire their own motive logic as a writer like Ayn Rand engaged them. ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE AND A BRIEF AYN RAND BIOGRAPHY The organizational pivot of this essay is a close reading of Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged—they are the magna opera of their authors, and the similarities between the two novels, in plot, character, conception, and exposition, are impossible to ignore. In comparison of these two novels, numerous common themes emerge. These include egoism, rejection of original sin, emphasis on the human will with its heroic capabilities and creative impulse, the relationship between freedom and necessity, emphasis on youth, the nature of negative emotions such as blame, guilt, jealousy, and envy, the God-man versus man-God problem,55 and the treatment of love, sex, and relationships. Given the centrality of these two novels to their respective authors, this project will proceed through a series of thematic chapters, each dedicated to one or more of these themes. Orbiting this central locus of investigation will be discussion of these key themes in terms of other central participants in the Russian conversation about “nihilism” that began in the 1860s. Dmitrii Pisarev and Fedor Dostoevskii are of particular importance, in this regard, as Pisarev became the movement’s standard-bearer after Chernyshevskii’s imprisonment in 1862, and Dostoevskii, in his own way, contributed to the creation of nihilism.56 Pisarev’s influence had a lasting power. Pozefsky has noted that the last decade of the nineteenth century saw a surge in interest in Pisarev, and in the 1890s, the literary critic Shelgunov argued that Pisarev’s 1862 essay “Bazarov,” on Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, had actually been what inspired Chernyshevskii to write What Is to Be Done?57 So, in the years immediately preceding Rand’s birth, discussion of the ideas of the 1860s was still a matter



Introduction 13

of great interest for an educated Russian readership. In 1900, the revolutionary Vera Zasulich argued that Chernyshevskii had inspired Pisarev with his own rejection of altruism and self-sacrifice, so that discussion of the 1860s in terms of its implications for the psychological health and behavior of the individual remained current for both the critic Shelgunov and for the Social Democrat Zasulich.58 While there is no direct and incontrovertible evidence that the young Ayn Rand sat down and read What Is to Be Done? from beginning to end, Pozefsky argues that there is a good amount of evidence to support the scenario of “provincial gymnasium students poring over Pisarev [and What Is to Be Done?] feverishly in secret, sharing in a clandestine, nocturnal and communal experience, a rite of passage and an intellectual awakening. . . .”59 This image of “provincial gymnasium students” huddled over the writings of 1860s nihilists provides a context in which Rand might have read these thinkers, at a young age. Chernyshevskii’s novel was ubiquitous, in any event. The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900), who was friendly with Dostoevskii and may have provided something of a model for the protagonist Alesha in The Brother Karamazov, will also loom rather large as a point of transition between the 1860s and Rand’s era in Russia.60 Solov’ev, particularly in his ideas about “Godmanhood” (Bogochelovechestvo) and through his central influence on late nineteenth and early twentieth century avant-garde culture, addressed a number of the same issues prominent in 1860s discourse, and so both he and the fin de siècle avantgarde will figure prominently in tracing the path of the nihilist conversation forward in time to Rand’s period in Russia in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Although Rand’s own words justify the use of Atlas Shrugged as the central window into her thought, this book engages Rand’s other writings. These include both published fiction and nonfiction, as well as unpublished archival sources and published correspondence. Finally, and in an admittedly cursory fashion,61 the project will also address the issue of Rand’s reception in the United States, with the particular aim of a comparison between it and the Russia reception of nihilism. To the extent that this reception proves to be similar, this will add to the evidence of Rand’s debt to the Russian 1860s. Given this book’s heavy use of literary evidence, what makes comparing Rand with Chernyshevskii and Pisarev have an initial historical plausibility? Reflecting on his attempt to bring his experience of the American 1960s to bear on his teaching and research in Russian radicalism, historian Abbot Gleason notes that he “wanted to avoid the pitfalls of easy and anachronistic analogy.”62 My central claim in answer to this problem, is that there is, from the shestidesiatniki to Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, an identifiable conversation going on, one that takes place in and through time, that is concerned with a

14

Introduction

roughly coherent nexus of ideas, and whose participants had real intellectual, and in some cases, personal connections to one another. What Is to Be Done?, Pisarev’s essay “Thinking Proletariat,” and Atlas Shrugged will serve as key “textual events” within this overall discourse that took place between the 1860s and the mid-twentieth century. . . . I have chosen to focus on Chernyshevskii and Pisarev, largely due to Pozefsky’s arguments about historical periodization of the 1860s. Pozefsky argues that the “1860s” were really the period from 1856–1866.63 The former date signifies the beginning of the relative thaw in state control of the intellectual sphere that followed the death of Nicholas I in 1855 at the close of the disastrous Crimean War.64 The latter date signifies the new round of censorship that marked official response to Dmitrii Karakozov’s attempt on the life of Alexander II in 1866. The government closed down the journals Russkoe slovo (“Russian Word”) and Sovremennik (“The Contemporary”), effectively ending this thaw.65 The years 1856–1866 thus make a good deal of sense as boundary lines for this pivotal period in Russian intellectual history.66 Pozefsky also argues that this ten-year period ought to be divided into two subperiods, 1856–1861, and 1862–1866. In the first period, the argument goes, key figures included Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, and N. A. Dobroliubov. This period was one of enlightenment, where, in his capacity as the editor of Sovremennik, Chernyshevskii “popularized the materialism of the German left-Hegelians and the economic theories of both French socialists and English utilitarians.”67 Dobroliubov died in 1861, and Chernyshevskii was arrested in 1862, ushering in a new generation of radicals who were most outspokenly represented by Dmitrii Pisarev.68 This new generation of radicals shifted their thinking “from social policy to social identity, and from the attempt to transform society to the attempt to preserve a place for the critically engaged intellectual within it.”69 Historian Jochen Hellbeck has made a similar argument about Chernyshevskii, suggesting that he wrote What Is to Be Done? “in part to define a norm of behavior for his own personal life. The pursuits and issues of his novelistic heroes were also the questions of his life.”70 An example of this shift in focus lies in Chernyshevskii’s portrayal of a “fictitious marriage” designed to liberate a girl from the stifling confines of her parents’ authority. The real-life phenomenon of fictitious marriages was heavily influenced by Chernyshevskii’s novel, and so exemplifies an answer to the “how should we live?” question.71 Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? (1863), though Pozefsky places its author’s primary journalistic influence in the 1856–1861 period, fits squarely within the zeitgeist of the second period, from 1862 to 1866. Pozefsky, in fact, makes this point, noting that Chernyshevskii “followed Pisarev’s lead” and turned his focus in that novel to “the personal lives of the youngest cohort



Introduction 15

of radicals.”72 This book will provide much additional evidence for Pozefsky’s argument here, and his periodic division of the 1860s thus suggests that treating Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? together with the ideas of Dmitrii Pisarev makes good historical sense: it is attentive both to logical historical periods and to the fact that together Chernyshevskii and Pisarev are canonical figures. These two figures, then, will form the basic chronological starting point, with the date 1862 being the key moment: Chernyshevskii was writing What Is to Be Done? in prison, and Pisarev was emerging as the leader of the new cohort of social radicals. Fleshing out our early cast of characters, one comes to the roles of Turgenev and Dostoevskii, who functioned both as critics and creators of nihilism and nihilist discourse. Bazarov, one of the central characters of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), became a kind of nihilist icon, so much so that Pisarev wrote a responsorial essay entitled “Bazarov,” in which he argued that “real” nihilists were just like Bazarov, only better, and that this was a good thing, with “Bazarovism” serving him as an archetypal signifier for a new and better generation of “new people.”73 As noted above, that Russian government officials sometimes failed to distinguish between fictional characters and actual people blurred the line between literature and “reality.” Pozefsky notes one particular case, where the Third Section produced an “History of the Social Revolutionary Movement” in 1887, in which the author’s “analysis of nihilism focuses on ‘Bazarov’ and does not distinguish between the nihilist literary-type and living representatives of the radical movement.”74 This fusion of reality and literature will be visible in Rand’s Objectivist movement as well. When you buy a bumper sticker reading “what would John Galt do?” you have thereby committed yourself— emulating the simultaneous success of the marketing strategists who dreamed up this imperative—to making fiction become reality. Paralleling his liminal status as a fictional/real character in Atlas Shrugged, John Galt has access to scientific knowledge that is more science fiction than science. This both exemplifies the blurring of literature and reality, and problematizes the buyer’s ability to do what John Galt does. Pisarev similarly argued that science and fiction ought to become one.75 This idea is revealing. It explains how nihilism could bill itself as an empirically realist way of life and incorporate the fantastical realms of Vera Pavlovna’s literary dreams, at the same time. Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdiaev noticed this phenomenon some one hundred years ago, in his contribution to Vekhi (Signposts) “Philosophical Verity and Intelligentsia Truth.” Arguing that Russian intellectuals were attracted to science not for its own sake, but because of the particular social uses to which it could be put, Berdiaev noted that “What attracted the Russian intelligentsia [to ‘scientific positivism’] was not the objectivity

16

Introduction

of positivism but its subjectivity, which idolized mankind.”76 For Berdaiev, intelligentsia interest in “science” was less about objective reality than it was about the “scientist.” Rand’s ideas exhibit the same dynamic: Atlas Shrugged incorporates science fiction–like qualities that idolize heroic individuals, and one can find Rand’s influence in American comic books and contemporary science fiction/fantasy writers such as Terry Goodkind.77 In a Russian context, the novels of Fedor Dostoevskii added to this fusion of literature with “reality” and provided a literary reaction to nihilism. Pozefsky argues that that “within an anti-nihilist discourse, the nihilist was not simply an average young revolutionary or proto socialist. Rather, the nihilist emerges from a collection of contemporary texts less as an actual social and political being than as a symbol of the apprehensions of the critics of radicalism.”78 As a social phenomenon, it is therefore possible to talk of “nihilism” as both Dostoevskii’s subject and his discursive creation. Emerging, then, is a “nihilism” born of a conversation that took place between and among Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, and Turgenev, in the 1860s, and continued in the works of Dostoevskii, from the 1860s through the publication of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, in 1880. Continuing on the heels of the 1860s and the novels of Dostoevskii, was the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev. According to Solov’ev’s contemporary, philosopher L. M. Lopatin, Solov’ev had begun his intellectual career as a “typical nihilist of the ‘sixties,” and that “[n]ever since have I met a materialist so passionately convinced.”79 Animating Solov’ev’s writings, to give only one example of his engagement with the 1860s, is the question of whether God became man in Christ, for the salvation of humanity, or, if/since God does not exist, man must become God so as to achieve salvation on his own terms. The question of whether man is/must become God runs through Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?, and Dostoevskii’s characters, particularly in Crime and Punishment and Devils, exemplify his answers to this same question. Solov’ev discusses the man-God question most explicitly in his Chteniia o bogochelovechestve (“Lectures on Godmanhood”), but these themes which animated both Chernyshevskii and Dostoevskii run throughout his writings.80 Solov’ev quickly rejected the positivism of the 1860s, but he remained engaged with issues such as the man-God problem and so helped sustain a long-running debate. Solov’ev also wrote widely on questions of love and aesthetics, topics near and dear to the hearts of the shestidesiatniki (“men of the sixties”). Chernyshevskii’s master’s thesis, for example, was titled The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality,81 and What Is to Be Done? is very much concerned with the nature of love and the place love ought to have in an aesthetically organized life. Solov’ev’s writings on love and aesthetics in turn exercised a heavy in-



Introduction 17

fluence on the Russian avant-garde around the turn of the nineteenth century. An entire cohort of poets and writers such as Zinaida Gippius and Dmitrii Merezhkovskii were very much concerned with questions about the relationship between a new and better world and personal questions about love, sex, and aesthetics.82 The late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century avant-garde heavily influenced the intellectual milieu that provided the immediate backdrop for Ayn Rand’s formative period in Russia. Solov’ev was also a key influence on the renowned philosopher Nicholas Losskii. Losskii may have been one of Rand’s teachers, and like Solov’ev, had gone through a Dostoevskii “phase.”83 As Sciabarra has noted, it is impossible to prove conclusively that Losskii was one of Rand’s teachers, as she claimed, but it seems likely that she took at least some instruction from him, albeit in an unofficial capacity.84 Losskii was banned from teaching at his St. Petersburg State University post in 1921, the same year Rand entered the university, and was exiled in the fall of 1922, along with Nicholas Berdiaev, Semen Frank, and Sergei Bulgakov of the Vekhi group (among others).85 I am inclined to agree with Sciabarra’s judgment that Rand had no compelling reason to lie about her connection with Losskii, particularly given her usual reticence to mention any thinkers other than herself.86 Additionally, Losskii’s mother-in-law Mariia Stoiunina ran a girls’ school located at # 20 Kabinetskaia Street in St. Petersburg.87 Rand lived in two main locations in St. Petersburg, one of which was approximately two-thirds of a mile southwest of the school, and the other less than half-mile northwest of the school.88 Between Rand’s own mention of Losskii and the fact that she lived in two locations that were within close walking distance of a school with which Losskii was personally connected, the suggestion that Rand took some unofficial instruction from him does not seem implausible. Additionally, the well-known Russian historian N. I. Kareev was on the university faculty in St. Petersburg when Rand was a student there. Kareev had expressed opposition to both student mutual aid societies (zemliachestvo) that had become dominated by radical students, and to the old class structure of the tsarist era.89 Kareev, too, was deeply invested in Russian intellectual history since the mid-nineteenth century. Rand’s college transcript lists a total of sixteen history courses she took at the university, and also contains the signatures of the courses’ instructors. The signatures on twelve of Rand’s history courses are illegible, and circumstantial evidence would suggest a high likelihood that Kareev was the professor of at least a few of these courses, and probably at least one non-history course, as well.90 In 1879, he published a work on peasants and agriculture in eighteenth-century France. This makes Kareev the logical candidate to have taught a course Rand took on “French Social Movements,” in addition to any of the twelve history courses whose professor is unclear.

18

Introduction

Kareev was a proponent of the individual’s role in the historical process, and as such, reconstituted much of the “subjective sociology” of Petr Lavrov and N. K. Mikhailovskii.91 While in school himself, Kareev read the writings of Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, “especially Pisarev,” and was a “regular reader of the journal ‘Otechestvennye zapiski.’”92 One of Rand’s probable teachers was very much engaged with the ideas of the shestidesiatniki. Finally, with the trail of “physical” evidence connecting Rand with the 1860s, it is worth noting that she conceived of herself as a historian. When she applied to film school in 1924, she had to fill out a questionnaire (oprosnyi list’), and under the question “profession and specialty,” she chose “historian.”93 So, along with evidence that suggests that Rand had teachers who were deeply invested in history in general and in Russian intellectual history in particular, the fact that Rand thought of herself as a historian provides a window into her self-image at this formative time. Putting her teachers’ familiarity and experience with Russian intellectual history and movements together with evidence that she thought of herself as having functional knowledge of the past, the historian has cause to operate under the working assumption that Rand was very much familiar with prominent trains of thought in public intellectual discourse in the 1860s—issues that retained their salience up to and into the Soviet era.94 With this chronological sketch in mind, we can now embark on a thematic analysis of a long-running Russian conversation about a series of themes such as egoism, heroism, creativity, youth, suffering, the question of whether God became man or man must become God, love, sex, and relationships. These themes are key both to 1860s nihilism in general and to What Is to Be Done? in particular, and what follows seeks to show how, through analysis of each of these themes, Rand was a full participant in a Russian context and conversation whose genesis occurred almost one hundred years before the 1957 publication of Atlas Shrugged. Though she became a citizen of the United States in 1931, Rand was an American whose intellectual roots were heavily Russian. This will shed light both on a nonRevolutionary trajectory taken by 1860s nihilism, and on the incredulity of Whittaker Chambers.95 Ayn (pronounced “Ain”) Rand was born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, in 1905. After her father’s business was nationalized in 1917, her family left Petersburg for the Crimea, during which time she declared herself an atheist.96 According to her graduation certificate, Rand graduated from high school on June 30, 1921, in the city of Yevpatoria, in the Crimea.97 Her family then returned to Petersburg later that same year.98 In 1921, she entered St. Petersburg State University,99 majoring in history and minoring in philosophy, and graduated in 1924, possibly having studied philosophy with Losskii.100 In



Introduction 19

1924, she briefly worked as a museum tour guide, an experience that adds to the autobiographical qualities of her novel We the Living, whose main character is also a museum employee for a time.101 Also in 1924, Rand entered film school, at the “State Technicum of Film Arts.102 According to the NKVD (the Russian secret police), Rand left Russia for the United States on January 14, 1926,103 ostensibly to visit relatives, and spent the rest of her life there. In 1929, Rand married Frank O’Connor, whom she met while employed as a screenwriter for Cecil B. DeMille, and in the early 1930s, began work on the semiautobiographical We the Living, which was published in 1936.104 In 1943, Rand published The Fountainhead, the story of one Howard Roark, an architect whose heroic, creative, and uncompromising vision of his art is stifled by the banality and altruist values of those around him.105 Four years later, Rand published the novella Anthem, which she actually wrote in 1937, and which portrays a dystopia not unlike that portrayed in Evgenii Zamiatin’s 1921 novel We.106 Rand then spent the next ten years working on her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, which she described to a Russian audience as “my best and most important novel.”107 Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, with Rand remarking in 1961 that that novel was the pinnacle of everything she desired to say, so that she was not sure that she would ever write fiction again.108 James Baker notes that Rand lectured at Columbia, Yale, and Princeton in 1960, so that this decade saw her enter more philosophical circles as opposed to a simple career as a fiction writer.109 Rand published collections of essays in volumes titled For The New Intellectual and The Romantic Manifesto.110 The place Rand gave to her fiction and to Atlas Shrugged in particular, however, remained unchanged. For the New Intellectual, for instance, is comprised of an eponymously titled introductory essay, followed by excerpts from Rand’s fiction, which she thought illuminated the most important points of her ideas. In the preface, she gives John Galt’s speech toward the end of Atlas Shrugged the highest place in this hierarchy of importance, noting for example that her philosophical system was complete and that “Galt’s speech is its briefest summary.”111 Rand continued writing until her death in 1982, all the while propounding a vision of man as a heroic individual, and arguing in favor of a laissez faire social and economic vision that would provide this individual with a context in which superhuman heroism could become the basic reality of human existence. As Rand said of her own efforts “[the] motive and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man.”112 The foregoing established Chernyshevskii’s similar intentions and provided plausible grounds for comparison with Rand. So, if Rand’s “individualism” and Chernyshevskii’s “communalism” must be opposed, then we still have to explain myriad and inescapable similarities between Atlas Shrugged

20

Introduction

and What Is to Be Done? These similarities range from the late-entering revolutionary superhero into the plot, the philosophically and erotically charged love triangles between the main characters, and the late entrance of a dream sequences in which the main female character observes the utopian characteristics of the ideal future, to much broader arguments in favor of rational egoism, a belief in action on the basis of self-love, without necessary reference to concepts such as “the good of the whole,” or altruism.113 It strains credulity to assume that the similarities in form, content, and implication of Atlas Shrugged and What Is to Be Done? are mere coincidence. And so what follows considers the similarities between Rand’s ideas and nihilism, as both sets of ideas look ahead to the “emancipation of personality”114 from the grasp of social structures and “irrational” patterns or habits of mind that inhibit the growth of heroic, egoist individuals to their full potential as human beings. NOTES 1. Rand’s complete HUAC testimony was published in the volume Hearings Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry (Washington, United States Government Printing Office, 1947). This volume is available electronically at: https://ia802607.us.archive.org/23/items/hearingsregardin1947aunit/ hearingsregardin1947aunit.pdf; internet, accessed February 12, 2020. Rand’s testimony begins on p. 82 of the book, and p. 92 of the electronic file. 2.  Transcripts available from The Alger Hiss Trials, “Excerpts from the Hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee Relating to the Alger Hiss Case”; available from https://famous-trials.com/algerhiss/648-hearings; internet, accessed February 12, 2020. 3.  Whittaker Chambers, “Big Sister is Watching You,” National Review, December 28, 1957, 594–95. 4.  American historian Jennifer Burns has argued that a central point of departure between Rand and the American Conservative movement was a conflict between Christianity and free-market capitalism, where Rand accused William F. Buckley of being “too eentelligent to bihlif in Gott!” and Buckley saw Rand as rejecting “the central truth his conservatism had to offer: that religion was the only viable foundation for victory over the collectivist madness of Stalin’s terror.” Sources that have gone some way to filling the distinct lack of scholarly work on Rand in this context include Jennifer Burns, “Godless Capitalism: Ayn Rand and the Conservative Movement,” Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 3 (2004): 359–85; Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: 2009). For more general works that deal with Rand as part of American political history, see George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2007); Rebecca Klatch, A Gen-



Introduction 21

eration Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); John A. Andrew, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).   5.  Chambers, “Big Sister is Watching You,” 596. The notion that only correct ideas can be reasonable will play a role in the analysis below. For an interesting discussion of this idea, from a formal philosophical point of view, see Maurice Finocchiaro, On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 226–28.   6.  If Rand’s perpetual “see Atlas Shrugged” answer to questions about her ideas strikes the reader as a bit self-serving, one doubts that Rand would have had any interest in defending herself against charges of arrogance. James Baker quotes Rand as calling herself “the most creative thinker alive” saying, in 1958, that “If anyone can pick a rational flaw in my philosophy, I will be delighted to acknowledge him, and I will learn something from him. Until then—I am.” James Baker, Ayn Rand (Boston, Twayne Publishers), 68. Rand reserved her philosophical imprimatur for Aristotle (“the father of logic”) and Thomas Aquinas (“the greatest philosopher ever to accept and defend the conception of God”). See The Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael Berliner (New York: Plume, 1997). Rand’s comment on Aristotle in response to a fan letter, March 4, 1945, 222; Rand’s comment on Aquinas in letter to novelist Isabel Paterson, August 4, 1945, 185. She further argues that “[t]he integration of an important theme with a complex plot structure is the most difficult achievement possible to a writer, and the rarest.” See “Basic Principles of Literature,” in The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet, 1971), 51. Rand praises Fedor Dostoevskii and Victor Hugo for having lived up to this standard, but few other writers or philosophers merit much attention, in Rand’s view.   7.  Chambers himself mentions this in his review, noting that “a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does. . . .” Chambers, “Big Sister is Watching You,” 594.  8. Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960); Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Road to Revolution (New York: Collier Books, 1962); Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979). Walicki’s volume covers the period “From the Enlightenment to Marxism,” and so its conception is not so much teleological as it is based on the idea that Marxism and the Enlightenment provide convenient and logical boundaries for a book on a series of intellectuals.   9.  Isaiah Berlin’s introduction is a bit more interpretive in nature, and is also worth reading as a standalone essay. 10.  See preface to Malia’s magisterial Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1961), vii, which is a reworked version of Malia’s dissertation. 11.  Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), 210.

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12.  By way of example, Venturi argues that “it was between 1848 and 1881 that the ideas and psychological characteristics which shaped the upheaval of 1917 came into being.” Venturi, xxxii. Yarmolinsky, for his part, regretted that he could not continue the narrative of nineteenth century radicalism on through 1917, “But this would have required another volume.” Yarmolinsky, 10. 13.  For other examples of literature generally indebted to the “identify and delineate” mold, see Philip Pomper’s Peter Lavrov and the Russian Revolutionary Movement (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1972); Walicki’s Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Notre Dame and London: Notre Dame University Press, 1992). 14.  Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 115. 15.  See Berlin’s, Russian Thinkers; See also his The Power of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 16. Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 115. 17.  See V. I. Lenin, “The Heritage We Renounce,” in his Collected Works, vol II (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 491–534. Lenin himself was a dedicated Chernyshevskii reader. He first read Chernyshevskii in 1887, after the execution of his older brother. Lenin thought that the book’s value was in its ability to change the behavior of readers, and so he tended to become angry with people who criticized What Is to Be Done? on aesthetic grounds. See Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 30–31. 18.  For interested readers, the full text of Lenin’s book is available electronically at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/. 19.  The many works of the late Richard Pipes were a consistent and notable exception to what has been the general professional trend on this matter. My sense of this historiographical debate is indebted to a reading of Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Chernaiev, and William Rosenberg, eds. Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914–1921 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997). See Acton’s introductory salvo (and “salvo” it is), “The Revolution and its Historians,” 12–16, and passim. The centenary of the Revolution recently has occasioned a spate of new histories. For a useful overview of a number of these, see George Gilbert, “‘New’ Histories of the Russian Revolution?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 21, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 159–72. 20.  Laura Engelstein, Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political Conflict (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), 223. Ronald Suny’s recent biography of the young Stalin provides much additional confirmation of this point. See Ronald Grigor Suny, Stalin: Passage to Revolution (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2020). 21.  Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 22.  See Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Yuri Slezkine’s magisterial The House of Government



Introduction 23

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) also charts a somewhat different course than the previously consensus view of the Revolution and its Bolshevik conspirators. For a brief treatment that covers much of the important historiography of the Russian Revolution since the 1950s, see Peter Holquist, “The Russian Revoluion as Continuum and Context and Yes,—As Revolution” Cahiers du Monde russe 58, no. 1/2, 1917: Historiographie, dynamiques révolutionnaires et mémoires contestées (Janvier–juin 2017): 79–94. See also Gilbert, “‘New’ Histories of the Russian Revolution,” 159–72. 23.  Peter Pozefsky, The Nihilist Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). 24.  Pozefsky, 8–9. 25.  Pozefsky, 15. 26.  Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds., Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1–2. Paperno discusses the fusion of art and life in the case of What Is to Be Done? in Chernyshevskii and the Age of Realism. 27.  Literature in this vein includes the Paperno and Grossman volume, Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism. Particularly useful essays in this volume include Paperno’s introduction, her “The Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories,” Olga Matich’s “The Symbolist Meaning of Love: Theory and Practice,” Alexander Lavrov’s “Andrei Bely and the Argonaut’s Mythmaking,” Grossman’s “Valery Briusov and Nina Petrovskaia: Clashing Models of Life in Art,” Michael Wachtel’s “Viacheslav Ivanov: from Aesthetic Theory to Biographical Practice,” and Irina Gutkin’s “The Legacy of the Symbolist Aesthetic Utopia: From Futurism to Socialist Realism.” Other literature includes Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1988); Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); John Bowlt and Olga Matich, eds., Laboratory of Dreams: the Russian Avante-Garde and Cultural Experiment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). In this volume, see especially the editors’ introduction, Irene Masing-Delic’s “The Transfiguration of Cannibals: Fedorov and the Avante-Garde, Bowlt’s “Body Beautiful: The Artistic Search for the Perfect Physique,” and Matich’s “Remaking the Bed: Utopia in Daily Life.” 28. Chris Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, 1st ed. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). Additional citations of this book will provide the publication date to distinguish between the first and second edition. 29.  Sciabarra, 1995, 8–9. 30.  Sciabarra, 1995, 9, 14–20. 31.  Sciabarra, 1995, 382. 32.  Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “The Russian Subtext of Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead,” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6, no. 1 (2004): 223, 195–225. 33. Zina Gimpelevich, “‘We’ and ‘I’ in Zamiatin’s We and Rand’s Anthem,” Germano-Slavica 10, no. 1 (1997): 13–23; Peter Saint-Andre, “Zamyatin and Rand,” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 4, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 285–304; Douglas J. Den Uyl and Douglas B. Rasmussen, eds, The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984). Adam Weiner’s How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) contains brief reflection on a Rand-Chernyshevskii connection.

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34.  Robert Hollinger, “Ayn Rand’s Epistemology in Historical Perspective,” in The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand, 47–48. 35.  James Baker, Ayn Rand.(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987). Baker’s book is another example of the above mentioned “identify and delineate” school of the history of ideas. 36.  “History of ideas” and “intellectual history” often appear to be synonymous. However, they have, at times, signified rather different approaches to the history of the fact that, as A. O. Lovejoy put it in the inaugural issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas, one of the distinguishing features of humanity is that we “[l]ike Br’er rabbit . . . [have] always kept up a heap o’ thinking,” and apart from a few philosophical objections, that man’s “thoughts have at all times had a good deal to do with his behavior, his institutions, his material achievements in technology and the arts, and his fortunes.” See Lovejoy’s “Reflections on the History of Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1, no. 1 (January 1940): 3. Briefly put, Lovejoy’s notion of the subject of inquiry was what he called a “unit-idea.” This conception was predicated on the notion that “[i]deas do exist as separate, atemporal entities which can be known to us,” and that a method of finding out about these “primarily consists simply in carefully scrutinizing the textual evidence to see whether or not an identical component recurs in two or more contexts.” See Daniel Wilson, ‘Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being after Fifty Years,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 2 (April–June 1987): 197– 198. The first quote is Wilson’s, the second is Lovejoy’s, quoted in Wilson. Wilson sees Lovejoy’s approach as fundamentally “rooted in his epistemological dualism,” where there exists a sort of Platonic form of an idea, and the goal of the historian is to ascertain the extent to which a particular thinker’s version of it overlaps with the ideal, enabling identification of “what forces and factors produced the distortion.” See ibid., 198. Since Lovejoy, however, this idea has fallen largely out of favor, as some critics emphasize the interpretive nature of texts, and historians in general now tend to reject the notion of “objective” historical knowledge (or its attainability, if such knowledge did exist) implied by Lovejoy’s formulation. See further, Wilson’s article on Lovejoy, passim. As the history of ideas has developed more into something like the history of “meaning” and its production, “intellectual history” has come more into favor as a more general term. See for example, Mark Bevir’s Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and the exchange between he and Vivienne Brown in History and Theory 41 (May 2002), where Brown suggests that since Bevir (among others) wants to relocate the subject of study from texts, to the intentions of authors, that “’intellectual history’ is less likely to provoke methodological confusion than the term ‘history of ideas.’” See Brown, p. 207, and Brown and Bevir, passim. 37.  Paul Griffiths, “The Very Idea of Religion,” First Things 103 (May 2000): 30–35; Peter Novick addresses this problem for intellectual historians in That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 1988). 38.  Though, such historians could certainly make the point that “The Battle of Stalingrad” as a historical narrative has no counterpart in the experience of any actual participant in or observer of, the battle itself, so that therefore there is a sense in which



Introduction 25

it should be viewed as a historical “construction.” See for thoughts on this point, Hayden White’s Content of the Form (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Michael Oakeshott, On History (Indianapolis; Liberty Fund, 1999), 59–65 and passim; and on the discussion of the nature of narrative in Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 1938), chapter 3, in particular. 39.  Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Reflection on the History of Ideas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 1, no. 1 (January 1940): 3–23. This is Lovejoy’s “unit idea.” 40.  Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8, no. 1 (1969): 3–53. Other prominent members of the Skinner school of thought are John Dunn, J. G. A. Pocock, and, in a more recent form, Mark Bevir, who calls his own view “postfoundational intentionalism,” which I take to be a rather opaque term for Bevir’s attempt to reconcile Skinner with literary deconstructionism. For Bevir’s position, full treatment of which is beyond the bounds of this study, see his Logic of the History of Ideas, as well as the exchange between him and Vivienne Brown, and the symposium in Philosophical Books 43, no. 3 (Jul. 2001): 161–93. 41. Philosopher of history Eelco Runia summarizes this point nicely, with his formulation: “In the beginning was the deed.” See Runia’s Moved by the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 116–119 and chapter 5, generally. 42.  John Toews, “Intellectual History After the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” The American Historical Review 92, no. 4 (October 1987): 896 and 879–907, passim. Similarly, I will be focusing on a number of “textual events” within the discourse of nihilism, such as Pisarev’s essay Thinking Proletariat and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. 43.  Maurice Mandelbaum, whose writings seem largely (and to my mind unjustly) forgotten, has suggested that a too-close adherence to Lovejoy’s “unit-idea” can lead the historian to assume too much continuity over time, and that while there may be “continuing ideas,” there are also “recurrent ideas,” which disappear and re-appear independently of somebody’s “influence.” Mandelbaum thus seems to suggest that the search for roots, if one is not careful, can lead to “minimize the independence of an author’s thought.” This warning is certainly well worth heeding, to avoid doing conceptual violence to the originality of individuals’ thoughts. See Mandelbaum, “The History of Ideas, Intellectual History, and the History of Philosophy,” History and Theory 5, Beiheft 5 (1965): 37–41; and Wilson, “Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being,” 198–99. 44.  One recalls here, Marx’s half-joking remark that he was not a Marxist. 45.  See Donald Kelley, “Intellectual History in a Global Age,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66, no. 2 (2005): 157–58. Pozefsky’s The Nihilist Imagination seems to have, à la Kelley, fused cultural and intellectual history rather well. 46.  See Rieff’s work generally, but especially Triumph of the Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith After Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), and the first two volumes of Rieff’s Sacred Order/Social Order trilogy: My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority (Charlottesville: University

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of Virginia Press, 2006) and Crisis of the Officer Class: The Decline of the Tragic Sensibility (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). See also Aaron Weinacht, “Triumph of a Theoretic: The Uses of Philip Rieff,” Anamnesis 4 (2015), 66–88. 47.  Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007) covers similar analytical territory, and also informs my overall sense of how to approach nihilism as a subject. 48.  See Weinacht, “Triumph of a Theoretic,” 74–78 and passim, for comparative historiographic analysis of Rieff and Foucault together. 49. White, The Practical Past (Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press), 109. See also the book’s concluding paragraph, where the best historians can hope for is “the illusion of substance.” White, 103. 50.  Paperno discusses this phenomenon in Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 11–12. 51.  This point is no doubt part of the explanation for Rand’s labeling of her ideas as the philosophy of “objectivism.” As Novick has detailed in That Noble Dream, even subjectivists (or “perspectivists,” etc.) want to be seen as being “objective.” 52. This general attitude fits well with Rieff’s notion that in the post-sacral, post-creedal West, the “theater” becomes a defining cultural motif, where “identity” become a matter of what costume one wear on the stage, at any given time. This argument is shot through much of Rieff’s work, but see My Life Among the Deathworks, 33–34. 53.  Here, I am indebted to philosopher Martin Bunzl’s Real History (New York: Routledge, 1997). Bunzl argues—I think accurately—that historians often espouse stronger theoretical commitments than can be supported by the character of the research they do. 54.  See Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” 3. Skinner thinks that F. R. Leavis provides a classic statement of the textualist position, in his “The Responsible Critic: Or the Function of Criticism at any Time,” Scrutiny 19 (1953): 173. 55.  Briefly put, this is the debate over whether God (in Christ) became Man for Man’s eternal salvation, or whether it is Man’s task to become God, here on earth. 56.  An intercepted letter from Alexandr Herzen to Chernyshevskii was the basis for Chernyshevskii’s imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Russian authorities took the letter took as evidence of his involvement with émigré critics of the regime. See Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, 189. 57.  Pozefsky, 177. 58.  Pozefsky, 181–82. 59.  Pozefsky, 196–98. Pozefsky also notes that the idea of Pisarev’s writings as providing a code of behavior applies equally well to Chernyshevskii. 60.  There is some disagreement as to whether Dostoevskii had Solov’ev in mind when he created Alesha Karamazov, or whether Solov’ev was a model for Ivan Karamazov. See Marina Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev: The Art of Integral Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 66. Kostalevsky suggests that



Introduction 27

Dostoevskii may have seen Alesha and Ivan Karamazov as embodying two different sides of Solov’ev. 61. Addressing Rand broadly, as a cultural phenomenon in the United States amounts to an entirely different book, beyond the present scope. 62. Abbot Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (New York: Viking Press, 1980), ix. 63.  Pozefsky, 1. Historians do this kind of thing all the time of course: the paradigmatic “long nineteenth century” come to mind. 64.  For a good look at relations between the government and the educated public during the reign of Nicholas I, see Nicholas Riasanovsky, A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia, 1801–1855 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). 65.  Pozefsky, 7. 66.  Of course, the 1860s were pivotal in many other ways, as the 1861 peasant emancipation and broader “Great Reforms” illustrate. 67.  Pozefsky, 2. 68.  Pozefsky, 2–3. 69.  Pozefsky, 3. 70.  Hellbeck, 17. 71. For discussions of the fictitious marriage phenomenon, see Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 31–35; Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 90–91. 72.  Pozefsky, 7. 73.  See D. I. Pisarev, “Bazarov,” in Sochineniia, tom II (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Khudozhestvennoi Literaturyi, 1955), 7–50. 74.  Pozefsky, 102–103. See also Paperno, Chernyshevskii and the Age of Realism, 9–12. 75. Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 10. Philosopher of science Michael Polanyi has argued that the instrumentalization (and consequent perversion) of science is actually a logical result of positivism, not a negation of it. If Polanyi is correct, this would modify my general view that the positivism of Pisarev, Chernyshevskii, and Rand was more rhetorical than actual, by suggesting that they simply made the journey down the instrumentalist road sooner than did the Soviets in the Lysenko Affair, for example. Michael Polanyi, “The Social Message of Pure Science, in The Logic of Liberty (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 10. Essay originally written in 1945. 76.  Nicholas Berdiaev, “Philosophical Verity and Intelligentsia Truth,” in Vekhi, ed. and trans. Marshall Shatz and Judith Zimmerman (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), 8. 77.  See Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth” series, particularly his Faith of the Fallen (New York: Tom Doherty, 2000). 78.  Pozefsky, 165. 79.  L. M. Lopatin, “The Philosophy of Vladimir Soloviev,” Mind, New Series 25, no. 100 (October 1916): 428. Lopatin’s article is a published version of an article

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he read to the Moscow Psychological Society in 1901, to commemorate Solov’ev’s death a year earlier. 80.  Literary scholar Marina Kostalevsky has argued that the man-God problem should be seen as a critical link/commonality between the thought of Dostoevskii and Solov’ev. See her Dostoevskii and Soloviev, 14. 81.  Chernyshevskii’s thesis is available in English, as N. G. Chernyshevskii, The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), 281–381. 82.  See for example, Olga Matich’s Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle. 83.  Walicki, 348, 393. 84. Sciabarra, Ayn Rand, 41–42. Since the original publication of his Ayn Rand, Sciabarra has since grown more sure that Rand studied with Losskii. In particular, Rand claimed to have been friends with Olga Nabokov, whose sister Helene Sikorski confirmed to Sciabarra that Nabokov and Rand had both attended the Stoiunin Gymnasium. See Sciabarra’s articles, “The Rand Transcript,” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 1, no. 1 (1999): 1–26; and “The Rand Transcript Revisited,” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7, no. 1 (2005) 1–17. Sciabarra was also kind enough to send me a link to web versions of his efforts to establish Rand’s connection with Losskii. Personal communication, May 16, 2006. Sciabarra also speculates about Rand’s involvement with the Stoiunin school in his Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, 69–71. 85.  For the circumstances of Losskii’s departure, see Lesley Chamberlain, Lenin’s Private War: The Voyage of The Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (New York: St. Martin’s, 2006). 86.  Rand’s recollections of her background took place as part of oral interviews with her associate, Barbara Branden. See Sciabarra, Ayn Rand (1995) 77, 84–91. Sciabarra’s search through the file on Rand for the University of Leningrad turned up no information on Rand’s coursework, and he also notes that Rand burned her “philosophic diaries and fictional outlines long before she came to the United States,” for fear that they would be used against her. Since the publication of Sciabarra’s book, however, more of Rand’s papers have been archived, and archival references in this book refer to materials to which, in some cases, Sciabarra did not have access. 87.  Chamberlain, 18. Kabinetskaia Street was changed to Pravdy Street on September 1, 1923, and it retains this name today. See The Encyclopaedia of St. Petersburg, available online at http://www.encspb.ru/en/adrarticle.php?kod=2803913218; internet; accessed June 26, 2008. Richard Stites briefly discusses the influence of the women’s movement on Mariia Stoiunina’s husband. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, 44–45. 88.  Rand’s fans have identified her former places of residence in St. Petersburg. Prior to the Revolution, her family resided above the above mentioned pharmacy, and upon their return to St. Petersburg, she lived at #16 Dmitrovskii Street. Locations’ proximity to the Stoiunin school can be established by a simple map search of St. Petersburg using the map function at www.google.com. For pictures of Rand’s residences in St. Petersburg, see “donparrish.com,” and specifically, https://www .donparrish.com/RandSites.html.



Introduction 29

89.  Peter Konecny, Builders and Deserters: Students, State, and Community in Leningrad, 1917–1941 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1999), 40.   90.  Ayn Rand Archives, 2-A, L, H, R-5. This material abbreviate hereafter as “ARA.” Thanks to Professor Cynthia Ruder, of the University of Kentucky, for assistance in deciphering the signatures on Rand’s transcript. Sciabarra has made similar conjectures as to Kareev’s teaching. See his article “The Rand Transcript.”   91.  For further discussion of Kareev, and his views on history and sociology, see John Thomas Sanders, “The Past in Service of the Future: Russian Historians and Russian Society, 1830–1930” PhD. diss., Stanford University, 1989). Sanders’s dissertation is focused primarily on the historians Kareev and Kliuchevskii. One of the central aims of Lavrov’s “subjective sociology” was to preserve a role for the “critically thinking individual” in history, in the face of nineteenth-century discourse about “scientific” laws of society, for example. For an attempt at a historical critique of Lavrov’s project, see Aaron Weinacht, “Utilitarian Morals, Collective Individualism, and Inevitable Spontaneity in Peter Lavrov’s Historical Letters,” MA Thesis, University of Kentucky, 2004.  92. Sanders, 172.   93.  ARA, 2-A, L, M-1. Rand handwrote “historian,” and so was not picking from a list of existing options.   94.  The themes I will cover certainly have significance beyond 1917, for Russian culture. The historian Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal has written extensively on Russian Nietzscheanism, extending into the Stalin era. See her New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); ibid, ed. Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).   95.  Jennifer Burns suggests that the main division between Rand and the American Conservative movement was over religion. This study may broaden Burns’s conclusions somewhat, since it suggests that there was much else in Rand that would have been foreign to American conservatives, besides her atheism. See Burns’ article “Godless Capitalism.”  96. Baker, 2–3.   97.  ARA, 2-A,L,H,,R-5. Rand’s graduation certificate lists her performance in all classes, except for Political Economy, as “very satisfactory.” Her grade for Political Economy reads simply obuchalas’ (read: “has taken the class”). Materials from this archive cited hereafter as “ARA.”  98. Baker’s, Ayn Rand gives a brief biographical sketch, 2–3.   99.  I refer to Rand’s university under its current title. The university’s name underwent similar changes as did the city of St. Petersburg. 100.  See discussion of Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, above. 101.  Ayn Rand, We the Living (New York: Signet, 1936). 102.  ARA, 2-A,L,H,R-1. Apparently, Rand was later expelled from film school, for nonpayment of tuition. This information comes from the finding aid for the “Special Collections” at the ARA, which lists an official report of Rand’s expulsion as contained in Box 2-A,L,H,R-2. Due to ongoing projects at the archives of the Ayn

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Rand Institute at the time of my visit, I was unable to look at this particular document for myself. So, this judgment is contingent on the accuracy of the finding aid’s description of the documents. 103.  ARA, 2-A,C,H,B-2. This document, dated June 28, 1929, is a copy, verified by the US government, of an NKVD report which certifies that one Alissa Rosenbaum had a clean criminal record. Given that Rand became a naturalized American in 1931 (See Baker, Ayn Rand, 7), it is probably safe to conclude that the US government obtained this document in the process of concluding Rand’s naturalization case. 104. Baker, Ayn Rand, 7. 105.  Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York, Signet, 1943). 106.  Literary scholar Zina Gimpelevich has made this comparison in her “‘We’ and ‘I’ in Zamyatin’s We and Rand’s Anthem,” Germano-Slavica 10, no. 1 (1997): 13–23; See also Peter Saint-Andre, “Zamyatin and Rand,” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 4, no. 2 (Spring 2003), 159–163. It should be noted that the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies was not, at the time these articles were published, a peer-reviewed publication. This journal is now a standard academic peer-reviewed journal. 107.  In transcript of Rand’s remarks for a 1968 Voice of America radio presentation to Russians, on Objectivism. ARA, 4b-A,L,M-1. 108. Ayn Rand, The Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. David Harriman (New York: Plume, 1999), 704. 109.  Baker, 18. 110.  Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: Signet, 1963); The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet, 1971). 111.  See Rand’s preface to For the New Intellectual, viii. 112.  Ayn Rand, “The Goal of My Writing,” in The Romantic Manifesto, 127. Italics in original. 113. Pozefsky also uses the term “rational egoism,” which he counterposes to “sentimentality,” to describe the philosophy of D. I. Pisarev. See Pozefsky, 100, and chapter 4, passim. “EGO,” in all capital letters, is the final word of Rand’s novel Anthem, in which she portrays a dystopian society not unlike that of Evgenii Zamiatin’s 1922 anti-Soviet novel We. Ayn Rand, Anthem (New York: Signet, 1946). 114.  Pozefsky sees the notion of “emancipation of personality,” in addition to rational egoism, as crucial to nihilism. See The Nihilist Imagination, chapter 4, passim.

Chapter One

Establishing the Nihilist Axiom Rational Egoism in Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, and Rand

INTRODUCTION In March 1968, eleven years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Rand wrote down some preparatory thoughts for an upcoming Voice of America broadcast to Russia. In these notes, she refers to her philosophical system, “Objectivism,” as “a new moral philosophy—an ethics of rational egoism”1 Understood as the view that self-interest is both the inherent basis of rational human action, and the valid end to which that rational action ought to be directed,2 this chapter argues that Ayn Rand’s “egoism,” particularly as espoused in Atlas Shrugged, is conceptually and functionally similar to the egoism of the Russian shestidesiatniki (“men of the sixties”), the radical social critics dubbed “nihilists” by Ivan Turgenev in his famous 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. In Turgenev’s view, the Russian intellectual radicals of the 1860s—the “sons” of his novel’s title—exemplified a new and unsettling tendency to reject social conventions and accept radical individualism instead, in contrast to the more sophisticated and socially minded “men of the forties” group of social and political critics (the “fathers”) most prominently represented by liberal-minded thinkers such as Alexander Herzen.3 In the thought of the central “nihilist” social critics Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Dmitrii Pisarev—as well as in the thought of Ayn Rand—there is a common nexus of beliefs that orbit a central idea of egoism. For all three, egoism is of critical importance, it has a similar character, and it serves similar functions. Beginning with a look at some of egoism’s points of origin prior to its emergence in 1860s Russia, this chapter will then discuss the concept as it pertains to Chernyshevskii’s 1863 What Is to Be Done? and Rand’s 1957 Atlas Shrugged. Following this, in turn, will be a broader treatment of egoism 31

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as a theme in a Russian nihilist context, with a comparison of Randian ideas to ideas Pisarev promoted in his own essays. First, this chapter suggests that egoism is a central concept from which follows much else that Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, and Rand say. Second, I argue that for both Rand and the shestidesiatniki, sociopolitical theses tend to function as different means to the same ends. Chernyshevskii’s fictional heroes may admire the British socialist Robert Owen or the French socialist Charles Fourier; Rand’s heroes resemble a hyper-capitalist product of a DNA cross between Henry Ford and Achilles. But, these political differences are symptomatic of different beliefs about what context is necessary for achievement of the same end: realization of the full potential of the individual self, liberated from all possible constraints, be they of a physical or a philosophical nature. STRAINS OF EGOISM BEFORE THE 1860s The egoisms of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) and Max Stirner (1806– 1856) found their way to Russia, in the mid-nineteenth century, and Feuerbach in particular was an important influence on Chernyshevskii. Philosopher Karl Ameriks sees the 1840s generation of German thinkers as having reacted against the “systematic idealism of their predecessors,” arguing that for Feuerbach and Marx, they were most definitely not writing “the System,” meaning “any version of Hegelian idealism”4 Philosopher Paul Franks has also remarked on the phenomenon of philosophy as a search for “the System,” noting that if one takes the works of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, one may feel “as though the completion of ‘the system’ were philosophy’s principal problem, under which all others are subsumed.”5 In 1841, Feuerbach attempted to liberate the individual from the confines of “the system,” so to speak, with his The Essence of Christianity, in which he argued that theology was in fact anthropology. This allowed Feuerbach to contend that “God” is simply a projection of the best in man: for all intents and purposes, God is Man. As Feuerbach puts it: “I show that the true sense of Theology is Anthropology, that there is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature, and consequently, no distinction between the divine and human subject.”6 In theologian Karl Barth’s introduction to The Essence of Christianity, he quotes Feuerbach as arguing that the point was to make “the friends of God into the friends of man . . . candidates for the other world into students of this world, Christians, who on their own confession are half-animal and half-angel, into man—whole men.” Barth remarks that “To these proposed improvements he had earlier added: theologians into



Establishing the Nihilist Axiom 33

anthropologians . . . , religious and political footmen of a celestial and terrestrial monarchy and aristocracy into free, self-reliant citizens of the earth.”7 On the one hand, there is clearly an impulse at work in Feuerbach’s ideas which desires to liberate man from “celestial and terrestrial monarchy and aristocracy” so that the individual man can discover that God is in fact himself: what is more egoist than that?8 Chernyshevskii makes direct, if backhanded reference to Feuerbach in What Is to Be Done?, making fun of a character who exposes his own philistinism by confusing Ludwig Feuerbach with Louis XIV of France.9 More broadly, historian Irina Paperno has argued for the importance of Feuerbach’s influence on nineteenth-century Russian thought.10 She mentions a member of the famous Petrashevskii Circle named Speshnev, for instance, who believed that Feuerbach was “a license to reject any higher authority and to posit self-will as the only law.”11 Speshnev served as a mentor to the young Fedor Dostoevskii, also a member of the Petrashevskii Circle, and provided something of a model for the quintessentially egoist character Stavrogin in Dostoevskii’s anti-nihilist novel Devils.12 So, Speshnev’s take on Feuerbach was well-known not only to Chernyshevskii, but also to the eventual bête noir of nihilism, Dostoevskii. Dostoevskii knew of Feuerbach and linked him, rightly or wrongly, to his intellectual enemies in Russia, enemies that included the ideas of both Chernyshevskii and Pisarev. More radical than Feuerbach, another of the early prophets of egoism was Max Stirner, whose 1844 text The Ego and Its Own propounded a radical individualism and libertarian ethic regarding the state and private property.13 Stirner was a known commodity in Russian circles from the 1840s onward. The famous Russian literary critic and “man of the forties” Vissarion Belinskii, for example, argued that Stirner’s egoism should not have had such negative connotations, since in his view egoism was an established scientific fact and could therefore be used as a guide for moral behavior.14 Ayn Rand mentions Stirner in a letter dated 1943, though given her familiarity with German philosophy through her readings of Nietzsche that dated at least to 1926, it is probably safe to suppose that Rand knew of Stirner long before.15 In the famous 1909 Vekhi (“Landmarks”) collection of essays, Russian philosopher Semen Frank linked Stirner to the 1860s nihilists. Frank thought that Stirner’s egoism provided a window into the mind of the nihilists, and in a discussion of Dmitrii Pisarev and “Bazarov”—Turgenev’s fictional nihilist in Fathers and Sons—Frank recapitulates “Stirner’s question, ‘Why am ‘I’ less valuable than ‘thou’ that I must be sacrificed to him?”.16 Stirner’s view rested on the “egoist axiom: it dismisse[d] as psychologically invalid any view of society which does not take the egoistic individual as the primary phenomenon, and every other social unit as subsidiary to his desires, however conditioned and repressed those desires may be.”17 Sociologist John Carroll

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argues that it is more proper to call Stirner’s egoism an “amoralist” than an “immoralist,” since—while the effect of his ideas is to place him in sympathy with those deemed immoral by the moralists—“he moves towards a position independent of, rather than in opposition to, social mores.”18 Carroll has Stirner envisioning his ideas in context of the “philosophical framework” of Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach,19 and the most important aspect of this “framework” appears to have been Stirner’s rejection of philosophy as properly a search for “the System,” in favor of philosophy as search for the egoist. Paperno notes that Stirner “went still further [than Feuerbach]” into liberation of the individual.20 From the Stirnerian point of view, there is a sense in which Feuerbach’s liberation of man from the Christian system falls short. Stirner argues that proposing the idea of an “essence” of man merely led Feuerbach to replace one theological concept with another, a concept smuggled in the guise of an ideal man, when in reality there is no such ideal. For Stirner, man must be what man is without any reference to abstract ideals like “essences.”21 A good example of Stirner’s rejection of ideals in any form—as detrimental to the ego’s ability to be itself—is his treatment of liberalism. Stirner argues that because liberalism poses “man” (an ideal concept in Stirner’s view), which it then posits as having been created equal and possessing certain inalienable rights, etc. . . . , it alienates the individual man from himself. It posits an ideal “man,” separate from the individual “I,” and then proceeds to evaluate the “man” on the basis of the former rather than the latter.22 Stirner’s answer to this problem, as he sees it, is to cease to evaluate the individual on the basis of any abstract categories at all. For Stirner, the egoist is inherently a “desecrator” (of ideals). “Nothing is holy to him!,” Stirner exclaims.23 Stirner generates a more anarchistic outlook than any political views derivable from egoist principles extant in Rand, or Pisarev and Chernyshevskii. The best example of this is in Stirner’s view of crime, which he argues can only be conceived of in terms of “fixed ideas” (i.e., ideals). In Stirner’s world, however, where the heroes are the desecrators of ideals, nothing is sacred, so there is no crime. So all is, in a sense, permitted.24 On the other hand, it was Dostoevskii’s view that by rejecting all, nihilism permitted all: witness the axe murder that drives the plot of Crime and Punishment. In his rejection of crime as a category, Stirner argues, that rather than submit to the democratic justice of Athens, Socrates should have rejected not the decision against him, but the Athenians’ “right” to judge him in the first place.25 Rand, too, recapitulates the death of Socrates in Stirnerian sorts of fictional retellings. Rand explicitly rejected the notion that truth could be defined by public opinion (democratic or otherwise), as American historian William Graebner has detailed. Graebner dubs the 1940s in the United States “The Age of



Establishing the Nihilist Axiom 35

Doubt,” and argues that in this era “Americans were increasingly prone to employ the public opinion standard in place of individual judgment. . . .”26 Rand responded to this cultural development through her portrayal of a heroic architect in The Fountainhead, who rejects the idea that the character of his architectural projects ought to be even partially determined by what people want. In Graebner’s words, she responded to the increasing prominence of polls and surveys in 1940s America by resolute “oppos[ition] to the idea that a survey of public opinion could yield a reasonable standard of judgment.”27 In Atlas Shrugged, Rand recapitulates the trial of Socrates, rejects public evaluation as a standard, and has one of her characters do exactly what Stirner said Socrates should have done at his Athenian judgment. At his trial for violating the terms of government legislation designed to promote “fair” competition, the steel tycoon Hank Rearden rejects not the evidence against him, but the moral authority of the court and the entire process by which he was brought to trial.28 Rand’s view of what gets to count as “crime,” then, does have some similarities to Stirner’s view of that subject, even if Rand herself never embraced the anarchism of Stirner. It should be said that Stirner’s world, inhabited by egoists, has a rather Hobbesian potential, with the proviso that Stirner’s eutopia is Hobbes’s dystopia.29 Stirner argues that property ought to be “torn from ghostly hands and become my property,” and that the “property question” is insoluble in terms of socialist or communist principles. “It is solved,” says Stirner, “only by the war of all against all.”30 On the one hand, Stirner employs the time-honored anecdote regarding Diogenes and Alexander the Great, arguing that the egoist “has nothing to say to the state except ‘Get out of my sunshine.’”31 On the other hand, Stirner seems to hold out the idea that the absence of the state may not necessarily have to result in the “war of all against all.” Stirner argues that minus the property-as-sacred principle, “everyone will have property,” (since they will simply take what they need), and that “Unions will then, in this matter too, multiply the individual’s means and secure his assailed property.”32 The crucial point for Stirner, is that in this scenario, “I” am the owner of the property (not the collective, contra the socialists), but property itself is not “sacred” (contra the liberals). Stirner thus manages to preserve the idea of property ownership by an egoistic individual, while excising from it what he considers to be conceptual “spooks” (in Stirner’s word) such as “Society,” which he contends are abstractions with no definable, specific content.33 Stirner seems to think that individuals will in fact be able to secure their property and persons in the egoistic future, as suggested by his reference to “unions.” Japanese philosopher Nishitani Keiji argues that what will ensure harmony in Stirner’s “nihilist” (Nishitani’s word) future is that everyone will be equal in their inequality, a state of perfect inequality, so to speak. “As a

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unique individual you no longer have anything in common with the others and there also nothing divisive or hostile,” with the key point being that there are no longer any “third party” entities such as law, God, or morality in context of which disagreements can be pursued, so that all that is left is the “nothing” of the individual egos.34 These egos then proceed to exercise the full extent of their “ownness,” a central Stirnerian concept “best understood as a variety of self-mastery, a form of substantive individual autonomy which insists that any actions or desires which involve waiving or suspending individual judgment violate the self-mastery and independence of the person concerned.”35 As such, the unions to be formed by the above egos will be a constantly shifting alliance which enables individuals to unite without loss of sovereignty, without swearing allegiance to anyone else’s ‘flag’. . . The union constitutes a purely instrumental association whose good is solely the advantages that individuals derive from pursuit of their interests: there are no shared final ends, and association is not valued in itself.36

Stirner’s ideas in The Ego and Its Own, then, constitute an important elaboration of egoist principles in the time immediately preceding the “nihilist” intellectual period in 1860s Russia. The vogue German philosophy experienced in Russia from the 1840s onward is a good reason to preface discussion of Russian egoism with a brief look at what Feuerbach and Stirner had already said, regarding the value of the individual and the implications of that value, for the organization of society. Another egoist phenomenon deserving of mention occurred around the time of Rand’s birth, between the 1860s and the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957. The 1907 publication of Mikhail Artsybashev’s novel Sanin, caused something of a scandal, for its candid portrayal of sex (including what appears to be a rape), and for the apparent hedonism of its eponymous hero. Artsybashev, as it turns out, was something of a fan of Stirner’s, whom Nicholas Luker has noted enjoyed some measure of popularity in Russian literary circles around the turn of the twentieth century.37 Sanin will merit closer attention in the chapter on love, sex, and relationships, but here, it is worth noting Luker’s remark that “Sanin’s self-assertive behavior demonstrates his author’s conviction that man is no longer true to his essential self and has become constrained by empty conventions and false priorities.”38 Sanin’s rejection of others’ expectations goes hand in hand with his affirmation of his own life trajectory. Luker mentions a poignant scene from the novel, where Sanin rejects Tolstoian nonresistance to evil, arguing instead that “moral victory does not lie in proffering the other cheek but in being right vis-à-vis one’s conscience.”39 This focus on being true to one’s beliefs and desires, as opposed to any universal ideals, argued Semen Frank in Vekhi, suggests that



Establishing the Nihilist Axiom 37

“Saninism” was less a “break with the spirit of Bazarov” than it was a logical conclusion of it.40 Sanin thus provides an example of egoist survivals between the 1860s and Rand’s student days in St. Petersburg. The particular nature of this survival will be addressed in future chapters, in context of the implications of adopting nihilist/Randian egoism for the rest of one’s life. EGOISM IN WHAT IS TO BE DONE? AND ATLAS SHRUGGED Broadly put, a main concern of Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? and of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is to compel the reader to ask: what is the purpose of my life, and how should I live it? Chernyshevskii and Rand arrive at the same Stirnerian answer to the question, namely: for myself and my own happiness.41 In Chernyshevskii’s telling, the heroine Vera Pavlovna argues that “I don’t want to follow the example of others’ opinions, to strive for what others suggest, when this isn’t what I myself need.”42 Rand phrases the issue similarly, when she has the heroic egoist John Galt deliver the ultimate Objectivist credo, which adorns the space above the door to the power station in “Atlantis,” Rand’s utopia: “I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”43 Adding to the effect, the power station houses John Galt’s invention: a new motor of infinite energy capabilities. The station’s door operates on a sound lock, so that one actually has to utter the phrase “I swear by my life” to open it. This makes the utterance of Rand’s egoist credo both the metaphorical and the literal “key” to a new world of the impossible made possible through belief in egoism as a first principle.44 This emphasis on egoism is critical for Chernyshevskii—it allows him to reconcile the interests of the individual and society by maintaining that when individuals act in what is “really” in their self-interest, all of mankind will benefit. Consider Vera Pavlovna’s thoughts on the matter, as she remarks in a letter to her recently “deceased” husband Lopukhov (he faked his own suicide so as to free his wife to marry someone else), “we three are the greatest egoists the world has ever known. Perhaps that’s even true! Perhaps there were no great egoists before us! Yes, that seems to be the case.”45 Previously in the novel, Vera Pavlovna lays out some of her feelings about the relationship between herself and others, arguing that she wishes no ties to others on the basis of any sense of obligation; that “I want to do only what I desire and want others to do likewise.” She rejects the notion that one ought to respect that which others feel is of value. She argues: “Why should I make sacrifices for a brilliant position only because other people think it’s valuable? I’m

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unwilling to sacrifice not only myself but even my slightest whim for something I don’t really need.”46 If the above establishes Vera Pavlovna’s mental basis for deciding what she will and will not do, her desires turn out to have some benefits that go beyond her personal success. When Vera first sets up her dressmaking workshop, she mentions that it “happens to be my passion to set up this enterprise with [her employees].” She desires to see if a workshop organized under a “new system” (i.e., cooperative labor initiatives such as that of Fourier or his disciple, Victor Considerant) could succeed.47 Not that her motives are altruistic, exactly, but instead she envisions her enterprise as similar to building a house, or planting a garden: “I want to organize a new sewing shop so that I may enjoy it.” Vera Pavlovna distributes the profits from the shop among the employees, but Chernyshevskii leaves the reader with no indication that Vera Pavlovna does this from altruistic motives. Vera argues that: “Who expects to earn any income from his passion?”48 Vera Pavlovna is not concerned with money, she is concerned with the personal challenge of setting up and running the dress shop as successfully and efficiently as possible, so that Chernyshevskii’s point is not that it would be evil if she kept the profits to herself, but that since she has no great passion for money, keeping the profits would fail to be the egoist thing to do. Parallel benefits to Vera Pavlovna’s associates turn out to accrue. Very quickly, Chernyshevskii writes, the shop grew so that it had to hire numerous additional employees.49 Vera Pavlovna’s dress shop seems also to operate on a combination egalitarian-meritocratic principle, where profits are divided equally among the employees and wages are based on quality of job performance.50 For Vera Pavlovna’s purposes, however, there is no indication that the goal of the dress shop is anything beyond her personal satisfaction— Chernyshevskii leaves the reader with the sense that Vera Pavlovna set up the dress shop not because she “ought” to have desired to, but simply because she did in fact desire to do so. Similarly, Ayn Rand’s version of egoism emphasizes the fulfillment of individual desire and passion. One of her main characters, Dagny Taggart, realized that she wanted to run the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad when she was nine, and she adheres unflinchingly to this desire throughout her life.51 In a scene from the youth of Dagny Taggart and Francisco D’Anconia (who is the heir to a copper-mining empire), the two of them are contemplating what they will do with their lives, dreaming about “When I run Taggart Transcontinental” and “When I run D’Anconia Copper.”52 The fact that they do this because they desire to is so obvious to Rand, that she notes, “They never had to explain the rest to each other; they knew each other’s goal and motive.”53 The fact that Francisco desires after his death to be known as “a man who made money”54 and that Vera Pavlovna’s dress shop will redistribute the prof-



Establishing the Nihilist Axiom 39

its should not obscure the fact that these are two different means to the same ultimate end: individual self-fulfillment. Chernyshevskii’s argument for this was mentioned above, with Vera’s Pavlovna’s declaration that money is irrelevant to the fulfillment of her “passion.” For Rand’s part, she has one of her characters, Hank Rearden, berate himself for having played by the rules of his enemies for too long, while having known all the time “that wealth is only a means to an end.” His mistake, says Rand, was in letting “[the expropriators] prescribe my ends.”55 To drive the point home, Rand has Rearden lamenting that “I, who shaped matter to serve my purpose, was left with a pile of steel and gold, but with my every purpose defeated, my every desire betrayed, my every attempt at happiness frustrated.”56 Combined with Rearden’s earlier realization that “man exists for the achievement of his desires”57 and Francisco D’Anconia’s dictum that “Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices,”58 this seems solid evidence for the compatibility of the visions of egoism held by Rand and Chernyshevskii in Atlas Shrugged and What Is to Be Done? Rand’s characters desire to make money for themselves, Chernyshevskii’s, to redistribute it, but in both cases the motive and the goal are the same: individual fulfillment via pursuit of one’s passionate desires.59 If Chernyshevskii and Rand argue that egoists should define the nature of their own passions and pursue them, it is also possible to see this principle’s diffusion in Rand-influenced sites of popular culture. The American comic book artist Steve Ditko (who created Spider-Man) created an Objectivist superhero called “The Question.” The Question is a business-suited superhero who runs a successful business as “Vic Sage” during the day and who fights criminals of a non-egoist persuasion as “The Question” on the side. Echoing opinions expressed by Vera Pavlovna and Hank Rearden about the futility of pursuing somebody else’s dreams or ideals, Sage criticizes a decision of a fellow businessman, remarking: “If you’re spending your earned money on what others decide you should buy, are you getting what you want?”60 The fact that an American comic book character expresses an opinion identical to that expressed by Vera Pavlovna one hundred and five years earlier attests to the longevity and transferability of the issues that Chernyshevskii raised. As in Chernyshevskii, the egoistic behavior of Rand’s characters does entail corollary benefits to human society writ large. The basic premise of Atlas Shrugged, for instance, is that when the heroes go on strike, the world suffers, with the corollary premise that when the heroes return to the world, it will be a much better place. “Galt’s Gulch,” the temporary utopian refuge of Rand’s heroes, has a certain paradisiacal quality to it—so, one has to ask, why would the heroes leave it at all? Rand might answer that her heroes will find more egoist fulfillment once they are set free of their self-imposed exile, but the

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reader also knows that the world at large will see a massive rise in available jobs, economic efficiency, and quality of life as the result of their return.61 Thus, both Chernyshevskii and Rand appeal to all rational people to adopt egoism, for their own good, with the understanding that doing so will begin a series of rolling benefits for all mankind that will make a reality the fantastic settings of Vera Pavlovna’s “fourth dream” in What Is to Be Done? and John Galt’s Atlantis in Atlas Shrugged, where life proceeds according to scientific, objective standards of value and perfection is an everyday fact of existence. The catalyst for achieving this future is the adoption of the principle set forth by Chernyshevskii’s Lopukhov, in conversation with Vera Pavlovna, that “cold and practical people are telling the truth when they say that man is governed exclusively by the calculation of his own advantage.”62 While Lopukhov acknowledges that the logic of his position may be “cold” and “merciless,” he argues that “[t]his theory is pitiless, but by following it, people will cease to be objects of idle compassion.”63 If there is anything Rand finds horrific, it is the notion of “idle compassion,” whose resultant attitude of altruism leads only to “mutual resentment” as it corrupts both the giver and the receiver into purveyors of “unwanted, unchosen Christmas presents, which neither is morally permitted to buy for himself.”64 Lopukhov’s statement also encapsulates the dual defining principles of egoism with which this study began— namely the idea that behavior on the basis of advantage to self is in fact the way human beings operate, (Lopukhov’s first statement) and that behaving in this fashion results in valid ends (Lopukhov’s second statement). THE EGOISM OF DMITRII PISAREV While What Is to Be Done? and Atlas Shrugged illustrate the similar natures of nihilist and Randian egoism, there are numerous other sources worth consideration, to flesh out the emerging portrait of a common set of egoist ideas. These sources include two of Pisarev’s essays of particular relevance: “Thinking Proletariat” and “Platos Idealism,” which this section will compare with Rand’s views.65 Pisarev’s essays contain some of the more candid examples of emphasis on the individual ego as the supreme good for the self and force for good in society. Pisarev laid out the essence of his ideal “new person” in his 1865 essay “Thinking Proletariat.”66 This “new type” of person, Pisarev argued, would exhibit the following characteristics: 1.  New people have acquired a passion for work for the benefit of society. 2.  The private benefit of new people coincides with benefit for society and their selfishness contains the broadest love of humanity.



Establishing the Nihilist Axiom 41

3.  New people’s reason is in perfect harmony with their feeling because neither reason nor feeling are distorted by chronic enmity for the rest of people. 4.  This may be summed up briefly as follows: new people is the name given to workers who think, who love their work. So there is no reason to be angry with them.67 Lest one conclude from the above passage that individual convictions might take second place to “the benefit of society,” Pisarev argues that individual beliefs and convictions constitute irreducible units of value, meaning that for Pisarev’s ideal person, “[w]hether their convictions are bad or good, they are their convictions and they value them, when possible they spread them in society, when they cannot, they keep silence; but they will not and cannot change their flag.”68 The implication of this brief elaboration of Pisarev’s position is that somehow, from the willful action of the individual ego, will spring the “greater benefit of society,” so that like Rand and Chernyshevskii, Pisarev advocates egoism with the understanding that this will benefit humanity at large. Rand makes much the same point as Pisarev, regarding the inviolability of the individual’s “flag.” She remarks, in an essay entitled “Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?,” that one’s moral principles, based on reason, cannot be compromised; when someone suggests that compromise is necessary, what they are probably doing is asking you to surrender some basic moral premise—to “change [your] flag,” to use Pisarev’s formulation, or to capitulate from the “true and good” to the “false and evil,” in Rand’s.69 Pisarev’s “Thinking Proletariat” is actually an extended review of Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? As such, Pisarev comments on the presence of Robert Owen in the novel; Owen’s significance, according to Pisarev, is that that “holy old man” “worked all his life for mankind.” This might suggest at first glance that the significance of the individual lies in the extent to which they pursue the common good. Pisarev goes on to say, however, that in these people [Owen, among others] love for mankind grows and becomes stronger as they become absorbed in their work . . . they constantly become better and purer, they constantly get younger instead of growing flabby and vulgar; by the process of their life and rational work they wash off themselves the filth that clung to their parents, that was splashed on them at school and is constantly splashed on them by the ‘absolute darkness’ of life around them.70

In this exposition—Pisarev’s vision of the ideal man of the future—the telos of progress is not a vague “common good,” but the actualization of individual potential. The problem with existing society, as Pisarev sees it, is that it prevents individuals from reaching their potential as human beings: for him,

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Owen’s real victory is not his theory of communal property or communal living, but that in spite of the “absolute darkness” of existing society, Owen still managed to become truly human. While there is no doubt room for argument with Pisarev’s reading of Owen, the point remains that Pisarev sees egoism triumphant as the ultimate goal. Pozefsky portrayed Pisarev in this self-focused fashion, with the significance of Pisarev’s thought being its internal focus rather its external implications for the future of Russian society or its role in an identifiable path to socialist revolution.71 In Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, the character Bazarov embodied most of the characteristics advocated in Pisarev’s ideas above.72 Bazarov is obsessed with science, uncaring in regard to others’ feelings about him, and does what he does based on individual compulsions, not on any greater love for “society.” Pisarev then took it upon himself to respond to Turgenev, portraying Bazarov as a positive example of the results of the egoist lifestyle. In terms of his impact on his contemporaries, therefore, Pisarev’s “readers were attracted to Pisarev’s Bazarov not because of an affinity for Pisarev’s social ideas but because, having read his essays, they were able to imagine what Bazarov would do if he were in their shoes.”73 As suggested in the above treatment of Chernyshevskii, Rand, and Stirner, this is a rejection of “the System” as an approach to philosophy, in favor of an egoistic outlook designed to ensure a maximally liberating context in which the individual can develop. This interpretation fits very well with the content of Pisarev’s essay “Thinking Proletariat,” as he admonishes his readers that “[n]o matter how beautiful and consoling any world outlook is, no matter how many centuries and peoples considered it an irrefutable truth . . . the most modest of the new people will accept it only if it suits the demands and make-up of his own intellect.”74 “Truth,” for Pisarev, is thus contained wholly within the boundary of the individual personality, which leaves him incapable of providing any sort of answer as to what exactly is the “common task of all mankind” that his new people should be “[b]earing constantly in mind.”75 It seems fair to characterize Pisarev’s primary focus, therefore, as being on the indeterminate freedom of the individual, with a somewhat vaguer notion of “rolling benefits” to humanity to follow. Rand’s focus on the same indeterminate individual freedom that will allow businessmen/women like her characters Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart to remake the world, with her vaguer implication that the world of the future will look like Galt’s Atlantis, is suggestive of the essential compatibility of her views with those of Pisarev. Given the egoist foundation laid down thus far, one has to ask how Pisarev conceives of the character of social relations. Pisarev’s answer is that “the more profound [the new people’s] selfishness, the greater their love for



Establishing the Nihilist Axiom 43

humanity will become . . . and the nearer they will approach the all-round development of their strength and the boundless fullness of their happiness.”76 Ayn Rand, for her part, similarly argued that only the truly egoistic person is fit to associate with other human beings; individualism has nothing to do with a “desert island” scenario. Rather, as Rand remarked in a 1946 letter to Rose Wilder Lane, it has everything to do with the “fact [that] only true Individualists are fit to associate with other men; but they do it only on the basis of the recognition of each man’s essential independence.”77 The heroes of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged inhabit a paradise-in-exile from a world they can no longer stomach, and they cooperate with one another in exactly this individualist fashion. Pisarev and Rand therefore appear to be making extremely similar arguments about the proper relationship between the individual and the individual’s fellow egos.78 The Russian conception of sobornost’ (literally, “conciliarity”) adds an additional way to see the commonality between Russian and Randian conceptions of the relation between the community and the individual ego. After 1905, historian Bernice Rosenthal has noted, the Symbolists of the Russian cultural “Silver Age” rejected a Nietzschean-inspired individualism in favor of sobornost,’ “originally a religious concept connoting a collective body in which the elements retain their individuality.”79 While sobornost’ is a religious concept, it is also true that the Chernyshevskiian/Randian future resembles a sort of secular sobornost’ that was supposed to be an ideal community of free individuals that was “scientifically” (rather than “religiously”) justified.80 At the same time, it is also true that neither Chernyshevskii nor Rand is as free of religion as they would have their readers believe.81 So, Rand’s remark that only individualists can rationally associate with other people and Pisarev’s linking of egoist fulfillment with collective happiness seem to fit well inside a Russian notion of sobornost,’ whose religious connotation was reemphasized by the late nineteenth-century philosopher Russian Vladimir Solov’ev, who both critiqued the “nihilist” movement and inspired the turnof-the-century Symbolist movement in Russian art and literature. PISAREV AND RAND ON PLATO AND PERSONALITY With regard to egoism, Pisarev’s essay “Plato’s Idealism” is also instructive. He calls Plato’s idealism (meaning his notion of the “forms” and his ideal Republic) a “hallucination,” arguing that “Platonism is a religion, not a philosophy.”82 The result of this train of thought, Pisarev contends, is that the individual will disappear into a morass of broad abstractions that will have detrimental practical consequences. He notes that Plato’s idealism was

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all fine and good (even if mistaken) when it remained theoretical—a sort of poetic vision of the world—but that “When he entered the sphere of the existent, he became a doctrinaire,” and the “persecution of dissidents” cannot be far behind.83 In other words, to reference the previous discussion of Stirner, in Plato’s world, the individual gets subsumed in “The System.” With Pisarev’s comments in mind, Rand’s position on Plato is instantly recognizable. In her essay “For the New Intellectual,” Rand proposes the existence of two archetypal and interrelated forms of evil, encapsulated in the metaphors of “Attila” and the “Witch Doctor.”84 Rand’s Attila is “the man who rules by brute force . . . respects nothing but man’s muscles, and regards a fist, a club, or a gun as the only answer to any problem.” Rand’s Witch Doctor, on the other hand, is “the man who dreads the necessity of practical action, and escapes . . . into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature.”85 The clinching statement from Rand will speak for itself: Plato’s system is a monument to the Witch Doctor’s metaphysics—with its two realities, with the physical world as a semi-illusory, imperfect, inferior realm, subordinated to a realm of abstractions . . . with reason in the position of an inferior but necessary servant that paves the way for the ultimate burst of mystic revelation which discloses a ‘superior’ truth.86

Not only do both Pisarev and Rand see the essence of Plato as an exercise in faith rather than rationality, but both argue that violence will not be far on the heels of its belief. Rand, for her part, argues that symbiotic with the Witch Doctor is Attila, whose brutality is a necessary corrective to the absurdities bound to be generated by the Witch Doctor’s denial of reality in favor of an ideal universe. Plato is the philosophic bête noir of both Pisarev and Rand, and is so for the same reasons, which have the same consequences for the vision of the unfettered human ego—he provides a vast philosophical system with no provable basis in empirical reality, in which the individual gets subsumed, the state tail wags the individual dog, and violence is done upon the ego who refuses to submit. A look at their respective positions on Plato is thus illuminating as to the extent of the similarity of the egoism of Pisarev and Rand. On a more positive note, Pisarev takes from his criticism of Plato the moral that the point of existence is enjoyment. He notes that “I do my work and try to make it easier—or, which is the same—to derive the greatest possible enjoyment from each and every effort. This is, as I see it, the Alpha and Omega of any reasonable human activity.”87 It is worth recalling here, the visceral satisfaction from work, gained by Chernyshevskii’s Vera Pavlovna, and Rand’s positive characters such as Dagny Taggart and Hank



Establishing the Nihilist Axiom 45

Rearden. Chernyshevskii remarks that since Vera Pavlovna’s life is based on the correct principles, “Labor takes on a passionate exhilaration.”88 Rand’s Hank Rearden, for his part, looks at his steel mill, “Rearden Steel,” as he is walking home from work very late one night, and wishes that the sign over his mill that represents his life’s work could read “Rearden Life” instead.89 These characters’ lived ethos is the same as that argued by Pisarev. As does Rand, too, Pisarev specifically rejects reference to common good as an alternate reason for one’s life and activities. He argues “The good or weal is an extremely broad concept, one that may be expanded ad infinitum,” when in reality, the correct conception of “the good” is simply an empty vessel, which the individual may fill with whatever he chooses, like (to use Pisarev’s example) a choice of wine depending on whether one prefers port or sherry.90 Pisarev’s commentary on who will get to fill this “empty vessel” is rather humorous: “And who, you inquire, created this notion of the common weal? That General-of-Philosophy Plato, I reply—and poor mankind, in thrall to his unending toils, is without a voice in this business, which is called its common weal.”91 Pisarev’s indictment of the “common good” as the plaything of philosophers with totalitarian paternalist ambitions is certainly a prominent theme in Rand’s writings, as her character Simon Pritchett demonstrates in Atlas Shrugged. Pritchett is Rand’s philosopher-antichrist, who argues that once man recognizes that “he is of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe [. . .] he will become much more . . . tractable.” Pritchett then speaks in support of an “Equalization of Opportunity Bill” (read: common good), because “A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free.”92 Rand and Pisarev appear to have a very similar view of the “common good.” Contra Plato, Pisarev argues for what amounts to a libertarian state that will provide a context in which the individual ego can define its own path, unfettered by abstract sociopolitical ideals. Pisarev contrasts Plato’s Republic unfavorably with a vision of “the republic as a preservative institution that protects the individual against offence and attack by internal and external enemies. By this definition they release the grown-up citizen from the specific and unwanted guardianship imposed upon him all his lifelong by Plato’s republic.”93 When one combines Pisarev’s rejection of nonspecific ideals such as “common good” with his arguments in favor of individual fulfillment and a minimal state, the resemblance between the character and context of the egos of Pisarev and Rand is striking. To cite on example among many, one of Rand’s “strikers,” a Judge Narragansett, spends his time in Galt’s Gulch studying the law. In the final scene of Atlas Shrugged, the Judge is sitting

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in his library, writing an amendment to the American constitution to ensure that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.”94 Making no claims about Pisarev’s politics, at this point it is possible to say with some confidence that whatever opinions he and Rand have on the context necessary for the ego to flower, they have an identical and definite subject in mind (the autonomous, unfettered ego), along with an identical and indefinite object (the realization of the happiness, desires of that ego). The object of Rand’s “ethics of rational egoism,” she argues, is to reveal that “The highest moral purpose of a man’s life is the achievement of his own happiness.”95 Given the specific character of her emphasis on individual happiness/self-fulfillment, Rand seems to mean the same thing by “egoism” as do Chernyshevskii and Pisarev.96 EGOISM AND THE CONFLICT-FREE PERSONALITY There is a final point worth making about the vision of egoism portrayed in the writings of Rand and the nihilists: the notion of an integrated personality, free from internal contradictions. In “For the New Intellectual,” Rand looks to the realization of the “integrated man.” She argues that the new type of person, who will replace Attila and the Witch Doctor, will end “irrational conflicts and contradictions,” including the “soul-body dichotomy,” “mind versus heart,” “reality versus desire,” and “the practical versus the moral.” The new type, Rand avers, “will be an integrated man, that is: a thinker who is a man of action.”97 The nihilist “new type” is similarly free of internal contradictions. In a negative example, Chernyshevskii casts women as conflicted and (as he characterizes their contemporary state) “pitiful,” for precisely this reason—the disjuncture between their reality and their desire. The most dearly held wish of all women, Chernyshevskii argues, is to have been born a man.98 Chernyshevskii was not arguing that men are by nature superior to women, but that in the Russian 1860s, he thought, women’s sociopolitical reality was at odds with the summit of what women could and should have desired to achieve. Chernyshevskii is thus posing a scenario where a sorry state of womanhood is the direct result of a dis-integrated personality in need of a resolution. Chernyshevskii’s new person is a thinking man of action. Lopukhov, for instance, chastises himself for thinking that Vera Pavlovna was making a “sacrifice” by marrying him, and reminds himself that “It’s certainly true that one’s own ego comes first; that’s where it begins and ends.” He then notes that “It’s very amusing for the theorist to observe how egoism can play with one’s own ideas in practice,” concluding that whatever happens



Establishing the Nihilist Axiom 47

with his and his wife’s circumstances, he will still be pursuing his passion— medicine—taking comfort in his ability to observe the interplay of his theory (egoism) and his reality (his medical career).99 This reinforces the notion that it is essential to begin with the correct ideas about life,100 as well as Chernyshevskii’s point that conflicted personalities in human beings are unhealthy and irrational.101 Ultimately, then, Chernyshevskii and Rand elaborate an identical vision of the integrated personality, free by virtue of its sociopolitical context to pursue its heart’s desires on the basis of its rational faculty, with internal and interpersonal harmony to follow. CONCLUSION Both Rand and the nihilists envisioned a human society radically different from the contexts in which they lived.102 Past treatments have, with some justification, seen the nihilists as an episode in the history of radical socialism in Russia. Rand’s ultra-capitalism is unarguable, by contrast. However, seeing these economic ideologies as the intellectual first principles for Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, and Rand is, so to speak, to mistake the flag for the goods. Rather, all three envision the unfettered egoist individual reigning supreme in a utopian future: be that future a commune inflected with shades of Owen and Fourier, for Chernyshevskii, or the creative industrial paradise of Galt’s Gulch, for Rand. Ayn Rand left Russia in January 1926, physically carrying a stack of film script ideas and a “precious stone sewn into her clothes,” by her mother.103 In her mental luggage, this chapter has suggested, was a concept of egoism with very close resemblances to the egoism of the 1860s “nihilist” period in Russian intellectual history. This version of egoism became an important piece of Rand’s entire literary-philosophical corpus, the fictional portion of which sold over 800,000 copies in 2008.104 Having now addressed the axiomatic role played by rational egoism, I now turn to a further set of comparative themes in the writings of Rand, Chernyshevskii, and Pisarev, beginning with the principles of heroism and creativity. NOTES 1.  ARA, SC, 4b, A, L, M-1, 1. 2.  This definition invites comparison with Adam Smith’s view of self-interest. For Smith, “self-interest” and “selfishness” are not the same thing at all, since self-interest is the sort of self-regard that has results beyond the individual’s benefit. The same appears true of Chernyshevskii and Rand (e.g., Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness) with the caveat that Smith perhaps relatively more emphasis on collective benefit as

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an intended consequence, as opposed to a secondary effect, of individual egoism. See for example, Smith’s of how to think about the rich and the poor, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 57–61.   3.  The definitive scholarly treatment of Herzen and his significance to the histories of Russia and socialism remains Martin Malia’s Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism. Aileen Kelly’s recent The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016) adds much to Malia’s treatment, however. Other important figures in the “men of the forties” era include Herzen’s collaborator Nikolai Ogarev, and the historian Timofei Granovskii (who undergoes a ribbing in the form of Dostoevskii’s character Stepan Verkhovenskii, in Demons). An accessible overview of this intellectual period and many of its important participants can be found in Isaiah Berlin’s essay “A Remarkable Decade,” in his Russian Thinkers (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 114–209.   4.  Karl Ameriks, “The legacy of idealism in the philosophy of Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard,” in Karl Ameriks, ed., The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 58. Ameriks actually argues that quite a lot of idealistic thinking is preserved in the writings of his subjects, but this does not change the point that they were self-consciously reacting to idealism.   5.  Paul Franks, “All or Nothing: Systematicity and Nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon,” in Karl Ameriks, ed., The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95.  6. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), xxxvii. See also Karl Barth’s introduction to Feuerbach, as well as Ameriks’ essay in the Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, 259.   7.  See Barth’s introduction to Feuerbach, xi.  8. See chapter 4 for an extended treatment of the nihilists and the man-God problem.  9. What Is to Be Done?, 112 and note 41. 10.  Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) 141–57. 11. Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia, 147. 12. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 257–72. 13.  See David Leopold’s introduction to Max Stirner. The Ego and Its Own, David Leopold, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 14.  John Carroll, Break-out from the Crystal Palace. The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 30. 15.  ARA, Russian Family Correspondence, 20. In a letter to writer Isabel Paterson, dated 10 Oct, 1943, Rand exhibits at least a general familiarity with Stirner. See Michael Berliner, ed. The Letters of Ayn Rand (New York: Plume, 1997), 174–75. In a letter to her sister, in January 1926, Rand mentions reading Thus Spake Zarathustra. 16.  Semen Frank, “The Ethic of Nihilism: A Characterization of the Russian Intelligentsia’s Moral Outlook,” in Vekhi (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), 134–36. 17.  Carroll, 29. Emphasis in original.



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18.  Carroll, 28. 19.  Carroll, 29. 20. Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia, 157. 21.  See Barth’s introduction to Feuerbach, xxvii–xxx, and Stirner, 33–34, 141–53, 155–158. See also Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes & Setsuo Aihara, SUNY Series in Modern Japanese Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 109. 22.  Stirner, 155–58. 23.  Stirner, 165. In Devils (1872), Dostoevskii would express much the same sentiments toward “nihilism,” albeit with horror rather than joy. 24.  Stirner, 183. 25.  Stirner, 191. 26.  William S. Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 34. 27.  Graebner, 34. 28. See Atlas Shrugged, 447-55, for the Rearden trial sequence. 29.  See for instance Leviathan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), chapter 13, passim, and Hobbes’s preface to De Cive, where he argues that that “state we may properly call the state of nature” “is nothing else but a mere war of all against all; and in that war all men have equal right unto all things.” Stirner’s point, of course, is that we ought not to view this scenario as a “state of misery” (Hobbes’s words), but instead we ought to promote a sociopolitical scenario in which this war could actually occur (though Stirner does not appear to think that it actually will). See Hobbes, De Cive or The Citizen (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), 13. Text is available electronically from https://ia600208.us.archive.org/15/items/deciveor citizen00inhobb/deciveorcitizen00inhobb.pdf. 30.  Stirner, 229–30. By “ghostly,” Stirner means abstractions such as “Man” or “Freedom,” for example. (Stirner also employs the word “spook” on a regular basis). For Stirner, then, the liberals and the socialists/communists make the same mistake regarding property: the liberals sacralize it with regard to “Man,” the socialists/ communists sacralize it with regard to “Labor,” all of which Stirner thinks are conceptual “ghosts” in need of demystification and “desecration.” 31.  Stirner, 208. 32.  Stirner, 229. 33.  For example, Stirner, 105. Interestingly enough, Stirner rejects both “Society,” and “Need” as undefinable abstractions that should be gotten rid of. These are of course, two key conceptual enemies for Rand as well, and Chernyshevskii’s position on the idea of “need” is also ambiguous at best. 34.  Keiji, 123. 35.  Leopold, Introduction to Stirner, xxii. 36.  Leopold, Introduction to Stirner, xxix–xxx. 37. Nicholas Luker, “Scandalous Sanin Revisited: A Literary Re-Assessment,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1999) 195. 38.  Luker, 195. 39.  Luker, 195.

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40. See Otto Boele’s introduction to Sanin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 9; Semen Frank, “The Ethic of Nihilism,” 132–38. 41.  One of Ayn Rand’s first purchases, upon her arrival in the United States, was a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which Rand marked up with underlinings and notes. Rand’s first marking in her copy of Nietzsche was to underline the following phrase: “but my happiness should justify existence itself!” ARA, Copy of Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (New York: 1917), 29. Rand’s markings in Thus Spake Zarathustra are preserved in this copy of Nietzsche, which is located at the ARA. Important to note is that the book is not Rand’s original copy, the whereabouts of which is unknown at present. Rand’s marking have been transferred from her original copy, which was the 1917 translation, to a later edition with a different translator, and then back to a different copy of the 1917 translation. Citation of this material, therefore, takes a certain degree of faith in the accuracy of the transfer of Rand’s markings. 42. Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Chto Delat’ (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe UchebnoPedagogicheskoe Izdatel’stvoMinisterstva Prosveshcheniia RSFSR, 1957), 32. 43.  Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Signet, 1985), 680, 993. 44.  Atlas Shrugged, 680–81. 45.  What Is to Be Done?, 323. 46.  Chto Delat’?, 32; What Is to Be Done?, 74. 47.  What Is to Be Done?, 190–91 and eds. note, 191. 48.  Chto Delat’?, 131–33; What Is to Be Done?, 190–91. 49.  What Is to Be Done?, 192. 50.  What Is to Be Done?, 193. 51.  Atlas Shrugged, 54. 52.  Atlas Shrugged, 95. 53.  Atlas Shrugged, 95. 54.  Atlas Shrugged, 96. 55.  Atlas Shrugged, 797. 56.  Atlas Shrugged, 797. 57.  Atlas Shrugged, 375. 58.  Atlas Shrugged, 389. 59.  Stirner made a similar argument in The Ego and Its Own, arguing that communism promises material solvency but cannot tell you how to enjoy your newfound possessions. Stirner’s point is that “enjoyment” (Stirner’s italics) is the ultimate goal of life, and he juxtaposes this to his portrayal of the logic of communism by arguing that since in a communist scenario possessions are held in common, that your solvency will always be dependent on the will of others, so that “ownness” is manifestly absent. See Stirner, 238–39. 60.  Mysterious Suspense: The Return of the Question 1, no. 1 (October 1968): 2. 61.  See further, Chris Sciabarra, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical 2nd ed. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 309–10. 62.  Chto Delat?, 67; What Is to Be Done?, 115. Lopukhov’s later suicide is not inconsistent with this point of view. See the reflections on the problem of suffering in chapter 3. 63.  Chto Delat’? 67–68; What Is to Be Done?, 115–16.



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64.  Rand’s arguments against altruism are everywhere in her writings, but see her “Introduction” to The Virtue of Selfishness, viii, from which the above quote is taken; see also her essay “For the New Intellectual,” in For the New Intellectual (New York, 1963), for a good summary of her position, as well as John Galt’s speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged, 927–93. 65.  These particular essays are a good logical fit into this essay, since “Thinking Proletariat” is an extended review of What Is to Be Done? And Plato is a subject of considerable interest to both Pisarev and Rand. 66.  Pisarev’s essay was originally titled “A New Type,” in its first publication in Russkoe Slovo (“Russian Word”). In 1867, there appeared an edition of Pisarev’s published works, and the editor of the collection thought that “Thinking Proletariat” would be more likely to pass the censors. See Pozefsky, 92 and 232–33n27. 67.  D. I. Pisarev, “Thinking Proletariat,” in Selected Philosophical, Social, and Political Essays (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1958), 646. 68.  Pisarev, “Thinking Proletariat,” 624–25. 69. ARA, Butterfield Collection, “The Objectivist Newsletter” pt. 1, May 20, 1962, “Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?” This collection of sources is largely made up of handwritten drafts of her essays for her periodical publications, such as “The Objectivist Newsletter,” and “The Ayn Rand Letter”; “Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York, 1964), 68–70. 70.  D. I. Pisarev, “Mysliaschii proletariat,” in Sochineniia tom IV (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Khudozhesvennoi Literaturyi, 1956), 19; Pisarev, “Thinking Proletariat,” 638–39. 71.  Pozefsky, 15. 72. Where Turgenev portrays “Bazarov” negatively, Pisarev turns those minus signs into plus signs. 73.  Pozefsky, 217. 74.  Pisarev, “Mysliaschii proletariat,” 23; “Thinking Proletariat,” 644. 75.  Pisarev, “Mysliaschii proletariat,” 15; “Thinking Proletariat,” 634. Given that Pisarev saw Bazarov as similar to himself (only not as advanced), and himself as similar to Bazarov (only better), this probably explains why Pisarev felt the need to compose an essay entitled “Bazarov,” to “set the record straight.” See D. I. Pisarev, “Bazarov,” in Sochineniia tom I (Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe Khudozhestvennoi Literaturyi, 1955), 7–50. 76.  Pisarev, “Mysliaschii Proletariat,” 20; “Thinking Proletariat,” 641. 77.  Letter to Rose Wilder Lane, November 3, 1946, in Letters of Ayn Rand, 346. 78. Purely on the basis of “Thinking Proletariat,” one would have to conclude that if there is such a thing as man’s “common task,” it is to allow individuals to reach their potential. This task is not really “common” though, since it is up to rather iconoclastic individuals (as exemplified by Bazarov and Pisarev himself) to effect the necessary destruction of self-inhibiting tradition. 79.  Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “The Transmutation of the Symbolist Ethos: Mystical Anarchism and the Revolution of 1905,” Slavic Review 36, no. 4 (December 1977): 609; See also Rosenthal, “Lofty Ideals and Worldly Consciousness: Visions of Sobornost’ in Early Twentieth Century Russia,” Russian History 20, no. 1–4 (1993):

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179–195; Rosenthal, “Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Visions of Sobornost’” California Slavic Studies 14 (1992): 147–70. 80. Gregory Salmieri observes a similar affinity between Rand and Chernyshevskii, noting that both believed that there “are no conflicts of interest between rational men.” See Gregory Salmieri, “Egoism and Altruism: Selfishness and Sacrifice,” in Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri, eds., A Companion to Ayn Rand (Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell, 2016), 134. Salmieri’s discussion of Chernyshevskii’s ethical consequentialism is a useful reminder that acknowledging Rand’s deep debt to the 1860s radicals is not to argue that their ideas are identical in every way. For Khomiakov and sobornost,’ see Walicki’s A History of Russian Thought, 92–106. 81.  See below where I discuss the “man-God problem,” and make the argument that the nihilist reversal of Christ-become-man in favor of Man-becomes-God does not occur without retention of a certain amount of religious baggage. 82.  D. I. Pisarev, “Idealizm platona,” in Sochininiia tom I, 80-81; D. I. Pisarev, “Plato’s Idealism,” in Selected Philosophical, Social, and Political Essays, 51–52. 83.  Pisarev, “Idealizm platona,” 79–80; “Plato’s Idealism,” 51–52. 84. Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” 10–57. Rand composed this essay after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, and in it, she bases her Witch Doctor and Attila metaphors heavily on characters in her novel. Recall Pozefsky’s argument that in the Russian 1860s, the line between art and life became extremely blurry. Rand’s essay presents a very similar case, where much of the “evidence” Rand presents for the existence of her archetypal evils is actually from her fiction, providing another interesting similarity between the oeuvre of Rand, and Chernyshevskii and Pisarev. Put another way, not only are the arguments the same, but so is the somewhat distinctive means of their transmission. 85.  Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” 14. 86.  Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” 22. Emphasis in original. 87.  Pisarev, “Idealizm platona,” 85–86; “Plato’s Idealism,” 59. 88.  Chto Delat’?, 276; What Is to Be Done?, 356. 89.  Atlas Shrugged, 38. 90.  Pisarev, “Idealizm platona,” 82; “Plato’s Idealism,” 54–55. 91.  Pisarev, “Idealizm platona,” 82. 92.  Atlas Shrugged, 129. 93.  Pisarev, “Idealizm platona,” 92; “Plato’s Idealism,” 67. 94.  Atlas Shrugged, 1083. 95.  ARA, SC, 4b,A,L,M-1, 1. 96.  The foregoing sections on egoism in Chernyshevskii and Pisarev bear comparison with Shoshana Milgram’s view that Chernyshevskii was not an “individualist” and that his characters have “no special regard for their own happiness.” As I have argued here, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Additionally, consider (1) what Pisarev actually says about the nature of the individual, and (2) the fact that much of this occurs inside a glowing review of What Is to Be Done? The most textually plausible conclusion is that he and Chernyshevskii’s egoism is fundamentally similar. That said, Chernyshevskii’s “socialist utopia” (if that’s what it in fact is) becomes his fore-



Establishing the Nihilist Axiom 53

cast second-order result of a first-order principle. And so, to argue for a fundamental similarity between Rand’s egoism and the nihilists’ changes little in interpretation of Rand’s views—it merely changes how one thinks about the implications of Russian ideas once taken to be unproblematically socialist in nature. See Shoshana Milgram, “The Life of Ayn Rand: Writing, Reading, and Related Life Events,” in A Companion to Ayn Rand, 23 and 38n7. See also Konstantine Klioutchkine, “Between Ideology and Desire: Rhetoric of the Self in the Works of Nikolai Chernyskevskii and Nikolai Dobroliubov,” Slavic Review, 68, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 351, for the pungent observation that in What Is to Be Done?, as in previous writings, the “indulgent language of [Chernyshevskii’s] illustrations exceeded the message of altruism.”   97.  Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” 51. Emphasis in original; Sciabarra, Ayn Rand 2nd ed., 323–24.  98. Chto Delat’?, 54.  99. Chto Delat’?, 96–98. 100. Chernyshevskii has his superhero Rakhmetov ask, at the beginning of his radical awakening to revolutionism, ask “What books should I read first?” What Is to Be Done?, 280. For her part, Rand constantly advises her correspondents to start by reading her books, especially Atlas Shrugged. 101.  Chto Delat?, 96–98. It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that Lopukhov and Kirsanov are members of the medical profession, since in the absence of a contrast between the mind and the body, the role of the physician and the psychologist are merged, and in fact, Lopukhov and Kirsanov consistently play both roles, as doctor and therapist. Turgenev’s character Bazarov was likewise a medical man. 102.  See further Sciabarra, Ayn Rand, 2nd ed. 343–58. 103. Burns, Goddess of the Market, 18. 104. Burns, Goddess of the Market, 2.

Chapter Two

Heroism and the Creativity Principle as a Nihilist Tradition

INTRODUCTION Having discussed the concept of egoism and its elaboration in the thought of Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, and Rand, this chapter moves to address answers to the overall question, “what kind of people should we be?,” once acolytes embrace nihilist/Randian egoism as the principle upon which life ought to be organized. Specifically, it will address what I will call the “creativity principle” and the notions of heroism that bind Rand and the nihilists of 1860s Russia together. A key bridge between Rand and the 1860s was the creative aesthetics of the turn-of-the-century avant-garde, who desired to achieve a fusion of art and life. Much of this drive to synthesize art and life traces back to the 1860s, to Chernyshevskii and Pisarev. The romantic modernist aesthetic of Symbolism, Irina Paperno argues, “rested on a solid positivist substratum” going back to Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?, which had proposed a “new man” “carefully encoded in the language of science and social theory.”1 The exercise of an individual creativity that fuses art and life turns out to be a central answer to the question of “what kind of people should we be?,” with the human possibilities resulting from this principle’s observance enabling the creation of individuals of truly “heroic” proportions. As in the previous chapter, this book will address these issues in context of a comparison between What Is to Be Done? and Atlas Shrugged, supplemented by consideration of other primary writings such as those of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev, whose influence on the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century avant-garde will prove to be an important bridge between nihilism and Rand. Additionally, it is useful to keep in mind the American context for Rand’s emphasis on creativity in an industrial capitalist setting. 55

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Rand came to the United States in the 1920s, and so lived through both the Great Depression and the period of prosperity that preceded it. As American historian Richard Pells has argued, the Soviet Union of the 1930s exerted a powerful pull on the American imagination, since in the midst of a Western Depression, “[t]he Russians were building a society whose political, economic, and cultural values tested the most cherished of American assumptions.”2 More specifically, Pells argues that “the American intellectual’s ability to devise a new social philosophy and value system in the 1930s depended to a great extent in what he thought about Russia.”3 Ayn Rand, needless to say, had definite views on the nature of the Soviet Experiment, and so her championing of the limitless possibilities of human creativity in a specifically American capitalist context takes on additional significance when one stops to consider the fact that she lived through a period in which intellectuals in her adopted country were considering the merits of the economic system that Rand had gladly left behind. Even in 1962, Rand was still thinking of the Soviet Union as “Our alleged competitor.”4 If widespread American questioning of the merits of the capitalist system provides a backdrop for Rand’s valorization of creativity in an industrial setting, the “Red Scare” provides an additional context for Rand’s particular version of the heroic principle. American historian Lary May discusses Rand’s composition of A Screen Guide for Americans, which was intended to strike a blow in the cultural Cold War by playing on Americans’ increasing identification with on-screen heroes. It advocated eliminating sympathetic portrayals of poverty, labor movements, and the “little people,” as well as negative portrayals of bankers, for example.5 Instead, Rand argued that films ought to heroize the “countless examples of self-made men who rose from the ranks and achieved great industrial success through their energy, ability, and honest productive effort.”6 Rand put her theoretical anti-communism into practice in the film industry. She had hoped that Gary Cooper might be chosen to star in the 1949 film version of The Fountainhead. Cooper was in fact chosen for the part, which was entirely apropos, since he was also a founding member of the “Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals,” the publisher of Rand’s Screen Guide for Americans.7 So, the cultural front on the American side of the Cold War, as well as public questioning of the viability of capitalism in light of the Soviet Alternative and the Great Depression, both provide a certain backdrop for Rand’s valorization of heroic capitalists and their creative pursuits. THE CREATIVITY PRINCIPLE Central to the characters of Chernyshevskii and Rand is their drive to build and create, in both material and spiritual senses. Their ultimate object seems



Heroism and the Creativity Principle as a Nihilist Tradition 57

to be something like the zhiznetvorchestvo (“life creation”) of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Symbolists, as described by Irina Paperno and others.8 As Paperno has noted, zhiznetvorchestvo has no direct English equivalent, but generally connoted a “deliberate aesthetic organization of behavior,” whose purpose was to address the “accursed question” of the relationship between art and life, by achieving a synthesis of the two.9 In this scheme, “the events of life were never experienced as merely and solely life’s events . . . the events of life immediately became a part of the internal world, a piece of creation.”10 For the characters in What Is to Be Done? and Atlas Shrugged, all philosophical statements have immediate life-significance, and all life-acts contain ultimate philosophical principles. The thinkers Vladimir Solov’ev and Nikolai Fedorov, two of the inspirations for the Symbolist movement, saw salvation as manifest in the “creative potential of human beings,” particularly in the areas of art and love, so that life itself could become a kind of “project.”11 In art, for instance, Fedorov thought that art should cease to merely represent life and should instead become constitutive of it, a motive force of life’s reconstitution.12 In the realm of love, likewise, Symbolists saw love’s function as transformative, so that poet Zinaida Gippius’s involvement in a series of unconsummated love triangles was indicative of the participants’ desire to transform the world though exercise of what Olga Matich has termed “erotic celibacy,” where the collective sexual energy of the human race was stored up, as it were, in anticipation of a sort of collective orgasm of cosmic proportions where death itself would be superseded.13 In Symbolism, then, there was a prominent argument that the old binary of art and life ought to be transcended, so that life could be lived as a “text,” and art could be envisioned as “living.” Bernice Rosenthal has detailed an important additional influence on the symbolists, that of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, with whom Rand was also familiar.14 Rosenthal argues that Nietzsche was a critical influence on the poet Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, and that part of Nietzsche’s appeal lay in his ability support Merezhkovskii’s “radicalism of the spirit” that rejected Populism in politics and Orthodoxy in religion: both of these “demanded a degree of self-effacement which the egoistic Merezhkovsky could not accept. The faith he sought would provide happiness on earth, guarantee personal immortality, and still withstand rational critique.”15 At one level, Nietzsche’s influence prompted Merezhkovskii to adopt an egoism that closely resembles the egoism detailed in the previous chapter. At another level, Merezhkovskii’s eventual rejection of Nietzscheanism led him to fuse art and life in his quest to uphold the creative potential of humanity. In an essay on Dostoevskii, Merezhkovskii rather counterintuitively used Dostoevskii’s characters Ivan Karamazov (The Brothers Karamazov), Kirillov (Devils), and Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment), to argue (according to

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Rosenthal) that man’s reason “must be guided by an ethical ideal, by love for one’s fellow man.”16 So, Merezhkovskii exhibited both egoism (in his adoption of Nietzsche) and the tendency to fuse art and reality (in his rejection of Nietzsche), by taking Dostoevskii’s characters as models for real life. In any event, Merezhkovskii desired to live a heroic and creative lifestyle that would transform the world, which adds to the sense that the symbolist era of the early twentieth century provides something of a bridge between the discussion of these concepts in both Rand and Chernyshevskii. If Paperno’s “positivist substratum” of 1860s thought provides an essential backdrop to the romantic modernist aesthetic of Symbolism, this should not be interpreted, I suggest, as evidence that the shestidesiatniki were true, thoroughgoing positivists. It might be more accurate to say that the positivist roots Paperno identifies were something of an 1860s semiotic gloss: if the shestidesiatniki rejected art for art’s sake,17 they also rejected science for science’s sake. This judgment seems to apply, even granting that the Russian nauka (“science”) is broader in connotation than “science” in contemporary English, where the Russian word can apply to social as well as the empirical natural sciences. In Chernyshevskii’s case, one can see the empirical science idea at work in Lopukhov and Kirsanov, who are both medical doctors, and are thus men of “science.” The practical connection between their status as scientists and their relative responsibility for the onset of a Chernyshevskiian utopia, however, is not exactly clear: the fact that Lopukhov and Kirsanov are men of “science” serves more than anything else as a rhetorical indicator of their reliability as examples of the “new people.” Put another way, “scientific” seems to serve Chernyshevskii as a rhetorical adjective, a kind of floating signifier that legitimizes. Pisarev, on the one hand, approvingly discussed Turgenev’s Bazarov because “[a]s an empiricist, Bazarov recognizes only what he can grasp with his hands.”18 On the other hand, Pozefsky has addressed the question of Pisarev’s popular appeal, when his science obsession was so spectacularly dilettantish. To cite one example, Pisarev once argued that coffee predisposed people to Catholicism, and tea predisposed people to Protestantism, so that the Reformation could be seen in light of physiology.19 The implication, Pozefsky argues, is that the appeal of “science” was that it “offered [Pisarev’s] readers more than access to the latest in European research. On the level of symbol and metaphor, it presented a new interpretation of the social world and offered new models of social conduct and historical change.”20 In other words, Pisarev’s worldview was neither science for the sake of science (pace his description of Bazarov), nor art for art’s sake, but encompassed a semiotic strategy in which he wrote socially directed literature, and addressed a physiology which “served as a reservoir of metaphors for redefined social relationships.”21 A reading of Pozefsky,



Heroism and the Creativity Principle as a Nihilist Tradition 59

then, seems to add additional pieces of evidence to Paperno’s argument that zhiznetvorchestvo owed quite a bit to the 1860s, where Pisarev, in this case, fused life and art: both his vision of the “scientific” material world, and his vision of the egoist social ideal that his writing promoted. Berdiaev’s argument that intelligentsia interest in philosophy “was limited to their need for philosophical sanction of their social sentiments” has the ring of truth.22 Olga Matich has made a parallel point to Pozefsky’s, in her Erotic Utopia. An example of the Symbolist attempt to fuse art and life was the (celibate) marriage of Zinaida Gippius and Dmitrii Merezhkovsky in 1889, which had a “hidden Chernyshevskiian subtext” where the What Is to Be Done? love triangle influenced those of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century avant-garde, for example.23 Gippius described Belinskii, Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, and Bazarov (notice that she lumped the fictional character in with the “real” people) as great, moral men, and that, in Matich’s phrase, “they were really romantic idealists who only called themselves materialists.”24 Rand, interestingly, advocates something like Matich’s “romantic idealism” in materialist clothing. She combines rejection of a “Witch Doctor metaphysics”25 containing “visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature,”26 with the argument that morality is a “normative science,” that should model the ideal to be striven for. In The Romantic Manifesto, Rand argues that art is “a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments” and that Romanticism is that sort of art which takes into account the basic principle that human beings possess an individual will.27 What Could Be is as valid as what Is, in this view, so that like Pisarev’s use of “science” to explain the Reformation, Rand’s employment of language like “objectivity” mostly serves to reassure the reader that she is not engaging in any ridiculous religious/Platonist drivel. Rand argues, on the negative side, that societies make children “suppress” and “repress” their natural inclinations, under the pressure of such platitudes as “Life is not like that” and “Come down to earth,” which, says Rand, suppresses their romantic leanings.28 The positivism of the 1860s appears more as a rhetorical ploy than as adherence to a self-evident empirical state of affairs. “Science” was in service of Chernyshevskii and Pisarev’s human ideals, not in service of itself, and Rand’s romantic-idealist vision seems to conform to that combination of materialism and idealism. The implication of work on the Symbolists, combined with Pozefsky, is that the idea of zhiznetvorchestvo based on a fusion of life and art has a long history in Russian thought, originating in the 1860s and continuing through the Silver Age. This fusion of art and life that results in a kind of infinite creativity continues in Rand’s work.

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One does not have to look far to see this common principle at work in Atlas Shrugged and What Is to Be Done? For Chernyshevskii, the creativity principle is wrapped up in the contrast between Vera Pavlovna and her family. Vera Pavlovna is a creator, and her family are “robbers,” to use terminology Rand later applied to government economic planners in Atlas Shrugged. Both of her parents are pawnbrokers, and Chernyshevskii makes a point of saying that Vera Pavlovna’s mother inherited (i.e., did not create) the wealth used to start herself in the business.29 It is interesting that Chernyshevskii chose a pawnbroking business as his foil for the later advent of Vera Pavlovna’s dress shop, as opposed, for instance, to a factory run on non-Chernyshevskiian principles, which might have been a more obvious choice had Chernyshevskii chosen to write a more straightforwardly socialist morality tale or take a cue from his “holy old man” Robert Owen. Chernyshevskii’s literary choice makes perfect sense once one acknowledges the centrality of the creativity principle, however—a pawnbroking business creates nothing, it only moves wealth from one place to another and depends on need rather than plenty— whereas Vera Pavlovna’s dress shop is itself a creation of her own “passion” (see previous chapter), and once running, is an eminently creative enterprise. Chernyshevskii drives home this view of Vera Pavlovna’s mother, Mariia Alekseevna, later in the plot. At one point, she is eavesdropping on a conversation between Vera Pavlovna and Lopukhov, who is serving as Vera’s tutor at the time. Mariia Alekseevna thinks to herself later, that if she had been as educated as Lopukhov, that she could have used her knowledge to make a lot more money than she presently had, so that she could then have bought “more than a thousand serfs.”30 So, says Chernyshevskii in so many words, given the chance that “fifty-year-old gnarled tree” would have used her money to further enjoy the wealth from the creative potential of others, without actually creating anything herself. In her final scene, before Mariia Alekseevna quits the novel, she has a dream that Lopukhov has married her daughter and come to visit her. Lopukhov lavishes money on his new mother-in-law, and as it turns out, he has come into his newfound wealth by taking up tax farming. Upon awakening, Mariia Alekseevna’s final line in the novel is “He [Lopukhov] really ought to go in for tax farming.”31 Chernyshevskii’s point could hardly be clearer, as he juxtaposes Vera Pavlovna’s creativity with her mother’s parasitic existence: not only does she not want to create anything herself, but she wants Lopukhov to marry her daughter and go into tax farming (that most parasitic of occupations), the proceeds of which he will then give to her. Mariia Alekseevna is a tick who wants to live on a leech, in this view. Vera Pavlovna’s dress shop, on the other hand, is an eminently creative enterprise, both in the sense that it is innovative and that it generates a use-



Heroism and the Creativity Principle as a Nihilist Tradition 61

ful product. The dress shop is so creative, in fact, that it generates more wealth than its owner and employees know what to do with, and it ultimately becomes something of a catalyst for an apocalyptic transformation of the world into a land of plenty, where everyone finds fulfillment via rationally organized, useful work.32 In the material sense of creation, Rand’s work is shot though with the creativity principle even more so than Chernyshevskii’s. While I will focus on Atlas Shrugged, it is worth the initial mention that the main character of Rand’s first novel, We the Living (1936) desires to be an architect and is prevented from doing so by the Russian Revolution, whose defining ideology she views as parasitic upon the creating class. In her next novel, The Fountainhead (1943), the main character is an architect whose main antagonist is a prominent architectural critic, so that the creator/parasitic-on-the-creator dynamic is again present. In her dystopian novella Anthem (1946), which she initially conceived while still in Russia, the modern world is only a memory, and the main character is ostracized and hunted for having rediscovered electricity and made light with it. In the above works, Rand espouses the creativity principle somewhat narrowly conceived. In Atlas Shrugged, she addresses the issue in a much wider-ranging fashion. All of the main positive characters are creative people, materially speaking, as is evident from (the non-exhaustive) table 2.1. As Chernyshevskii contrasts the material creativity of his positive characters with the parasitic nature of their antagonists, so does Rand imbue all of her negative characters with a parasitic aura, regardless of their role in the plot. This nature is visible in (the also non-exhaustive) table 2.2. From the contrast between Vera Pavlovna and her mother and this list of character descriptions, it is apparent that for both Chernyshevskii and Rand, the dividing line between the saved and the damned rests heavily on a creator/ parasite dichotomy, so that being counted in the list of creators is a crucial point that decides whether a person is for or against the coming Revolution.33 This opposition raises an interesting question, namely, how permeable is the dividing line between the two camps? To put it in somewhat biblical terms, can the parasites be “born again,” or are they doomed, like the rich man in chapter 16 of the Gospel of Luke, to beg the saved—ineffectually— for water to quench the flames of their eternal torture? As it turns out, Chernyshevskii and Rand pose similar answers to this question as well, adding an additional point of comparison between the philosophies of the two. Both authors place their emphasis on whether those they deem parasitic are consciously or unconsciously so, with the latter being redeemable and the former being unredeemable. In Chernyshevskii’s case, he contrasts the employees of Vera Pavlovna’s dress shop (redeemable), and

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Table 2.1.   Fictional Characters and Creative Functions. Fictional Character

Creative Function

John Galt

Creator of a new kind of motor powered by the infinitely renewable static electricity in the atmosphere. Rand also refers to Galt as “The Destroyer,” in the sense that he is the engine of the destruction of the old world, allowing for the creation of the new. This is exactly the ethos Pisarev had in mind when he accepted the term “nihilism” as a correct description of his new generation. Creator of a new kind of metal (“Rearden Metal”), which is stronger, lighter, and more durable than steel. Owner of copper mines, creator of new mining processes, whose creative drive is further expressed by his temporary need to destroy his own enterprise for the good of the world. Creator of railway systems enabling others (such as Rearden and d’Anconia) to ship their own creations. Producer of coal, without which Hank Rearden, and, in turn, Dagny Taggart, cannot survive. Composer of music. Philosopher, creator of (in Rand’s view) the correct description of reality such that his was a critical influence on Galt, d’Anconia, and Ragnar Danneskjold. Philosopher following in his mentor Hugh Akston’s footsteps. His temporary vocation is that of pirate. In this capacity, he destroys the wealth created by the creators rather than let it fall into the hands of the robbers, a choice which Galt and d’Anconia regret. Rand uses Danneskjold’s role as destroyer to reinforce the centrality of the creativity principle, where he sees his piracy as a temporary evil in service of good; the other characters, while respecting his choice, hold creativity sacred so that that they have palpable qualms about his methods—even though they serve an ultimate good. Creator of a new process for extraction of oil from shale.

Hank Rearden Francisco d’Anconia

Dagny Taggart Ken Dannager Richard Halley Hugh Akston

Ragnar Danneskjold

Ellis Wyatt

Source: Table created by author.

Lopukhov’s irrational behavior toward her (redeemable), with Vera Pavlovna’s mother, who is conscious of her parasitic existence (see section above on tax-farming) and earns the moniker “fifty-year-old gnarled tree,” (read: “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”) as a result. Chernyshevskii does mention that the environment in which Mariia Alekseevna lived was not conducive to her positive development, but the general sense one gets from Chernyshevskii is one of unredeemability, in spite of the fact that Chernyshevskii personally forgives her, for what it is worth.34 It is easier for Chernyshevskii to write the



Heroism and the Creativity Principle as a Nihilist Tradition 63

Table 2.2.   Fictional Characters and Destructive Functions. Fictional Character

Destructive Function

Wesley Mouch

Government functionary, whose nominal similarity with “mooch” is undoubtedly intentional and whose main occupation is to destroy producers like Hank Rearden. Scientist, who uses the creative discoveries of another scientist to aid Rand’s “forces of evil.” What results from Farris’s expropriation of another’s discoveries in physics, is a fearsome weapon that uses sound waves to utterly destroy everything within a several-mile radius. President of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, who presides over its destruction, takes credit for the successes of his sister, drives a woman to suicide, and appears to disintegrate physically over the course of the novel. Hank Rearden’s wife and brother, respectively, who have no vocations of their own, and use Rearden’s money to actively undermine his creative enterprise for the benefit of his enemies. Philosopher, antithesis of Hugh Akston. His mission is to convince people that they are “of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe” so that when a person realizes that “it does not matter Whether he lives or dies, he will become much more . . . tractable.”1 As Akston puts it, Pritchett “has nothing to deposit to the account of philosophy, except his declared intention to destroy it.2

Floyd Farris

James Taggart

Lillian and Philip Rearden

Simon Pritchett

Source: Table created by author. 1. Atlas Shrugged, 129. Ellipsis is Rand’s. 2. Atlas Shrugged, 690.

enemies of The Revolution out of the narrative than it is to rehabilitate them, the same logic that no doubt inspired Whittaker Chambers to argue some ninety years later that the basic imperative of Atlas Shrugged was “To a gas chamber—go!”35 In Atlas Shrugged, Rand makes an identical distinction between conscious and unconscious behavior. A government stooge employed at Rearden’s steel mill (against Rearden’s will), gets jokingly referred to as the “Wet Nurse,” but Rand makes a point of noting that the Wet Nurse is the way he is due to the malevolent education he received. In a late portion of the novel, the Wet Nurse helps save Rearden’s steel mills from a thuggish takeover, sacrifices his life in the process, and achieves a pietà-like redemption as he dies with his head in Rearden’s lap. On the other side of the equation, a prime example of

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unredeemability is Dr. Robert Stadler, of whom Galt remarks, in the “Atlantis” sequence, “He’s my conscious enemy. He’s the man who sold his soul. We don’t intend to reclaim him”36 As for the consequences, the saved get to ascend to the paradisiacal fourth dream/Atlantis, and the damned get to meet the fate of the “unconscious,” which would become a heavily loaded word in the Revolutionary Russia that Rand inhabited. Though it is overly obvious to note that Rand and Lenin held opposite views as to what kind of economics was revolutionary, they assigned similar fates to the “unconscious.” Dagny Taggart shoots one of Galt’s prison guards in the climactic scene of Atlas Shrugged, with Rand noting that she did so “[c]almly and impersonally, she, who would have hesitated to fire at an animal, pulled the trigger and fired straight at the heart of a man who had wanted to exist without the responsibility of consciousness.”37 Dagny’s victim had his chance to join the “strikers,” refused to come over to the side of the creators, and so merits Rand’s punishment and relegation to a suspiciously Orwellian-sounding nonpersonhood. Chernyshevskii, for his part, writes a sarcastic “Eulogy” to Mariia Alekseevna, in which he insincerely tells her that he is sorry for making her quit the scene of the novel at such an “unfavorable” moment, while the reader is told that she has “cease[d] to be an important active participant in Verochka’s life.”38 As Vera Pavlovna’s “life” is the story of zhiznetvorchestvo, Chernyshevskii is also telling the reader that Mariia Alekseevna has, in effect, dropped off the human map, has become a nonperson, as it were. With his “Eulogy,” Chernyshevskii (who, true to his word, never mentions Mariia Alekseevna again) “kills” Vera Pavlovna’s unconscious mother just as effectively as Dagny Taggart’s bullet dispatches Galt’s prison guard. If Rand and Chernyshevskii elaborate more or less identical positions on the nature and desirability of physical creation, both authors also argue that material creation (i.e., dressmaking establishments and steel mills) is not the good in and of itself. The key for both, I argue, lies in the principle of zhiznetvorchestvo, wherein, if the distinction between art and life is done away with, the act of artistic creation becomes an act of “life creation.” The importance of Vera Pavlovna’s dress shop and Hank Rearden’s steel mills, then, has less to do with their objective value to society (people can see how to rationally organize work, trains can run on tracks made of Rearden’s steel), and more to do with the fact that these material creations stand as living embodiments of, and monuments to, the creative will of their makers. In effect, I suggest, the dress shop and the steel mill both serve as shouts of “I exist!” to the universe, and their value is measured by the extent to which they embody this pure, unadulterated human will. In Chernyshevskii, the endeavors of Vera Pavlovna, Lopukhov, and Kirsanov embody this principle. Chernyshevskii always speaks of the dress shop



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in terms of Vera Pavlovna’s “passion,” and Kirsanov remarks that “[l]abor takes on a passionate exhilaration when one’s whole life is organized that way.”39 The implication here is that work and labor are the means by which life can be lived more exuberantly, more passionately, to the extent that Kirsanov remarks that he now lives life riding a constant “high” that he had before only glimpsed through the temporary “highs” of coffee and wine.40 When this emphasis on living a life according to one’s passions is combined with a parallel look at Chernyshevskii’s emphasis on ownership, an interesting picture emerges. Chernyshevskii tends to link ownership to freedom. As Vera Pavlovna and Lopukhov are planning her escape from her parents’ house, she demands her future financial freedom from him, as part of the deal. She will not trade her slavery to her parents for another form of the same, to live on the charity of Lopukhov’s money.41 Similarly, and on a more introspective note, Chernyshevskii makes a case for the absolute sanctity of the individual person by proposing the rooms in a house as a metaphor. He notes that in the “undeveloped” (and populated by “unconscious” people) world, “[t]he sanctity of a threshold no one has the right to cross is recognized only in one room, the one that belongs to the head of the household, because only he can drive out anyone who drops in on him without his permission.” This unfortunate state of affairs “also applies to one’s inner life,” Chernyshevskii contends, where people seem to think that they can presume upon you at will, and without expectation of resentment on your part.42 The sort of person Chernyshevskii has in mind here is again exemplified by Mariia Alekseevna, who dislikes Lopukhov for his refusal to lower his tutoring fee, bitterly noting that that “money-grubb[ing] Lopukhov failed to “conduct his financial affairs with any regard for their need[.]”43 In Chernyshevskii’s mind, then, Mariia Alekseevna’s “need” is an unwarranted presumption upon the personal sanctity of Lopukhov, and “[w]ho dares posses another person?” he asks. Possessions are things such as bathrobes and slippers, to use Chernyshevskii’s examples, where the desire to “possess” another person is “filth, what pure filth.”44 When one combines the Chernyshevskiian principles elaborated above, the following argument emerges: 1) People ought to pursue their passions in life (i.e., Vera Pavlovna’s dress shop, Kirsanov and Lopukhov’s medical studies). 2) People ought to be free to do this without others presuming upon the absolute sanctity of themselves and their desires. 3) And therefore, Chernyshevskii suggests, the results of one’s creative passions stand as markers of the achievement of the desires of the individual ego, so that these may not be claimed or presumed upon by others who illegitimately attempt to cross one’s “threshold,” either literally or metaphorically. Contained in What Is to Be Done?, then, is a strong argument that the fruits of one’s passions are significant insofar as they embody the “I” of the person in question. While

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this argument is insufficiently strong to change the traditional reading of the social (Fourierist/Owenite) thrust of Vera Pavlovna’s dress shop, it does suggest that there is more to the story. Chernyshevskii’s palpable ambivalence toward the concept of “need” and his emphasis on individual desire suggest, as I have argued, an additional egoist trajectory as to the significance of the dress shop, which fulfills a similar function, I suggest, to Hank Rearden’s steel mill in Atlas Shrugged. If, for Chernyshevskii, the function of creativity is to send up a sort of signal flare that marks the existence/triumph of the ego, Rand takes much the same position. Of all the creations in Atlas Shrugged—Dagny Taggart’s Railroads, Francisco d’Anconia’s Copper mines, John Galt’s motor—Hank Rearden’s steel mill and his new invention, “Rearden Metal,” receives the most attention. A particularly illustrative scene, though perhaps melodramatic, has Rearden standing on a hill, looking out over his mill. “He stood straight, as if before a bench of judgment. He thought that in the darkness of this night other signs were lighted over the country: Rearden Ore—Rearden Coal—Rearden Limestone. He thought of the days behind him. He wished it were possible to light a neon sign above them, saying: Rearden Life.”45 Rand uses this scene to argue that what Rearden has created is not of value because of the objective existence of the steel it produces, but that the product is evidence of the real value: the creation of a life in accordance with the principle that the ultimate good in the world is the creation of one’s “I.” To drive home the point, Rand has Rearden walk home, following his hilltop musings, carrying a bracelet he has made from the first batch of Rearden metal—a metal that has taken him ten years of strenuous effort to invent. The bracelet functions for Rand as a sort of portable “Rearden Life” sign. Rearden intends to give the bracelet to his wife, so that for Rand, he is making the supreme gift: he is symbolically giving his “I” to his wife. Hank Rearden’s wife Lillian is one of the worst villains of the novel; she is parasitic on the creation of human spirit (as opposed to a physical expropriator of property), and so her reaction to the gift is worth quoting: “What’s that?” she asked. “The first thing made from the first heat of the first order of Rearden Metal.” “You mean,” she said, “it’s fully as valuable as a piece of railroad rails?” He looked at her blankly. . . . “God, Henry, but you’re conceited!” said Philip [Rearden’s brother].46

The utter misunderstanding evident in the conversation above turns around the failure of Rearden’s wife Lillian and brother Philip to understand the significance of the bracelet: they make the mistake of thinking of it as itself, rather than the congealed human will to create that it embodies. Rearden’s



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“blank” look is thus evidence both of his failure to understand the nature of his enemy, and for the probable unredeemability of his wife and brother. From this point on the evil represented by Lillian and Philip Rearden becomes a more prominent element in the plot and Lillian in particular becomes one of Rand’s examples of a parasite whose host is a human spirit (Hank Rearden’s) rather than a capitalist economy. The bracelet scene not only makes Rand’s point as to the function of material creation, but also it points to another Chernyshevskiian theme, which will receive attention in the final chapter: relations between the sexes. For now it will suffice to note that ultimately the bracelet comes into the possession of Dagny Taggart, and again, the manner in which it does is worth discussing at some length. Dagny observes Lillian, at a party, telling a friend that the bracelet she wears is “hideous,” and that she would “exchange it for a common diamond bracelet any time.” Dagny tears the bracelet off her own wrist, and says to Lillian “If you are not the coward that I think you are, you will exchange it.” Lillian then exchanges the bracelet with Dagny, who clips the Rearden Metal bracelet onto her own wrist, at which point, “[Dagny] felt calm and free. The pressure was gone. The need to get out [of the party] had vanished. . . . She liked the feel of the weight against her skin. Inexplicably, she felt a touch of feminine vanity, the kind she had never experienced before: the desire to be seen wearing this particular ornament.”47 As an embodiment of Hank Rearden’s will, his ego, the bracelet has now found its true home in Dagny Taggart: one who can truly appreciate its incarnation of the fusion of life and art into Hank Rearden’s “I.” While there is much to discuss in this scene in terms of Rand’s view of love and relationships between the sexes, for now, I will simply note that Rand feels so strongly about the creativity principle that the sight of an unfit person in possession of the fruits of that principle nearly makes Dagny Taggart physically sick. One additional item in Atlas Shrugged is worth some discussion, in light of the fusion of art and life in Rand and Chernyshevskii: John Galt’s motor. What separates Galt’s motor from Rearden’s mill and any number of other creations in Atlas Shrugged is its science fiction–like quality. Trains, alloys, and copper mines are known entities in the twentieth century, motors that provide inexhaustible sources of power are not. Galt’s motor is, in fact, Rand’s monument to the impossible made possible, through the exercise of a life-philosophy of zhiznetvorchestvo. In her book on Socialist Realism, which became official state dogma several years after Rand’s emigration, Irina Gutkin has traced the idea of the impossible made possible back to the 1860s.48 Gutkin argues that Chernyshevskii and Pisarev49 were acknowledged antecedents of Socialist Realism because “only radical realists were accepted as ideological ancestors.” “Real”

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for the Socialist Realists, Gutkin argues, meant not that art would be an exact copy of life, but that Chernyshevskii and Pisarev could “envision ‘the impossible and the nonexistent’ as possible and real.”50 This fusion of art and life helps make sense of Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream and John Galt’s Atlantis, then, since it implies that to envision is to create, in some sense. The utopias of Rand and Chernyshevskii, then, are made less outopos because the authors do not actually have to explain how the world will resemble the Crystal Palace of the 1851 Great Exhibition, or how Galt managed to invent a motor the size of half a boxcar that will power an entire valley inhabited by Rand’s novye liudi. In Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, “For everyone there will be eternal spring and summer and joy everlasting.”51 Dagny Taggart crashes her airplane and regains consciousness in Galt’s Atlantis, a world without “pain or fear or guilt,” to which her response is, “But of course.”52 When art and life become one, as Gutkin noted, the impossible becomes possible. Put another way, Pisarev argued that “science and fiction should merge.”53 The result? Science fiction. In the case of Socialist Realism, this fusionist imperative resulted in Bogdanov’s Red Star, a Bolshevik science fiction novel that details a communist society on Mars.54 In the case of Objectivism, it results in the contemporary American fiction of Objectivist writer Terry Goodkind. Goodkind’s novels portray a world of magic and fantasy, and his central character is a sculptor (i.e., creator) of the first order whose projections of ideal human beings actually help to catalyze their creation.55 I take one implication of Gutkin’s argument to be that for Chernyshevskii and the later Socialist Realists whom he inspired, “real” did not refer to some given state of existence with which mankind must deal on a grinding, quotidian sort of level. Instead, “real,” means, that which can, on the basis of acceptable principles, be “rationally” envisioned. Among other things, this implies a particular interpretation of Chernyshevskii’s infamous master’s thesis, “The Aesthetic Relationship of Art to Reality.” One prominent interpretation of Chernyshevskii’s argument for “realism” in art can be found in Michael R. Katz and William Wagner’s introduction to What is to Be Done, where they argue that for Chernyshevskii, “[r]eality itself could not be transcended, only comprehended. Idealist notions of pure art or beauty therefore were not simply false but dangerous, because they obscured reality and subordinated it to an unrealizable ideal.”56 Thinking with Gutkin and the concept of zhiznetvorchestvo, it appears that Katz and Wagner have reproduced the binary opposition between art and life that Chernyshevskii (as well as the later Symbolists, Socialist Realists, and Ayn Rand) sought to eliminate. While Katz and Wagner are surely correct to point out Chernyshevskii’s vision of art as utilitarian, the evidence seems to indicate that Chernyshevskii would be more likely to think of “utilitarian” in the sense



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not of a “realistic” description of some given state, but in the sense of a useful description of some ideal state of affairs that is achievable given a basis of correct (duly defined) philosophical principles. Andrzej Walicki’s take on Chernyshevskii seems to support this sort of approach, with his remark that “[b]ecause [for Chernyshevskii] man’s spiritual and material natures are one,” art cannot be reduced to a sort of spiritualist aesthetics.57 As Gutkin has suggested, then, neither can art be reduced to life: contra Katz and Wagner, when one is a right-thinking egoist, there are no “unrealizable ideal[s],” be they Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, Socialist Realist flying cities, or John Galt’s Atlantis. The power of this train of logic can be seen in a certain, not to say ironic, similarity between Rand and the Socialist Realists, which proceeds from their common debt to the 1860s. Gutkin has noted that the Soviet adoption of “really existing socialism” where “objectively” the Revolution had achieved its goals, led to the idea that life and art had “in fact” been merged (that being one of the goals of the Revolution). This, in turn, suggested that for the Socialist Realist artist, grandiose dreams of flying cities were actually “real.”58 In other words, neither Socialist Realists nor Rand have to actually reference any known principles of physics to explain how the cities will fly or how atmospheric static electricity will power the world through Galt’s motor; when art and life are fused, the impossible “will” become possible, by definition. That Chernyshevskii’s vision of life and art merged could exert such an influence on two otherwise radically opposed camps speaks to the power of the principle of zhiznetvorchestvo. In Gutkin’s view, a crucial figure for Socialist Realism was the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev. Solov’ev remembered his own flirtation with 1860s realism somewhat fondly, recalling his youthful laboratory dissections “more pernicious for the laboratory microscope than edifying for me.” Yet Solov’ev remarks, “But repenting [of] the senseless destruction of these young relatives, I recall the excitement I experienced only with thanks. I know that it was useful for me, and I think that passing through a cult of natural science after Hegelian abstraction was necessary and useful for all of Russian society in its youth.”59 With the 1860s natural-scientific “cult” forming part of his mental background, Solov’ev rejected the positivism of the mid-nineteenth century60 and created an idealist concept he called “free theurgy” whose emphasis on creativity then influenced the Socialist Realist vision of a future where art would become a “real force” that could “transfigur[e] the whole human world and become the basis of our entire reality.”61 This poses a scenario, then, where the emphasis on radical realism and creativity that occurred in the 1860s found further explication in the work of Solov’ev, and reappeared again in the thought of Rand and in the practice of Socialist Realism.

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THE HEROIC EGOIST Building on the discussion of egoist first principles common to the thought of Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, and Rand, the first portion of this chapter has sought to address the “creativity principle,” as a common answer to the question “what will egoistic people do?” In answer, an identifiable train of thought from the 1860s, through Solov’ev, Symbolism, Socialist Realism, and Ayn Rand, has answered: They will create, and the presently impossible will be the future possible. The second portion of this chapter builds on these insights by asking: what do all these egoistic creators look like, as human beings? In answer, both Chernyshevskii and Rand place a high degree of emphasis on notions of the “heroic.” Their heroes, who seem at times appear superhuman, serve as models—though not-unproblematically so—for the possibilities of what human beings can achieve, once they adopt an egoistic worldview whose mission is to leave a better world behind them that contains as much evidence of the existence of one’s “I” as it possibly can. Chernyshevskii primarily conveys his notion of the heroic through the character Rakhmetov, and secondarily though Vera Pavlovna, Kirsanov, and Lopukhov. Rakhmetov’s heroic qualities verge on the superhuman, beginning with Chernyshevskii’s account of how he (Rakhmetov) came to be a revolutionary. The first thing Rakhmetov does, is to ask “What books should I read first?”62 This highlights Chernyshevskii’s belief in the importance of having the right ideas to begin with, at which point, Rakhmetov embarks on a program of vigorous exercise in both mind and body. Rakhmetov read, according to Chernyshevskii, for over three days without rest, between 11:00 a.m. on a Thursday until 9 p.m. the following Sunday. “The first two nights he had no trouble staying awake; the third night he drank eight glasses of strong coffee. By the fourth night, even the coffee didn’t help: he collapsed on the floor and slept for about fifteen hours.”63 Not to be put off by the need to sleep, only a week later, Rakhmetov went to Kirsanov for additional bibliographic advice—a reading regimen of which Alexei Stakhanov, the real-life inspiration for the Stalinist “shock-work” movement, might have been proud. Rakhmetov’s workout included a more physical side, as well. Most tellingly, Rakhmetov becomes the reincarnation of the legendary Volga barge hauler Nikita Lomov, who was supposed to have been seven feet tall and weighed 542 pounds.64 Rakhmetov engaged in a bit of barge-hauling himself, and contrary to the impression one gets of the physical effects of this occupation, from Il’ia Repin’s famous depiction, Rakhmetov grew even more robust and heroic.65 Following his six-month shock-education in correct ideas, Rakhmetov declares that “Now reading has become a matter of secondary



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importance. As far as that’s concerned, I’m now ready for life.” And, Chernyshevskii says, Rakhmetov then devoted only a quarter of his time to reading, while the rest of his time he spent sleeping on nails, eating copious amounts of beef, engaging in his one vice (smoking cigars) and pursuing “matters of concern to others or to no one in particular.”66 The fact that Rakhmetov’s choice of beds inspired one admirer to actually sleep on a bed of nails attests to the power of Chernyshevskii’s vision that literature could “create life” as it were.67 John Galt, Rand’s Rakhmetov analogue, engages in a similar path of development. Both Rakhmetov and Galt, whose existences are implied but not explicitly stated by their respective authors, enter the action of What Is to Be Done? and Atlas Shrugged about two-thirds of the way through the novels. Prior to their grand entrances, Chernyshevskii refers to Rakhmetov as the “rigorist.” Rand refers to Galt as the “destroyer,” meaning, like “nihilist” for Pisarev, that he is the agent of destruction of the irrational so that the rational new people can be born and flourish. Galt’s path, like Rakhmetov’s, includes a rather shadowy background, a coming into contact with those of like mind (whom he both admires and supersedes), and occasional appearances in the action with extended forays into revolutionary activities vaguely hinted at. After an extended foray in Europe, whose purpose is not entirely clear, Chernyshevskii says of Rakhmetov, “in three years or so he’d return to Russia because it seemed that there—not now, but then, in three or four years—it would be ‘necessary’ for him to be in Russia.”68 Even Rakhmetov’s landlady keeps his secrets; Chernyshevskii notes that in spite of the fact that she no doubt knew a great deal about Rakhmetov, “It was impossible to get anything more out of her.”69 Similarly, Rand has Dagny Taggart, in her capacity as vice president of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, pay a visit to one Ken Dannager, her best coal supplier. Dannager had recently been in court, to be indicted for having violated state commerce rules by buying 4,000 tons of Rearden’s metal, which he desperately needed. Dagny Taggart’s right-hand man Eddie Willers mentions, shortly following the indictment, “When [Dagny] saw Ken Dannager in the courtroom today, she said that he was ready for the destroyer,” and “She’s desperately anxious to reach Dannager first.”70 Dagny Taggart then flies off to Pittsburgh, to meet with Dannager, only to discover on arrival, that Dannager is in a meeting with some unnamed visitor, whose identity is only hinted at by the presence of cigarette butts (Rakhmetov’s cigars?) with “$” signs on them, in the waiting room ashtray. When she finally does get in to see Dannager, the visitor has just left, his presence marked only by the sound of “the private exit door closing after the caller who had preceded her.”71 To top off Galt’s shadowy identity, the reader later discovers that

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Eddie Willers’s unnamed interlocutor in the passage referenced above, was actually John Galt, who had been working unnoticed as a common laborer for Dagny Taggart’s railroad. So, like Rakhmetov, Galt works by his own inscrutable code, is where it seems “necessary” for him to be, and overwhelms both his friends and his enemies with his brute force of argument. Chernyshevskii notes that “It was absolutely impossible to save oneself from hearing [Rakhmetov’s] opinion when he considered it necessary.”72 Dagny Taggart, upon learning that Dannager has decided to retire and leave for parts unknown after merely listening to Galt for a short while wails, “I didn’t believe it possible that in three hours one could make a man turn against fifty-two years of his life.”73 Even Dannager’s secretary, like Rakhmetov’s landlady, is reticent to discuss the man she had seen entering Dannager’s office prior to Dagny Taggart’s arrival.74 Like Rakhmetov, Galt’s heroic career begins with a shock course in “reading the right books,” as it were. Galt, Francisco d’Anconia, and Ragnar Danneskjold were all at school together at “Patrick Henry University,” and studied under the philosophy professor Hugh Akston. All three majored in physics and philosophy (merging the material and the spiritual, life and art75), and exhibited nearly superhuman prowess in doing graduate-level work in philosophy at the age of sixteen. Almost immediately, Akston had the three embark on a rigorous education, at which they excelled—failing, much of the time, to remember to eat. Setting Galt apart from the other two, Akston recounts a time when all three had come over to his house for discussion, and he noticed that Galt had fallen asleep on the ground in his backyard. D’Anconia and Danneskjold told Akston that Galt had not slept in three days.76 As with Rakhmetov, there is a physical side to Galt’s superheroism. In one of the climactic scenes of Atlas Shrugged, Galt takes the place of the crucified Christ, as he is tortured on a machine whose invention and existence Rand sees as the inevitable outcome of government organized on “Witch Doctor Metaphysics.” In a plot outline for the scene, Rand even includes Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness and wounding on the cross, as she has “his one moment of temptation, when he almost speaks, out of pity and natural ability, to save [his torturers]—but looks at the blood running out of the wound in his shoulder and keeps silent.” 77 Rand’s description of Galt in his torture runs as follows: His naked body looked strangely out of place in this cellar. . . . The long lines of his body, running from his ankles to the flat hips, to the angle of the waist, to the straight shoulders, looked liked a statue of ancient Greece, sharing that statue’s meaning, but stylized to a longer, lighter, more active form and a gaunter strength, suggesting more restless an energy—the body not of a chariot driver,



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but of a builder of airplanes. And the meaning of a statue of ancient Greece—the statue of man as God—clashed with a cellar devoted to prehistorical activities.78

As with Rakhmetov’s self-inflicted torture—he chooses to sleep on a bed of nails to prove his heroism and possibly to prepare for state-sponsored torture—the superheroic physique is presented as both ideal-typical, and as redemptive.79 Both scenes present the ideal bodies possessed by their heroes as a natural outcome of their successful fusion of the material with the spiritual. Rakhmetov and Galt have read all the right books and drawn all the right conclusions; one possesses the body of Nikita Lomov, the other, that of a Greek god. The superheroic physique has a redemptive, almost martyrological function as well. Marcia Morris has argued that Rakhmetov ought to be read as an example of the Russian literary tradition of the Ascetic Hero, whose “fellows find him very odd: he engages in extremely rigorous ascetic practices and associates with others as rarely as possible. He seems to have some sort of secret knowledge, gained from a mysterious source.”80 Morris continues her characterization of the ascetic heroic trope: Ultimately, led by an unbending will to achieve a great thing, [the ascetic hero] leaves the city and dedicates himself to preaching the advent of a great cataclysm. His fellows have only a vague sense of the nature of this cataclysm, yet they accept the wisdom of his decision. They too dedicate themselves to his cause, but although they admire him and seek to emulate him, none can match him.81

It is instructive to analyze Galt’s character along these lines. Like Dostoevskii’s Christlike Prince Myshkin, part of the power of Galt’s character is that no one knows what to do with him: his very presence makes people feel both inferior and uncomfortable. Galt’s lifestyle is certainly ascetic, as a look at Rand’s “Atlantis” scene brings out. Galt lives in a plain wood cabin, whose furnishings are spare and whose purpose is utilitarian. As Galt’s Gulch embodies Rand’s vision of what the future ought to look like, there is, then, some evidence for Galt’s personal asceticism. Likewise, though John Galt and Dagny eventually end up together, Galt first has to deny himself a relationship with her, because he has to destroy her/her railroad82 as part of his plan to stop the “motor of the world.”83 Like Rakhmetov, then, the revolutionary goal cannot accommodate too many human relationships. When Galt, d’Anconia, and Danneskjold began college, Akston noted that though all three were from radically differing backgrounds, “they must have picked one another at first sight, among the thousands on that campus.”84 Not only do Ascetic Heroes stand out from their peers and hold themselves

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apart from others, but they eventually embark on some sort of journey. Rakhmetov’s “city” that he must leave is his ancestral estate. Galt’s is college. Galt left college on the same day as the second of his two mentors, the great physicist Dr. Robert Stadler, put his name and blessing on the establishment of a “State Science Institute,”85 at which point Galt disappeared and began his journey toward a “great cataclysm,” to use Morris’s phrase. Finally, to address Morris’s concluding characteristic, Galt’s followers are, in some senses, rather pale reflections. If we divide the people in Galt’s world into three groups, a picture emerges. Group One: Followers Galt has convinced to quit, and join him on strike in Atlantis. Early members of this group include d’Anconia, Danneskjold, Akston, the banker Midas Mulligan, and the judge Narraganset. Group Two: those who the reader knows will eventually become Galt’s followers, even if they do not quite yet see the absolute necessity of doing so. This group, for most of the novel, includes Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. Group Three: The damned. This group, the reader knows, will never join Galt, and actively oppose him, either knowingly because they understand his principles and disagree, or unknowingly, because they lack the courage or desire to understand them. Members of the first group, while closest to being “Galt-like,” still acknowledge him as their leader, and, in fact, risk their lives to save him from the torture discussed above. The second group, in Rand’s phrase, is aware that there is “something wrong with the world,” but cannot quite put their finger on what it is. A typical example is contained in a conversation between Hank Rearden and Dr. Floyd Ferris (the inventor of the “Ferris Persuader,” the machine used to torture Galt). Ferris arrives at Rearden’s office, in order to tell him that he and the government he represents know about Rearden’s coal deal with Dannager, and to use this knowledge to engage in blackmail. Ferris remarks: “You honest men are such a problem and such a headache. But we knew you’d slip sooner or later—and this is just what we wanted.” “You seem to be pleased about it.” “Don’t I have good reason to be?” “But, after all, I did break one of your laws.” “Well, what do you think they’re there for?”86

Rand then sets off the all-seeing Galt from the brilliant-but-not-quite-thereyet Rearden: “Dr. Ferris did not notice the sudden look on Rearden’s face, the look of a man hit by the first vision of that which he had sought to see.” Soon after in the same conversation, Rand notes that “What Dr. Ferris was seeing in Rearden’s face was the look of luminous serenity that comes from the sudden answer to an old, dark problem.”87 So while Galt has “known his



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own special truth since earliest childhood,” Rearden is one of the slightly lesser lights, whose intellectual journey is less a state of being than it is a state of becoming.88 Regardless of when they choose to cast down their nets and follow Galt, all members of the first two groups needed Galt to come along and show them what they cannot or will not see for themselves. Interestingly enough, the presence of the Ascetic Hero in What Is to Be Done? and Atlas Shrugged provides another means by which the dividing line between the saved and the damned is drawn. Morris ties religious apocalypticism to the creation of the Russian ascetic heroic tradition. This apocalypticism, Morris argues, “was characterized by a radical dichotomy between the ‘saved’ and the ‘lost,’ although its goals were social rather than religious.”89 The fact is that, for the most part, Rakhmetov and Galt simply “are,”90 in their perfection, so that the damned, whose blinders Galt will not be willing/able to remove, will, at the end of their miserable lives, simply be consigned to the flames of hell, the dustbin of history, or simple irrelevance. What begins to emerge in this discussion of heroism, then, is the question of which characters are supposed to serve as models for the reader’s emulation, and why? Chernyshevskii’s novel certainly exhibits a conflicted-ness over the extent to which Rakhmetov is similar to or different than, Vera Pavlovna, Kirsanov, and Lopukhov. As we will see, Rand’s novel exhibits an identical tension, which springs from the logic of Galt’s super heroic nature, over his status versus that of the novel’s other “heroes,” such as Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. In both novels, it is difficult to tell whether the author sees them as super heroic (“being”) or merely heroic (“becoming”). Chernyshevskii and Rand have similar difficulties, when they touch on the question of whether Rakhmetov and Galt should be read as super heroic, as fundamentally identical to the other heroes of the story, or somewhere in between. This chapter has already addressed the extent to which the portrayals of Rakhmetov and Galt can be read as super heroic, as above and beyond all the somewhat lesser heroes. Chernyshevskii himself suggests a sort of two-tiered heroic system, in a section entitled “A Conversation with the Perspicacious Reader Followed by His Expulsion.”91 Chernyshevskii avows that with Vera Pavlovna, Lopukhov, and Kirsanov, “I wanted to depict decent, ordinary people of the new generation, those I meet by the hundreds . . . Where do you see even the slightest indication that these people are God knows how lofty and beautiful . . . and that they are ideal human beings.” Chernyshevskii then contrasts these “ordinary people” with Rakhmetov, so as to set straight his benighted reader who has no doubt mistaken them for the “real” heroes. On the contrary, his New People cannot even be considered “heroes” (says Chernyshevskii), “people of a higher nature,” or even “idealized figures,” since this might make them “inconceivable in reality because of their very great nobility. No, my friends, my mean, base, pitiful friends,

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you’re quite mistaken: it’s not they who stand too high, but you who stand too low.”92 Chernyshevskii’s comments here do seem to support Rakhmetov as the “real” (super)hero of the novel, since if we can believe the above explanation, Rakhmetov’s presence is largely Chernyshevskii’s attempt to prevent being misunderstood. If this is so, then one has to ask, what are the fundamental differences that separate Rakhmetov from Vera Pavlovna, Lopukhov, and Kirsanov? Chernyshevskii is unclear on this point. Consider the following issues: 1) Rakhmetov reads the same books as Kirsanov, his original mentor. 2) He assesses his situation rationally and does what is “necessary,” as do the other characters.93 3) If Vera Pavlovna’s family is Chernyshevskii’s portrayal of the old world populated by outmoded people, and the new lives and relationships of Vera Pavlovna, Kirsanov, and Lopukhov are to be taken as diametrically opposed to that old, irrationally organized way of life, then it is unclear how anything Rakhmetov does is more “revolutionary” than the lives of these three characters. Vera Pavlovna’s dress shop seems to catalyze the advent of the new world at least as much, if not more, than anything Rakhmetov does. What Is to Be Done? therefore contains a tension, I suggest, between Chernyshevskii’s desire to present his three central characters as “ordinary,” and his need to create a character who would be both “extraordinary” and yet possess all the same positive attributes and beliefs as his “ordinary” characters. Put another way, if everyone in the future is perfect, then everyone is both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. NEEDING THE SUPERHERO, NEEDING THE ORDINARY The purpose of this discussion is less to criticize Chernyshevskii’s character-logic, than to argue that Rand has created a similar dynamic with identical tensions, with her Galt/“extraordinary”—Taggart-d’AnconiaRearden/“ordinary” nexus. Again, Galt’s super-heroic traits received some discussion above, and it is left to elaborate on the ways in which he seems more like his fellow characters in Atlas Shrugged. Keeping in mind that Galt is the first to realize the “truth” of Rand’s United States, and that it is he who masterminds the whole plan to convince society’s “Atlases” that they do not owe the world anything after all, Galt is otherwise nearly indistinguishable from his fellows. He talks and behaves in the same ways, and likes and dislikes the same things as his co-characters. Like Rakhmetov, it is not entirely clear why it is Galt—as opposed to some other like-minded character—who gets to be the superhero. Consider the following points of comparison be-



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tween John Galt and Dagny Taggart. The Creativity Principle is at work in Galt’s motor, which utilizes atmospheric static electricity and will change the world, the reader knows. Dagny Taggart single-handedly manages to keep her railroad together, in the face of opposition from the U.S government, from Galt, who is actively trying to bring her down (since she is, effectively, a “scab” in the strike94), and from the staggering incompetence of virtually everyone around her (with the exception of her assistant Eddie Willers). In fact, it is not even Galt who finally brings down Taggart Transcontinental, but an accidental use of the government’s “Project X” doomsday device that destroys the Taggart railroad bridge over the Mississippi River that drives the final nail in the coffin of Taggart Transcontinental’s existence. On the physical side, Rand describes Dagny Taggart thus, as she reposes on one of her trains: “her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long lines running straight. . . . Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision.”95 Rand then connects these physical characteristics to Dagny Taggart’s heroic status. Working as a laborer for Taggart Transcontinental, Galt remembered seeing her on a train platform: Then I saw that you wore a long gown, the color of ice, like the tunic of a Grecian goddess, but you had the short hair and imperious profile of an American woman . . . but then, suddenly, I knew that you did belong among the rails, the soot, and the girders, that that was the proper setting for a flowing gown and naked shoulders and a face as alive as yours . . . and I thought that if our age gave form to its proper gods and erected a statue to the meaning of an American railroad, you would be that statue.96

Dagny Taggart’s superhuman competence at and dedication to her work, and Galt’s description of her seem to place her rather on par with Galt himself, who has, as we have seen, merited comparisons to Greek statuary.97 Dagny Taggart is a revolutionary heroic force in both mind and body. The essence of this comparison between Dagny Taggart and John Galt, could be repeated just as easily with any number of other characters, including d’Anconia, Danneskjold, and Rearden. So, Atlas Shrugged, like What Is to Be Done?, contains a tension between the need to have a super heroic character who typifies the revolution or shows the way, and the need to portray a perfect future in which everyone who possesses the will can be Rakhmetov/John Galt/Vera Pavlovna/Dagny Taggart. The final portion of this chapter will propose two central reasons why the logic of Chernyshevskii’s nihilism and Rand’s novel requires at one and the same time the existence of the superhero, and the essential similarity of all the positive characters. This inner tension, as well as that tension’s component parts, is then a piece of the

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evidence for the case that Ayn Rand, in many ways, reproduced 1860s Russian nihilism as represented by What Is to Be Done? The necessity of the superhero in Chernyshevskii, I suggest, can be traced to his belief in a “scientific”98 worldview. One of the central problems in Russian thought, beginning at least by the late 1830s and early 1840s, was how to reconcile the mandate to act socially and politically with “scientific” arguments for historical inevitability and/or environmental determinism. A famous instance where this problem came to the fore occurred with Vissarion Belinskii and Mikhail Bakunin’s temporary “reconciliation with reality,” which they based on a particular interpretation of Hegel’s dictum that “the real is the rational and the rational is the real.”99 Belinskii took this doctrine to mean that what was in existence was also necessary and rational, so that everything, including unjust sociopolitical orders, “which in fact existed was reasonable and hence should be accepted as necessary and just by rational men, whatever their ‘subjective’ feelings might be.”100 As philosopher of science Michael Polanyi has remarked of linkages between inevitability and Hegel’s Romanticism, “reason became invincible; but unfortunately also redundant.”101 If Belinskii and Bakunin eventually repudiated their “reconciliation with reality”—the former to the reality of tuberculosis, and the latter to become a globe-trotting anarchist agitator—strains of environmental determinism still resonated in Russian intellectual circles through the 1860s and beyond. The view of populist Petr Lavrov, author of the Historical Letters (1873) and founder of a school of “subjective sociology,”102 was that history required the existence and emergence of certain “critically thinking individuals” (kriticheski-mysliashchiia lichnosti) who would facilitate the rise of a new and just social order.103 As literature scholar Andy Byford has noted, “[t]he nineteenth century was the age of science,”104 in context of which, Lavrov extolled the virtues of Darwinism. Lavrov analogizes from Darwinian evolution, to the creation of his critically thinking individuals, arguing that “[a] society’s culture is the environment which history has provided for the work of thought, and this environment determines what is possible for that work in a given age just as inevitably as the immutable laws of nature sets its limits in all ages.”105 Lavrov further notes that critically thinking individuals are supposed to serve as critics of the cultural components of social institutions. The problem, of course, is that Lavrov previously argued that culture itself is environmentally determined, so that what begins as a paean to Darwinian biology ends with critically thinking individuals who think environmentally determined thoughts and who struggle against unjust social institutions that are the inevitable product of an environmentally determined culture.106 This characterization does, needless to say, become problematic if one’s goal is to

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urge the creation of revolutionary individuals who will go on to create a new, sociopolitically just world. These two examples chronologically bookend the 1860s; the shestidesiatniki were living, thinking, and writing in a time when the implications of “science” for questions of freedom and necessity, and the implications of those questions, in turn, for sociopolitical agitation and change, were at the forefront of intellectual life. Chernyshevskii and Rand both have to deal with the inevitability trap that results from the dual emphasis on scientific “fact” and the understandable need to assure readers that while the present may leave a lot to be desired, rest assured, the future looks pretty good. Chernyshevskii, for instance, converses with his own character, as is his habit. He tells Vera Pavlovna that not only would a world without poverty, coercion, and mental depression and evil be a good thing, but there are “those” (he does not specify who) “who’ve proven that this must come to pass, that it certainly will, that it can’t help but be.”107 Chernyshevskii, to bring up a previous example, provides an environmental explanation for the character of Mariia Alekseevna. But, lest the reader conclude that environment determines (for the worse) only the character-traits of the “old people,” Chernyshevskii narrates an instructive conversation between Lopukhov and Vera Pavlovna, which is worth reproducing here. Vera Pavlovna asks Lopukhov if, given egoistic first principles, it would be wise for her to marry a suitor who is rich, but whom she dislikes. Lopukhov replies: “Calculate what’s the most advantageous for you.” ... “And if I choose a rich husband and hordes of admirers?” “I’ll say that you chose what you considered to be in your own best interest.” “And what will you feel compelled to say about me?” “If you acted dispassionately after thinking it over carefully, then I’ll say that you acted in a reasonable manner and most likely won’t come to regret it.” “But will my choice be reprehensible?” “People who utter all sorts of nonsense may say what they like about it; people who possess a correct view of life will say that you acted as you should have. If you behaved as you did, it means that your personality is such that it was impossible for you to act differently under those circumstances. They will say that you acted out of necessity and, strictly speaking, you had no other choice.” “And there would be no censure for my choice?” “Who has the right to censure the consequences of facts, when these facts exist? Your personality in given circumstances constitutes a fact; your actions are

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necessary consequences of this fact, produced by the nature of things. You don’t answer for them, and it’s absurd to censure them.”108

Unpacking this conversation, the following principles emerge: 1) That there can be no disagreement about proper behavior among people possessing a “correct view” of life. 2) That “Personality”109 (lichnost’) is a sort of factual ground zero that one cannot “get behind the back” of, to paraphrase H.G. Gadamer’s dictum on language. 3) That Personality is a fact “produced by the nature of things.” One could wish that Chernyshevskii had been more specific than “the nature of things,” but a textually plausible rendition of this conversation suggests, given the “scientific” focus of the positivist 1860s in general, that Chernyshevskii’s novel incorporates much of the same tensions between inevitability and action that motivated much of the conversation in Russian Hegelianism, and that imbues Petr Lavrov’s Historical Letters. For present purposes, the significance of this tension lies in the fact that it explains Chernyshevskii’s need for a “superhero.” As I have argued, the lives and views of most of his positive characters are effectively interchangeable. Like Lavrov’s “critically thinking individuals,” Fourier’s phalansteries—and Rand’s John Galt, who first realizes that the “men of the mind” (in Rand’s phrase) must go on strike, Rakhmetov as a character is Chernyshevskii’s answer to the accursed question of how to adopt an optimistic inevitable-ism based on “scientific facts” without, so to speak, getting “mugged by a reconciliation with reality.”110 Rakhmetov is Chernyshevskii’s intangible force that finally gets “it” started, and he must be intangible since, as Belinskii concluded, “facts” are conservative and “science” may or may not support revolution. As argued in the previous chapter, the nihilist and objectivist egoism that underlies Chernyshevskii and Rand’s common conceptions of creativity and heroism are conceptually and functionally identical. It is no surprise, then, that Atlas Shrugged showcases an argument for a radical vision of human freedom that nevertheless relies for much of its force on “scientific” inevitability-type arguments that exist in tension with the radical freedom of the novel’s characters and require a superhero in order to “break through” the reality of “conservative facts.” In John Galt’s radio address toward the end of Atlas Shrugged, he tells the people of the United States: “Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man.”111 John Galt’s speech is the summation of what Rand wanted to say to the world, and here, she tells the reader that he/she must bow to a “nature” whose reality is both known and nonnegotiable. There is good reason to be skeptical



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of Rand’s consistency on this point, when her main character is a physicist who apparently possesses knowledge unavailable to anyone before or since. As bowing to received wisdom about nature is not generally what has driven scientific progress (see Copernicus’ abandonment of Ptolemaic cosmology, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions), so it would seem that the creation resulting from Galt’s genius must have required him to ignore the concept of a natural order with whom man must deal as it is presently understood. As Petr Lavrov reflected in 1873, when Garibaldi arrived in Sicily “no respect for order was in evidence.”112 It is no accident, then, that Galt is both the superhero of Atlas Shrugged and the one who invents the motor: Rand needs him in order to start the motor of revolution, after which, the positive results are inevitable. Rand’s sole concession to historical contingency is contained in a remark of Galt’s original mentor, Hugh Akston, who notes, from the haven of Galt’s Gulch, “The world is crashing faster than we expected.”113 In other words the only variable in nihilist/objectivist meteorology is not if the forecast is accurate, but how soon the storm will arrive. This discussion of the common inherent tensions in What Is to Be Done? and Atlas Shrugged leads us to the final point of this chapter: the implications of the fact—once the superhero has arrived on the scene as a mysterious force who jump-starts the revolution—that everyone can be equally heroic, which in turn will effect a hardening of the line between the saved and the damned. CONCLUSION: HEROES MAY VARY (A LITTLE), BUT ERROR HAS NO RIGHTS The question of the dividing line between the saved and the damned in Chernyshevskii and Rand has merited some attention already. With the conclusion of this discussion of the causes and implications of creativity and heroism in the two novels, however, it is possible to make some final judgments as to how the two authors divide the human world into the saved and the damned. The best way to address this question is through the lens of the authors’ rather didactic rhetorical strategy, which, in the Russian case, prompted a young girl to comment to her diary that the forces of the tsar and of radical intellectuals both acted like governments, “and it’s hard to say which one is more severe.”114 For both Rand and Chernyshevskii, the answers to life’s questions are always straightforward, simple, absolute, and obvious. Rakhmetov argues that “There are only a few fundamental works on every subject. All the rest merely repeat, dilute, and distort what’s more fully and clearly stated in these

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few fundamental works.”115 Chernyshevskii remarks of his own character, Vera Pavlovna, that he finds “nothing astonishing” about her, and, using the personality contrasts between Lopukhov and Vera Pavlovna, and Mariia Alekseevna, makes the case that true: simple, and false: complicated.116 While Rand’s novel is shot through with this same argument, there is, appropriately enough, a single scene that should be sufficiently suggestive of the extent to which Rand embraced the truth-as-obvious formula. When Dagny Taggart regains consciousness, after accidentally crashing her plane, she awakens in Atlantis. She thinks to herself that it looks like the world as she had thought it would be at the age of sixteen, “and now she had reached it—and it seemed so simple, so un-astonishing, that the thing she felt was like a blessing pronounced upon the universe by means of three words: But of course.”117 It is not too difficult to see how this common argument that all truths are simple leads Chernyshevskii and Rand to—in spite of themselves— effectively harden the line between the saved and the damned so that there appears to be very little chance that any of the goats of the present will become the sheep of the future. In both cases, the authors make very few references to the “masses” of the unenlightened. Chernyshevskii’s dismissal of Vera Pavlovna’s family is one indicator that, in his view, if you cannot see the truth before your face, you do not deserve to have it explained. Mariia Alekseevna is Chernyshevskii’s representation of the inevitable collateral damage of revolution. Along similar lines, John Galt’s strikers rarely need much time to have their proper course of action convincingly explained to them. Ken Dannager took two hours, the banker Midas Mulligan took fifteen minutes. The entire remainder of the United States’ population merits a single radio address, in which Galt says the following: Some of you will never know who is John Galt. [But some of you] have known the state of being a man, and I—I am the only man who knew that that state is not to be betrayed. I am the man who knew what made it possible and who chose consistently to practice and to be what you had practiced and been in that one moment.118

This, then, is the result of the ethos of truth-simplicity in What Is to Be Done? and Atlas Shrugged. If you have not the skill to see what is so obvious in the Chernyshevskiian-Randian “but of course” scheme, you will end up as one of the literal/figurative goats, whose disintegration Robert Stadler witnessed at the testing of the government’s “Project X.”119 Chernyshevskii and Rand leave a theoretical door open for a “conversion” experience, but it is hard to read their writings and gain a sense that they think this eventuality is too likely. The survivors of the nihilist apocalypse, on the other hand, look very much alike in their egoist creativity and heroism. One has no doubt that Rearden



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will deliver Taggart Transcontinental’s rail steel on time; there is no doubt that everyone in Chernyshevskii’s technological universe will be equally happy; Dagny Taggart will not accidentally lose her railroad’s train schedule; there is no doubt that the future will be universally populated with “heroes” of the of the John Galt/Rakhmetov/Dagny Taggart/Vera Pavlovna variety. While Ayn Rand seems to have built the objectivism of Atlas Shrugged on a nihilist edifice, the principles of egoism, creativity, and heroism do not constitute the sum total of the bricks. The next chapter will delve more deeply into the American context in which Rand’s latter-day nihilism was delivered, and will address two issues touched on obliquely in this chapter, the vision of man become god, and the question of youth in Russian nihilism and Ayn Rand. NOTES   1.  Irina Paperno, “Introduction,” in Creating Life, 4–5.  2. Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 62.  3. Pells, 61.   4.  ARA, Butterfield Collection, draft essay entitled “Our Alleged Competitor,” 5 Oct, 1962.   5.  Lary May, “Movie Star Politics: The Screen Actors’ Guild, Cultural Conversion, and the Hollywood Red Scare,” in Lary May, ed. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 145. See also Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991), 127–51.  6. Ayn Rand, Screen Guide for Americans. Beverly Hills, CA: The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, 1946; accessed April 16, 2021, http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/AmRad/screenguideamericans.pdf, 3.   7.  Whitfield, 127. Barbara Branden, recounts Rands hope that Cooper could play Howard Roark. Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (New York: Doubleday, 1986), 23.   8.  See essays in Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds, Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism.   9.  Paperno, “Introduction,” in Creating Life, 1–2. 10.  Symbolist contemporary Vladislav Khodasevich, quoted in Paperno, “Introduction,” in Creating Life, 2–3. 11. Paperno, “Introduction,” in Creating Life, 5–7. A recent article by religion scholar Katharina Breckner has gone so far as to suggest (though not entirely convincingly), that the idea of human creativity—envisioned as a human continuation on the “eighth day of creation” of what God left unfinished on his seventh day of

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creation—was the conceptual glue that gave Silver Age thought its coherence. Katharina Breckner, “Russian Philosophers on Continuous Creation as the Basis for Social Change,” Studies in East European Thought 58, no. 4 (December 2006): 271–97. For a succinct overview of Solov’ev’s ideas and development, see Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, 371–92. A brief overview of the ideas of Fedorov can be found in Elizabeth Koutaissoff, “The Philosophy of the Common Cause,” Slavonic and East European Review 62, no. 1 (January 1984): 98–101. 12.  Paperno, “Introduction,” in Creating Life, 7. 13.  See Paperno, “Introduction,” in Creating Life, 7–8; Olga Matich, “The Symbolist Meaning of Love” in Creating Life, 31, 41–50; Matich’s Erotic Utopia: the Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siecle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), especially the Introduction and chapter 5, passim; John Bowlt and Olga Matich, eds., Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avante-Garde and Cultural Experiment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), especially the Introduction and Olga Matich’s “Remaking the Bed” essay. 14. See The Journals of Ayn Rand, entries dated May 15, 1934, and December 4, 1935, where Rand discusses Nietzsche’s views on the “freedom for” versus “freedom to” question, and his “Beyond Good and Evil.” Ayn Rand, The Journals of Ayn Rand, 70, 77. Barbara Branden also discusses Rand’s take on Nietzsche in her biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand. Branden’s biography requires careful handling. In light of its lack of source references, and Branden’s personal connections to Rand (such as Rand’s long-running affair with Branden’s husband). 15.  Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Nietzsche in Russia: The Case of Merezhkovsky,” Slavic Review 33, no. 3 (September 1974): 430–33. 16.  Rosenthal, “Nietzsche in Russia: the Case of Merezhkovsky,” 444. 17.  For example, Chernyshevskii’s master’s thesis “The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality,” where he argued that art ought to be evaluated in terms of its social utility. What Chernyshevskii means by “utility,” will merit further attention below. 18.  Pisarev, “Bazarov,” Sochineniia tom II, 9. 19.  See Pozefsky, 44. 20.  Pozefsky, 21. 21.  Pozefsky, 26. 22.  Berdaiev, “Philosophical Verity and Intelligentsia Truth,” 4. 23. Matich, Erotic Utopia, 62; 98–123; 162–64. 24. Matich, Erotic Utopia, 164. 25.  See discussion of Rand’s “Attila” and “Witch Doctor” archetypes from the chapter on egoism. 26.  Rand, “For the New Intellectual,” 14, 22. 27.  Rand, “What is Romanticism?” in The Romantic Manifesto, 64. 28.  Rand, Manuscript draft of essay “Art and Moral Treason,” February 6, 1965, 22–24 (page numbers indicate Rand’s handwritten pagination). ARA: The Butterfield Collection. 29.  Chto delat’?, 12–13. 30.  Chto delat’?, 70. 31.  Chto delat’?, 110–11; What Is to Be Done?, 166–67.



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32. See Chto delat’?, 130–39, for a description of the dress shop, and 279–94, for Chernyshevskii’s vision of the future via Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream. 33.  The question of parasitism echoes another prominent question in nineteenthcentury intellectual history, namely, the extent to which intellectuals are by definition “parasitical.” The solution of Chernyshevskii and Pisarev seems to be encapsulated by the Populist Petr Lavrov’s “critically thinking individual” formulation. On the one hand, none of their ideal types are under the delusion that art is somehow “superior” to reality (Chernyshevskii) or that Pushkin is more important than boots (Pisarev). This seems to support a nonintellectual lifestyle. On the other hand, Chernyshevskii’s characters repeatedly evaluate themselves in light of abstract philosophical principles, as does Pisarev in his “Bazarov” essay for example. “Critically thinking individual” thus seems to capture what Chernyshevskii and Pisarev were after, fairly well. Rand resolves the question of parasitism in a similar manner: Galt, d’Anconia, and Danneskjold all majored in physics and philosophy in college (fusing the abstract with the practical), and the inhabitants of Galt’s Gulch all espouse Objectivist principles while engaged in decidedly nonabstract occupations like hog farming. The message: When one fuses art and reality, abstraction and practicality, intellectuals “become” useful and laborers become philosophers. 34. See Chto delat’?, 111–13. 35.  Chambers, “Big Sister is Watching You,” 596. 36.  Atlas Shrugged, 723. 37.  Atlas Shrugged, 1066. 38.  Chto delat’?, 111. 39.  Chto delat’?, 276–77; What Is to Be Done?, 356. 40.  Chto delat’?, 276; What Is to Be Done?, 356. Regarding Pisarev’s physiological explanation for the Reformation, wags might remark that if only members of the council of Trent had traded coffee for tea and cooperative labor instead, the CounterReformation might have succeeded. 41.  Chto delat’?, 91–92. 42.  Chto delat’?, 239; What Is to Be Done?, 316. 43.  Chto delat’?, 62; What Is to Be Done?, 108. 44.  Chto delat’?, 34; What Is to Be Done?, 76. 45.  Atlas Shrugged, 38. 46.  Atlas Shrugged, 42. 47.  Atlas Shrugged, 151–52. 48.  On Socialist Realism as state dogma, see Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863–1922 (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 265. 49.  She mentions Dobroliubov and Belinskii, additionally. 50.  Irina Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890– 1934 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 39. 51.  Chto delat’?, 290; What Is to Be Done?, 372. 52.  Atlas Shrugged, 652. 53. Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 10. 54.  For more on Red Star, and on Bolshevik revolutionary fantasies in general, see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Visions and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 32–33, 167–89.

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55.  Terry Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen (New York: TOR, 2000). Goodkind’s books will receive further attention in the next chapter, in discussion of the man-God question. 56.  What Is to Be Done?, eds. introduction, 17. 57. Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, 194. 58.  See Gutkin, Cultural Origins, 91 59.  Vladimir Solov’ev, “The Idea of a Superman,” in Politics, Law, and Morality: Essays by V.S. Soloviev, trans. Vladimir Wozniuk (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 256. There is no doubt room for skepticism as to the numbers of ordinary Russians who actually participated in Solov’ev’s “Hegelian abstraction” and the 1860s fetishization of science. 60.  Solov’ev’s 1874 doctoral dissertation was titled The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists, for example, and it argued for a reworked version of the “Slavophile historical and religious worldview.” Manon de Courten, History, Sophia, and the Russian Nation: A Reassessment of Vladimir Solov’ev’s Views on History and his Social Commitment (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 31. Solov’ev later parted company with Slavophilism, but his mystical-religious worldview remained central to his thought. 61. Gutkin, Cultural Origins, 11. 62.  Chto delat’?, 208; What Is to Be Done?, 280. 63.  Chto delat’?, 208; What Is to Be Done?, 280. 64.  See ed’s. notes, What Is to Be Done?, 278. 65.  Repin, Il’ia, Barge Haulers on the Volga, oil on canvas, (The State Russian Museum), https://rusmuseumvrm.ru/data/collections/painting/19_20/zh_4056/?lang=en. 66.  Chto delat’?, 210–13; What Is to Be Done?, 282–84. The editors of Chernyshevskii’s novel suggest that this last should be taken as an allusion to Rakhmetov’s involvement in “revolutionary activity,” which Chernyshevskii could not refer to directly, due to censorship. A more skeptical view might suggest—taking into account that the inexplicable fact that the censors allowed Chernyshevskii to write his novel at all—that possibly his vagueness at what would seem to be a critical point in the story might be more due to his lack of ideas about concrete methods of constructive political action, than his putative inability to write down what those methods were. 67.  Rakhmetov’s emulator was a man named Osipanov, a member of a group that attempted to assassinate Alexander III, in 1887. Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 30. 68.  Chto delat’?, 217; What Is to Be Done?, 291. 69.  Chto delat’?, 214–15; What Is to Be Done?, 288–89. 70.  Atlas Shrugged, 413–14. 71.  Atlas Shrugged, 416–17. 72.  Chto delat’?, 213; What Is to Be Done?, 287. 73.  Atlas Shrugged, 421. 74.  Atlas Shrugged, 414–17. One might also observe that a description of the hero would probably lessen the effect of Galt/Rakhmetov’s superheroism. For both children and utopian novelists, imagination is better than reality.



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75.  In fact, one of the marks against Dr. Robert Stadler is that while Akston “knew why they needed both our professions; [Stadler] never understood their interest in mine. He never understood its importance to himself—which, incidentally, is what destroyed him.” Atlas Shrugged, 734. 76.  Atlas Shrugged, 732–33. 77. Rand, Journals of Ayn Rand, 432. Entry dated April 23, 1946. 78.  Atlas Shrugged, 1059. Rand’s comment on Galt as man become God will be the subject of further discussion in the next chapter. 79. See Chto delat’?, 214-215, for the bed of nails scene in the novel. 80.  Marcia Morris. Saints and Revolutionaries: The Ascetic Hero in Russian Literature. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 1–2. 81.  Morris, 1. 82.  Keeping in mind that according to the principle of zhiznetvorchestvo Dagny Taggart and her railroad are inseparable from one another. 83. See Atlas Shrugged, 724–25. 84.  Atlas Shrugged, 731. 85.  Atlas Shrugged, 734. 86.  Atlas Shrugged, 411. 87.  Atlas Shrugged, 411. 88.  Morris, 12, 104. 89.  Morris, 23. 90.  As opposed to being in a state of “becoming” which lasts over the course of their respective novels. 91.  Chto delat’?, 231–36; What Is to Be Done?, 307–13. 92.  Chto delat’?, 234–36; What Is to Be Done?, 311–13. 93.  For example, Rakhmetov considers it “necessary” to sleep on nails, Lopukhov considers it “necessary” to fake his own death. 94.  See the Atlantis sequence in Atlas Shrugged, 658. 95.  Atlas Shrugged, 20. 96.  Atlas Shrugged, 724. 97.  The fact that Galt’s description of Dagny is not particularly feminine, at least in a traditional sense, might also suggest the two characters’ essential interchangeability. 98.  For “science” as a kind of floating signifier in an 1860s Russian (and French) context, see Andy Byford, “The Politics of Science and Literature in French and Russian Criticism of the 1860s,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literature 56, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 210–30. 99. Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism, 204–5. See Robert Pippin’s essay, “Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: The Realization of Freedom,” for a good discussion of Hegel’s “philosophy of spirit” and its implications for freedom and necessity. Includes discussion of textually plausible readings of Hegel’s “the real is the rational” doctrine. Robert Pippin, “Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: The Realization of Freedom,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, 180–99.

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100.  Malia, 204. See also Venturi, Roots of Revolution, 40–43, for a discussion of the Hegelianism of Bakunin and Belinskii; Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, 280–82 for additional discussion of Hegel’s dicta and their implications for the role of the individual in history; Walicki, “The Russian Hegelians—From ‘Reconciliation with Reality’ to ‘Philosophy of Action,’” passim, in A History of Russian Thought, 115–34. 101.  Polanyi, “Perils of Inconsistency, in The Logic of Liberty, 124. 102.  The very name “subjective sociology” evokes the tension between deterministic description of social reality and the need to leave room for individual free will. 103. Petr Lavrov, Istoricheskie Pis’ma (Sankt Peterburg, 1905); Peter Lavrov, Historical Letters, ed. and trans. James P. Scanlan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). See also Aaron Weinacht, “Utilitarian Morals, Collective Individualism, and Inevitable Spontaneity in Peter Lavrov’s Historical Letters.” 104.  Byford, 210. Italics in original. 105.  Peter Lavrov, Historical Letters, “Sixth Letter,” 161. For a broader treatment of the question, see James Allen Rogers, “The Russian Populists’ Response to Darwin,” Slavic Review 22, no. 3 (September 1963): 456–68. 106. Weinacht, “Utilitarian Morals, Collective Individualism, and Inevitable Spontaneity in Peter Lavrov’s Historical Letters,” 40. Alexander Herzen, by contrast, interpreted Darwin as leaving much more room for the individual to Matter. See Aileen Kelly, The Discovery of Chance. 107.  Chto delat’?, 58; What Is to Be Done?, 104. A likely candidate for “those” who have proven the future’s inevitability would be Charles Fourier, though Chernyshevskii does mention Robert Owen in the novel. 108.  Chto delat’?, 68–69; What Is to Be Done?, 116–17. Joseph Frank discusses these overtones of Bentham’s utilitarianism in his Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 106–7. 109.  See Pozefsky, The Nihilist Imagination, for a good discussion of “personality” in a Russian context. 110.  To paraphrase Irving Kristol’s famous comment on the identity of American neoconservatives. 111.  Atlas Shrugged, 941. 112. Lavrov, Historical Letters, 160. 113.  Atlas Shrugged, 695. 114.  Elena Shtakenschneider, quoted in Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 7. 115.  Chto delat’?, 210; What Is to Be Done?, 282. 116.  Chto delat’?, 59–61; What Is to Be Done?, 105–8. 117.  Atlas Shrugged, 652. 118.  Atlas Shrugged 982. 119.  Atlas Shrugged, 763–65.

Chapter Three

Youth, Suffering, and the Man-God Problem

INTRODUCTION This chapter will focus on the intertwined topics of youth, suffering, and what I will term the “Man-God” problem.1 The problem of suffering provides the connecting point between the topics of youth and the Man-God problem, thus suggesting that these three topics ought to be covered together. Building on the work of Pozefsky and others, this chapter will first argue that the nihilism of the 1860s, and the ideas Rand espouses in Atlas Shrugged, are essentially youth-focused, both in their argumentative style and in the audience to which they appeal. Further—and keeping in mind the principles of life-creation elaborated in a previous chapter—I will suggest that there is an important sense in which the characters in Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? and Rand’s Atlas Shrugged are actually children themselves; in the act of achieving godhood, man will regain his youthful ideals and probably his youthful physique as well. The common childlike denial of the necessity and/or redemptive value of suffering then provides an avenue into the Man-God problem. Central to the nihilist/Randian project, I suggest, is a reversal of the Christian notion of God-became-man, in the person of Jesus Christ, in favor of a man-becomegod paradigm, in the persons of the literary characters of Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand. Much of this reversal turns on the refusal to sanction the necessity of suffering: Christ may have saved the world by suffering for the sins of the many, but nihilist acolytes save the world by becoming gods themselves and refusing to suffer on anyone’s behalf. Central to the playing out of this paradigmatic reversal, I will argue, is the work of Dostoevskii, whose novels were, as Pozefsky has noted, at least as constitutive of 1860s 89

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nihilist discourse as they were descriptive of it. A defining thread in Dostoevskii’s novels is the question of what happens to various characters as a result of their varying answers to the question: Did God become man, or does man become God?2 In her study of suicide, Susan Morrissey has noted that the suicide of the character Kirillov in Devils is part of Dostoevskii’s “exploration of the consequences of a Godless world” and may even indicate Kirillov’s actual “transfiguration” into new kind of “God.”3 Dostoevskii is an integral part of the 1860s conversation about man’s destiny and its relationship to godhood, thus providing another link in the chain that binds Rand to her 1860s predecessors, Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Dmitrii Pisarev. Further fleshing out this chain, this chapter suggests, are the ideas of Vladimir Solov’ev, who was friendly with Dostoevskii4 and whose writings on the God-man question are wrapped up in his notion of “Godmanhood” (Bogochelovechestvo).5 Solov’ev died in 1900, and became the muse of a whole generation of the Russian avant-garde. RUSSIAN NIHILISM AS A YOUTH MOVEMENT, AND THE “IMPUDENCE OF SIMPLICITY” The 1860s provided a mental starting point for much of the Russian student movement, over the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.6 The historian Samuel Kassow, for instance, has argued that during World War I, “the students were still debating many of the same issues they had been struggling over ever since the 1860s,” and that among these issues was a preoccupation with questions of “self-definition.”7 One member of an 1860s student group commented that Chernyshevskii’s book was “very similar to our lives.”8 This portrayal suggests a long-lived introspective, “who are we?” character to the Russian student movement, which engaged in political behavior but always returned to the “who are we?” question, in the end. In this sense, the Narcissus-like character of the student movement mirrors the consistent prominence, in the course of the previous chapters, of focus on the self and its character, with the idea that once the novye liudi manage to get egoism and its corollaries correct, that social/cultural/political outcomes will more or less fall into place on their own. When the adolescent introspection of the nihilists and their radical student descendants is combined with the rather glaring absence of children in What Is to Be Done?9 and Atlas Shrugged, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that it is the main characters of Chernyshevskii and Rand who are the children, who reject the “Fathers” as typified by Turgenev, for example, and have to engage in an introspective process of “becoming,” under their own intellectual steam.



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Pozefsky cites numerous instances of Russians who recalled having gone through a sort of “Pisarev phase” in their youth. He notes that “The attraction to Pisarev emerges in these memoirs as a characteristic episode of adolescence that in adulthood was sometimes treasured and sometimes despised but seldom understood.”10 Historian Susan Morrissey has discussed this phenomenon, noting the influential nature of Pisarev’s writings on education that helped define the goals of the post-1860s student movement. In the 1870s, Morrissey argues, Pisarev’s ideas about education, (along with those of Petr Lavrov) “shaped the primary institutions of studenchestvo—the kruzkok, the zemliachestvo, and the skhodka—which each spread through the capital and provincial cities and thrived well into the twentieth century.”11 This “Pisarev phase” retained its power to motivate the young through 1917, even after Pisarev “ceased to be a fundamental part of the elevated polemic of left-wing journalists” in the 1860s. Pozefsky argues that while youth were attracted to “radical sociology”12 and heroic images of “supermen,” they also found that nihilism addressed immediate concerns such as providing model portrayals of “new people” who were “of average ability that satisfied complex social aspirations and addressed in a familiar language matters of love, work, and friendship that educated Russian youth confronted on a daily basis.”13 On the other hand, as the contemporary critic Pogodin noted, nihilists’ youth also led them to alternate “between extreme doubt and extreme certainty,” where their “inexperience, arrogance, and enthusiasm” “allowed them to see everything they wanted to see, to prove everything that they set out to prove,”14 using a confident scientific dilettantism as their justification. This judgment is a nice fit with contemporary conclusions of developmental psychology regarding typologies of adolescent behavior and mental processes. Adolescents, according to the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, can be and often are concerned with the “world of ideas,” and can discuss questions such as the morality of wars, the legality of abortions, and “what an ideal community should be like.” Their tendency, however, is to be “impressed with the power of thought and naively underestimate the practical problems involved in achieving an ideal future for themselves or for society. They feel that the sheer force of their logic will move mountains.”15 These findings in developmental psychology do seem to illuminate the youth appeal of Chernyshevskii and Rand’s “read-the-right-books-and-get-the-right-ideas” approach to problem solving. A look at Chernyshevskiian and Randian characters does nothing to dispel this impression of youthful zeal and optimism. The most obvious feature of the novels, in this regard, is their characters’ radical idealism: they adopt the running assumption that having the right ideas is the paramount concern, and this being achieved, everything else will more or less fall into place. Recall

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that Rakhmetov’s super heroic odyssey began with the question: “What books should I read first?”16 Having achieved the proper education a mere two pages later, Rakhmetov proceeds to “put away childish things,” as the Apostle Paul might have said.17 After finishing the “few fundamental works on every subject,” Rakhmetov mentions that “I’m now ready for life.”18 In other words, Chernyshevskii casts Rakhmetov’s previous, aristocratic life as a case of arrested development, leaving him as a child in an adult’s body, necessitating his embarkation on a sort of pedagogical Five-Year Plan to become an adult. Rand has her characters go through an effectively identical process of arrested development and crash maturation, leaving the reader with the sense that her characters are children in adult bodies, waiting to hear the directive (in the 1860s critic Shelgunov’s phrase) from the “nihilist Koran” as to “when they should wake up in the morning and what they should drink for breakfast: tea or coffee? And what should they do after breakfast? And how should they do it? Should they kiss or not? Should they wear gloves on the street or should a realist have chapped hands like sore paws?”19 In a memoir of the libertarian movement in the United States, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, Jerome Tuccille’s recollections tend to echo this description of nihilism’s overweening didacticism.20 Tuccille recalls young initiates who took courses on Objectivism so as to gain entrance “to the ‘Senior Collective’ (sobornost’?) comprising a handful of undeviating ‘individualists.’”21 Tuccille recalls some of these Objectivist devotees showing up at a meeting of radical libertarians: Most [of the attendees] were Objectivists, whose leaders included a Randian super-hero with a penchant for showing up all decked out in a black stretch suit with an enormous gold dollar sign embroidered on his chest and a gold lamé belt cinching his waist. Someone ventured to remark that all he needed to complete the image of a freaked-out capitalist superman was a gold cape swirling from his shoulders—and he was immediately informed that the cape did indeed exist, but was kept for at-home wear lest its owner call undue attention to himself in public.22

This description seems to accord well with the judgment of nihilist contemporary Shelgunov, whose comment above suggests the ease with which the call to create an “aesthetic utopia” could result in youthful “individualists” desperately desiring to be told what to do by their nihilist/objectivist teachers. In the extant teacher/student relationships in Atlas Shrugged, it is possible to see Rand as modeling for her readers the process of asking what they should, so to speak, “eat for breakfast.” In the “Atlantis” sequence, Dagny crashes her plane into “Galt’s Gulch,” as she is following a plane containing



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John Galt and his latest “victim,” one Quentin Daniels, whom Dagny had hired to try to figure out the secret of Galt’s motor. Upon arrival in Atlantis, Daniels is so excited about Galt’s motor that he shouts “‘there’s no limit to what’s possible here! I’m going to be the greatest electrician in the world and the richest! I’m going to—’ ‘You’re going back to Mulligan’s house,’ said Galt, ‘and sleep for twenty-four hours—or I won’t let you near the power plant.’ ‘Yes sir,’ said Daniels meekly.”23 Following this scene, where Galt tells Daniels to go to bed or he jolly well won’t get any supper, there is an additional scenario worth analysis. A few days after Dagny’s accidental arrival in Atlantis, she attends an evening instructional gathering at the house of Hugh Akston, who was Galt, d’Anconia, and Danneskjold’s original mentor at the Patrick Henry University. A slightly more subdued Daniels also attends, with Rand noting that he “sat on the floor, with his tray on his lap; he seemed completely at home, and he glanced up at [Dagny] once in a while, grinning like an impudent kid brother who had beaten her to a secret she had not discovered. He had preceded her into the valley by some ten minutes, she thought, but he was one of them, while she was still a stranger.”24 So here is a glimpse of Quentin Daniels on the cusp of adulthood, reading all the right books, as it were, and about to embark on his journey into the adult world. Dagny herself is still a child, however, and so there follows a sort of roundtable seminar, in which Dagny Taggart learns about the causes of her own arrested development, and how the inhabitants of Galt’s Gulch put away their own “childish things.” Dagny shouts “Why? What are you doing, all of you?” Galt replies, “We are on strike.”25 Dagny then sits at the feet of the teachers—and learns. The evening begins with a brief speech on first principles (i.e., the “right books”) by Galt himself, at which point, the rest of the group chimes in, as one by one they tell their own coming-of-age stories. Akston tells of his decision to quit academic philosophy, when he found that he would have to share the discipline with the likes of Simon Pritchett, who had “nothing to deposit to the account of philosophy except his declared intention to destroy it.” Midas Mulligan tells of his exit from banking after a court case forced him to loan money to the undeserving, and “‘I quit,’ said Ellis Wyatt, ‘because I didn’t wish to serve as the cannibals’ meal and to do the cooking besides.’”26 In each of these cases, Galt was the catalyst for their realization that they needed to “strike” in response to the irrationality of their world. So, the teacher-student relationship is a crucial background to the above scene from Atlas Shrugged, and Dagny is then faced with her own choice: whether or not to put away childish things and become a responsible adult. As the reader finds out, Dagny Taggart is not yet psychologically ready to cease mucking about in her immaturity, and so she returns to the rest of the world at the end of the Atlantis sequence, though the reader

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can rest assured that she and Hank Rearden will come to see the childishness of their struggle and join Galt in his strike. The contemporary Objectivist movement provides an interesting additional window into the child-adult paradigm in Rand’s philosophy. The official website for the Ayn Rand Institute (where most of Rand’s papers are archived) now provides the online full text of The Ayn Rand Lexicon, a useful compendium of definitions that answers all its readers’ questions, “from A to Z.”27 Like What Is to Be Done? as a manual for living, the Lexicon collects the proverbial hadith of the Prophet.28 This provides the means for youth to be told what to do next, as Shelgunov observed above, as well as a certain measure of interpretive closure: of what is and is not “Objectivist,” in this case.29 Should one wish for instance to find out the nature of civil disobedience and its acceptability under what circumstances, the Lexicon contains an entry comprised of Rand’s words, quoted from her essay “The Cashing In: The Student ‘Rebellion.’” A selection from the entry reads: “An individual has no right to do a “sit-in” in the home or office of a person he disagrees with—and he does not acquire such a right by joining a gang. Rights are not a matter of numbers—and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.”30 This essay was published in 1966, in Rand’s book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,31 and so this quote stands as a good example both of Rand’s attempt to comment on the direction of the 1960s student movement and Shelgunov’s “what do I do next?” characterization of nihilism. At an even broader level, one does not have to delve too far into the Objectivist milieu to find irresistible comparisons with Pozefsky’s argument that nihilism mattered because young people were able to read Pisarev and conceptualize “what would Bazarov do?”32 If Pozefsky’s formulation of nihilism’s contemporary significance could be rephrased as providing Russian youth the means to ask “what would Bazarov do?” in any given situation, an internet search for “what would John Galt do?” turned up readily available T-shirts and bumper stickers emblazoned with that same question.33 This question of “what would John Galt do?” is not without significance in terms of the contemporary Objectivist movement, and its attempt to garner support among youth. Answering the question, as I suggested above, implies a certain interpretive closure. Put another way, somebody has to decide on the definitive John Galt, so that one avoids a scenario where people take opposite actions and both argue that their own course is what Galt would have done. In the mid-1990s, there emerged a split in the Objectivist movement that was effectively a result of the issue of interpretive closure. According to philosopher David Kelley, this split essentially arose from a disagreement between himself/The Atlas Society (TAS) and Leonard Pei-



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koff/The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI). Peikoff was and remains the executor of Rand’s estate. Kelley disagreed with Peikoff on two main issues, the second of which was, in Kelley’s words, “whether Objectivism is a closed or an open system of thought.” Kelley took the latter position, while Peikoff argued that “Objectivism means all the philosophical ideas, and only the ideas, that [Ayn Rand] espoused.”34 In 2002, economist William Thomas (who is coauthor of a work titled The Logical Structure of Objectivism, with Kelley) continued the conflict between Kelley and Peikoff.35 In an article entitled “TAS vs. ARI: A Question of Objectivity and Independence,” Thomas argued that the goal of The Atlas Society is to work with students, but warns potential students that affiliating with one organization may preclude any contact with the other. Particularly, Thomas accuses the ARI of “breaking ties with students and groups who do not strictly adhere to its demands” and that “[The ARI] has in the past insisted that student groups affiliated with it incorporate a rejection of David Kelley and TAS/TOC into their bylaws.”36 One does not have to take a position on or get involved in ideological disputes to see two important trends at work here. First, both the ARI and TAS see their mission as spreading the Objectivist gospel to youth. The ARI, for example, hosts annual essay contests for students between the ninth-grade and college levels. The instructions for the ninth- and tenth-grade essay contest on Rand’s Anthem notes that “[w]inning essays must demonstrate an outstanding grasp of the philosophic meaning of Anthem.”37 On the one hand, this statement exhibits a definite position on the question of interpretation: the meaning of Ayn Rand’s ideas is fixed, and the judges know what the answers are. On the other hand, the essay question for Atlas Shrugged invites readers to consider one of Galt’s statements on morality and “explain its meaning.”38 This suggests that “what would John Galt do?” is a fairly good summation of the ideas with which the Objectivist movement seeks to imbue its target youth, so that there is every reason to see the youth-oriented-ness of Objectivism as analogous to Pozefsky’s argument that nihilism gave youth the chance to envision what Bazarov would do, if he were in their place. If it is possible to see a commonality between Objectivism and nihilism through their youth focus and their reliance on a “WWJ(G)D” sort of approach, it is worth taking some time to explore a couple of other manifestations of Objectivism in American popular culture, to see the extent to which their promotion of Ayn Rand’s ideas parallels the tenets of nihilism. The first of these, is in the world of comic books. The original creator of the character “Spider-Man” was an adherent of Objectivism, Steve Ditko. Ditko was also behind the creation of other comic book characters, one of whom was known as “The Question” and another as “Mr. A.”

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“The Question” is a Hank Reardon/Francisco d’Anconia businessman look-alike.39 The comic asks readers to consider the possibility that a heroic individual “is a man who faces up to the challenges and obstacles of life and acts on them in a manner that does credit to himself and the proper principles that have been proven to be true[.]”40 This echoes two of Rand’s arguments, for instance, where she suggests that morality is a “normative science,”41 and that if someone asks you to compromise, odds are good that they are asking you to surrender some basic moral principle.42 If there is not much question as to the Randian credentials of “The Question,” the comic’s intended audience is also rather clear. On one page, the reader is invited to consider the truth of Rand-themed sermons, such as “The greatest battle a person must constantly fight is to uphold proper principles, known truths, against everyone he deals with! But when a man refuses to know what is right, or does, what he knows is wrong. . . . He defeats himself! The truth remains unbeaten.”43 Only two pages after sampling this heady philosophical brew, readers are invited to purchase magic cards, smoke bombs, and “X-Ray Specs” that enable the wearer to see through solid objects, with the large-breasted girl in the advertisement leaving an adolescent audience with little doubt as to the product’s potential uses.44 While advertisements such as this one provide a picture of The Question’s target audience, it is probably worth considering, as a thought experiment at least, that clothingpenetrating glasses and our two utopian novels serve effectively identical purposes. Like the theology of Russian Orthodox icons, they provide a mental means to cross a hitherto uncrossable threshold, they give the subject a glimpse into the ineffable: What Is to Be Done? and Atlas Shrugged are philosophical “X-ray Specs,” which suggests that a combination of panderings to adolescent fantasy and Randian expansions on the philosophical law of noncontradiction has a certain internal logic. The comic title “Mr. A” is a direct reference to Rand’s argument that every philosophical truth, one way or another, goes back to the law of noncontradiction (that A cannot be both A and non-A). Atlas Shrugged, for instance, is divided into three major sections, respectively titled, “Non-Contradiction,” “Either-Or,” and “A is A.”45 The editorial introduction to “Mr. A” echoes Pogodin’s argument that the nihilists’ youth led them to alternate “between extreme doubt and extreme certainty,” as well as foreordaining their ability to “see everything they wanted to see, [and] to prove everything that they set out to prove.”46 Mr. A’s character, avers the comic’s editor, is sufficiently explained by the formulation “A is A,” and “does not hide behind his words or mask his true feelings behind meaningless actions,” “[u]nlike many of today’s contemporary heroes.”47 With echoes of the previous chapter’s con-



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clusion that that in a nihilist universe the goats (damned) do not often attain sheep-hood (saved), one “Mr. A” cover contains at least three “either-or” choices: black or white, good or evil, and life or death, as well as the nottoo-subtle argument that “A’s” are always and forever “A’s” and that you the reader had better choose the right one.48 In 1962, Rand argued that the proper response to an “irrational society” was “Never fail to pronounce moral judgment.” Rand’s specific target is what she called “moral agnosticism;” she argues that every choice has a moral component, whether or not one wishes it were otherwise.49 The ubiquity of either-or moral decisions is certainly a message of the comics discussed above. As for the fate of those who make poor choices (or in the case of Rand’s “moral agnostics,” refuse to recognize the existence of a moral decision to be made), the comic’s cover is also unequivocal: death is acceptable and/or necessary. As in the previous chapter, where Dagny shot a guard who abdicated his right to live through his attempt to live a life “without the responsibility of consciousness,”50 Mr. A’s cover art depicts a scene of death entirely justified as a result of a rational understanding of moral realities. Rand explicitly links this to a childlike worldview. Toward the end of his radio address in Atlas Shrugged, John Galt tells his listeners that if they adhere to the principles he espouses and create a new world, “In that world, you’ll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure, and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe.”51 In a late 1968 essay “The Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,” Rand discusses the Prague Spring, which she sees as exemplifying a youthful “radiance of certainty.” She portrays the protesters as engaging in futile arguments with police: as telling the communist state, in effect, “But don’t you see? It’s true!”52 Putting together the material covered thus far, then, it is possible to see a broad commonality between the character and appeal of 1860s nihilism and Rand’s Objectivism. Both sets of thought exhibit a heavy dose of what Dostoevskii called “the impudence of simplicity” and what modern psychology identifies as an excessive belief in the motive power of logic to change the world.53 In both cases, readers are urged, just as Vera Pavlovna left the arrested development of her parents’ environment, to come out of the cellar of their childhood, throw off the negative influences of the previous generation, read the right books, adopt what is true and reject what is false—with the understanding, as portrayed in “Mr. A,” that the difference is always crystal clear. They are to throw off childish things, to enter into the adult world where the best facets of childhood are preserved, where ego reigns supreme and is constrained only by the generous bounds of rational philosophical principles.

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THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING Suffering has long been an important trope of Russian culture. In general, of course, Christian salvation is predicated on the suffering of Christ’s crucifixion. In particular, the hagiography of the Kievan princes Boris and Gleb provides a glorification of suffering in the case of Russia’s first national saints. The murder of these two sons of Vladimir, whose conversion to Christianity in 988 helped redeem Russia, exemplified their willingness to suffer death rather than raise a hand against their rapacious older brother Sviatopolk. So, contained in a founding myth of the Russian state is a paean to suffering and its redemptive function. Marcia Morris has noted the importance of suffering as a long-lived trope of Russian literature, going back to the Kievan era of Boris and Gleb. Morris’s “ascetic hero” proves to be worthy of the message he has been given through some secret means, “by suppressing all passions and mortifying his flesh.”54 Dostoevskii, too, plays on the cultural appeal of redemptive suffering, with his long-suffering Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, for instance, whose saintly character is bolstered by his suffering for the sake of an abused and self-hating woman.55 Coming out of the nihilist emphasis on and appeal to youth, however, is a radical rejection of this cultural heritage. Louis Lavelle nicely encapsulates these two opposed ways of looking at suffering when he notes: “Suffering is the mark of our finite nature. But it would be a serious mistake to see it as nothing but a pure negation, as certain optimists contend, thinking that by denying it they ennoble our humanity.56 Chernyshevskii and Rand argue that suffering is always and forever to be rejected as signifying the presence of some evil of which it is a product. Put more simply, for Chernyshevskii and Rand, suffering never has any redemptive qualities or value. In the single appearance of children in Atlas Shrugged, Rand describes two small boys who live in Galt’s Gulch. “The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt . . . and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.”57 Rand’s comment leaves no room for the possibility that suffering might have a redemptive value, and this point will turn out to be a defining commonality that links Rand to the Russian 1860s. In one of his frequent asides to his readers, Chernyshevskii admonishes them to come up, out of their “thieves’ dens” (trushchoby).58 Out in the open, as it were, “life is good; the path is easy and inviting. Try it: development, development . . . read those books that tell you about the pure enjoyment of



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life.” Having given his readers a mandate to “Read,” “Observe,” and “Reflect” (in that order), Chernyshevskii proclaims: “That’s all there is to it! No sacrifices are needed, no deprivations required—they’re all unnecessary.”59 So, Chernyshevskii argues, in and of itself the path to the perfect future requires no real suffering on the part of its travelers. On the other hand, Chernyshevskii also argues that suffering, even if borne for some good end, fails to yield happiness. Having faked his own death so as to remove himself from the Kirsanov–Vera Pavlovna portion of the love triangle, Lopukhov writes a letter to Vera Pavlovna from Berlin, delivered via Rakhmetov, to his former wife. Lopukhov reflects on the effect of the irreconcilable personality differences that troubled his failed relationship with Vera Pavlovna. He notes that “I felt great exhaustion when I gave up only a few evenings to the woman I loved more than myself, one for whom I was willing to sacrifice my life, and not only that; I was willing to suffer any torment for her.”60 So, Lopukhov’s willingness to suffer on Vera Pavlovna’s behalf not only fails to redeem the integrity of their marriage, but also causes him to violate the first principle of egoism (see chapter 1), all of which results in the increasing deterioration of their marriage, Lopukhov’s eventual (though temporary) quitting of the scene entirely, and a great deal of heartache for both Kirsanov and Vera Pavlovna. For Chernyshevskii, suffering is not evidence of sacrifice for a good cause: it is evidence of failure to accurately understand reality and change one’s behavior accordingly. After Rakhmetov delivers Lopukhov’s letter to Vera Pavlovna, the two of them have a revealing conversation, where Rakhmetov argues that it does not make any sense for her to defend Lopukhov, since he was in effect the cause of her suffering, and though, in Rakhmetov’s view, Lopukhov had handled his departure “very well,” the fact remains that “It [the whole sequence of events] should never even have happened.”61 So, Chernyshevskii’s verdict on suffering not only concludes that it is unnecessary, but that when it actually occurs, it is no more than a regrettable deviation from the true path to happiness, the result of a sort of temporary irrationality, in the case of his “new people.” There is reason, then, to modify the judgment of philosopher Tibor Machan, who has argued that Ayn Rand’s “ethical egoism” is somewhat unique in that it rejects out of hand the necessity of sacrifice.62 As this point, it seems clear that this is exactly what Chernyshevskii was doing, which makes Rand look less like an isolated phenomenon and more like a participant in a conversation that has a long Russian history. Dostoevskii, too—whom Rand admired for his method if not his conclusions63—portrays a shestidesiatnik who questions both the need for and the value of suffering. In one of the most critical (and famous) scenes in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov argues that if a pass to a harmonious

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eternal bliss is somehow predicated on the sufferings of others, that the only moral thing to do is to refuse to go to heaven. Ivan regales his brother Alesha with tales of the horrors of war—babies bayoneted and cut from their mothers’ wombs—and with tales of depravity closer to home—a general, for instance, who punished a small boy by letting his dogs tear the boy to pieces. Ivan then argues that he wants no part of an eternity where horrific events such as these somehow become explainable, or even worse, necessary. Ivan sees no possible justice in the prospect of the “lion laying down with the lamb,” in a heaven where the general and mother of the small boy embrace. Thus, Ivan rejects a theoretical ticket to heaven, on the basis of a rejection of the efficacy of suffering. That Dostoevskii regards this formulation of the ages-old problem of evil as of the utmost importance is evidenced by the fact that not only is Ivan’s speech on the topic rather lengthy, but also that Alesha, a Christlike hero, has no immediate, easy answer for him, and simply kisses his brother and leaves the café where their conversation took place.64 Ivan, on the other hand, is left with the insoluble problem of theodicy without God: he is unwilling to sanction what seems to him to be undeserved forgiveness, while at the same time, he is unwilling to accept the world as he knows it—with its irrational violence and suffering—as it is given. So through his “nihilist” Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevskii problematizes the Chernyshevskiian narrative of rejection of suffering leading to resolution of inner conflict and ultimately salvation. Ivan Karamazov rejects the necessity of suffering, but leaves the café just as conflicted as when he entered it, so that for both Chernyshevskii and Dostoevskii, the problem of suffering is of the utmost importance.65 Rand’s view of suffering in Atlas Shrugged echoes that subject’s treatment in Chernyshevskii’s in What Is to Be Done? and through the character Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevskii’s The Brothers Karamazov. After John Galt realizes that he has to “stop the motor of the world,” Francisco d’Anconia is one of his first “victims.” D’Anconia then embarks on a complicated scheme, remaking himself into a world-class playboy, which he uses as a cover for his covert destruction of his family’s copper mining business, so that he can use his prestige to get “looters” to buy his stock, at which point, he will finally destroy his own business and the “looters” who invested in it, as well. Part of his mission, then, implies the end of his romantic relationship with Dagny Taggart, since, as we have seen, she is still in her “child” phase and Galt/d’Anconia know that she will be unwilling to join them as of yet. Dagny is therefore unaware of the real motive behind Francisco’s new decadent lifestyle, and here is how she reconciles herself to her grief: “She survived it. She was able to survive it because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it



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matter. Suffering was a senseless accident; it was not part of life as she saw it.”66 Dagny Taggart would not be a better person for suffering for her love of Francisco d’Anconia. Rather she would sin against the principle of selflove, either by falsely believing that an irrational person deserved her love, or by failing to understand why what Francisco is doing actually is rational and therefore praiseworthy and deserving of love. Either way, any suffering Dagny might undergo on Francisco’s behalf would be merely a “senseless accident” with no redemptive qualities or rational justifications. Interestingly enough, there is room to question both Chernyshevskii and Rand’s consistency in their respective denials of suffering’s functionality. In both cases, it does appear that a hero or heroes undergo something like a “suffering-on-behalf-of” process that results in some greater good. The point is not to quibble about the consistency of these fictional scenarios and philosophical constructs. Rather, the point is to argue that they are inconsistent for the same reasons, namely, that both authors co-opt the imagery of the redemptive suffering of the crucified Christ, which they use to reverse “God-become-man” soteriology, in favor of a “man-become-God” paradigm of salvation. In both novels, the Rakhmetov/Galt superhero appears to engage in Christlike suffering designed to be a redemptive act. Rakhmetov, for example, sleeps on a bed of nails, an act of self-mortification designed to prepare himself for trials ahead, or to suffer on behalf of the ideals he has only recently discovered.67 Immediately after relating this story to his readers, Chernyshevskii tells another story about Rakhmetov, who it seems had been injured while saving a woman from a runaway carriage. The woman in the carriage helps nurse Rakhmetov back to health, and in doing so, falls in love with him; she tells Kirsanov that “I see him in my dreams surrounded by a halo.”68 That Chernyshevskii would place these two items so close together is no accident, as both reinforce the idea that Rakhmetov has to undergo a certain amount of redemptive suffering in order to play out his salvific role in Chernyshevskii’s utopian drama, both because somebody will have to face the enemies of the revolution—William Wagner has pointed out that one can read Rakhmetov’s self-mortification as preparation for government repression in the form of torture—and because Chernyshevskii heightens the appeal of Rakhmetov’s character by drawing on Orthodox hagiography.69 Parallel events in Atlas Shrugged received some attention in the previous chapter. Galt actually undergoes the torture for which Rakhmetov prepared, in one of the novel’s climactic scenes. Galt is strapped to an infernal machine known as the “Ferris Persuader” after its inventor, Floyd Ferris. Galt is strapped to a mattress, and given a series of shock treatments, while Rand describes his naked and sweating form as “the statue of man as a god.”70 Rand’s

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reference to Christian tradition is as obvious as Chernyshevskii’s. In a final insult to the ostensible incompetence of her enemies, Rand has the generator that runs the “Ferris Persuader” break down in the middle of the torture session.71 In a combination of Jesus Christ’s command to “turn the other cheek” and his plea for God to forgive his executioners “for they know not what they do,” Rand has Galt tell his tormentors how to fix the machine with which they are torturing him. Galt’s superior nature proves to be too much, and his enemies either flee, or mentally break down on the spot, both reiterating the tendency of youthful psychology to believe that logic can move mountains, and suggesting the salvific nature of Galt’s suffering.72 Three possible explanations come to mind, that might explain why Chernyshevskii and Rand have Rakhmetov and Galt undergo some sort of suffering experience. First, they might simply be inconsistent. This explanation has the virtue of avoiding the historian’s temptation to impose coherence where there is none, but the fact that both Chernyshevskii and Rand invoke scenarios of suffering-that-saves makes one suspect that there is more to it than that. Second, Chernyshevskii and Rand might have been attempting to parody the Christian narrative of Christ’s suffering and death, to rob it, as it were, of its mystical power in favor of rationalist narrative that has the same emotional appeal to readers. This seems plausible enough, were it not for the fact that Rand in particular exhibits a certain paranoia about being misunderstood. Rand’s original conception of Atlas Shrugged included a priest character, who eventually refuses to hear James Taggart’s confession and joins the “strikers,” so that Taggart is unredeemable even in the eyes of the Christian church. Rand deleted this character because she was afraid that even this minimally complimentary portrayal of a priest might be construed as approval of religion.73 If Rand was this concerned about avoiding religious connotations, then it seems fair to ask why she would have written a scene intending to explicitly co-opt Christ’s suffering and death on the cross. Third, one might argue that Rakhmetov and Galt are members of a sort of “sacrificial vanguard” which suffers so that the rest of the “new people” don’t have to. One thinks here, by analogy, of Machiavelli’s amoral rulers who engage in immorality to the extent that political circumstances dictate, so that the citizenry is free to live moral lives. This third possibility seems to me the best explanation for why Chernyshevskii and Rand would have included a suffering element to the Rakhmetov/Galt character, though it does leave the impression that neither Chernyshevskii nor Rand is entirely consistent in their rejection of suffering as a redemptive principle.



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THE MAN-GOD PROBLEM If the reasons for the inclusion of redemptive suffering seem opaque and possibly inconsistent, it is clear what result this inclusion achieves in What Is to Be Done? and Atlas Shrugged. These instances bring a greater immediacy to a key idea in Chernyshevskii and Rand: we must reverse the “God-becomeman” paradigm that is a legacy of the Christian tradition, in favor of a “manbecome-God” principle that both describes the nature of future humanity and provides a philosophical basis for that future’s realization. The question of this principle and the relative efficacy of its reversal will occupy the remainder of this chapter. In Vera Pavlovna’s pivotal fourth dream, she finally discovers the identity of the “goddess” who has shown her all her previous dreams. Now that Vera Pavlovna has reached a sufficiently elevated state of consciousness, the goddess turns out to be Vera Pavlovna herself. The goddess tells her: “I am the woman to whom I appear, the one who loves and is loved. . . . You’re seeing your reflection in a mirror just as you are, without me.”74 While Chernyshevskii adopts the notion that man is or becomes God for the specific purposes of his novel, as we have seen, the question of the results of man-as-God had much broader currency in 1860s Russia than as a simple Chernyshevskiian device to catalyze a future filled with free love and aluminum furniture. The results of envisioning man-as-God (the nihilist position) versus God-become-man (the Christian position) is one that runs through the novels of Dostoevskii, who is of particular importance here.75 Not only was he very much concerned with the radicalism of the 1860s, but also, as Pozefsky has argued, his novels helped “create” nihilism as much as they criticized or described it.76 A clear way to address the God-became-man versus the man-becomesGod problem in Dostoevskii is to simply compare two of his protagonists, Raskolnikov, of Crime and Punishment (1866) and Myshkin of The Idiot (1868). Raskolnikov is Dostoevskii’s vision of the true egoist, uninhibited by traditional social convention or morals, with visions of himself as a new Nietzschean Overman (sverkhchelovek) on the order of Napoleon. So, Raskolnikov embodies Dostoevskii’s attempt to portray the social and psychological results of the man-becomes-God side of the question at hand. What actually happens, in the event, is that Raskolnikov acts on his newfound godhood by axe-murdering a poor pawnbroker. Raskolnikov spends most of the rest of the novel sweating inside his apartment, unable to cope psychologically with the freedom to murder that he supposes he has been given, as the new man-God. Dostoevskii’s message is thus a fairly simple one: man is psychologically unfit to take on the ethical responsibility of replacing God, and a moral chaos

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of the murdering kind is what we can expect to characterize the triumph of a new nihilist society, where man either attempts to become God or presumes that he is already. In the “Epilogue” to Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has delirious visions of a “strange new plague that had come to Europe.” This plague was such that “microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will;” victims “became at once mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible.”77 For Dostoevskii, the idea that man is or can replace God is a “plague.” In the end, however, Raskolnikov finds healing from his illness. He realizes his love for Sonia—who continues to suffer by following him to Siberian exile—and the truth of Christian salvation. Though seven years remain on his prison term, he and Sonia’s faces “were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life,” and Raskolnikov begins to heal his “schism”78 with a reading of the New Testament, from which Sonia “had read the raising of Lazarus to him.”79 So, as Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, into a new life, so does Raskolnikov become a Dostoevskiian New Man by embarking on a path to acceptance that God became man so that he could suffer for the redemption of the sins of humanity. The difference between succumbing to the “plague” of nihilism and achieving the goal of eternal salvation, for Dostoevskii, thus turns on whether man becomes God, or whether God became man, helping to cement this question into the intellectual milieu of the Russian 1860s. In Devils, Dostoevskii sets out a slightly more fleshed-out picture of the nihilists, of their habits, lifestyle, and social results thereof. Dostoevskii establishes the shestidesiatniki theme immediately. A central character, one Stepan Trofimovich, represents the “fathers” against whom “Bazarovism” was a reaction, and imagines that he has tormentors in Moscow who despise him because he had the temerity to argue that Pushkin was more important than boots.80 This a reference to Pisarev’s famous statement that boots—meaning: utility and cold, empirically verifiable reality—were much more important than Pushkin. Having engaged nihilism immediately, Dostoevskii moves on to address what is, in his view, the logical outcome of the argument that man is or must become God. The character Kirillov, who is planning to commit suicide, says that “Absolute freedom will occur only when it doesn’t matter whether one lives or dies.” When man has rejected pain and fear, Kirillov argues, then he “will become God. And then the old God will no longer exist.”81 So for Dosto-



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evskii, suicide is the logical outcome of nihilism’s desire that man become God, a marker of absolute human freedom to do what one wills, and he sees this problem as afflicting the shestidesiatniki. In The Idiot, Dostoevskii turns on its head the “schism” within the human soul that results from Raskolnikov and Kirillov’s adoption of the manbecome-God principle. Drawing on traditional Russian cultural tropes of the “holy fool,” Myshkin can be read as the human result of what happens when humans acknowledge/embody the principle that God became man.82 Myshkin shows up in St. Petersburg after a several-year treatment for epilepsy in Switzerland, and exhibiting a naïve innocence, functions as a kind of walking exposé of the moral bankruptcy of the society around him. Not only does Myshkin’s Christlike demeanor cause his contemporaries to suffer by comparison, but they actually feel a need to confess their sins in his presence. Of particular poignancy is a classic scene of Dostoevskiian surrealism, where a party of bored aristocrats play a game where each tells the worst thing that they have done in their lives.83 Not only does Myshkin exhibit a childlike innocence and Christlike demeanor, but his very presence causes people to confess the unChristian realities that lurk in the depths of their souls. Myshkin, therefore, can be read as the other side of the coin that Dostoevskii minted in Crime and Punishment just a few years earlier. When one adopts the notion that Christ became man, salvation is just around the corner, and the unsaved must either accept, by confessing their sins, or reject this. Like Chernyshevskii’s characters who either bow to his crushing logic and become “new people,” or who refuse and either “quit the scene” (Mariia Alekseevna) or violently oppress the New People (the torturers for whom Rakhmetov prepares), Dostoevskii’s characters must accept Christ and become like him (Myshkin), or descend into madness and mayhem (Raskolnikov). In The Idiot, the latter choice is best exemplified by the character of Nastasiia Filippovna, for whom Myshkin functions as a means of salvation from a life of debauchery and madness. In the scene discussed above, Myshkin proposes marriage to Nastasiia Filippovna, not out of “romantic” love, but because he sees that she needs someone to believe in her, to believe that she is a human being with value.84 She initially accepts his offer, but as the true extent of the grace she has just been shown dawns on her, she rejects Myshkin in disbelief, choosing instead to wallow in her own depravity and run off with a dissipate heir named Rogozhin instead, who showed up with one hundred thousand rubles with which he proposes to buy her.85 As she prepares to exit the scene, she shouts that she will take Rogozhin’s money, “but never mind about wanting to marry me,” and “I am a shameless hussy.”86 Dostoevskii invests this scene of divine grace rejected with such importance that he repeats the process once again, at the end of the novel. Here,

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Myshkin has again proposed marriage to Nastasiia Filippovna, and in doing so, he has rejected a woman, Aglaia Epanchin, whom he loves romantically and is in turn loved by. So, Myshkin has not only sacrificed himself for another’s redemption, but he has also sacrificed the happiness of another, as well. On the day of the wedding, as Nastasiia Filippovna is exiting her house, on her way to the church, she runs screaming into the arms of Rogozhin, and he again spirits her off, leaving Myshkin at the literal altar.87 She again refuses to accept the immensity of Myshkin’s self-giving, as he was prepared to sacrifice himself for the sake of her redemption. As in Atlas Shrugged, the alternative to salvation is death and madness: Nastasiia Filippovna ends up as a murder victim, killed by Rogozhin in his apartment, a victim of her refusal to accept the redemptive sacrifice of the God-man. Between Dostoevskii and Chernyshevskii, the 1860s produced a serious conversation on whether God became man, for the salvation of humanity, or whether, since there is no God, man must become/replace Him. In an undergraduate classical mythology course, a professor once suggested to me that what the ancient Greeks were doing was envisioning everything that could theoretically go wrong in a family setting, and then thinking out in story form what the results of those failures—such as killing one’s father and sleeping with one’s mother—might be. In Chernyshevskii and Dostoevskii, I submit, there exists a similar dynamic, where the two of them start out with the notions that man is or can become God, or in Dostoevskii’s case, that man has a choice to accept Christ’s salvation or to futilely try to become God himself. They then think out the possible implications of how one answers the Godman or man-God question. Chernyshevskii argues that once man becomes or acknowledges that he is God, his rationality can provide the necessary raw materials to achieve utopia; Dostoevskii argues that without a Christ who first became man, man’s hopes for eternal life and godhood are doomed to fail miserably. While Dostoevskii’s characters aim, like Raskolnikov’s salvation in Crime and Punishment’s epilogue, to achieve union with God—to become complete human beings, in a sense. The characters in What Is to Be Done? and Atlas Shrugged assume that humans are complete as they are, and that only by rejecting falsehoods such as the guilt of original sin and the debt to Christ’s suffering, can human live out life as the gods they really are. What this difference should not obscure, however, is that both authors view getting the right answer to the man-God or God-man question as pivotal for the achievement of a better world. One might say that Chernyshevskii and Dostoevskii are arguing for different conclusions using similar premises.88 This conversation did not end in the 1860s. Rather, the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev took up the question in the latter part of the nineteenth century, helping preserve it as an important topic of public conversation into Rand’s



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era in Russia. While Solov’ev’s sympathies lie largely with Dostoevskii’s antinihilism, like Chernyshevskii, he views the answer to the man-God/Godman question as utterly central to the problems of human freedom and happiness. While he deals with the question of “Godmanhood” most explicitly in his eponymously titled series of lectures, this problem is one that gains a broad treatment in Solov’ev’s writings. Solov’ev argues that godhood is effectively what “positivists” (read, the radicals of the 1860s) want to achieve. He notes that the modern condition features something he calls “negative conditionality,” which is, in effect, man’s desire to “declare himself to be free from any internal limitation, declaring [thus] his negative unconditionality, which constitutes the surety of infinite development.”89 So, Solov’ev’s “negative” condition is the individual’s absolute freedom from constraints of any kind, where egos are free to do what they will, when and how they will it. In light of Chernyshevskii, the egos of What Is to Be Done? throw off internal limitations—Vera Pavlovna’s acceptance of her parents’ authority, for example—which is the beginning of the “infinite development” of her fourth dream. The problem with this modern condition, Solov’ev argues, is that “[c]ontemporary man is aware that he is internally free, deems himself to be higher than any external principle independent of him, asserts himself as the center of everything; but with all that, appears in reality to be only one infinitely small and disappearing [transitory] dot upon the circumference of the world.”90 The reason for the ultimately dissatisfying nature of this newfound internal freedom, the argument goes, is the fact that “[c]ontemporary consciousness acknowledges that the human personality has divine rights, but does not give to it either the divine powers or the divine content.”91 Put in somewhat plainer language, Solov’ev is arguing that the problem with the modern, rational-scientific condition is that it subtracts God from life’s equation, while it at the same time adopts a materialist worldview that precludes man from filling this theological vacuum. Unsurprisingly, then, Solov’ev argues that the positivism of his younger days smuggled a “religious” principle in, from logical necessity if not out of a conscious existential crisis. To avoid the anarchic implications of individually defined truth, positivism must have reference to a transcendent “truth” against which the truthfulness of the empirically verifiable must be checked. Solov’ev argues that we can call this transcendent reality “God,” and that since knowledge of this reality can only be known through “internal revelation,” it therefore “represents the object of religious knowledge.”92 Again putting Solov’ev’s point in slightly plainer language, he is suggesting that for the radical materialism that writers such as Chernyshevskii and Pisarev ostensibly represented to successfully avoid intellectual anarchy, they must

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import some piece of “internal revelation” to provide an a priori standard that their scientific certainty can be evaluated against. One final set of ideas that seem to provide a link between Rand and the 1860s is the “God-building” (bogostroitel’stvo) movement that began in the first decade of the twentieth century, shortly after the death of Solov’ev. This group, which included Maksim Gorkii, Anatolii Lunacharskii, and Aleksandr Bogdanov, argued that Marxism was a profoundly religious exercise, that “religion was the key to the realization of human potential, and socialism was bound to shape a new religion, one which would be totally humanistic.”93 For Lunacharskii, the task of socialism was to promote a “deification of human potential,” and he argued that human beings would actually change physically as they developed into new, human “gods.”94 Historian Nina Tumarkin argues that the medical doctor and writer Bogdanov wanted to realize “a living community of people which would transcend individualism and achieve immortality.”95 In this vision, it is possible to see a fork in the path of the ideas these chapters have discussed. Needless to say, Ayn Rand’s ideas embody a deification, not a transcendence of individualism. On the other hand, Rand’s vision of human potential seems rather open-ended, so why not immortality, too? Bogdanov authored two science fiction novels, Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1913). The first of the two portrays a communist civilization on Mars which, though not without its problems, is immeasurably superior to the benighted feudal-capitalist earth civilizations. Engineer Menni is set in Martian history prior to the time of Red Star, and its main protagonist is in fact a superheroic engineer whose ideals would be perfectly at home in both Chernyshevskii and Rand. Historian Richard Stites has noted the same, suggesting that “In his rigid logic and rugged individualism, [Engineer Menni] resembles in many ways the Nietzschean and Darwinian characters in some of Ayn Rand’s novels.”96 Bogdanov died as part of his attempt to achieve godhood through the sustaining power of blood transfusions. Bogdanov founded “Institute for Blood Transfusion” in 1926, and through the resulting “comradely exchange of life” intended to achieve immortality.97 Interestingly enough, however, Soviet critics viewed both Red Star and Engineer Menni as excessively focused on the creative engineers and technicians, to the detriment of the “creative role of the proletariat.”98 So, at least in a Soviet context, there was a certain ambiguity about the implications of Bogdanov’s argument that humans and humanity ought to become God. Through the God-building movement in general and through Bogdanov’s novels in particular, the question of humanity’s deification and its implication for the individual and society remained very much current well into the period in which Rand was a young adult.99



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Engineer Menni’s super-heroism certainly suggests that he has access to some sort of internal revelation that sets him apart from the rest of his contemporaries. We can ask then, is the scientific certainty of the success of Vera Pavlovna’s dress shop correlated by a logic of internal revelation? The fact that utopia is realized in context of the final of Vera Pavlovna’s four dreams certainly suggests so. Is the logical certainty of the success of Galt’s Gulch and all that it represents justified by reference to a priori, internal revelation? The facts that John Galt disappears and magically returns with the answer to life’s mysteries, and that Dagny Taggart arrives in Atlantis in a state of unconsciousness, from which she awakes and is shown the truth, again suggests both the truth of Solov’ev’s observation of surreptitious religious principle in the 1860s, and the connections between his thought and that of Ayn Rand and the nihilists. From this basic idea that (ostensible) radical materialists inevitably smuggle “God” in the guise of internal revelation across the intellectual borders, Solov’ev moves to argue that those of a Chernyshevskiian ilk then must transcend the world of mere “facts.”100 It is unclear, after all, which immanent “facts” support the revelations that the characters of Rand and Chernyshevskii undergo. Transcending reality through internal revelation, man becomes God, just as Rakhmetov and Galt effectively become gods, in their quest to transcend the strictures of facts, paying lip service all the while to those facts’ immutability and empirical reality.101 The alternative to this new “religious” godhood, Solov’ev contends, is as follows: “If man is only a fact, if he is inevitably limited by the mechanism of external reality, then let him seek not anything greater than that natural reality, then let him ‘eat, drink, and be merry’: and if he is not gay, then he can, perhaps, terminate . . . his factual existence with just as factual an end.”102 Do nihilism and objectivism acknowledge this train of thought as well? The irrelevance of those such as Vera Pavlovna’s mother, who remain unconverted to the new Chernyshevskiian orthodoxy in What Is to Be Done?, and Lopukhov’s fake-suicide solution to the results of his failure to live up to the man-God requirements of Chernyshevskiian egoism, suggests an affirmative answer. Dostoevsky’s characters, too, suggest the relevance of Solov’ev’s formulation. Raskolnikov desires to be God himself, and ultimately reconciles himself to the one, transcendent God who once became man. In Devils, “Kirillov, the arch-Westernizer, elevates man to godhood and his absurd individualism leads to self-annihilation.”103 Kirillov refuses to acknowledge that man cannot remain a “mere fact” and still become God—to use Solov’ev’s phraseology, and so commits suicide, ending “his factual existence with just as factual an end.”104 Put another way, in Irina Paperno’s judgment the suicide of Kirillov (and other suicides in Dostoevsky’s novel) is simply “an end point

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of a syllogism.”105 In The Idiot, the nihilist character Ippolit does effectively the same thing as well. His advanced case of tuberculosis has shown him the cold reality that he is, as Solov’ev put it above, “only one infinitely small and disappearing [transitory] dot upon the circumference of the world.” Ippolit therefore decides to commit suicide, since that is the only action left to him that he can truly say is of his own “will,” thus hastening his own “factual” end.106 Engineer Menni’s own career ended in suicide as well, as he sought to exercise his freedom in an absolute fashion and in doing so deny the existence of the new Marxist religion that passed him by. Do Rand’s protagonists and antagonists face effectively the same suicidal dilemma? Rand’s entire plot device that has her heroes face a “join the strikers or join the looters” problem suggests that they do. Dagny Taggart chooses to join the strikers—to become God. Dr. Robert Stadler understands the true nature of reality (as Rand sees it), and refuses to do the same. Modeled on J. Robert Oppenheimer,107 Stadler comes to a tragically “factual” end, killed by his own doomsday invention. Earlier in Atlas Shrugged, Stadler’s device had been tested on literal goats; Stadler dies as one of the metaphorical goats of the previous chapter. Dagny’s brother James comes to a similar end, in the climactic torture and rescue scene. As Galt tells his torturers how to fix the electric motor that drives the “Ferris Persuader,” the hapless mechanic is faced with the truth that Galt has been right all along. “He shuddered, dropped his pliers, and ran out of the room,” which Rand uses as a device to argue that the choice to become God or to descend to a “mere fact” existence is a choice that is unavoidable. James Taggart has his own moment of realization, and tries his own, “shoot the messenger” method of avoidance. He screams at the torturers to turn up the electricity and kill Galt. What happens next is worth quoting at length: And then it was Taggart who screamed. It was a long, sudden, piercing scream, as if at some sudden sight, though his eyes were staring at space and seemed blankly sightless. The sight he was confronting was within him. The protective walls of emotion, of evasion, of pretense, of semi-thinking and pseudo-words, built up by him through all of his years, had crashed in the span of one moment—the moment when he knew that he wanted Galt to die, knowing full well that his own death would follow.108

Adding to the evidence that adolescent psychology tends to excessive belief in the power of ideas to change the world simply by virtue of their being true, this scene places Rand squarely in the midst of a conversation that animated the 1860s, and that Solov’ev continued. James Taggart refuses to become a God of Atlantis—in light of the previous chapter’s discussion of the dividing line between the saved and the damned, he may be beyond redemption any-



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how—and is faced with stark picture of the irreducibly “factual” nature of his insignificant existence. He thus desires his own death, as well as Galt’s: he can no longer sustain the illusion that he can fake happiness and fulfillment “in defiance of reality,” and since he refuses to join Galt, suicide is his only alternative.109 This is a true, Solov’evian “factual end.” Thus, Solov’ev’s argument that man must become one with God or face the crushing knowledge of human irrelevance in the face of the infinite proves be an important tie between nihilism, Dostoevsky’s counterclaims, and Rand’s objectivism. Not only do nihilism and objectivism surreptitiously import a religious justification (meaning, based on internal revelation) for how man can achieve godhood, but also both argue that man must become God or face the crushing logic of self-immolation. As Solov’ev put it in an 1884 essay, the “morally ailing man” who realizes his state “will not recover until he makes a first step towards salvation. The first step toward salvation is for us to sense our powerlessness and bondage: he who senses this fully will not now be a murderer; but if he rests on this feeling of powerlessness and bondage, he will then arrive at suicide.”110 While there is no definitive evidence that Rand read this particular essay, she almost certainly took classes with the Russian philosopher and Solov’ev scholar N. O. Losskii, through whom she probably would have been exposed to Solov’ev. Rand’s characters have three choices in life: become nihilist/objectivist gods and barring that, violently oppose those who do have the will to do so or else commit suicide. These three choices are an exact match for Solov’ev’s argument that man must either become godlike or face the consequences. While Rand obviously would have disagreed with Solov’ev as to how man can become God (“believe that Christ was God become man and achieve mystical union with him” versus “read Ayn Rand”), this does not change the fact that she participates in the conversation in terms identical to Solov’ev’s and comes to identical conclusions as the shestidesiatniki and Dostoevsky’s literary creation/discussion of them. Ayn Rand once told William F. Buckley that he was too intelligent to believe in God.111 The evidence above has proposed an explanation for why Rand was so incensed with a person whose anti-communism might lead the casual observer to assume would be a Randian ally. While Rand’s championing of the laissez-faire state and her anti-Soviet feelings placed her—to a limited extent—in alliance with the conservative movement, Rand and American conservatives parted company over the issue of God. The book that helped make William F. Buckley famous was his 1950 God and Man at Yale.112 For Rand though, the concept of God was an insult to man, a sort of intellectual thievery of the place that man himself ought to occupy, as the section above has evidenced. Rand valorizes reason, as evidenced for example by her contention that “A is A” explains more or less everything there is to understand

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about the universe and its inhabitants. God, Rand thinks, is a negation of reason, and she has John Galt argue that it was in violation of God’s imperative that man gained the ability the ability to reason (i.e., the knowledge of good and evil) in the first place.113 If Rand bases her own atheism on the argument that the concept of God is an insult to the existence of man’s reason, Rand conveyed her feelings about the connections between religion and American conservatives rather clearly, in a 1964 Playboy magazine interview with the later futurist Alvin Toffler. Rand argues that “I consider the National Review the worst and most dangerous magazine in America. . . . Because it ties capitalism to religion.”114 American historian Jennifer Burns has argued that in this war between Buckley and Rand, one can see “the fault lines upon which modern American conservatism rested,” as a result of inner turmoil over where exactly capitalism fit into the conservative program.115 For Burns, a look at Rand exposes internal inconsistencies in the American conservative movement. The evidence in this chapter suggests that the atheism that was the cause of the split between Rand and Buckley has deep roots in Rand’s debt to Russian culture, where she took the nihilist side of the man-God question that thinkers as diverse as Chernyshevskii, Dostoevskii, and Solov’ev had considered critical. In Rand’s Russian heritage, then, the historian can identify both the ways Rand fit (anti-communism) into an American context, and did not fit (atheism) into that same context. Interestingly enough, there is evidence in contemporary American culture that these questions and the nihilist/objectivist answers to them retain a certain salience. A popular fiction author, who has written in the fantasy genre, is Terry Goodkind, a self-proclaimed Objectivist.116 Goodkind’s books, according to a publisher press release posted on a Goodkind fan website, have sold around 25 million copies around the world.117 Goodkind says that the central intention of his books is “simply to tell a good story,” but adds the caveat that: My Objectivist beliefs, however, guide what I think is a good story and how I tell it, just as every writer, whether they realize it or not, is guided by their philosophy. Because our outlook on life, “our philosophy,” governs our every action, it is essential to have a complete and integrated philosophy in order to live the fullest life possible.118

The following cover of one of Goodkind’s books illuminates the effect that this statement above has on his writing.119 On the cover of Faith of the Fallen (2000), man has become God, and the aspiring mortal looks up to the artistic image of super-heroism. The statues depicted on the cover do not only depict what might be, however. The statues are actually part of the plot of the book, and their carving actually helps cata-



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Figure 3.1.   Cover image from “Faith of the Fallen.” Source: Copyright Keith Parkinson, www.keithparkinson.com.

lyze a new and better future, fusing the art and reality of the previous chapter. The scene from Faith of the Fallen that immediately follows the unveiling of these two statues bears reflection: They both reflected a love of the human form as sensuous, noble, and pure. The evil all around seemed as if it was recoiling in terror of that noble purity. More than that, though, Richard’s statue existed without conflict. . . . This was a manifestation of human power, ability, intent. This was life lived for its own sake. This was mankind standing proudly of his own free will. This was exactly what the single word at the bottom named it: LIFE.120

Like James Taggart’s unceremonious exit and the suicides resulting from an inexorable nihilist logic, Richard statue and Richard’s enemies cannot coexist. Fusing Rand’s categories of “Attila” and the “Witch Doctor,” a priest punches Richard in the face for his crime of creativity. In a replay of Galt’s torture, the priest attempts to destroy Richard’s statue with a sledgehammer, and when he fails, Richard does it for him.121 In Faith of the Fallen, then, the

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ideals of man-as-God and the power of art to actually create that reality are reproduced in a manner highly accessible to the general public. Ideas that became topics of conversation in the Russian 1860s have had, it must be said, some unexpected life histories CONCLUSION Through a look at the interrelated questions of youth, suffering, and the question of the relationship between God and man, this chapter has sought to provide additional evidence that Rand’s Objectivism owes a large debt to the nihilism of 1860s Russia. The novels of Chernyshevskii and Rand are psychologically adolescent, in the sense of the logic of their construction and the audience to which they appeal. Too, a common rejection of suffering, however problematic, both supports their ideas’ excessive reliance on the power of logic to change the world, as well as their attempt to reverse the idea that God became man. For both authors, man needs no outside assistance, and in both, outside assistance in the guise of a “religious” principle makes its appearance anyway. The next chapter will conclude this thematic comparison of nihilism and objectivism, with a look at issues of love, sex, and relationships. Though these themes have received brief mentions in this and previous chapters, they are prominent enough in their own right to deserve further detailed discussion, and so these form the substance of the next chapter. NOTES 1.  Briefly stated, this involves the question of whether God became man, in the person of Christ, as the sole means of human salvation, whether man can/will become God without divine intervention of any kind, and various possible positions in between these two poles. 2.  For an engaging treatment of these themes in Russian literature more broadly, see John Givens, The Image of Christ in Russian Literature (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018). 3.  Susan Morrissey, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 3; see also Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution, 123–25. Joseph Frank’s magisterial five-volume series on Dostoevskii gives a solid narrative of both Dostoevsky’s life and works, and provides extensive discussion of action and interpretations of the latter. See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (Princeton: Princ-



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eton University Press, 1997), Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003).  4. Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, 348; Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, chapter 2, passim.   5.  See Vladimir Solov’ev, Chteniia o Bogochelovechestve, in Vladimir Solov’ev, Chteniia o Bogochelovchestve; Stat’I; Stikhotvoreniia I Poema; Iz “Trekh Razgovorov,” Kratkaia Povest’ ob Antikhriste (Sankt-Peterburg: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1994); Vladimir Solov’ev, Lectures on Godmanhood, trans. Peter Zouboff (London: Dennis Dobson LTD, 1948).   6.  The phrase “The impudence of simplicity” is taken from Fedor Dostoevskii, The Idiot, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Bantam, 1981), 448–49.  7. Samuel Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989): 405.   8.  Quoted in E. I. Shcherbakova, “Roman N.G Chernyshevskogo ‘Chto Delat’?’ v Vospriiatii Radikal’noi Molodezhi Serediny 60-kh Godov XIX v,” Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta 8, no. 1 (1998): 62.   9.  Chernyshevskii’s translators make a brief note of this absence, see What Is to Be Done?, 271, no. 160. They do not, however, speculate as to possible explanations for it. If anyone has engaged in serious analysis of the absence of children in Atlas Shrugged (or The Fountainhead, for that matter), it has escaped my notice. 10.  Pozefsky, 198–99. 11.  Susan Morrissey, Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the Mythologies of Radicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 24–25. The kruzkok was a study circle, zemliachestva were “informal regional organizations” that connected students with each other and with students at home and the skhodka was an “impromptu representative body” that was supposed to emulate the peasant obshchina commune). Morrissey, 25. 12.  Probably, a reference to the sociology of Lavrov and Mikhailovskii. 13.  Pozefsky, 208–9. 14.  Pozefsky, 135. 15.  Patricia H. Miller, Theories of Developmental Psychology 4th ed. (New York: Worth Publishers, 2002): 58–59. 16.  Chto delat’?, 208; What Is to Be Done?, 280. 17.  See 1 Corinthians 13:11. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” 18.  Chto delat’?, 210; What Is to Be Done?, 282. 19.  Quoted in Pozefsky, 192–93. 20.  Jerome Tuccille, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (New York: Stein and Day, 1971). One should note the unusual character of Tuccille’s memoir: it is written directly from his firsthand experience of the libertarian movement, but is composed in a fictional style. 21.  Tuccille, 21. My interpolation. 22.  Tuccille, 105. 23.  Atlas Shrugged, 665. 24.  Atlas Shrugged, 684–85.

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25.  Atlas Shrugged, 686. 26.  Atlas Shrugged, 686–92. 27.  Ayn Rand Lexicon, available from http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/. This volume is also available in hard copy. See Harry Binswanger, ed. The Ayn Rand Lexicon (New York: New American Library, 1986). 28.  The website advertises the Lexicon as a “mini-encyclopedia of Objectivism . . . compiled from Ayn Rand’s statements on some 400 topics in philosophy, economics, psychology, and history.” See http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/. 29.  This problem of interpretive closure is not, of course, unique to Objectivism, as Salman Rushdie’s troubles after the publication of his The Satanic Verses illustrated. 30.  Ayn Rand Lexicon, http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/civil disobedience.html. 31.  Ayn Rand. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966). 32.  Pozefsky, Chapter 8, passim, and 217. 33.  The car magnet from cafepress.com will run you $10.39, as of 2/18/2020. 34. David Kelley, “Better Things to Do,” Article originally published in IOS Journal, June 1994. Article reposted on the website for Kelley’s organization, “The Atlas Society,” (formerly “The Objectivist Center,” which was formerly the “Institute for Objectivist Studies”); accessed 16 April, 2021, https://www.atlassociety.org/ post/better-things-to-do. Kelley, incidentally, is a well-known philosopher, and is the author or a widely used introductory logic textbook. 35. Kelley and Thomas’s book can be found in a “beta version” at https:// global-uploads.webflow.com/5e9494215713f67c21b33cab/5fc56f592864d57695e2d 2ae_LSO%20Binder.pdfInternet; accessed 15 April, 2021. 36.  William Thomas, “TAS vs. ARI: A Question of Objectivity and Independence,” article originally dated 12/10/2002, available from The Atlas Society; accessed 16 April, 2021, https://www.atlassociety.org/post/tas-vs-ari-a-question-ofobjectivity-and-independence. 37. The Ayn Rand Institute, “Anthem Essay Contest;” accessed July 2, 2008, http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=education_contests_anthem. 38. The Ayn Rand Institute, “Anthem Essay Contest;” accessed July 2, 2008, http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=education_contests_anthem. 39.  Some images available at Comic Vine. “The Question.” Accessed April 16, 2021, https://comicvine.gamespot.com/the-question/4050-3805/. 40.  Mysterious Suspense: Return of the Question 1, no. 1 (October 1968): 9. 41. ARA, Butterfield Collection: “The Objectivist Newsletter.” Draft of essay entitled “Art and Moral Treason,” February 6, 1965. Emphasis in original. 42. ARA, Butterfield Collection: “The Objectivist Newsletter.” Draft of essay entitled “Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?” May 20, 1962. 43.  Mysterious Suspense: Return of The Question 1, no. 1 (October 1968): 8. 44.  Mysterious Suspense: Return of The Question 1, no. 1 (October 1968): 10. 45. See Atlas Shrugged, Table of Contents. 46.  Pozefsky, 135. 47.  Mr. A, 1973, 1. “A is A” is actually the opening sentence of this editorial salvo.



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48.  Cover image available at “Goodreads;” accessed 16 April, 2021, https://i.grassets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1317496858l/12769204 .jpg. 49.  ARI Butterfield Collection, draft dated March 12, 1962, for essay titled “How does one lead a rational life in an irrational society, as we have today?,” 1 (page number is Rand’s). 50.  Atlas Shrugged, 1066. 51.  Atlas Shrugged, 922. 52. ARA, Butterfield Collection, “The Objectivist Newsletter,” November 10, 1968/January 1, 1969, “The Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,” 3–9. 53. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 448–49; Miller, Theories of Developmental Psychology, 58–59. 54. Morris, Saints and Revolutionaries, 1. 55. In Dostoevskii’s case, one could also point to the saintly and self-denying Father Zosima, in The Brother Karamazovm or Sonia, in his Crime and Punishment. 56.  Louis Lavelle, The Dilemma of Narcissus, trans. W. T. Gairdner (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), 90. 57.  Atlas Shrugged, 730. 58.  Chto delat’?, 236. Katz translates trushchoby as “underworld,” which seems to capture generally the idea that Chernyshevskii was working toward. On the other hand, given Chernyshevskii’s feelings about Vera Pavlovna’s parents and their parasitic pawnbroking business, and his periodic allusions to Vera Pavlovna’s escape from the “cellar” and “dirt” of her upbringing, translating trushchoby colloquially as “thieves’ dens” also captures Chernyshevskii’s intent. 59.  Chto delat’?, 236; What Is to Be Done?, 313. 60.  Chto delat’?, 242–43; What Is to Be Done?, 319. 61.  Chto delat’?, 226; What Is to Be Done?, 302. 62.  Tibor Machan, “Some Recent Work in Ethical Egoism,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 1 (January 1979): 5. 63.  For Rand commenting on Dostoevskii, see her essay “What is Romanticism?” in The Romantic Manifesto, 64–87. 64.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (New York: Bantam, 1981), 284–97. 65. For Ivan Karamazov as Dostoevskii’s vision of a nihilist, I rely on Joseph Frank. See particularly Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 426–42. 66.  Atlas Shrugged, 114. 67.  Chto delat’?, 214–25. 68.  Chto delat’?, 215; What Is to Be Done?, 289. It is true that Rakhmetov eventually rejects the woman he had saved, apparently because he could not compromise his lifestyle as a full-time revolutionary. It would probably be a mistake to read this as Rakhmetov’s rejection of divinity, however, given his superheroic qualities (see previous chapter) and the redemptive function he serves in the novel. 69.  What Is to Be Done?, 288–89, and notes 195, 197. See also Marcia Morris, Saints and Revolutionaries.

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70.  Atlas Shrugged, 1059. 71.  Rand’s message is clear: How can we fail, when our enemies can’t even torture us competently? 72.  Atlas Shrugged, 1061–64. 73.  Ayn Rand, The Journals of Ayn Rand, 540–41. Entry dated August 24, 1946, in Rand’s preparatory materials for Atlas Shrugged. 74.  Chto delat’?, 285; What Is to Be Done?, 367. 75.  The question of what occurs in life, depending on how one answers the “isman-God? or did-God-become-man” question, is a defining theme of Dostoevsky’s major novels. Irina Paperno has made a similar argument, with her view that Dostoevsky’s central goal was to “test the atheist worldview.” Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia, 126. John Givens’ The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak also contains relevant commentary on this issue. 76.  Pozefsky, 165. 77.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Constance Garnett (Cleveland: Fine Editions Press, 1947): 495. 78. Literally “Raskolnikov” means “schismatic” or “dissenter,” by which Dostoevskii evokes both his alienation from society, and his inner war between nihilist egoism and the principles of Christian salvation. 79.  Crime and Punishment, 497–98. 80.  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Devils, trans Michael R. Katz (New York: Oxford World Classics, 1999), 23. Dostoevskii also lampoons the “father” Stepan Trofimovich by making fun of him in a passage of truly brilliant humor: “You should have seen [Stepan Trofimovich] at our club when he sat down to play cards. His whole demeanor proclaimed, ‘Cards! Imagine me sitting down to play a game of whist with you! Is it fitting? Who’s responsible for this? Who’s destroyed my career and turned me to whist? Ah, perish Russia!’ Then he’d majestically trump with a heart.” Devils, 10. 81.  Devils, 121. 82.  See further, Frances Hernandez, “Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin as a ‘Juródivij,’” The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 26, no. 1 (March 1972): 16–21. 83.  The Idiot, 136–49. 84.  The Idiot, 157–59. 85.  The Idiot, 163–65. 86.  The Idiot, 163. 87.  The Idiot, 577. 88.  For Dostoevsky’s most direct answer to Chernyshevskii’s view, see his Notes from Underground. 89.  Lectures on Godmanhood, 79. 90.  Lectures on Godmanhood, 80. 91.  Lectures on Godmanhood, 80. 92.  Lectures on Godmanhood, 73–74. 93. Nina Tumarkin, “Bolshevism and the Origins of the Lenin Cult,” Russian Review 40, no. 1 (January 1981): 41.



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 94. Tumarkin, 42–43. One thinks here, of Fourier’s argument that human beings would develop tails and gills, following the successful establishment of a phalanstery. For the collateral damage that the “goats” (see chapter 3) must suffer as a consequence of this godhood achieved, see also Yuri Slezkine’s argument that Bolshevism should be viewed as a millenarian cult. In Slezkine’s memorable prose: “All millenarians—indeed most human beings—believe in some combination of faith and works, fate and hope, predestination and free will, the inexorable tide of Providence and purposeful human action, the locomotive of history and the ‘party of a new type.’ As the end nears, some people pray, some sing, some starve, some make furniture, some study genealogy, some dance the ghost dance, some don’t dance at all, some kill their cattle, some kill themselves, and some kill the forces of darkness variously defined as priests, lawyers, money-lenders, ‘lords and princes,’ and any number of Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites.” The House of Government, 107–8.  95. Tumarkin, 43.  96. Richard Stites, “Fantasy and Revolution: Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Bolshevik Science Fiction,” 11. Stites’s essay forms the introduction to Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, trans. Charles Rougle. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). This volume contains the texts of both Red Star and Engineer Menni; citations from these works will come from this edition. Stites also comments on Bogdanov and Bolshevik science fiction in general in his Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).   97.  Stites, “Fantasy and Revolution,” 15; Tumarkin, “Origins of the Lenin Cult,” 43.   98.  Stites, “Fantasy and Revolution,” 14. The problem of expertise in a communist context, of course, has a much broader scope than can be discussed here.  99. For the God-building movement, see also Edward Roslof, Red Priests (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Timothy O’Connor, “Lunacharskii’s Vision of the New Soviet Citizen,” Historian 53, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 443–54. 100.  Lectures on Godmanhood, 80–81. 101.  See previous chapter on heroism and heroic creativity. 102.  Lectures on Godmanhood, 81. 103.  Michael R. Katz, Introduction to his translation of Besy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): xi. 104.  Lectures on Godmanhood, 81. 105.  Irina Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky’s Russia, 125. 106.  The Idiot, 401–2. Ippolit’s gun, in the event, fails to go off as planned. 107.  Ayn Rand, Journals of Ayn Rand, 330–31. Entry dated January 15, 1946. Rand had done some interviews with Oppenheimer, for a film script that never materialized. 108.  Atlas Shrugged, 1063. 109.  Atlas Shrugged, 1063. 110. Vladimir Solov’ev, “Three Addresses in Memory of Dostoevskii,” in The Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics, trans. Vladimir Wozniuk (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 22. Italics in orig.

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111.  Quoted in Jennifer Burns, “Godless Capitalism,” 359. 112.  Burns, “Godless Capitalism,” 359. 113.  Galt’s speech from Atlas Shrugged, quoted in For the New Intellectual, 137. 114. Ayn Rand, Playboy Interview, March 1964; accessed February 18, 2020, https://rickbulow.com/Library/Books/Non-Fiction/AynRand/PlayboyInterview-AynRand_3-1964.pdf. 115.  Burns, “Godless Capitalism,” 360. 116. See Goodkind’s website, http://www.terrygoodkind.com/the_author/ philosophy.html; internet; accessed July 8, 2008. Goodkind’s personal website also links to the Ayn Rand Institute. Links to Goodkind’s website here, and below, are now inactive, and Goodkind himself recently deceased. An August 2003 interview Goodkind gave in USA Today provides a general sense of the points noted in citations to Goodkind’s website. This interview available from USAToday.com, “Talk Today,” http://cgi1.usatoday.com/mchat/20030805003/tscript.htm, accessed 10/22/2020. 117.  Terry Goodkind: The Official Website; accessed July 8, 2008, http://www .terrygoodkind.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10984. 118. Terry Goodkind, “The Philosophy of Terry Goodkind,” accessed July 8, 2008, http://www.terrygoodkind.com/the_author/philosophy.html. 119.  Terry Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen (New York: TOR, 2000). 120.  Terry Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen, 726. 121. Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen, 744, 748–49.

Chapter Four

Love, Sex, and Relationships

INTRODUCTION This chapter will address the intertwined topics of love, relationships, sex, and gender. Specifically, it addresses the nature and function of love in general and sex in particular, as well as the common conceptions of the proper nature of human relationships. To come full circle with the first chapter, it will also address how the “new” men and women should conceive of masculinity and femininity, when egoism is the ground zero from which they are supposed to begin. This will turn out to involve a combination of physical and intellectual pleasure, which Chernyshevskii portrays in a scene where Kirsanov and Vera Pavlovna engage in sex that is punctuated with philosophical discussions about the nature of the New People.1 As in the previous chapter, it will become clear that the function served by love and sex, for Rand, is a close parallel to those items’ functions for Chernyshevskii. Further, Rand did not simply have to read What Is to Be Done? to gain exposure to the nihilist interpretation of love and sex, but the cultural discussions of these topics passed through the 1860s, into the work of Solov’ev, and outward from Solov’ev into the milieu of the turn of the century avant-garde, so that by the time Rand entered her formative years, the conversation had spun off relatively sober reflections such as those of Solov’ev, and less-than-sober reflections, such as those of Mikhail Artsybashev in his 1907 hedonist tract Sanin. Sex will prove to be, as Malcolm Muggeridge opined, the mysticism of the materialist.

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CHERNYSHEVSKII, LOVE, AND SEX The demands of love and sex, one might argue, constitute a central theme of What Is to Be Done? One of the key dynamics in the novel is the evolving relationship between Vera Pavlovna and Lopukhov, to which Chernyshevskii later adds Kirsanov. Much of the vitality of these three “egos” is bound up in who they love, how much, for what reasons, and to whose benefit. Initially, the love between Lopukhov and Vera Pavlovna is a sort of emancipatory, rather altruistic affair, with Vera Pavlovna as the beneficiary of Lopukhov’s intellectual largesse.2 Consistent with the discussion of egoism and altruism in chapter 1, however, it is this largely altruistic initial motivation that dooms the Vera Pavlovna–Lopukhov relationship from the beginning. To see Chernyshevskii’s feelings about altruism in love, one need look no further than his portrayal of Vera Pavlovna’s rejection of an unworthy suitor, early on in the novel. Chernyshevskii has the suitor, one Mikhail Ivanich Storeshnikov, debase himself at Vera Pavlovna’s feet, and ask her for “some time to earn your forgiveness” and even worse, tell her that “You’ll see how obedient I can be.” At Vera’s continued refusal, Storeshnikov shouts “‘I’ll earn it, I’ll earn another answer. You’ll save me!’ [At which point] He seized her hand and began to kiss it.”3 Chernyshevskii, of course, displays nothing but contempt for such self-abasing behavior, calling it “tawdry vulgarity” and “filthy rubbish.” Even though Vera Pavlovna avoids engaging in any philanthropic attempts to redeem Storeshnikov’s embarrassingly un-egoist behavior, Chernyshevskii still reprimands her anyway. He ridicules Vera Pavlovna’s “pity” for Storeshnikov as well; she still inhabits her intellectual “cellar” and is thus gulled into pity when she should just ignore the ridiculous Storeshnikov altogether.4 Chernyshevskii sums up the embarrassing scene above by exclaiming “That’s not what love is!,” which neatly encapsulates his view on unearned love based on an altruism that fails to ask what there is that deserves to be loved in the other person. Storeshnikov presumes, for instance, that in order to deserve Vera Pavlovna’s love, he will have to remake himself into something other than himself, which Chernyshevskii suggests is a corruption of his own ego and of Vera Pavlovna’s, were she to actually marry him. Chernyshevskii’s denunciation of love-as-altruism finds a rather close analogue in Atlas Shrugged, in the tragic and melodramatic relationship between Dagny’s brother James (originally conceived as a character who “goes insane on the idea of charity”5) and a lowly dime-store clerk named Cheryl. On the one hand, Rand has James exhibit a not-too-subtle desire to lord his superior social status as a prominent railroad executive over Cheryl, so that at every moment she is aware of his altruistic behavior in deigning to have a



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relationship with her. To cite one example among many, Cheryl recognizes James when he comes into her store, and when she asks him how it feels to be a “great man,” he asks her how it feels “to be a little girl.”6 Having established their relative social positions, James then moves to establish their relative intellectual positions, telling her that she could not possibly understand the depravity of people like his sister Dagny and Hank Rearden: she has not read Dr. Simon Pritchett’s The Metaphysical Contradictions of the Universe, in which the author “has proved irrefutably [that] Nothing is absolute. Everything is a matter of opinion. How do you know that the bridge hasn’t collapsed? You only think it hasn’t.”7 In the above scenes, then, Rand sets up James as the altruist-benefactor in both social and intellectual senses, and Cheryl as the benighted cellar-dweller. While the James-Cheryl relationship ends in a more thoroughgoing disaster than the relationship between Vera Pavlovna and Lopukhov, this does not change the fact that in both cases, altruism failed to be sufficient context for romantic love to flourish. In Lopukhov’s case, his initial impulse to help Vera Pavlovna escape her “cellar” devolves into dissatisfaction with their love life. In James’s case, his impulse to bring Cheryl into his own illuminating presence8 results both from a misguided altruistic desire, on the one hand, and from a not-too-secret desire that she will “save” him from himself. So, Rand casts James Taggart as both misguided altruist and as a “Storeshnikov,” at the same time. As he is leaving the store, James invites Cheryl to go with him, and Rand notes that “she wore an ugly raincoat, made worse by a gob of cheap jewelry on the lapel, and a small hat of plush flowers planted defiantly among her curls. Strangely, the lift of her head made the apparel seem more attractive, it stressed how well she wore even the things she wore.”9 Here, Rand casts Cheryl as a sort of “diamond in the rough,” as a sort of second-tier ego like Eddie Willers, who is not at the level of the novel’s heroes, but possesses a lesser or unrealized potential. Cheryl regales James with tales of the apathetic laziness and stupidity of the family she left behind, mistaking him for a representative of a higher existence when in reality he might as well be the family she left behind.10 James, on the other hand recognizes the will to succeed and achieve that Cheryl represents—albeit in a pre-cognizant state. He desires both that she “save” him from the walking contradiction that he is, and that she affirms his superiority to his archenemies, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. Rand encapsulates James’s need for Cheryl as follows: “that she was the one person he needed tonight, did not strike him as a contradiction. He did not name the nature of his need. The unnamed and the unuttered could not clash into a contradiction.”11 The relationship between James and Cheryl is bound to end in tragedy. James marries Cheryl as an extension of his conflict above: he wants the

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public to see how altruistic he is, to marry a “commoner” as it were, while at the same time, he desperately hopes that her inner vitality will save him from himself. Instead James commits adultery with a woman much like himself: Lillian Rearden. Like Storeshnikov, Lillian commits the unforgivable sin of desiring to possess another person without deserving them.12 Cheryl, discovering her husband’s infidelity and realizing her mistake in her assessment of his character, commits suicide by throwing herself off a bridge.13 So, what began as a relationship based on altruism on one side and a misguided heroworship on the other, ends in tragedy and unnecessary suffering.14 For their part, Vera Pavlovna and Lopukhov manage to avoid this fate, though their initial mistake in basing their relationship on Lopukhov’s altruism and Vera Pavlovna’s hero worship does cause them a great deal of needless (in Chernyshevskii’s view) suffering. Chernyshevskii communicates this in a scene where Rakhmetov reveals to Vera Pavlovna that Lopukhov had actually faked his own death and so was still alive. In explaining the causes of marital discord, Rakhmetov tells Vera Pavlovna that “[Lopukhov] didn’t notice what he should have noticed . . . and that’s produced unfortunate consequences.” Rakhmetov argues that while Lopukhov’s attempt to stay with Vera Pavlovna was understandable, it is also not entirely praiseworthy, either, since the split between he and Vera Pavlovna would, according to Rakhmetov, “inevitably arise from the nature of the relations between your character and his.”15 While Vera Pavlovna tries to justify she and Lopukhov’s attempt to stay together as an understandable concession to the jealousy that would have occurred had they allowed Kirsanov a place in their marriage, Rakhmetov argues that in a “developed person,” jealousy should not occur, that that emotion is “the result of regarding a person as my own property, as an inanimate object.”16 So, what began as misguided hero worship and altruism ended in a lot of unnecessary suffering, according to Chernyshevskii: Lopukhov has to fake his own death to free Vera Pavlovna to marry Kirsanov, and both of them had to live with the emotional pain of unrequited love and jealousy, none of which were necessary had they either come to terms with reality sooner, or simply lived in a ménage à trois with Kirsanov. As with Rand, then, tragedy is the only possible result of love embarked upon under false or irrational pretenses. Cheryl Taggart’s suicide/Lopukhov’s “death,” or rationality regained, are one’s two options. At this point, it is instructive to point out an internal tension in Chernyshevskii’s views. If altruism is so unnecessary, then why does Lopukhov’s mistaken altruism form a necessary plot device that brings Vera Pavlovna into the “light of day,” as it were?17 The answer to this question probably lies in Chernyshevskii’s intellectual context, namely the prominent linkage between sociopolitical progress in general and women’s emancipation in



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particular. Peter Pozefsky has pointed out the influence of Charles Fourier’s argument that social progress and social regress can be tracked through the relative proximity of women and liberty. Pozefsky sees Fourier’s idea as operating in 1860s intellectual circles through “the implicit linkage of the idea of the liberation of women through courtship and the liberation of society through political activism.”18 So, even if Chernyshevskii appears inconsistent in hindsight (and maybe he really is inconsistent), there is at least an obvious intellectual context that explains why an anti-altruist writer such as Pisarev would write such a glowing review of What Is to Be Done? and see no apparent inconsistency between anti-philanthropy and the “raising up” of women to social and intellectual parity with men.19 The idea that intellectuals had a duty to pursue female education, or that female emancipation was a measure of a progressive society possessed a broad salience in Russian intellectual culture.20 Petr Lavrov, for instance, helped organize a “Working Women’s Society” in 1863, and in 1864, the censor and professor Nikitenko—the same Nikitenko, incidentally, who supervised Chernyshevskii’s master’s thesis, “The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality”—argued that a series of Lavrov’s lectures were designed for “transforming young women and girls into Nihilists.”21 So, Lavrov stands as another example of a prominent intellectual who was a proponent of women’s education and progress. In the 1870s—between the 1860s and Rand’s Russian period—the philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev further expanded on a link between femininity and social progress. In the course of his life, he experienced three mystical visions of “Sophia,” whom he viewed as a God or an image of God, and who represented “eternal womanhood.”22 Solov’ev’s notion of “eternal femininity” is built around the idea that humanity is “pure potential,” and desire to grasp “the fullness of divine life.” For Solov’ev, humanity is distinct from God, but not entirely separable from God either, so that he sees an analogy with the biblical account of woman as both distinct from man and as derived “out” of man. All of this leads Solov’ev to the notion that God is the active/ male partner and humanity is the passive/female partner, so that Sophia, as a vision of the godlike image of humanity, becomes the “eternal feminine,” or the representative of that which is God, in humanity.23 At a practical level, Solov’ev gave a series of lectures to a “women’s curriculum,” in the early 1880s, suggesting that he too saw women’s education as a necessary social/intellectual task.24 At an abstract level, he also expands on his vision of womanhood, embodying in it his dynamic principle for humanity’s salvation, i.e. “Sophia.” As the central female character in What Is to Be Done?, Vera Pavlovna also embodies this saved/salvific role. I discussed the first half of this dual function above, and it is, after all, Vera

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Pavlovna’s ideas and the dressmaking establishment that results from them that catalyzes the creation of Chernyshevskii’s ideal future. So it appears that Vera Pavlovna can also be read both as needing to be saved, and as a salvific force in her own right. More broadly, as historian Richard Stites has argued, Chernyshevskii “was a Bible for all advanced Russian women with aspirations toward independence, whether they thought and acted as organized feminists, as revolutionaries, or as ‘nihilist’ women.”25 The turn of the century saw a new take, albeit one heavily influenced by Solov’ev, on the relationship between gender and the realization of a utopian future. This topic came up in the previous chapter on heroism and creativity, but is worth revisiting here, since the focus of that chapter was to view nihilism/objectivism through a different lens than in this chapter.26 Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century avant-garde culture emphasized not only the co-equality of men and women vis à vis the utopian future, but also the specifically aesthetic-dynamic functions of sex. Olga Matich has detailed the existence of numerous avant-garde love triangles, which exemplify this principle. Participants in various triangles included, for instance, the poets Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and Zinaida Gippius. Inspired by Solov’ev’s views on sex in his essay The Meaning of Love, the point of these love triangles, which were supposed to be unconsummated, was to break the cycle of birth-death-birth, and yet at the same time, to “celebrat[e] erotic love because only it possesses the necessary libidinal power to vanquish the grim reaper.”27 That the love of avant-garde love triangles was supposed to be unconsummated was also a nod to Solov’ev, who was concerned with the question of “whether men and women should expend their sexual energy now or save it, storing it till the end of history, at which point the energy would be released collectively in a big bang that would transfigure the world.”28 Much of this Solov’ev/avant-garde take on love and sex goes back, I have had occasion to mention previously, to the 1860s. Matich spends a good deal of time detailing the “Chernyshevskiian subtext” of Gippius’s marriage to writer Dmitrii Merezhkovskii in 1889. While Gippius did not have much use for What Is to Be Done? from an artistic point of view (and the “pronitsatel’nyi chitatel’,” Chernyshevskii’s oft-addressed “perspicacious reader,” is tempted to sympathize with her view, on occasion), she did have a great deal of late-in-life admiration for Chernyshevskii, in the 1920s.29 For instance, looking back on the mid-nineteenth century from the perspective of 1925, Gippius “described the literary critics Vissarion Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dmitrii Pisarev, as well as Turgenev’s Bazarov as men of true chivalry and spiritual strength.”30 All of this is to say, then, that through Solov’ev and the turn-of-the-century avant-garde, questions about love and sex that



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occupied the “nihilists” retained their currency and significance at least up to and including the arrival onto the scene of one Alissa Rosenbaum. An additional pre-Rand trajectory taken by Russian cultural discussions about love and sex is exemplified by Mikhail Artsybashev’s Sanin (1907), which was a widely read literary scandal and has a number of ties to the 1860s, so that this novel, too, seems to provide an important part of Rand’s intellectual backdrop. In brief, the titular character arrives back in the town of his birth, after a lengthy absence, and proceeds to sow chaos in his wake, living an unrepentantly hedonist lifestyle and scandalizing everyone. For example, at one point, Sanin perpetrates what appears to be a rape, and he aids another of the book’s characters along a mental path that ultimately leads to suicide. As literary scholar Otto Boele has argued, Sanin was, in effect a “sympathetic continuation of the stories about the New People,” with numerous contemporary commentators observing similarities between Sanin and Pisarev’s Bazarov, for instance.31 Like Sanin, Rand herself is ambiguous about the meaning of violence in sex. In answer to a reader’s question about sexual violence in The Fountainhead (sexual violence is also present in Atlas Shrugged), Rand argues that what appears to have been a rape was not actually so. Rather, “she had asked for it, and he knew that she wanted it. . . . What Dominique liked about Roark was the fact that he took responsibility for their romance and for his own actions. Men nowadays . . . expect to seduce a woman, or rather they let her seduce them and thus shift the responsibility to her. That is what a truly feminine woman would despise.”32 Rand’s explanation for what looks like a rape to the casual reader goes something like this: Being true to your desires and up front about their results precedes any qualms about violent or quasi-violent sex. While this justification is not entirely convincing, it does provide an interesting window into Rand’s view of egoism’s result in the sexual sphere, a thought process which animated Artsybashev’s Sanin as well, and with similar results. If Sanin was the cause of scandal in the novel, then Sanin was a cause of major scandal in Russian society. Boele recounts a rather fascinating incident where the head of a girls’ school wrote a letter to Lev Tolstoi, imploring him to compose a tract on sex, for the benefit of the younger generation, whom she feared were engaging in lewd behavior of the worst sort, and were reading Sanin, to boot. Paralleling this book’s observations about the fuzzy relationship between literature and reality, Boele observes, “what is striking about this letter is less the headmistresses’ dismay at the sexual laxity of her pupils than her assumption that their sexual activities have a direct connection with a literary hero who does not conceal his depravity.’”33 At one level, Boele’s comment is a nice fit with this book’s running attention to beliefs

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about the extent to which art can remake or outright create reality. At another level, Boele’s comment illuminates the centrality of sex in Russian cultural discourse, where Sanin’s ultra-egoist behavior naturally plays itself out in this realm of life. So, the 1907 serial publication of Sanin provided another means by which ideas about love, sex, and egoism were transmitted from the 1860s to the period in which Rand arrived on the scene. Sanin itself could be read as a new take on the New People, and the discourse that surrounded that novel resurrected discussions about the meaning of the 1860s. As Semen Frank argued in Vekhi, for instance, “Bazarov” was alive and well in Russia intellectual culture in the early twentieth century.34 Frank’s comment has a certain “see, I told you so” kind of connotation, and he seems to be suggesting that “Sanin” was the logical outcome of 1860s nihilist beliefs about egoism and sexual liberation. This underscores the fact that whether one agrees or disagrees with Frank’s link between Bazarov and Sanin, the legacy of the 1860s was still contested territory in the early twentieth century. Rand herself both denigrates what she considers those “cheap little schools of free love” and celebrates sex that seems violent and borderline rapine.35 In a journal entry, she explicitly makes a distinction between hedonism and her own moral views, arguing that while the hedonist views the good as that which provides pleasure, Rand’s moralist says “that is good which is the expression of my moral values and that gives me pleasure.”36 While this distinction is not entirely convincing (why couldn’t hedonism be my moral value?), the more important point is that Rand saw accusations of hedonism as an obvious possibility that needed to be fended off in advance. So, to the extent that Sanin embodies the basic principles of egoism, Rand would have approved of his example, and to the extent that Sanin’s behavior embraces a kind of moral arbitrariness, Rand would have disapproved.37 One way or another though, Chernyshevskii, Artsybashev, Frank, and Rand were all considering the logical results of egoism for the sphere of love, sex, and romantic relationships. RAND ON LOVE AND SEX Rand defines love as “our response to our highest values—and [love] can be nothing else.”38 On the one hand, this fits in with the nihilist/objectivist argument that having right or wrong ideas first, inevitably dictates the acceptability or character of the outcome.39 On the other hand, this statement gives love a rather central place in Rand’s thinking, since Rand regards morality as an objective science, implying that for her, true love is the result of the high-



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est exercise of man’s rational faculty, and if Rand has a god, man’s ability to reason is surely that god.40 Like Chernyshevskii, Rand invests love with a dual nature, as having both a physical, selfish side, and as a catalyzing agent whose function is to help realize a new and better future. This latter function is also, as suggested above in the discussion of the avant-garde, very much present in Russian intellectual culture around the turn of the century. On the physical side, Rand notes that whatever ridiculous notions a person might adopt, regarding the “virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment.”41 This statement occurs in a conversation between Francisco d’Anconia and Hank Rearden, and Rand considered the notion important enough to reprint the conversation in For the New Intellectual, under the title, “The Meaning of Sex.”42 Chernyshevskii certainly emphasizes the raw physicality of love’s desire. Immediately following his engagement to Vera Pavlovna, Lopukhov goes home, and has trouble working on his studies, as he is preoccupied with “amorous fantasies.”43 Earlier in the nihilist conversation, Turgenev’s Bazarov in Fathers and Sons remarked on a female character’s appearance, noting “What a delectable body! . . . Perfect for the dissecting table.”44 Chernyshevskii follows up on this vulgar sort of comment, asking rhetorically “what else” could Lopukhov have been thinking about? “A materialist thinks exclusively about advantage, and indeed, [Lopukhov] was considering only that. Instead of lofty poetic and sublime visions, he was concerned with the sort of amorous fantasies appropriate to a crude materialist.”45 While Chernyshevskii uses this scene to needle his benighted (“perspicacious”) reader by “confirming” all their worst suspicions and fears of nihilist barbarians knocking at the gates, he also confirms the legitimacy of physical desire and its natural place in the course of human relationships. Chernyshevskii does much more with love, though, than emphasize Lopukhov’s physical desire for his wife-to-be. The sorting out of his three main characters’ love problems goes hand in hand with their catalyzing of the utopian future. Along with the dress shop, the working out of relations between Lopukhov, Vera Pavlovna, and Kirsanov forms one of the key components of Chernyshevskii’s novel. Like the dress shop, which Vera Pavlovna planned and executed because she desired to, her eventual pairing with Kirsanov is also a result of her acknowledgment of the demands of her ego, as well. In Vera Pavlovna’s Third Dream, she is cast as slightly deluded, because she refuses to recognize the attraction between herself and Kirsanov, an attraction that is apparently immutable. This dream, then, is where Vera Pavlovna comes to admit that she may love the fact that Lopukhov helped deliver her

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from her parents, more than she actually loves him for himself.46 Lopukhov agrees with this assessment, and muses that he might have been able to keep Vera Pavlovna’s love “If he could have altered his own nature and acquired that propensity for quiet tenderness which her nature demanded.” This, Chernyshevskii avers, is a scientifically unsound train of thought, since “If such an inclination is neither endowed by nature nor instilled by life experience independent of a person’s intentions, no one can create it in himself through force of will.”47 Since science and a life lived under its rubric—as any good reader of Father’s and Sons à la Pisarev would have known—is the path to salvation, the above characters’ reconciliation with reality is of the essence for Chernyshevskii’s utopia to find its realization. Chernyshevskii suggests that affection implies desiring the other person’s happiness, as well as your own, but that “there’s no happiness without freedom.” As we have seen already, Pisarev, Chernyshevskii, and Chernyshevskii’s literary creations conceive of freedom in egoist terms, so that the existence of a “rational” love then becomes a measuring stick of just how progressive Chernyshevskii’s New People really are. Put another way, when every aspect of life is invested with philosophical significance and is lived as a “text,” then the sphere of love is yet another indicator of one’s relative progress down the road to rationality. Like Chernyshevskii, Rand uses sex as a lens through which to view rational and irrational behavior. When Rand’s characters are behaving irrationally or are trapped in circumstances with other people who are, sex is always portrayed as twisted or depraved. Rand has Francisco d’Anconia argue, for instance, that when one views love as based on “self-denial” or “sacrifice,” that a man’s “body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find.” Rand caps d’Anconia’s speech by declaring that once a person has adopted this logic, that they are then “cut in two” (a violation of the integrated personality principle): the mind will adopt the fallacy that “sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom, and sex—nothing but shame.”48 Here, then, is a reaffirmation of the principle that egoism properly lived out will result in rational love, sex, and happiness about both of them. In Chernyshevskii’s case, Rakhmetov is the prophet of the good news, as he tells Vera Pavlovna that none of she and Lopukhov’s suffering was necessary or even in good cause. In Rand’s case, Francisco d’Anconia helps Hank Rearden understand what Rearden sees in Dagny Taggart that he does not see in his wife Lillian, for whom Rearden feels apathy at best and disgust at worst. Olga Matich has argued for the importance of the fact that the marriage between Vera Pavlovna and Lopukhov appears to have been celibate. As her



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historical subjects are the late-nineteenth-century avant-garde, who had read their Chernyshevskii and their Solov’ev, and whose erotic love triangles were supposed to be unconsummated, this makes a kind of sense. On the other hand, however, Matich seems to gloss over the point that while Lopukhov and Vera Pavlovna may have been celibate, Vera Pavlovna and Kirsanov certainly were not.49 This seems to support an interpretation which would suggest that the reason for their celibacy (if that’s what it was) has less to do with ideology and more to do with the fact that, as it turns out, they were more in love with the idea of each other than they were with each other in reality. Once Vera Pavlovna and Lopukhov realize the error of their attempt to stay together in the face of irreconcilable differences, it is sex, not further celibacy, that results. Put another way, Chernyshevskii’s New People aesthetic seems to me to be one of fulfillment or plenty, rather than one of asceticism or deprivation.50 The above discussion, to my mind, simply illuminates one of the basic implications of this entire book: namely, the fact that Chernyshevskii can be and has been read many different ways. In this case, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century avant-garde read Chernyshevskii in light of Solov’ev, and concluded that the erotic asceticism of unconsummated love triangles would create some sort of intergalactic orgasm that would spring humanity free of this world and allow them to enter the utopian next world. Rand, on the other hand, appears to have read Chernyshevskii (or at least Chernyshevskiianism) as promoting an aesthetic of plenty—both she and Chernyshevskii, as I have detailed previously, wholeheartedly rejected the necessity or redemptive value of suffering or deprivation, so that this appears to be a legitimate reading of What Is to Be Done? as well. My intent is not to argue that one particular interpretation is correct. Instead, my intention is to point out that the meaning of sex in Chernyshevskii’s novel and the meaning of sex in general was a consistent topic of discussion in Russian intellectual life following the 1860s, up to and including Rand’s time there, and that much of this discussion centered around issues Chernyshevskii raised.51 If Chernyshevskii’s love triangle and those of the late nineteenth century avant-garde, were each integral updrafts in the apocalyptic forecast, Rand’s love triangle(s)52 are no less critical. Dagny Taggart’s initial love is Francisco d’Anconia. In an uncanny analogue with What Is to Be Done?, d’Anconia quits the scene after much soul-searching and, as it turns out, does so for Dagny’s (and his) own good. This cannot help but recall Lopukhov’s decision to fake his own death for Vera Pavlovna’s (and his) own good. Dagny later finds a kindred spirit in Hank Rearden, whose values and ideals correspond with her own. Dagny’s relationship with Rearden is part of what helps her see the futility of participating in a world organized on (according to Rand) irrational premises.

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As in What Is to Be Done?, the Randian love triangle helps catalyze a utopian future. Dagny’s relationship with Francisco d’Anconia is part of what inspires him to quit the scene and join Galt’s band of “destroyers.” She is exactly the sort for person for whom Galt’s Atlantis is designed. Dagny’s relationship with Rearden, similarly, is an alliance between two people who see themselves, much like the main characters in Chernyshevskii, as rational human beings surrounded by a sea of irrationality and needless suffering. Interestingly, Dagny’s relationship with Rearden, while an illicit but praiseworthy love between two of Rand’s New People, is also afflicted with the symptoms of the irrational disease. Calling to mind d’Anconia’s argument that love which proceeds from irrational premises will only corrupt the participants and is not really love anyway, Rearden fantasizes about sex with Dagny: “[I would like] To bring you down to things you can’t conceive— and to know that it’s I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal’s pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent on the obscenity of your need.”53 So at one and the same time, Rearden is admiring a woman whom he regards as “the only person I respected—the best businessman I know—my ally—my partner in a desperate battle,”54 while at the same time, he fantasies about her sexual degradation at his hands. Rearden’s sex life with his wife has led him to believe that sex is something one ought to feel guilty about. So while he greatly admires Dagny, the conflict between his laudable (for Rand) desire to have sex with her and his inner compulsion to feel guilty about it leads him to solve it by wallowing in his own “depravity” (and hers) rather than “checking his premises,” as Rand would counsel. Echoing the difficult married relationship between Lopukhov and Vera Pavlovna, this is a textbook case of the nihilist/objectivist argument for the “integrated personality”55 and an argument for the inner conflicted-ness that arises when one’s existence is not based on rational principles. While Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart get their conflicted-ness resolved, James Taggart and Lillian Rearden, un-redeemables who also cheat on their spouses, do not. Rand characterizes their adultery as a “triumph of impotence.”56 Driving the point home, Rearden remarks, the morning following his and Dagny’s first (and rather violent) sexual encounter, “I want you to know this. . . . What I feel for you is contempt. But it’s nothing compared to the contempt I feel for myself.”57 This is Hank Rearden’s summation of his sexual experience with Dagny Taggart, when the previous night, Rand characterizes their sexual experience thus: The course led [Hank and Dagny] to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one’s values, in an admiration not to be expressed by any other form of



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tribute, one’s spirit makes one’s body become the tribute, recasting it—as proof, as sanction, as reward—into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of existence is necessary.58

Rand’s view of sex paraphrased: the joy of the ego victorious taking pleasure in the possession of an equal which one regards as equally heroic.59 The fact that Rand has Rearden express his contempt for Dagny Taggart immediately after this rapturous encounter serves to underscore the overall emphasis on the essential nature of the integrated, conflict-free personality, and Rand’s characterization suggests that the centrality of love and sex to nihilism, which was recast in the thought of Solov’ev and the late nineteenth-century avantgarde, has now found a new home in the Objectivism of Ayn Rand. Rand goes one step further than Chernyshevskii, in one respect: in the end, Dagny Taggart ends up not with Francisco d’Anconia, not with Hank Rearden, but with John Galt. A contemporary critic of What Is to Be Done? argued that logically speaking, Vera Pavlovna ought to end up in love with Rakhmetov and then live together with him, Kirsanov, and Lopukhov.60 Rand builds an additional love triangle (or maybe quadrangle) into Atlas Shrugged, between Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, and John Galt (and Francisco d’Anconia still loves her too, apparently). In the end, Dagny chooses John Galt, as the heroic personality who best lives out her values. Interestingly enough, however, it is the sex scenes between Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden that Rand spends most of her time discussing, and which she invests with detailed philosophical significance. Atlas Shrugged includes only a single sexual encounter between John Galt and Dagny Taggart, which takes place in a railroad tunnel.61 Rand indicates that the two of them have been more or less destined for each other, but there is no real indication of why Galt is better for her than Rearden or d’Anconia, or of what sets him apart from the two of them. The lack of surprises or revelations in the sex scene between Dagny Taggart and John Galt might simply indicate that each of them is a perfectly rational person free of internal contradictions, that they understand this about each other, and so there really is not much more to be said about it. Bluntly put, perfection is boring. Chernyshevskii argues that sex is a natural outgrowth of the birth of the New People who behave in a “rational’” manner, and for him, the status or nature of sex is a marker on the road to a better future. Following Lopukhov’s faked death and Vera Pavlovna’s attachment to Kirsanov, the two of them alternate between bouts of sex and abstract philosophical discussions of the nature of the New People and how one gets to be one, presenting the reader with an odd sort of literary cadence where Vera Pavlovna and Kirsanov first revel in their philosophical revelations, then revel in each other, and then “some

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two hours later” get back to discussions about rational emotions, equality, women’s liberation, and egoism. As Kirsanov, the good egoist, remarks: “Take [the initiative in the conversation], but I refuse to follow your lead. Now I’ll take the initiative and continue to interrupt. Give me your hand.” Vera Pavlovna: “But Sasha, we must finish talking.” Kirsanov: “We’ll have time for that tomorrow. Right now, as you see, I’m much too interested in investigating this hand.”62

In a similar manner, the character of sex serves Rand as a marker of her characters’ relative progress toward a rational, integrated egoist personality, so that it does seem appropriate to apply Malcolm Muggeridge’s aphorism that “Sex is the mysticism of the materialist.” In sex, the spiritual joy of Chernyshevskiian/Randian egos triumphant is realized. Finally, it remains to discuss the question of gender, in this case, the nihilist/objectivist conception of what it means to be masculine or feminine. For Chernyshevskii, unsurprisingly, the proper way to be a man or a woman is directly linked to the egoist principle, where his reader is supposed to conclude that they should, as it were, “be who you are,” versus “be who society says you should be.” Chernyshevskii’s harshest judgment on gender expectations is that society fosters a scenario where it is the “most intimate desire” of every woman to have been born a man.63 In her pre-emancipation state, Vera Pavlovna agrees with this judgment, and argues that instead, she desires most of all to achieve individual independence. “To do what I want, to live as I want, without asking anyone, without demanding anything from anyone, without needing anyone at all. That’s the way I want to live!”64 So, Chernyshevskii’s concept of gender liberation then becomes the freedom to live as one’s desires and as one’s nature dictates, regardless of whether one is a man or a woman. For Chernyshevskii, the greatest sin one can commit is to desire to be something one is not, and thus his contempt for a society which causes women to wish to be men. On the contrary, the egoist lives of Chernyshevskii’s protagonists end up resulting in a social revolution, so that having the right ideas about love, sex and gender is an important part of his characters’ quest to achieve a personhood free of internal strife and contradiction. To borrow a phrase from the poet Bely, one might say that Chernyshevskii’s social revolution is first and foremost a “revolution of the spirit,”65 with a decidedly sexual component. In her own way, Rand also links gender to egoism, arguing that men and women should behave as their desires and nature dictate, regardless of social gender expectations. Dagny Taggart, one of Rand’s central characters, is an ultracompetent (though temporarily deluded) railway executive, and Rand’s point is not that women “ought” to be railroad executives, but that Dagny



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should be one because railroads are what she loves. With the exception of Eddie Willers, most of the other men in the railroad office seem to fear her, as the indomitable woman in the midst of a “good old boys’ club.” Rand’s point is not that women should run railroads, but that Dagny should, because she wants to, and doing what one desires is the egoist thing to do. Rand communicates this point rather effectively, in a scene where Dagny has fled to a remote cabin, after swearing that she will no longer participate in an economic system that penalizes the competent. She hears on the radio that a major tunnel owned by her railroad has been destroyed, and the magnitude of the disaster cause her pain that is emotional and almost physical. She physically tears herself away from Francisco d’ Anconia, and, breaking her promise not to have any more dealings with the railroad, runs back, “with the force of a living creature fighting for life,” to the main office to try to salvage the disaster.66 Like Chernyshevskii’s characters’ doomed attempt to save their marriage, Dagny Taggart’s desire to save her railroad is both indicative of a vibrant personality and doomed to cause failure and unnecessary suffering. Also like Chernyshevskii, Rand argues that the results of one’s desires are also dictated by the constraints of one’s nature. Chernyshevskii argues that Vera Pavlovna’s struggle to stay with Lopukhov was pointless because of immutable differences in their respective natures, differences that could not be overcome simply by force of will. Paperno has discussed Chernyshevskii’s view that the sexes ought to interact on a sort of “salon” model, because “[i]t was to woman, who was endowed with a special instinct for literature, that authors looked for inspiration, guidance, and protection.”67 Following on Chernyshevskii’s views about the “nature of things,” as it were, Rand’s position on this question can be seen in her argument that a rational woman would not want to be president of the United States. Rand argues that “For woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero worship—the desire to look up to man.” She qualifies this by arguing that this does not imply any sort of “inferiority,” but that because the object of this adoration is a “metaphysical concept of masculinity,” that this precludes the “properly feminine woman,” from acting toward men “as if she were their pal, sister, mother—or leader.”68 Rand’s 1969 comment suggests a certain disconnect from the larger feminist movement in the United States. Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and helped form the National Organization for Women in 1966.69 While the women’s movement was notable for its lobbying for workplace, educational, and reproductive rights, it was not, perhaps, notable for a public argument that women ought to heroize masculinity and organize their behavior as women accordingly. It is certainly possible to read Rand as a “feminist” in the sense that her positive female characters are assertive and do not assume that they live in a “man’s world,” while her negative characters

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tend to make chauvinist remarks around Dagny Taggart, for instance. On the other hand, Rand’s view that there is such a thing as a feminine “essence” places her at odds with the wing of modern feminism that generally rejects talk about “essences” or “natural” tendencies as indicative of social construction rather than biological fact.70 Further, American historians Linda Herber and Jane de Hart point out that Friedan’s diagnosis of the “woman problem” was rooted “not only from her experience of suburban life, but also from her experience in left-wing politics and in the labor movement.”71 Historian Amy Swerdlow has detailed, along these lines, a major women’s “strike for peace” in Washington D.C., designed to oppose the activities of HUAC.72 Given that Rand’s distance from anything like “left-wing politics,” her involvement in Hollywood communist-searches, and testimony before HUAC, it is not to difficult to see why Rand did not emerge as a prominent member of the women’s movement in the post–World War II United States. Rand’s philosophical stance on valorization of the masculine, combined with her politics, did not make for a good fit with a major portion of the feminist movement in 1960s America. One may agree or disagree with Rand’s take on the question of feminine essence. The larger point though, is that like Chernyshevskii, Rand invests her writing about gender with reference to the “nature of things” as it were, so that in discussion of rational calculations of personal advantage in the face of a marriage prospect, Chernyshevskii argues, “Who has the right to censure the consequences of facts, when these facts exist?”73 Interestingly enough, it is possible to see some long-term “consequences of facts” in the reception Rand has received in the United States. Thus far, this book has mentioned Rand’s American reception in terms of political movements such as American conservatism, official organizations, such as the Ayn Rand Institute, and in popular media such as comic books and fantasy novels. Not to be left out, Rand’s views on love have also found at least one popular outlet. The “Atlasphere” is a website whose mission is “to bring together admirers of Ayn Rand’s novels, from around the globe, to network both personally and professionally.”74 As part of this convergence of Ayn Rand fandom, one can set up a dating profile on The Atlasphere, recognizing that “the human soul needs fuel” and that as of 2008, there were 8,541 “dating profiles” of eligible persons who presumably share one’s commitment to living life on Randian principles.75 The Atlasphere provides a forum attractive to a younger generation, a topic covered in the previous chapter. Also, it provides a window into the nihilist/Randian logic of individual development. Interested persons can post personal information about themselves in a dating profile, and according to website information, The Atlasphere lists 864 total member blogs and 1,695 member websites, providing more forums where



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members can discuss their views and prescreen prospective paramours so that embarrassing first-date misunderstandings about whether “A” is in fact “A” and not “B” or “C” can be avoided.76 In short, the internet seems to have provided an obvious outlet for people whose goal is to live life according to objectivist principles and who desire to find someone else who wants to do the same. If the connection this book has sought to draw between Rand the “nihilists” is valid, then the legacy of the Russian 1860s has cropped up in some unexpected places. CONCLUSION This chapter has argued that nihilist/objectivist views of the nature and function of love, sex, and gender are conceptually and practically similar, adding another block to the edifice of themes this book has addressed. Beginning from the egoist principle, Rand and Chernyshevskii argue that there is a rational way to engage in love, sex, and thought about gender, and the behavior of their characters exemplifying this rationality is fundamentally similar. Additionally, one gets the sense, in reading What Is to Be Done?, that properly executed, love and sex can have a catalyzing effect on the utopian future as well, an idea that both preserved and elaborated upon in the writings of Solov’ev and the Russian cultural avant-garde in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rand reproduced this additional function of love and sex in Atlas Shrugged through the sex scenes between Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, suggesting that the historian can add this sphere of life to the evidence that suggests a close link between her thought and the nihilism of the Russian 1860s. NOTES 1.  Chto delat’?, 266–69. 2.  Irina Paperno discusses Chernyshevskii’s own marriage and his intent to emancipate his wife through education, in Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, chapter 2, passim. 3.  Chto delat’?, 40–41; What Is to Be Done?, 84. 4.  What Is to Be Done?, 84. Chernyshevskii and Rand reserve nothing but contempt for pity in any form. Chernyshevskii argues for instance, that his “theory is pitiless, but by following it, people will cease to be pitiful objects of idle compassion.” ibid., 116. Rand continues Chernyshevskii’s thought by arguing that not only is pity unjustifiable, but that it is usually hypocritical, too. In one scene in Atlas Shrugged, a group of the novel’s antagonists meet in an exclusive club, to discuss how private

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property is only justifiable to the extent that it serves a public good. During the conversation, James Taggart complains that “the liquor they serve here is swill. I suppose that’s the price we have to pay for not being crowded by all kinds of rabble.” Atlas Shrugged, 51.  5. Ayn Rand, The Journals of Ayn Rand, 406. Entry dated 10 April, 1946.  6. Atlas Shrugged, 248.  7. Atlas Shrugged, 252. Emphasis in original.  8. Whether this is a positive or negative development depends, of course, on one’s point of view.  9. Atlas Shrugged, 248. 10.  Atlas Shrugged, 249. 11.  Atlas Shrugged, 248. This sentence from Atlas Shrugged speaks to another broad aesthetic similarity between Chernyshevskii and Rand, namely, their common tendency to have characters overtly reflect on abstract philosophical principles as part of the story. 12.  Atlas Shrugged, 289–94. 13.  Atlas Shrugged, 842–43. Rand adds another layer to Cheryl’s suicide by having a “social worker” try to stop her, suggesting that her suicide was entirely understandable and that only somebody whose job description began with the hated adjective “social” could be so blind as to miss this. 14.  Following her discovery that it is Dagny and not James, who really runs the railroad, Cheryl feels cheated by her husband’s lies, and so discovers that her heroworship was misplaced. She later apologizes for her behavior toward Dagny, confessing that “I married Jim because I . . . I thought he was you.” The best James can do is accuse her of ingratitude for his largesse in stooping to marry her, which nicely encapsulates Rand’s view of the outcome of altruism in the context of a love relationship. See Atlas Shrugged, 817–24. 15.  Chto delat’?, 228; What Is to Be Done?, 304. 16.  Chto delat’?, 229; What Is to Be Done?, 305. 17. See What Is to Be Done?, 313, for a good statement where Chernyshevskii urges his readers, like Vera Pavlovna, to leave their “cellar.” 18.  Pozefsky, 83–84. 19.  Nowhere in “Mysliashchii Proletariat,” for instance, does Pisarev appear to question Chernyshevskii’s consistency on this point. 20.  For a broad view of the Russian women’s movement, see Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia. 21.  Nikitenko quoted in Russian historian James P. Scanlan’s biographical introduction to Lavrov’s Historical Letters, 34. 22.  Andrzej Walicki gives a brief synopsis in his A History of Russian Thought, 372. 23.  This analysis summarizes points Solov’ev makes in his essay “The Meaning of Love,” in The Heart of Reality: Essays on Beauty, Love, and Ethics. 24.  The topics of Solov’ev’s remarks included historical coverage of the French Revolution, and an argument that the increasing violence of the Russian Revolutionary movement in the early 1880s was effectively picking up “where the French Revo-



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lution left off, and this is a logical course of events.” See Solov’ev’s remarks from March 13, 1881, in the volume of Solov’ev’s writings, Politics, Law, and Morality: Essays by V.S. Soloviev. 25. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, 89. “Nihilist” women, according to Pozefsky, “traded their hooped skirts and crinolines for black jumpers, wore blue-tinted glasses, smoked cigarettes, cropped their hair, and received men unaccompanied by chaperones.” Peter Pozefsky, “Love, Science, and Politics in the Fiction of Shestidesiatnitsy N. P. Suslova and S. V. Kovalevskaia,” Russian Review 58, no. 3 (July 1999): 361. 26.  Key works include Matich’s Erotic Utopia; Olga Matich and John Bowlt, eds., Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant Garde and Cultural Experiment; Irina Gutkin’s The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic; and Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds. Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism. 27.  Matich, 60. 28.  Matich, 59. 29.  Matich, 162–65. I have seen no direct evidence that Rand was familiar with Gippius’ writings, but given that Rand’s formative years were in direct overlap with Gippius’ championing of 1860s “standard bearers of high moral values,” it is tempting to speculate in this direction. Quoted in Matich,164. 30.  Matich, 164. Notice, incidentally, that Gippius includes “Bazarov” in amongst the “real” people. 31.  See Boele’s introduction to Sanin, 7–8. 32.  Letters of Ayn Rand, 222. Letter dated March 4, 1945. 33.  Boele, introduction to Sanin, 2. 34.  Semen Frank, “The Ethic of Nihilism,” 132–35; Boele, introduction to Sanin, 9. 35.  For Rand’s comment about those “cheap little schools,” see The Journals of Ayn Rand, 609. Entry dated 6 Oct, 1949. For the violent side of sex, see the scenes between Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged and between Howard Roark and Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead. 36.  The Journals of Ayn Rand, 597. Entry dated May 19, 1949. 37.  Rand has an interesting reflection on the idea of arbitrariness, in which she speculates that the reason that chess has been so popular in Russia and the Soviet Union, and why American have not been prominent on the international lists of chess masters, is that chess in Russia serves the players as an escape from the rule of the arbitrary into an alternate world of the rational. In America, Rand suggests, “men are still free to act,” by which she seems to imply that American don’t really need to play chess because their regular lives are governed by nonarbitrary rules that Russian/Soviet citizens lack. Ayn Rand, manuscript draft of “An Open Letter to Boris Spassky,” August 12, 1972. ARA, Butterfield Collection, 1–12. Rand’s pagination. Rand’s reflection tempts one to speculate about a possible connection between her manifest hatred of arbitrariness and non-absolutes, and the long tradition in Russian political culture of holding up arbitrariness (proizvol’nost’) as a benefit of autocracy, where the Tsar can act as a paternal benefactor, free of legalistic rules and laws. While this issue

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is outside the bounds of the present inquiry, Rand’s explanation of chess’ popularity as a reaction to Russian political culture is an interesting one. For influential commentary on arbitrariness, law, and Russian political culture, see Edward L. Keenan, “Muscovite Political Folkways,” Russian Review 45, no. 2 (April 1986): 115–81, and Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 38.  Atlas Shrugged, 461. 39.  See, for example, the discussion of youth in the previous chapter. 40.  In a manuscript draft of an essay entitled “Art and Moral Treason,” for instance, Rand argues that morality is a “normative science,” so that heroic models are necessary to provide objective standards that will define the goal or “ideal to be reached.” ARA Butterfield Collection, “The Objectivist Newsletter,” vol. II, “Art and Moral Treason” draft dated February 6, 1965, p. 22. Rand’s emphasis. 41.  Atlas Shrugged, 460. 42.  For the New Intellectual, 99–101. 43.  Chto delat’?, 96; What Is to Be Done?, 149. 44.  Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans Michael R. Katz (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 61. 45.  Chto delat’?, 96; What Is to Be Done?, 149. 46.  Chto delat’?, 172–73. 47.  Chto delat’?, 183; What Is to Be Done?, 249. 48.  Atlas Shrugged, 461. 49.  See Matich’s chapter on Zinaida Gippius, “Transcending Gender,” in Erotic Utopia, for an extended treatment of the Gippius-Merezhkovskii marriage and its Chernyshevskiian “subtext.” 50.  Rakhmetov, however, is a more ascetic character, as in the previous chapter’s discussion of Morris’s “Ascetic Hero” trope. This problem might be symptomatic of Chernyshevskii’s belief that it is possible to give up everything for a cause and still be an egoist. Alternately, Chernyshevskii could have meant Rakhmetov’s asceticism to be of a temporary nature, which leads to the conclusion that Chernyshevskii’s rejection of sacrifice is not entirely consistent. In this interpretation, Dostoevskii may have been correct: like Ivan Karamazov, rejection of suffering does lead to internal inconsistency. 51.  Other discussions about sex centered around the 1890 publication of Tolstoi’s Kreutzer Sonata. See David Herman, “Art and Adultery in Anna Karenina and Kreutzer Sonata,” Slavic Review 56, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 15–36. 52.  Most of Rand’s fiction seems to include a love triangle of some sort. We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged all contain something like this plot device. 53.  Atlas Shrugged, 196. 54.  Atlas Shrugged, 196. 55.  See chapter on egoism. 56.  Atlas Shrugged, 836. 57.  Atlas Shrugged, 242. 58.  Atlas Shrugged, 241.



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59.  As suggested by the discussion of Sanin above, Rand appears to acknowledge that the joy of the “ego victorious” in sex could be of a legitimately violent character. 60. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, 97. 61.  Atlas Shrugged, 885–93. 62.  Chto delat’?, 266–69; What Is to Be Done?, 344–47. 63.  Chto delat’?, 54; What Is to Be Done?, 99. 64.  Chto delat’?, 54–55; What Is to Be Done?, 99–101. 65.  Historian Bernice Rosenthal reproduced Bely’s phrase as the organizing concept of an edited volume of essays by Solov’ev, Merezhkovskii, Bely, and others. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed. A Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis of Value in Russia, 1890–1918 (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1982). 66.  Atlas Shrugged, 581, 574–82. 67. Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 98–99. 68.  Rand’s comments in manuscript draft essay dated January 8, 1969, “An Answer to Readers, for the newsletter, “The Objectivist.” ARA, Butterfield Collection, “The Objectivist,” vol 1. “An Answer to Readers,” January 8, 1969, 3–5. Pagination and emphases are Rand’s. 69. For commentary on Friedan, see Daniel Horowitz, “Betty Friedan and the Origins of Feminism in Cold War America,” in Linda K. Herber and Jane Sherron de Hart, eds. Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 481–95. 70.  For a discussion of the conflict over “essences” regarding the question of historical writing, see Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 40 and passim. Scott’s discussion illuminates the division over the idea of “essences,” where she critiques the work of Carol Gilligan, whom Scott accuses of arguing that “women think and choose in this way because they are women.” Ibid., 40. 71.  Herber and de Hart, eds, 481. 72.  Amy Swerdlow, “Ladies Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace versus HUAC,” in Herber and de Hart, eds, 517–32. 73.  Chto delat’?, 69; What Is to Be Done?, 117. 74. The Atlasphere, “Our Mission,” accessed 16 April, 2021, http://www.the atlasphere.com/about/. 75.  The Atlasphere; accessed June 24, 2008, http://www.theatlasphere.com/about/. 76. The Atlasphere; accessed June 23, 2008, http://www.theatlasphere.com/ directory/browse-blogs.php, and http://www.theatlasphere.com/directory/browse-sites .php.

Conclusion The Nihilist Self in Context

SUMMING UP THE SCHOLARLY FIELD Russian culture scholar Irina Paperno has summed up Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s work as follows: Behind Chernyshevsky’s creative efforts lies a belief in the unlimited power of human reason to arrange the world, individual lives, and even human nature itself by independent, “rational” principles, a belief characteristic of the age of realism. But behind it also lies a romantic belief in the power of art; it is after all a work of art that was chosen as the main vehicle of “reason.”1

With this basic understanding of what Chernyshevskii was about, this book has addressed a series of questions about egoism, heroism, creativity, youth, suffering, the relationship between man and God, and questions about love, sex, and gender in terms of their importance to Russian intellectual debates. The 1860s saw the birth of “nihilism” in the writings of Chernyshevskii, Pisarev, Turgenev, and Dostoevskii, and these broad themes retained their salience in Russian intellectual culture up to and including Ayn Rand’s formative years in Russia. With Rand’s 1957 publication of Atlas Shrugged, the United States saw the elaboration of that same 1860s Russian nexus of issues and discussion of them. Above, Paperno argues that Chernyshevskii’s ideas were essentially a combination of elements of realism and romantic idealism. Rand identifies herself similarly: “[T]he Romantic school projects the choices which men can and ought to make. I am a Romantic Realist— distinguished from the Romantic tradition in that the values I deal with pertain to this earth and to the basic problems of the era.”2 The foregoing attempted to demonstrate that the Chernyshevskiian and Randian versions of “realism,” 143

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“idealism,” “romanticism,” and so on, are essentially identical. The United States in the mid-twentieth century made have been a new wineskin, but Atlas Shrugged was old wine, nonetheless. A potential downside of the thematic manner in which I have organized this thesis is that it runs the risk of over-determining the argument. What about the differences between Rand and Chernyshevskii? The most important such difference is the obvious disparity in economic philosophy. Chernyshevskii is certainly indebted to Owen and Fourier, and it would be difficult to imagine two economic thinkers further from Rand.3 On the other hand, I have suggested that to emphasize this difference too much is to miss the fact that for Chernyshevskii and Rand, economics is a means to an end on which they are in agreement. Putting the point counterfactually, had Rand lived in the early industrial era, she might well have been inspired by the liberating possibilities of Fourierist phalansteries, and had Chernyshevskii lived through the era of war communism, he might have campaigned for Barry Goldwater. More broadly, I have not claimed that Rand’s writings are the definitive recapitulation of nihilism, so that all other claimants to the heritage of the 1860s ought to cease and desist. Instead, I have suggested that Rand was critically engaged with key issues emerging out of the Russian 1860s, and that there is a good deal of textually plausible justification for her reading of these issues. Whether or not a resurrected Chernyshevskii would have approved of his legacy being used to support a radical and utopian capitalism is somewhat beside the point. Additionally, one can point out that Rand’s own legacy appears to be up for grabs. The Objectivist world is afflicted with what can only be described as infighting worthy of potboiler novels of palace intrigue, most of which turns around who has the authority to define what Rand “really” meant. In short, I have tried to avoid simply replacing one overly simplistic assessment of an intellectual legacy with another. These points taken together suggest that the differences between Rand and Chernyshevskii are less significant than the similarities, and that the process of illustrating this does not have to commit the historian to an overly restrictive reading of the nihilist phenomenon. That said, a number of unanswered questions suggest themselves. First, some of Rand’s papers are inaccessible. While Rand is not famous for crediting her sources, there remains the possibility that sources exist in which she might discuss her intellectual debts in more detail. One line of inquiry that this might illuminate, is Rand’s thinking about Nietzsche, particularly as regards the “superman” or “overman.” While Rand seems to accept Nietzsche’s valorization of the heroic, and reject his concept of the “will to power,” there is room for further inquiry regarding Nietzsche and Rand.4 Historian Bernice Rosenthal has researched connections between Nietzsche and Russian/So-



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viet culture rather exhaustively, and so there is already a very good existing source base for this sort of project. Second, this book no doubt leaves historians of American thought and culture with unanswered questions. While I have utilized evidence from American culture and tried to place Rand in an American context, my core intention has been to establish the basic plausibility of a link between Rand and the Russian “men of the sixties.” This task has both required a look at Rand’s American context, and dictated the amount of American evidence included here. The impact of Rand’s recapitulation of nihilism in twentiethcentury American culture, though, is certainly a historical topic that cries for further inquiry. In an interview on National Public Radio, for example, an executive from the Branch Banking and Trust Company (BB&T) discusses a $1,000,000 donation to Marshall University, for the study of Rand’s ideas, calling Atlas Shrugged “the best defense of capitalism ever written.”5 The influence of Rand’s ideas on American business and education is a topic with plenty of room for further research. Chapter 4 provided as evidence some Rand-inspired detritus of popular culture, such as bumper stickers and comic books. Nihilism in popular culture, and youth culture in particular, strikes me as another fruitful line of inquiry. Anecdotally, a colleague once mentioned that during his graduate student days at the University of Maryland, the Objectivist club was by far the largest student organization on campus. If Rand is, as I have argued, an expositor of issues with a thoroughly Russian heritage, then this might cast her influence on contemporary American culture in a new light. Third, there is an additional question about Russian nihilism. Are there any other unexpected places where that discourse seems to have resurfaced? In 1993, the administrative director of an entity called the “Igra-Teknika Corporation” sent a letter to the Ayn Rand Institute, discussing the sale of Rand’s book, The Morality of Individualism. The letter mentions that the book sold out in a matter of days, without any real advertising campaign aside from a few reviews. According to the letter, which references conversations with retailers, most of the people who bought it were more or less familiar with Rand, and saw the Russian-language publication of her work as a “logical development of the democratic/capitalist changes in the country’s economy and ideology. A lot of them still remember the time when mere possession of an Ayn Rand book meant a one-way ticket to Siberia.”6 Further, an article reviewing the same publication of Rand’s book suggested that while Rand was a “romanticist of capitalism,” elaboration of an economic philosophy “is not her goal, but [a] means of allowing a man to say, I exist, I wish. . . I am my own justification and forgiveness.” The review’s author, a Victoria Maslennikova, also mentions that “not least important is the fact that the American

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individualist was born in St. Petersburg.”7 Unfortunately, Maslennikova does not elaborate on why she considers Rand’s Russian heritage “important,” but her comments and those contained in the letter cited above suggest that the reception of Rand in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia would be a fruitful line of historical inquiry. Rand’s connections with Russian thought, for example, would provide a new avenue of inquiry into the aesthetics of Soviet life. One other interesting possibility for a surfacing of 1860s nihilist discourse involves Japan. Scholar Janet Walker has noted the rise of individualism in Japanese culture in the nineteenth century, particularly as it concerned a fusion of samurai ethics and aristocratic “love of self-satisfying pursuits.”8 A Japanese literary critic named Kitamura Tokoku (1864–1894) apparently regarded Dostoevskii’s Raskolnikov as a personal role model, and novelist and critic Futabatei Shimei’s work (1864–1909) was indebted to mid-nineteenthcentury Russian “realist fiction” in terms of its discussion of disintegrating social boundaries, raising up of women and emphasis on romantic love, and “the gradual erosion of family-centered values and a corresponding growth in individualistic values.”9 The reception of Russian nihilist discourse in midnineteenth-century Japan, is another topic of no little inherent interest. Granted that there are always new and fruitful lines of inquiry to pursue, this book’s argument that Ayn Rand can be viewed as a sort of latter-day nihilist makes at least two immediate and concrete contributions to the study of Russian intellectual history. First, it complicates the view of the shestidesiatniki exemplified by historians such as Venturi and Yarmolinsky, where the “men of the sixties” were radical precursors to the 1917 Revolution. Further, it problematizes later attempts, such as Lenin’s, to “claim” for the Bolsheviks the “heritage” of the 1860s. Soviet bureaucrats could erect obelisks with Chernyshevskii’s name on them. But, others could (and apparently did) read What Is to Be Done? and draw their own conclusions. Objectivists can read the 1860s-inspired Atlas Shrugged and ask, “what would John Galt do?,” with Rand’s answers framed in terms identical to Chernyshevskii’s.10 Second, this book has tried to add to Paperno and Pozefsky’s work on nihilism by arguing that in addition to nihilism’s contemporary importance as an embodiment of a set of cultural symbols, the life aesthetic that nihilism represented had a legacy in and of itself. Nihilism was preoccupied with the fulfillment of individual potential, with the grounding of that fulfillment in ultra-rationalist language, and it argued these points in a manner that greatly impacted youth. This is also an excellent description of Rand’s work. Highlighting key “textual events”11 in a broader nihilist discourse, I have cast Rand as a Russian thinker of the 1860s variety, and so the linkage between nihilism and Ayn Rand provides a new way to view the legacy of the shestidesiatniki. This both adds to historians’ understanding of the 1860s



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generation of Russian radical intellectuals, and goes a long way to explaining the incredulity of Whittaker Chambers, with which I began. Chambers objected to what he felt was Rand’s comic-opera caricature of Good versus Evil, and suggested that Rand’s putative aristocracy of talent would have to end in dictatorship.12 He argued that no “ordinarily sensible head could possibly take [Atlas Shrugged] seriously.”13 But Chambers phrased his critique in the wrong terms: Rand was no “ordinarily sensible head,” but a latter-day Russian nihilist. THE NIHILIST SELF IN THE “BIG PICTURE” While it is important and worthwhile to cast one’s argument in terms of its contribution to specific scholarly lacunae, the foregoing touches on items of the broadest possible significance to life in the postmodern West. Attention now paid to the scholarly trees, I do not wish to lose sight of this much larger forest. Together, Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and Marcel Gauchet form a nexus of scholars who have struggled over the origins and constitutive features of what Taylor called our “secular age.” While differing in analytical perspectives, contemporary diagnoses, and much else, all three argue that an epochal shift has occurred in Western culture, since 1800 or so. Specifically, they argue that humanity’s basic relationship with the Sacred has undergone a seismic change, such that we are now as different from our pre-eighteenthcentury forbearers as our ancestors in the ancient world were from humans prior to the Neolithic Revolution.14 Strong claims, these. As my analysis of nihilism offers a significant measure of supporting historical evidence, it seems appropriate to conclude by briefly recontextualizing that evidence, placing it in dialogue with these three broad-gauge theorists. A foundation stone of the nihilist edifice was the rejection of the transcendent in favor of the immanent. One can see this in nihilism’s elaboration of egoism and the idea of the man-God. Here, the “I,” the egoist self, takes precedence over anything that might transcend that self. Thus, Rand’s argument that the idea of God is an insult to the immanent potential of man.15 With his notion that Christianity was the religion to end religion, Gauchet attributes this shift to the arrival of Christ, the God-man. This arrival moved from a pre-monotheist religious field with no transcendent/immanent distinction at all, to a cultural/political context in which that distinction could not only be made, but could also be critiqued. So when Pisarev and Chernyshevskii upheld the egoist individual as the sine qua non of existence and questioned the validity of social relations conceived as mutual striving toward transcendent

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obligations, they did their part to illustrate and further these broader dynamics Gauchet discusses. Taylor’s notion of the “Immanent Frame” provides a complementary way of contextualizing the nihilist rejection of transcendence. First, consider his definition: So the buffered identity of the disciplined individual moved in a constructed social space, where instrumental rationality is a key value, and time is pervasively secular. All of this makes up what I want to call “the immanent frame.” There remains to add just one background idea: that this frame constitutes a “natural” order, to be contrasted to a ‘supernatural’ one, an ‘immanent’ world, over against a possible “transcendent” one.16

Then, consider my analysis of the nihilist self, where we have a series of buffered selves, disciplined to behave in light of that identity, who have constructed their environments (Atlantis, Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream) in a “deliberate aesthetic organization of behavior.”17 “Instrumental rationality” rules the day, be that the overt utilitarianism of Chernyshevskii’s master’s thesis, or the functional utilitarianism of Rand’s view that only those things which promote such aesthetic organization are worthy of preservation. This felicific calculus proceeds in a quite literally immanent time frame, where the revolution can happen tomorrow, should we so desire it. There being “nothing astonishing”18 about ‘A’ being ‘A,’19 pursuing life thus conceived is not to aim at a transcendent goal but is to simply recognize that this is the way things “are.”20 In short, to look at Taylor’s idea of the “Immanent Frame” is to see nihilist discourse reflected at every turn. As in Taylor and Gauchet, a common nihilist view of transcendence/immanence gets increasingly sophisticated when read through Philip Rieff’s idea of the “Vertical in Authority.”21 Rieff defines culture as the medium in which our ancestors reconciled themselves to the demands of transcendently given or revealed interdicts. For Rieff, Western culture since the mid-nineteenth century is historically unprecedented, in that it is the first time a culture has ever attempted to constitute itself on the principle that we can address our failures to live up to the demands of what we hold sacred, by getting rid of the transcendent altogether. This is what Rieff calls the “Triumph of the Therapeutic,” where we move our gaze from the transcendent view, to the horizontal.22 Rieff’s notion of horizontality is thus functionally equivalent to Taylor’s “immanent frame,” and to Gauchet’s view description of a purely immanent ontology and epistemology. Having excluded the transcendent from our collective horizon of possibility, what room is there for the nihilist to self-create? The nihilists analyzed here clearly did not see this lowering of horizon as limiting, and again, the



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reflections of Rieff, Gauchet, and Taylor usefully contextualize how this could be so. Rieff argued that our secular age incorporates two important themes or motifs: Fiction (as opposed to Fate and Faith, in previous historical eras) and the “Primacy of Possibility.” With the Fiction motif, we, as we have seen, can write our own story; we self-create, in a phrase. The question is, though, how much room have we got for these continual acts of self-creation? Here, Rieff argues, we necessarily commit ourselves to the view that Possibility is endless, with our institutions existing to ensure that that endlessness suffers no constraint. At his most quotable on such themes, Rieff argues that “If one is feeling too definitive, too fixed, the best thing to do would be to take a bath in the river that is not the same river twice.”23 And likewise: “I doubt that Western men can be persuaded again to the Greek opinion that the secret of happiness is to have as few needs as possible.”24 That said, Rieff thinks, the role of the state is to “secure that consoling plenitude of options in which modern satisfaction really consists,”25 which brings us to Marcel Gauchet’s much more positively phrased that this is exactly the raison d’être of the contemporary democratic state. To let Gauchet speak for himself, here in the twilight of the religious view of the world, it probably means the ruin of representational systems claiming to know and control the future. . . . What is important is the practical organization of social activity in all its facets by the imperative of its own production, that is, an imperative to create a new maximizing transformative relation to the given. This organization actually involves opening onto a future whose content is completely underdetermined, and tacitly accepted as such, even if it is more and more deliberately prepared, even if its probable channels and precipitating factors are ever more clearly defined.26

It is not necessary for us to know how Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream will come to fruition. Chernyshevskii’s ellipses are beside the point, as is the technology of John Galt’s power source that harnesses infinite atmospheric static electricity. The point is not the existence/nonexistence of these things; the point is the possibility of these things. Nietzsche’s Overman promises to “make it new,”27 and it is this infinite possibility that is both integral to the secular age in which we find ourselves, and to the nihilist thought in which the spirit of that age finds itself articulated. Finally, is this asking too much? Viewing the nihilist field as dispossessed of both transcendence and telos, what kinds of new persons (as in Chernyshevskii’s subtitle, Tales about the New People) will we have to be, to survive and thrive in such a context?28 Here, Taylor, Gauchet, and Rieff diverge in important ways. And yet, their analyses sketch out at the same time a common

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ground on which nihilism as it has been presented here finds an agreeable home. All three are more or less convinced that “there’s no going back.” For better or for worse, the nihilist self is here to stay. For Rieff, this means that any attempt to rediscover the authority of the sacred will have to do so in ironic self-awareness of its own future acts of re-creation.29 In other words, such a rediscovery will invariably be—at least in the beginning—themselves a species of the aesthetic self-creative acts that have been so integral to the nihilism analyzed here. Where Rieff sees this triumph of the nihilist self as something needing to be surpassed—even though he is less-than-certain that it can be— Gauchet sees our disenchanted world as fundamentally fruitful, even if we are doomed to suffer more individual angst than our distant ancestors, whose more naïve belief at least afforded more clarity as to what we are For.30 For example, in Gauchet, childhood now must be reconceived from its former status as “apprenticeship,” where we learn what is Given, to the figure of the “child-king,” who is “the archetypal incarnator of value and the privileged object of emotional investment.”31 I previously argued that the main characters of Chernyshevskii and Rand “are,” in a sense, children. Gauchet’s view nicely illustrates why such a presentation makes sense, and conversely, this particular nihilist discourse lends some additional evidence to Gauchet’s argument. While a world shorn of its sacral trappings “calls for the State to administer it,”32 this is not to worry that such a state will necessarily become tyrannical. On the contrary, “The State, through its intrusive and meddlesome influence, its meticulous organizing activity, and the proliferation of its resources as a social entrepreneur, guarantees humans the stable legibility of their world formerly delivered by devotion to the God’s sacred plans.”33 If this seems at odds with Rand’s notion of the minimal state, I can only reply that I am not the first person, nor will I be the last, to argue that existence of a truly libertarian society is directly proportional to the parallel existence of a state capable of administering it and guaranteeing its “freedoms.” To argue as I have that the 1860s Russian nihilists and their twentieth-century epigone Ayn Rand were heralds and exemplars of the secularized world that Taylor, Rieff, and Gauchet have persuasively described, is not to argue that such a world will give our future nihilists the world Rand and Chernyshevskii forecast. Rieff argued that now, “The answer to all questions of ‘what for?’ is ‘more.’”34 The specific character of that “more” awaits its future analysts. For now, I think it sufficient to conclude with the suggestion that nihilism, in all its travels, has had some part to play in “setting the scene” for such a telos-free present and future.



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NOTES  1. Paperno, Chernyshevskii and the Age of Realism, 221.   2.  Ayn Rand, Foreword to We the Living (New York: Signet, 1959), vii. Rand’s Foreword dated October 1958. We the Living was originally published in 1936.  3. Commenting on Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid,” to cite another example, Rand merely noted, “Good God Almighty!!!!” Rand’s comment dated May 9, 1934, Ayn Rand, The Journals of Ayn Rand, 70.   4.  One suspects, though, that further research on Nietzsche and Rand will probably provide more evidence for Berdiaev’s argument that the Russian intelligenty were intellectually and morally compromised because their slavish adherence to particular social commitments turned them into bad philosophers.   5.  NPR Morning Edition, May 6, 2008; accessed 16 April, 2021, https://www .npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90104091.   6.  Letter to Ayn Rand Institute from Igra-Teknika America Corporation, August 18, 1992. ARA, 14b-A,W,FE-4.   7.  Victoria Maslennikova, “We and They,” in the Independent Gazette 208, 30 Oct, 1993. ARA 14b-A,W,FE-4. Review accompanied the above-cited letter from the Igra-Teknika America Corporation. Emphasis in original.  8. Janet Walker, The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 4.   9.  Mochizuki Tetsuo, “The Russian Role in the Creation of the First Japanese novel: Futabatei Shimei’s Ukigumo”; Janet Walker, “Kobayashi and Dostoevsky,” in Thomas J. Rimer, ed. A Hidden Fire: Russian and Japanese Cultural Encounters, 1868–1926 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 18 and 30, in particular. See also Walker’s The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of Individualism; and Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, trans. Graham Parkes & Setsuo Aihara (Albany: NY, State University of New York Press, 1990). 10.  As noted in the Introduction, there is no 100 percent definitive and explicit evidence that Rand actually read What Is to Be Done? herself, but the “preponderance of the evidence” contained in the preceding pages makes this speculation fairly safe. James Goodwin has engaged in a similar sort of project, in his article, “Russian Anarchism and the Bolshevization of Bakunin in the Early Soviet Period,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 533–60. 11.  John Toews, “Intellectual History After the Linguistic Turn,” 896. 12.  Chambers, “Big Sister is Watching You,” 596. 13.  Chambers, “Big Sister is Watching You,” 594–95. 14. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 15.  For example, For the New Intellectual, 136–39. 16.  Taylor, 542. 17. Paperno, Creating Life, 1–2. 18. See What is to Done?, 105. 19.  See the table of contents to Atlas Shrugged, for example.

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20.  See generally Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream in What Is to Be Done?, 359–79; scenes from Atlantis in Atlas Shrugged, 652–758. 21.  See especially My Life Among the Deathworks. 22.  See particularly Triumph of the Therapeutic, My Life Among the Deathworks, and Crisis of the Officer Class. I provide a summary description of Rieff’s thought in “Triumph of a Theoretic: The Uses of Philip Rieff.” 23. Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks, 185. 24. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 17. 25. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 26. 26. Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, 179. 27.  See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 9–13, 190. Deleuze casts Nietzsche’s basic concept of “will” as that entity which desires, telos-free, to “affirm its difference.” Free to do this, the Will then engages in an endless and joyous “affirmation of life,” which is itself the purpose of the Will. Some years ago, the great Bishop of Hippo put his own spin on the meaning of such a view: “they say; only let it flourish with abundant treasures, glorious in victory or—which is better—secure in peace, and what do we care? What is of more concern to us is that a man’s wealth should be always increasing for the support of his daily pleasure, and that the stronger may thereby be able to subject weaker men to themselves. Let the poor serve the rich because of their abundance, and let them enjoy under their patronage a senseless idleness; and let the rich abuse the poor as their clients and the appendages of their pride. Let the poor applaud, not those who take counsel for their welfare, but those who are most lavish with pleasures. Let nothing unpleasant be required; let no impurity be forbidden; let kings care not how good their subjects are, but how docile. Let provinces serve their kings not as the rulers of their morals, but as the lords of their property and the procurers of their pleasures; and let them not honor them in sincerity, but fear them in worthlessness and servility. Let the laws take cognizance rather of the harm done by a man to his neighbor’s vineyard than of that which he does to his own life. Let no one be brought to judgment unless he harms another’s property or house or health or is troublesome or offensive to someone against his will. Otherwise, let everyone do as he wishes with what is his, either with his own cronies or with anyone else who is willing. . . . If anyone disapproves of this happiness, let him be a public enemy. If anyone attempts to change or abolish it, let the abandoned multitude deny him a hearing, expel him from the assemblies, and remove him from among the living. Let those who procure this state of things for the people and preserve it when they have it be treated as gods. Let them be worshipped as they desire; let them demand whatever games they wish; let them hold them with, or at the expense of, their worshippers. Only let them ensure that such happiness is not assailed by enemy, pestilence, or any calamity. See Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge, University Press, 1998), 75–76; See also Gauchet, 172–79. 28.  Joshua Kotin’s recent Utopias of One contains some suggestive reflections on this theme, arguing that a number of modern writers, from Thoreau to Akhmatova to Wallace Stevens, construct utopias that are by definition irreplicable and inaccessible



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to outsiders. Joshua Kotin, Utopias of One (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2018). 29.  See Rieff’s Crisis of the Officer Class, chapter 6, “Toward the Fourth Culture,” passim, and especially 166–67. 30.  Gauchet’s honesty about this is on full display in his conclusion to Disenchantment. See especially pp. 206–7. Rieff remarks similarly that “I suspect the children of Israel did not spend much time elaborating a doctrine of the gold calf; they naively danced around it, until Moses, their first intellectual, put a stop to the plain fun and insisted on civilizing them, by submerging their individualities within a communal purpose.” Triumph of the Therapeutic, 10. 31.  Gauchet, 180. 32.  Gauchet, 196. 33.  Gauchet, 196. 34.  Triumph of the Therapeutic, 65.

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Index

Page references for figures are italicized. altruism, 13, 19–20, 38–40, 51n64, 53n96, 122–25, 138n14 atheism, 18, 29n95, 112, 118 Berdaiev, Nicholas. See Vekhi Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 68, 108, 119n96 Bogochelovechestvo, 13, 16, 90, 106–7 capitalism, 15, 20n4, 47, 56, 112, 144–45 Chernyshevskii, Nikolai: and feminism, 27n71, 46; as author of What is to Be Done?, 2, 12–20. See also egoism, suffering, suicide children, 38, 69, 74, 89–98, 105, 112, 115n9, 150 conservatism, 1–2, 20n4, 29n95, 111– 112, 136. See also National Review creativity, 18, 55–56, 60–61, 62, 66–70, 77, 80–83, 83n11, 113, 126, 143 Egoism: and Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 14–15, 32–34, 37–47, 52n80, 52n84, 96, 53n67; and Pisarev, Dmitrii, 3, 6, 13, 33–34, 40–46; Rand, Ayn, 37–47, 52n80, 52n96, 80, 99,

128–34, 147; and Sanin, 36–37, 121, 127–28, 141n59 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 32–36, 48n4 Foucault, Michel, 10–11 Fourier, Charles, 32, 38, 47, 66, 80, 88n107, 119, 125, 144 Frank, Semen. See Vekhi Gauchet, Marcel, 147–50 Gippius, Zinaida, 17, 57, 59, 126, 139nn29–30, 140n49 Godmanhood. See Bogochelovechestvo Goodkind, Terry, 16, 27n77, 68, 112– 14, 120n116 hedonism, 6, 36, 121, 127–28 heroism, 12, 16–20, 32–39, 43, 57, 53n100, 55–59, 70–83, 86n74, 91–92, 96–98, 100–101, 108–112, 117n68, 123–24, 133–35, 138n14, 140n40, 144 Herzen, Aleksandr. 4, 14, 18, 26n56, 48n3, 88n106 HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities), 1, 20, 136 165

166

Index

idealism, 32, 40, 43, 48n4, 59, 68–69, 91, 143–44

Rieff, Philip, 10–11, 26n52, 147–50 romanticism, 59, 78, 144

Landmarks. See Vekhi Lenin, V. I., 4, 22nn17–18, 146 libertarianism, 21n4, 33, 45, 92, 150 life-creation. See zhiznetvorchestvo

sacrifice, 13, 33, 37–38, 46, 63, 99, 102, 106, 130, 140n50 science, 15–16, 21n5, 27n35, 42, 55, 58–59, 68–69, 78–80, 86n59, 87n98, 96, 140n40, 142–144 science fiction, 15–16, 67–68, 108 semiotics, 5, 58 sex, 36, 57, 121–34, 137, 139n35, 140n51, 141n59 Signposts. See Vekhi Silver Age. See Symbolism. sobornost’, 43, 52n80, 92 Socialist Realism, 67–70, 85n48 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 6, 13, 16–17, 25n60, 27n79, 28n80, 43, 55–57, 69, 84n11, 86nn59–60, 90, 106–12, 115n5, 119n110, 121, 125–26, 131nn23–24 Soviet Union, 56 Stirner, Max, 32–37, 48n15, 49nn29–30, 33, 50n59. See also egoism suffering, 7–9, 18, 50n62, 89, 98–102, 106, 114 suicide, 37, 50n62, 63, 90, 104–105, 109–13, 124, 127, 138n13 Symbolism, 43, 55, 57–59, 68, 70

Merezhkovskii, Dmitrii, 17, 53, 58–59, 126, 140n49 National Review: and Buckley, William F., 1–2, 20n4, 111–12; and Chambers, Whittaker, 1, 18, 20n3, 21n5, 21n7, 63, 147 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 33, 43, 50n.41, 57–58, 84n14, 103, 108, 144, 149, 151n4, 152n27 nihilism: and Bazarov, 11–15, 33, 37, 42, 51n72, 51n75, 51n78, 53n101, 58–59, 85, 94–95, 104, 126–29, 139n30; and Dostoevskii, 10–12, 15–16, 33–34, 57–58, 73, 89–90, 97–107, 117n55, 117n65, 118n78, 140n50, 143; Pozefsky on, 5–6, 10–16, 26n59, 30n114, 42, 52n84, 58–59, 89–95, 103, 125; and Shestidesiatniki, 16–18, 31–32, 58, 79, 104–5, 111, 146 objectivism, 26n51, 30n107, 31, 68, 83, 92, 95–97, 109–11, 114, 116nn28–29 original sin, 9, 12, 106 Owen, Robert, 32, 41–42, 47, 60, 66, 88n107, 144 parasitism, 60–62, 66–67, 85n33, 117n58 Plato, 8, 24, 43–44, 51n65 populism, 6, 57, 78, 85 Rand, Ayn: as author of Atlas Shrugged, 1–2, 7–8; and feminism, 134–36; and Kareev, Nicholas, 17–18, 29; and Losski, N. O., 17–18, 28n84, 111; as Rosenbaum, Alissa, 1, 18, 30n103, 127

Taylor, Charles, 26n47, 147–50 theodicy. See suffering theology, 32–34, 96, 107 utilitarianism, 14, 68, 73, 148 utopia, 2, 6, 11, 20, 35–39, 47, 52, 58–59, 68, 92, 106, 109, 126, 129– 32, 137, 144, 152n28 Vekhi, 15, 17, 33, 37, 128 youth. See children zhiznetvorchestvo, 6, 57–59, 64, 67–69, 87n82

About the Author

Aaron Weinacht is professor of history at the University of Montana Western.

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