Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [257]
she must have been frighteningly intelligent: Author interview with Robert Bidinotto, Vancouver, July 9, 2004.
little interest to anyone: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
family “shrugged impatiently”: WTL, p. 47.
the same was true of her classmates: TPOAR, p. 17.
sure that such social awkwardness: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
thought Nora was like her: TPOAR, p. 31.
“shadow and yes-man”: 100 Voices, NR, p. 13.
It presented Catherine: This is the account AR gave fifty years later. AR had an unusually good memory, so her version may have been the way the story was written for the children of the time, but if so, it was historically inaccurate. In reality, Catherine was a German princess who came to St. Petersburg to marry Peter III, the grandson of Peter the Great. After his death, she ruled Russia for thirty-four years, bringing Western ideas and methods to a still largely Asiatic empire. In the 1790s, she also created the infamous Pale of Settlement through usurpation and partitioning of lands that had belonged to Poland.
“something between a misfit and an ugly duckling”: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
meant for an exceptional fate: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
according to Bill Bucko’s translation: The Mysterious Valley has been translated from French and re-published in the United States in book form as The Mysterious Valley, Bill Bucko, trans., introduction by Harry Binswanger (Lafayette, Co.: The Atlantean Press, 1994).
“my present kind of hero”: Introduction to The Mysterious Valley, p. xiii.
All things British: Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 76.
never forgot this girl, whose name was Daisy: This was Daisy Gerhardie, sister of British novelist William Gerhardie. Interestingly, when speaking about Daisy and another equally tall, slender, blue-eyed girl she had glimpsed the year before, she called them “symbols. I admired them from afar as though with a movie-star infatuation.” What’s interesting here is that her infatuation was theatrical; since she couldn’t hope to emulate or become these long-legged girls, she could only fantasize about them. She went on to say, “Those were the first value steps in my development;” in both cases, they were steps away from being Russian and Jewish (“Ayn Rand’s Life”).
“ideal country”: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
describe reason: Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, 1964), p. 28.
He was her “exclusive love”: The Mysterious Valley, p. xiii.
something that none of them could see or share: The Mysterious Valley, p. xiii.
her feeling for Cyrus was of “unbearable intensity”: The Mysterious Valley, p. xiii.
conducting official business before he headed off to Sarajevo: Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989).
moved on to Switzerland and Paris: TPOAR, p. 14.
Rand found a rare playmate: TPOAR, p. 14.
what she had always thought existence would be like: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
she decided to become a writer: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
sailed on a packed ship: AR, p. 9.
“The war marked the end of the world”: TPOAR, p. 14.
mistakenly believing that St. Petersburg was a Germanic name: Arthur L. and Elena George, St. Petersburg: Russia’s Window to the Future (Oxford, UK: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2003), p. 409.
began a classical course of study: AR is listed as one of thirty-nine second-year students at Stoiunin in the Central Historic Archive of St. Petersburg. Individual students’ records were not preserved, but a list of students, their teachers, and the courses they taught were. (Fond 148, file 420, inventory 1, pp. 1–2.)
Founded in 1889: Dostoevsky File, fond 100, Manuscript Department of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), St. Petersburg.
The school had an extraordinary faculty: Chris Matthew Sciabarra, The Russian Radical (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 41–42.
sidestepped official quotas on Jewish students: Jews were limited to at most 10 percent