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By Root 1580 0

to “be against” Aristotle. In one of her first college courses, she would change her mind about Plato, fall in love with Aristotle, and passionately align herself with Aristotle’s empiricism for the remainder of her life. She also studied political economy, which fired her imagination. The class was her introduction to the Declaration of Independence and America’s constitutional guarantee of individual rights, and these deeply impressed her. Henceforth, the United States would replace Britain as the focus of her hopes and plans. She read Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, a romantic fable about a witty, proud French soldier and poet with a disfiguring nose whose love letters on behalf of his rival, Christian, win the heart of his cousin Roxane; when Roxane discovers who wrote them, she pledges her love to Cyrano, but only as he is dying from a wound. On reading about the trials and triumph of the ugly, honorable misfit, “I cried my eyes out,” Rand said. She learned the play by heart, and it became another of her lifelong literary touchstones.

There is a picture of Ayn Rand from this period, posing with her high-school graduating class of about twenty somber-looking girls and almost as many teachers, all artfully arranged on a period Turkish rug outdoors, in the schoolyard. Rand’s hair is bobbed and caught in a barrette, and she wears a white broad-collared shirt and skirt, both fresh and crisp. She must have made a special effort to look neat that day, for her usual disarray often caused her mother to complain that she didn’t care how she looked. In the picture, she peers out intently, almost defiantly, toward the camera, while the other girls just stare. This was in the late spring of 1921, and Rand’s class was smaller by a third than it had been six months before. During the previous November, retreating White Russian military officers had evacuated 150,000 soldiers, civilians, and families—anyone who wanted to leave Russia—while the Red Army massed for its final, conclusive assault on the Crimea. The Whites loaded everybody into French and British ships and sailed them across the Black Sea to Constantinople, whence passengers could travel on to Europe. Some of the ships set sail from the docks at Yevpatoria, but the Rosenbaums were left behind. Anna had pleaded with Zinovy to let the family emigrate, but Rand’s father was as certain as Kerensky had been that Communism couldn’t last. One day, he promised, they would reclaim their business and property in St. Petersburg. By spring, the Bolshevik victory was complete and uncontestable; with a few far-flung exceptions, all of Russia was under Red control.

The Communist victory meant that Yevpatoria and nearby towns were overrun by an army of ragged, hungry, illiterate Red soldiers, many of whom had also served in World War I. As a group, they were looking for booty and eager to exact revenge and spread terror—they were a classic mob. There were mock trials, burnings, and hangings, and Rand later recalled that one classmate’s father was summarily and publicly shot. Zinovy’s old-style rubles were now worthless; the Bolsheviks issued their own inflated rubles, which became the legal tender in the south. By 1924, five billion of these rubles would buy what one had bought in 1914. This was a decisive blow in the campaign of economic devastation against the former middle class.

In this setting, the sixteen-year-old Rand composed what she later called her “first adult novel.” It was inspired by Hugo and set in medieval France, where battling groups of feudal lords fought for and against an evil king in an epic civil war. (According to one researcher, the teenaged Rand admired feudalism because it represented “a pyramid of ability,” with noble, if not necessarily gifted, men and women at the top.) She completed about a third of the novel’s planned chapters, then halted—in fact, stopped writing plays and novels altogether. She was aware, she later told a friend, that she was simply too young to write the way she now wanted to write—presumably, with some of the urbanity and passion