Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [25]
Anna was unusually resourceful and seems to have thrived in her new role as the family’s breadwinner. At one point, she wrote to Rand in America, “You and I have our love of work in common.” In a diminishing turnabout, Zinovy was placed in charge of keeping house, waiting in lines for rationed food, and cooking the millet or, in flush times, peas or potatoes that typically made a meal. Some of these were chores that Rand’s husband Frank would also perform.
Rand had left St. Petersburg a girl and had returned a young woman. In August 1921, she was admitted, free of charge, to Petrograd State University as a student in the newly formed Social-Pedagogical Division of the College of Social Sciences. This division combined the old disciplines of history, philology, anthropology, and philosophy under one academic roof. She declared a major in history and a minor in philosophy and began attending classes in October. As a student, as in little else, she benefited from the Bolshevik regime, since Lenin had adopted Kerensky’s policy of offering educational opportunities to Jews and women, while doing away with tuition fees and reducing the full term of study to three years. These changes were meant to help factory workers, but they made it possible for her to get the kind of education, and degree, that her parents could have only dreamed of. By her own lights, she made the most of it, studying as much as she could with the older, classically trained, Western-leaning liberal professors who were slowly being phased out, arrested, and deported. She took ancient, medieval, Western, and Russian history; logic; philosophy of the mind, a forerunner of psychology; French; biology; and historical materialism and the history of socialism, which were required courses. She read Hegel and Marx, Shakespeare, Schiller, and the great proto-Nietzschean novelist Dostoyevsky, whose mystical point of view she said she rejected but whose brilliant integration of plot, theme, and “philosophy of mind” she learned from and found exciting. She later said that Dostoyevsky was the world’s best interpreter of the psychology of evil. He “gives me the feeling of entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide,” she wrote in 1971. She was lucky to be admitted to the university when she was; by 1924, the year she graduated, a decree was issued barring admission to students from families who had owned property before the revolution or who had employed one or more servants at any time during the last three generations.
Determinism, the irreducible feature of a Marxist view of history, was on the rise at the university. Rand found the notion offensive, and not merely because “historical necessity” was the battle cry of the Bolsheviks. She recalled sitting outraged through a lecture in which the instructor offered proof that individuals act without free will. If a young man, he said, standing at the doorway of his home, could turn either left or right to reach a destination in the same amount of time, but knew that he would see a pretty waitress in a restaurant if he turned right, he would turn right. He would have no choice; his action would be determined by his nature. Rand thought, If you have a reason for what you do, you are making a choice. Later, she would define free will as the freedom to think or to avoid thinking in any particular situation.
During her stay in the Crimea and as a university student, she grew closer to