Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [15]
*After coming to the United States, Rand referred to herself as Alice, the English equivalent of her name Alissa.
TWO
LOOTERS
1917–1925
There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter. … And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth.
—“Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,” 1969
Howard Roark, the flame-haired architect-hero of The Fountainhead, has often been compared to the famously willful American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Both were professional rebels; both were “faithful to the truth, though all the world should stand against” them, to quote Wright. But Roark’s original prototype may well be Peter the Great, the early-eighteenth-century Russian czar who, harnessing his own unbending will and limitless power, built the improbable city of Ayn Rand’s birth.
Some of the best-known lines in Russian poetry, memorized by Russian schoolchildren for the last 150 years, were written by Aleksandr Pushkin and describe Peter at the moment of his decision to raise St. Petersburg on a collection of frigid, barren islands on the Baltic seacoast near Finland: “On the shore of empty waves he stood, filled with great thoughts, and stared out.” Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the opening lines of The Fountainhead read, “Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked on the edge of a cliff. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water.”
In Rand’s first novel, We the Living, she describes St. Petersburg as a “city of stone,” which it is. Like her rock-jawed hero Roark’s sculpted glass and granite buildings, the city Rand grew up in was “not acquainted with nature,” she wrote in the early 1930s. “It is the work of man” and, moreover, “the work of man who knows what he wants.” The adult Rand admired, even lionized, men who knew what they wanted, though few she ever met would understand their objectives as well as she understood hers. And all her life she loved cities that were “not acquainted with nature,” especially New York, her home for her final thirty years.
The willful Peter paved the way for Catherine, his granddaughter by marriage, to embrace and celebrate everything European. What Peter wanted was “a window to the West”: a new capital city that would turn its back on the Mongol and Slavic traditions of central Russia and look toward Europe and its technical achievements. In building St. Petersburg as close as possible to Europe, his aim was “to astonish Russia and the civilized world” and to rival Paris, Amsterdam, and Venice. This he did: In the course of just twenty-five years, beginning in 1703, he created an astonishing eighteenth-century port city entirely of imported granite, marble, slate, and travertine. For Peter, as one historian has observed, “St. Petersburg was … a vast, almost utopian, project of cultural engineering to reconstruct the Russian as a European man.” To this end, he commissioned peasant workers from all over the empire; tens of thousands of them died of starvation, disease, and exposure to the cold. Even today, residents of St. Petersburg speak of their city as having risen on the bones of the dead. As Ayn Rand would demonstrate, though less violently, the utopian strain in the Russian imagination was harsh and rarely found expression without inflicting damage.
Peter’s project failed to Westernize Russia. Although generations of inhabitants of St. Petersburg, including Rand, learned to value Western attitudes and culture, Ukrainians, Turkmen, Mongols, and Russian yeomen and peasants remained uneducated and stubbornly provincial. An intractable tendency lay embedded deep in Russia’s heart: to hold fast to its semi-Asiatic, feudal, Byzantine Christian, anti-Western past. For the most part, Peter’s city remained an island of Western values in a sea of illiteracy, abject poverty, and daunting superstition. This was the Russia that Ayn Rand hated and that the Bolshevik Revolution