Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [11]
In the summer of 1914, when Ayn Rand was nine and still reading The Mysterious Valley, a series of momentous events occurred, for her, for Russia, and for the European continent. As she and her family set out on their very first trip “abroad”—a word that soon would stir an echo of longing in middle-class Russians trapped by the revolution—the Austro-Hungarian emperor-in-waiting, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was about to ride into an assassin’s sights. His politically motivated murder would propel Europe into World War I. His killer was a Serbian nationalist who, maddened by the Austrian empire’s annexation of parts of the Slavic Balkans, ambushed and shot the archduke in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Russia was closely allied with its fellow ethnic Slavs in Serbia, and by the end of July 1914, Germany, Austria’s ally, had declared war on Serbia and Russia. Russia reciprocated. France and England entered the conflict on Russia’s side, and Turkey, Russia’s ancient enemy, eventually joined with Austria and Germany. Europe quickly became impassable, and, before the year was out, would be the scene of slaughter such as the world had never seen.
Of course, the Rosenbaums knew none of this in late May or early June, when they set off. With their governess in tow, they embarked on the kind of six-week idyll that every St. Petersburg family who could afford it took: the European tour. They traveled first to what was then the intellectual capital of Europe, Vienna. There, as it happened, they might have glimpsed some of the giants of the age who were in residence that summer: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arnold Schonberg—and also Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the architects of the coming revolution. Even Archduke Ferdinand was on hand, conducting official business before he headed off to Sarajevo. From Austria the Rosenbaums moved on to Switzerland and Paris. In a resort in the Swiss Alps, Rand found a rare playmate, an intelligent boy whose family was staying in the same hotel. Setting aside her aversion to exercise, she climbed hills with the boy, picked wild berries, and generally discovered a freedom in the outdoors that forty years later she would commemorate in her descriptions of the happy childhood of Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged. As with everything Rand responded to passionately as a child, she remembered this boy; he later contributed to the character of Dagny’s childhood playmate, the copper scion Francisco d’Anconia. In Paris, Rand and her mother and sisters probably shopped for the season’s fashions, including clothes for Rand’s approaching first school term. Later, she would remember this summer abroad before the war as being what she had always thought existence would be like. This was where real people, intelligent people, lived. The trip confirmed her childish hatred of Russia.
While still on the Continent, the Rosenbaums learned that Russia was at war. They made a dash for London, where, since land travel had now become impossible, they and thousands of other stranded European travelers waited for ships to take them home.
In the few days Rand spent in the city on the Thames, the small, dark Jewish child glimpsed other willowy, fair-haired girls like Daisy, and one day, the story goes, strolling in the West End with her governess, she saw a poster for a theatrical production featuring a chorus of blond girls in plucky English pageboy haircuts. By her account, she went back to her hotel and began to write adventure stories about the girls—her first endeavor at writing. That evening, pencil to paper, she decided to become a writer. Although this memory may be apocryphal, in the service of the adult Rand’s legend, it has the ring of truth. The girls, pictured as bold, modern, beautiful, and vaguely Aryan, were the female counterparts of Cyrus, and his proper consorts. At the time, of course, wanting to be a writer wasn’t unusual for a girl of nine—especially a girl from St. Petersburg, where poets, novelists, and polemicists