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By Root 1595 0

she called such thinking “pre-philosophy.” The job of the adolescent, she explained, is to integrate the likes and dislikes of childhood into a coherent if subconscious “sense of life,” which she defined as an implicit appraisal of the nature of the world. Is the world understandable or incoherent? Do people have the power of choice, or are they servants of destiny? Can a person achieve his goals, or is he helpless against the designs of an all-powerful God or a malevolent universe? Depending on how the child answers, he will become a self-assured creator or a passive social parasite. That Rand answered her questions with such an insistent affirmative, and devoted so many years to proving that lack of credence in the power and efficacy of individual will equals moral cowardice, provides a clue as to just how great she felt were the obstacles to having “what I want” as a child. Russian tradition and her family provided some of the resistance. The politics of the Russian Revolution produced the rest.

Now in her third year at the Stoiunin school, she got one thing she wanted very much: her first close friend, a slightly older girl named Olga Nabokov. Olga, also a student at the school, was one of five children of a wealthy and distinguished family that was known throughout Russia and Europe even before Olga’s older brother, Vladimir, began to publish poems and novels, including, in English, Lolita. Olga’s mother was a cultured heiress. Her grandfather had been the minister of justice under Czar Alexander III, and though a gentile, was asked to resign partly because of his outspoken advocacy of political rights for Jews. Olga’s father, V. D. Nabokov, was a jurist and a statesman, a member of the Russian army’s General Staff, and a founder of the Constitutional Democratic Party, which favored a parliamentary form of government and emancipation of the Jews. In 1917, he had a bird’s-eye view of the unfolding revolutionary drama from his ranking seat on the Duma, St. Petersburg’s on-again, off-again national legislative assembly whose power the czar periodically stripped away and then restored. In February 1917, the Duma was in session.

Olga had been a member of Rand’s class since 1915, but the girls seem to have become well acquainted only in their third tumultuous year. Olga lived with her family in a massive Florentine-style pink-granite mansion on Morskaya Street, not far from the czar’s Winter Palace and about a mile from the Rosenbaums’ store and apartment. To Rand and her mother and sisters, the Nabokovs’ glittering life, seen up close, must have been a revelation. In their mansion and at their estate at nearby Vyra, Olga and her siblings were looked after by footmen, coachmen, chauffeurs, a concierge, cooks, maids, butlers, governesses, and tutors. Many of Russia’s most admired poets and statesmen came and went as family friends. According to Helene Nabokov Sikorski, Olga’s younger sister, Rand paid many visits to the family home in 1917. Rand appears to have been thinking of the Nabokovs when, in We the Living, she gave Kira Argounova, her semiautobiographical heroine, a prerevolutionary home that was a “vast” … “stately granite mansion” … where, at night, “a maid in black fastened the clasps of [Kira’s mother’s] diamond necklaces” in preparation for parties “in sparkling ballrooms.” The fictional Argounovas’ former summer estate, set amid acres of well-tended gardens, near a fashionable resort, recalls the Nabokovs as well.

The unusual friendship between Rand and Olga must have pleased, if somewhat mystified, Anna, whose frustration with her daughter’s gracelessness didn’t diminish as Rand entered her teen years. And the friendship was a boon to Rand. In Olga’s company, the solitary girl probably felt as she did in Switzerland and Paris: This was where real people lived and where existence was exciting. She and Olga “conversed endlessly” about political ideas and events, Helene Sikorski remembered, with Olga bringing political bulletins from the family dinner table and Rand exercising, even then, her gift for ironclad