Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  Though Lossky had been barred from teaching courses where his anti-materialist, anti-Bolshevik stance would be most obvious, he was not prohibited from teaching survey courses, like the one on ancient worldviews. Rand had probably studied (#3 and #4 above) with Lossky’s closest intellectual colleagues. Her presumed knowledge of the great Lossky from her experiences at the Stoiunin gymnasium made it even more likely that she would have sought him out at the annex on the strength of recommendation and recollection. (As Lossky’s mentor and the department chair, Vvedensky himself was known to recommend his colleague to students in their fulfilment of degree requirements.)

  Any doubt that Rand actually studied ancient philosophy in college has now been erased. Given that this course on the history of worldviews in the ancient period was sufficiently early in Rand’s academic career to qualify as a Spring 1922 class, and that the Spring semester was the only period in which Lossky could have taught the class, I am convinced now more than ever of the accuracy of Rand’s memory.19 That this course appears precisely where Rand said it would appear is further confirmation of the quality of her memory, which always impressed her biographer, Barbara Branden (1986), for its “range and exactitude” (13). Since we can now confirm Rand’s recollections of the Nabokovs and of this specific course, it is no great stretch of the imagination to acknowledge the validity of her recollections of Lossky himself. The circumstances coalesce in time so distinctly that it is difficult to escape the natural conclusion: Rand knew Lossky and studied with him.

  One very interesting clue concerning this case emerges from a perusal of Lossky’s bibliography. Unbeknownst to me at the time of writing Russian Radical, Lossky published in 1924, in Prague, only a year and a half after this university course, an article entitled “Types of Worldviews.” This article was subsequently expanded to an eight-four-page monograph of the same title, published in Paris in 1931. These titles are the only ones bearing the term “Worldviews” in the entire Lossky corpus. It is significant that they were published so close in time to a 1922 course that dealt with the same topic.20 In these articles, Lossky examined metaphysics as the central philosophical discipline, and classified metaphysical systems from the ancients to the moderns according to their materialist, spiritualist, and panpsychic premises. He ended with a critique of dualism, proposing an “organic ideal-realist” alternative as a “many-sided philosophical synthesis.” Lossky’s textual surveys of the history of philosophy often ended with his dialectical pronouncements, a technique that was typical of his lecturing—which is why he got into such trouble with the authorities. Kline reports that, in his courses in New York in the early 1950s, Lossky would present the systems of Plato or Kant or Hegel, and then, quite habitually, would add, “But I affirm that …”—a preface to his own perspective on the issues.

  Ultimately, however, my insistence on the Lossky connection remains symbolic, for he was a paragon of all the dialectical tendencies in Russian thought, of the belief that “‘everything is immanent in everything’” (quoted in Scanlan 1998, 833).21 He presented a system in his lectures and books, developing interconnections among metaphysics, logic, philosophical psychology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy of religion (834). This dialectical orientation was central to the Russian Silver Age, the period of Rand’s youth—from its neo-Idealists to its Nietzschean Symbolist poets to its Marxists. It was expressed by every major Russian thinker, from Vladimir Solovyov, who saw the world in terms of universal interconnections, to Aleksandr Herzen, who saw philosophy as an instrument of action.22 The Rosenbaum transcript makes clear that even if Rand had never met Lossky, she would have benefitted from a profoundly dialectical education. Indeed, this Lossky course was just the tip of the dialectical iceberg.

  8. Biology

  Prior to 1922, biology was taught by Sergei Nikolaevich Vinogradsky, who became an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Vinogradsky left the Soviet Union in 1922, and went to France to direct the division of agricultural microbiology of the Pasteur Institute (GSE, vol. 5, 1974, 482). In the Spring of 1922, when Rand took biology, Lev Semenovich Berg was its most likely teacher. Berg was one of the organizers, in 1918, of the Geography Institute (GSE, vol. 3, 1973, 186). He worked in the area of Russian geography and biology. As the author of Theories of Evolution, he embraced an idealist and teleological approach, which emphasized the evolution of biological and social forms.

  9. History of Greece

  In Russian Radical, I suggested that Rand had enrolled in several literature courses. The transcript shows, however, that Rand did not register for such classes. But literary works were integrated into her history and philosophy studies. This was not unusual, considering the Russian penchant for synthesizing the literary arts with social critique. The State Academic Council had attempted to reduce “parallel” courses in the different departments so as to highlight the “organic” connections among disciplines. In a course on the “History of Greece,” Rand studied such classic Marxist texts as A. I. Tiumenev’s three-volume Essays on the Socioeconomic History of Ancient Greece and his Did Capitalism Exist in Ancient Greece? (both of which I highlight in Russian Radical). The Tiumenev works were typical in their stress upon history as a developing unity of complementary “moments”: culture, politics, aesthetics, literature, art, economics, sociology, and philosophy. Such dialectical integrations were taught even by non-Marxist scholars, like Faddei Frantsevich Zelinsky, whose classes on ancient Greece stressed the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Greek mythology. Zelinsky focused too on the recovery of antiquity in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.23 Other teachers, such as the archaeologist Boris Vladimirovich Farmakovsky, stressed the Hellenistic period of Greek sculpture (GSE, vol. 27, 1981, 104).

  10. History of Rome

  Previously, Michail T. Rostovtsev had taught the history of Rome. He was praised by Anatoly V. Lunacharsky, the head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, for his archeological expertise. Around the time of Rand’s tenure, however, it was O. F. Val’dgauer, a 1903 graduate of the university and an historian of ancient art, who probably taught this course. Val’dgauer studied at the University of Munich (1900–3) with the classical archaeologist A. Furtwängler.24 He was an expert in ancient artifacts and documents who “was among the first to introduce scientific methods of organizing museum exhibitions” (GSE, vol. 4, 1974, 478). Val’dgauer linked his studies of the ancients to crucial issues current in Soviet art studies of the period, including the problems of realism and the portrait. This course used such Marxist texts as V. S. Sergeev’s History of Rome (discussed in Russian Radical).

  11. Russian History

  It seems odd that in her studies of history, Rand did not focus extensively on the experiences of her native land. Yet this course was essential for any history major. Taught until 1925 by Sergei Fyodorovich Platonov, a specialist in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russian history, it used such texts as S. I. Kovalev’s General History Course. A representative of the conservative-monarchist tendency in Russian historiography, Platonov was a renowned professor at St. Petersburg from 1899. He eventually became director of the Pushkin House, the Institute of Russian Literature in the Academy of Sciences, from 1925 to 1929. Platonov may have been the target of Marxist critics who doubted his ability to understand “class contradictions,” but his work was highly respected. He surveyed the Time of Troubles and focused on social conflict in Russian society. As with Rand’s study of ancient history, this course probably included some literary readings. Here, the emphasis would have been on the Golden Age of Russian literature, in which such writers as Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky represented the “dialectical” conflict of ideas through the characters of their stories.

  12. Medieval History

  This was the first of five courses that Rand attended on European medieval history. It is no coincidence that Rand studied the Middle Ages so intensely. The Petrograd history department was an internationally acclaimed center of medieval scholarship
.25 “Medieval History” was probably the last course that Professor Lev Platonovich Karsavin taught prior to his exile at the end of 1922. A student of Ivan Mikhailovich Grevs, and brother of the Russian ballerina Tamara Platonovna Karsavina, he earned his degree at St. Petersburg. He began teaching in 1912 at the St. Petersburg Institute of History and Philology, and was appointed professor of history at the University of St. Petersburg in 1916. He held the chair of the history department until his departure.

  Karsavin was a close intellectual associate of Lossky. Influenced by Solovyov, he sought to create a unified religious worldview. As the Great Soviet Encyclopedia puts it, Karsavin interpreted Solovyov’s concept of “total-unity” “as a dynamic principle of development, of ‘growth of being,’ and consequently as a fundamental category of the historical process: any existing thing does not so much ‘exist’ as ‘become’ and thus appears as one of the manifestations of total-unity. Interpreted in this manner, historicism becomes a universal principle in Karsavin’s metaphysical system, rendering it in certain respects similar to Hegel’s dialectical process” (GSE, vol. 11, 1976, 463). As a specialist in the history of medieval religions and spiritual life, Karsavin stressed, in all his works and lectures, the interlocking coincidence of opposites in historical development. For Karsavin, as Zenkovsky (1953) puts it, “everything is connected in one whole” (vol. 2, 851). Historical science is a structured totality, an organic unity, in which different levels of generality—the person, the family, the nation—relate internally, with each constituting and expressing the other. Studying with Karsavin, Rand may have rejected his spiritualist monism—much as she had rejected the materialist monism of the Marxists. But she would have learned, yet again, the dialectical form of social and philosophical analysis. As a nonreductionist orientation, dialectics cautions against the reification of culture, politics, economics, ethics, ideology, or language as wholes unto themselves. Each aspect is mutually implied in every other aspect, Karsavin declared, and all the aspects taken together are dynamically and systemically related in the constituted whole.

  In “Medieval History,” Rand would have also studied important historical works, including such pre-Marxist classics as P. Vinogradov’s Book of Readings on the History of the Middle Ages and D. N. Egorov’s The Middle Ages Through Their Monuments.

  13. History of Socialism

  Among the standard Marxist social science courses that were recommended for study was this survey of the history of socialism (David-Fox 1997, 61). Part intellectual history, part social history, the course covered the gamut from ancient Platonic expressions of collectivism through the utopians, Marxists, and revisionists. Among the teachers of this course was Aleksandr Evgen’evich Presniakov, a 1907 graduate of the university who, despite his socialist politics, did not agree entirely with Marxist ideology. Presniakov began as a privatdocent at St. Petersburg, and was appointed professor in 1918. A member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1920, Presniakov taught also at the Institute of Red Professors. The Bolsheviks had “attempted to convert the existing higher education structure into a network of academic institutions training specialists for the demands of a socialist society” (Konecny 1994, 1). The Institute was a graduate-level Bolshevik training center for higher learning that sought to boost Marxist university scholarship in the social science programs, achieving a veritable “Revolution of the mind” (David-Fox 1997, 133, 23).

  There was a marked change in the content of Presniakov’s scholarship over time. His prerevolutionary works expressed a “positivist” sociology that centered on such topics as the history of political relations and state formation in pre-sixteenth-century Russia, the sources of sixteenth-century Russian chronicles, and the history of nineteenth-century social thought (GSE vol. 20, 1977, 524). But after the 1917 Revolution, Presniakov moved toward mastering Marxist dialectical methods, as reflected both in his writings and lectures. He focused primarily on socioeconomic questions and the history of revolutionary movements—the important and inseparable link between theory and practice, an omnipresent theme throughout Russian intellectual history.

  14. Special Course: Social Movements in Fourteenth-Century France

  This was the first of several “special courses” that Rand attended. A special course, in which a half-dozen students participated, was similar in style to a seminar. Seminars, however, were usually open only to senior undergraduates majoring in history. During this period, more and more seminar-like courses, stressing “activity methods of teaching,” were introduced into the university’s social science curriculum. “Social Movements in Fourteenth-Century France” was probably taught by the famous liberal historian Nikolai Ivanovich Kareev, who, as an Idealist, was somewhat critical of Marxism. Like Lossky, Kareev stressed the “personalist” credo that “‘the individual is the supreme principle in the philosophy of history’” (quoted in Zenkovsky, vol. 1, 375). Stressing the role of ideas, he was, like the mature Rand, extremely critical of the monistic approach of Marxists, who advocated “economic materialism” as the sole causal agent in social evolution. Moreover, he was adamantly opposed to censorship. In 1899, he had actually been expelled, along with the historian Grevs, by the Ministry of Education, following his demonstration against Tsarist police intervention at the university (Konecny 1994, 31). Kareev was an outstanding Russian sociologist and an expert in historiography. With Grevs, he lamented the postrevolution-ary impediments to genuine democratization in higher education, and worked tirelessly to augment one-on-one personalized study between students and professors.26

  Kareev counted among his influences Nicholas G. Chernyshevsky (who had made a huge impact on Lenin), N. A. Dobroliubov, D. I. Pisarev, and the Populists P. L. Lavrov and N. K. Mikhailovsky. But he was also affected by Marx’s Capital—making him a rather eclectic intellectual. Though Kareev’s work on the French peasantry exhibited certain “positivist” assumptions, Marx himself praised it as “first-rate.” Kareev’s The Peasants and the Peasant Question in the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century (1879) was among his many published books. Others included Studies in the History of the French Peasants from Earliest Times to 1789 (1881); a three-volume dissertation, Basic Questions of the Philosophy of History (1883–90); a seven-volume History of Western Europe in Modern Times (1892–1917); and a three-volume study of Historians of the French Revolution, praised by the Soviets as “the first composite survey—not only in Russian but anywhere in the historical literature—of the historiography of the Great French Revolution” (GSE, vol. 11, 1976, 441).

  In a course such as this, Kareev would have stressed the interlocking political, economic, military, and religious dynamics of the period, during which France warred with England and was internally divided by peasant restlessness and the spread of the “money economy.” Kareev brought to his students the high quality of his scholarship.

  15. Special Course: History of the Crusades

  In this special course, Rand probably studied with the renowned historian Ol’ga Antonovna Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaia. “Dr. Dobiash,” as she was known, was widely acknowledged for her work in medieval history and paleography. Of greater significance, perhaps, was her status as “the first woman in Russia to receive a master’s degree (1915) and doctorate (1918) in general history.” Her work, in scholarly descriptions and the printed catalogs of early Latin manuscripts, was central to her position, from 1922 to 1939, in the manuscript section of the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library (GSE, vol. 8, 1975, 329). Dr. Dobiash was originally a teacher at the Bestuzhevskii Women’s Courses, a higher or postsecondary school for women that by the turn of the century was granted university accreditation for most of its offered classes.27 But as a Leningrad University professor, a member of the Academy of Sciences, and a model for women educators, Dr. Dobiash was first and foremost a cultural historian. Her lectures on the Crusades focused on the importance of culture and its interconnections with religion, politics, and economics. Almedingen (1941) describes her as “thorough.
” In fact, Dr. Dobiash was known for grilling her students, especially those in “formal seminar studies” (209).

  16. Modern History

  This was the first in a series of courses that Rand took on “modern history.” It was probably taught by Evgenii V. Tarle, whose work in Marxist historiography was fast becoming even more important than the work of Kareev. A frequent lecturer at the Petrograd House of Scholars, he was decidedly “non-Marxist,” however (Konecny 1994, 140). Tarle was a student of I. V. Luchitsky. He wrote many works, including those on Royer-Collard, G. Canning, C. Parnell, L. Gambetta, Lord Rosebery, an analysis of More’s Utopia (his master’s thesis), and a two-volume doctoral dissertation on The Working Class in France During the Revolutionary Epoch. In fact, he qualified as “the first historian of the Russian school to focus on the history of the working class” (GSE, vol. 25, 1978, 385). Tarle’s prolific writing drew from his archival work in Paris, London, and The Hague. After defending his doctoral thesis in 1911, he went on to write such books as The Continental Blockade (1913) and The Economic Life of the Kingdom of Italy During the Reign of Napoleon I (1916). His later work centered on European imperialism, Napoleon, Talleyrand, the history of diplomacy, the French bourgeoisie, and the Crimean War. These works contributed to his receipt, in the 1940s, of three State Prizes. He also authored textbooks on higher education.

  In terms of his historiography, Tarle moved closer to the Marxists, as he interpreted modern history from “a historical viewpoint” (GSE, vol. 25, 1978, 386). This process-oriented approach was reflected both in his books and lectures.28

  17. Modern History of the West

  It seems likely that Rand studied with Kareev, who probably taught course #14 as well. Indeed, Kareev’s work in Western history was unparalleled. The class probably used Kareev’s own seven-volume work on The History of Western Europe in Modern Times, which, despite its “eclecticism,” was praised by the Soviets, who cited “its wealth of factual material” in which “socioeconomic processes are accorded an important place” (GSE, vol. 11, 1976, 441). He presented a general review of historical conflict from a Marxist perspective, as well as topical studies on the Reformation, the development of culture, and the English Revolution.