Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [258]
Almost a third of Rand’s second-year class: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, p. 101. AR, the Nabokov family, and the Stoiunins and Losskys cross paths in many different ways, as I describe later in this chapter.
student there from 1914 until 1918: Until recently, AR’s attendance at Stoiunin was unproved; Sciabarra found incontrovertible evidence of it, and so did my researchers at Blitz research services. Blitz obtained and searched the school archives, which revealed all the facts contained here. A collection of documents from the Stoiunin school exists in St. Petersburg’s Central Historic Archive, fond 148, including class lists and lists of teachers from the 1880s on. (Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “The Ayn Rand Transcript,” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Fall 1999 [vol. 1, no. 1], pp. 1–26.)
studied French and German: Unfortunately, the academic files of AR and other students have not been preserved.
Jewish girls had to attend: the Central Historic Archive of St. Petersburg (fond 148) and the Manuscript Department of the Russian National Library.
“revoltingly dark”: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
Russian Orthodox prayer: The late George Walsh, a former professor of philosophy at Salisbury State University, related this personal anecdote to Dr. Sciabarra. (Author interview with Chris Matthew Sciabarra, November 13, 2003.)
“Any man [who has] a serious central ambition”: Ayn Rand, The Art of Fiction (New York: Plume Books, 2000), p. 61.
“a tremendous sense of intellectual power”: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
The teacher asked the class: “An Illustrated Life.”
to play boring games and read silly books: Later, AR would also decry both Descartes and Pascal (“An Illustrated Life”).
known as “the brain”: TPOAR, p. 32.
a ridiculous thing to say: Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand? (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 160.
“the first most important event”: TPOAR, p. 26.
writing novels at home and in school: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
Russian military losses: St. Petersburg: Russia’s Window, p. 411.
“stood alone against everyone”: NB speculates that AR learned of Joan of Arc through reading Friedrich Schiller’s play The Maid of Orleans (author interview with NB, August 10, 2004). It is the part of Joan in this play that Vesta Dunning is rehearsing when Howard Roark first meets her in an excised section of TF (Ayn Rand, The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection of Her Unpublished Fiction, Leonard Peikoff, ed. [New York: Signet, 2005], p. 441). According to another former friend, the philosophy professor and 1972 Libertarian Party presidential candidate JH, Schiller was AR’s favorite playwright (John Hospers, “Conversations with Ayn Rand,” Liberty, July 1990, p. 25).
didn’t expect to publish anything: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
“You [always] planned to be greater than Columbus”: “Ayn Rand in Russia.”
hated the stocky shape of her developing body: AR, p. 11.
was again desperately lonely: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
TWO: LOOTERS: 1917–1925
“There is a fundamental conviction”: Ayn Rand, “Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,” The Objectivist, January 1969, bound volume, p. 579.
“faithful to the truth”: Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 375.
“On the shore of empty waves”: These are the opening lines of Alexander Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman,” which takes its name from the Etienne Falconet statue of Peter the Great in St. Petersburg’s Senate Square. In the poem, “he” is the czar Peter (1672-1725), and the empty waves represent the desolate spot on which he chose to build St. Petersburg (St. Petersburg, pp. 3-7).
a “city of stone”: WTL, pp. 23839.
“to astonish Russia and the civilized world”: St. Petersburg, p. 9.
“St. Petersburg was … a vast, almost utopian, project”: Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan