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her silent and usually inexpressive father, who was almost always at home while her mother worked. It was only after she and he began to be allies in opposition to the Bolsheviks, she later said, that she felt real love for him, a love that meant something beyond family affection and abstract respect. She and he shared a disgusted contempt for Communist ideology, which was perhaps best summarized by the slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and their contempt grew deeper and more acrid as “need” was increasingly revealed to be a euphemism for the demands of those in power—those exerting “pull,” as Rand would memorably write in Atlas Shrugged. Somewhat unreasonably, both father and daughter considered Anna much too eager to defend and appease her Communist employers, just as she had once been pleased to emulate the city’s intellectual elite. In fact, Zinovy severely disapproved of his wife’s working for the Communists at all, and Rand’s sister Nora once remarked that Anna was a little “pink.” Young Rand and her father proudly endorsed individualism and free will.

Most important, the father was openly supportive of his daughter’s brilliant analytical intelligence, drive, and vocation as a writer. He must often have encouraged her as he did in the late 1920s, when he wrote to her in America: “You must see clearly that you are not like everybody else and be proud of it. Eschew all doubts and continue firmly and with assurance to walk toward your goal.” She clearly returned his love and admiration. “She spoke about him with more respect than I can recall her ever speaking about anybody,” said a friend who knew Rand in the 1950s.

There was one area of conflict between the girl and her father: He opposed her chosen course of study at the university. Without asking her to give up writing, he wanted her to apply her math training and love of the scientific method to a more remunerative occupation, such as engineering. This would have been an unusual profession for an early-twentieth-century Jewish father to urge on any daughter other than Rand, who was to make it Kira’s frustrated calling in We the Living. Having grown up in the Russian Pale, he was more aware than Anna or the children of the crucial role that work and money played in protecting against the onslaughts of anti-Semitism. As Rand and her sisters grew older, he urged them to choose occupations that would always allow them to earn a living. All three chose to be artists. Natasha studied piano at Petrograd Conservatory, the nation’s most distinguished school of music, along with fellow students Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich and former student Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Anna approved of Natasha’s choice, unlike Rand’s, because music was a properly ladylike career. Nora, the youngest, studied to be an artist, though she later became a teacher like her mother and, finally, a graphic designer. Rand argued with her father that, as a future writer, she had to study history in order “to have a factual knowledge of man’s past” and understand philosophy in order “to achieve an objective definition of my values.” She promised him that she would one day make a living as a writer, and, as always when hard work and force of will were the deciding factors, she was right.

In her first two years at the university, a number of events took place that solidified her “sense of life” and influenced her for years to come. The first was taking a course called Ancient World Views, probably the last class taught by the distinguished professor N. O. Lossky before he was deported. The course surveyed the pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato, and Aristotle. This may sound innocuous, but not for Rand; by now, ideas of every kind and vintage earned her passionate assent or disapproval. In Lossky’s class she was dazzled by Aristotle, particularly his logical starting point of the axiomatic existence of objective reality and his belief in human reason as the only means to understand the world; for him, as for Rand, man was a rational animal. She