Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [12]
From the moment she began to regard herself as a future writer, Rand’s life had a purpose. Writing became an idée fixe that would see her through the next tumultuous years in Russia and feed a growing and finally passionate determination to escape and emigrate to America—like Britain, a free society that historically tolerated Jews.
The Rosenbaums sailed on a packed ship through the North Sea, but their fate would have been kinder had no ship been found to take them home. After 1914, the war created unimagined hardships for all Russians, but especially Russian Jews, and its toll in lives and penury led directly to the revolution. Among her family members on both sides, with a very few exceptions, only Rand would ever again leave Russia. By the time she did, she and those closest to her would be battered and starving. “The war marked the end of the world,” she told a friend much later.
By early August the family was safely home. But their home was in an altered city renamed Petrograd. The czar, mistakenly believing that St. Petersburg was a Germanic name, had ordered the official change to an eastward-looking Slavic variation, ending two centuries of proud, and productive, openness to the developing West.
That fall, as the imperial regime was hastily mobilizing its huge but badly prepared army to go to war against the modern, well-trained Germans, Rand entered school. Natasha and Nora stayed at home with the governess, while Rand began a classical course of study at a famous private girls’ gymnasium, or primary school, called Stoiunin. The choice of Stoiunin has all the earmarks of Rand’s mother’s preferences. It was fashionable with the city’s elite families, and its curriculum promised to encourage both intellectual and athletic development in girls. Off and on, for the next three and a half years, Rand profited from it and hated it.
The school was progressive and well run. Founded in 1889 by Madame M. N. Stoiunina, a renowned educational thinker and a friend of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s wife, and by her husband, V. J. Stoiunin, a noted teacher of Russian and a member of the scholars committee of the Ministry of Public Education, it was conceived as an exemplary school for the Stoiunins’ daughters and the daughters of their literary friends. Its purpose was to balance academic, artistic, and hygienic development. The tuition was steep, but money wasn’t enough to secure entry. Applicants had to pass rigorous entrance exams, and so the small student body was alert, well connected, and affluent—typically, better connected and more affluent than Rand’s family. The school had an extraordinary faculty, including, during Rand’s years there, the well-known literary critic V. V. Gippius, who had earlier been the headmaster of the Tenishev boys’ school, where Vladimir Nabokov was a student, and the famous philosophy professor N. O. Lossky, with whom Rand would later take a memorable class at the University of Petrograd. They tended to be prominent liberals who favored a democratic middle way between the czar and the burgeoning revolutionaries. The school was liberal, too, in its admission policies: Thanks to the Stoiunins’ government contacts, it sidestepped official quotas on Jewish students. Almost a third of Rand’s second-year class of thirty-nine girls was Jewish at a time when most Russian secondary schools were legally constrained to limit Jews to no more than 2 to 5 percent of students. By a decree of the academy’s governing council, each year two or three bright girls from very poor families were admitted and allowed to study at the expense of the trustees, though Rand wasn’t among them.
Stoiunin was renowned for an equally high level of teaching in the humanitarian disciplines and in the natural and mathematical sciences, which Rand was good at and liked. She remained a student there from 1914 until 1918, and she received a general education such as few American middle school students