Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [260]
Rand’s tendency to argue: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
International Women’s Day march: Details of events from February 23 to March 3, 1917, are based on A People’s Tragedy, pp. 307–45; Red Victory, pp. 38–39; Passage Through Armageddon, pp. 320–45.
one hundred thousand hungry, war-weary workers: A People’s Tragedy, p. 308.
recklessly shouting, “Down with the czar!”: Red Victory, p. 33.
stood on their apartment balcony: TPOAR, p. 18; and AR, p. 14, based on material in the Ayn Rand Papers. (In AR:SOL, p. 38, Paxton writes, “She saw red flags rise up on the streets. Armed Cossacks appeared and one man descended from a horse. He walked into the crowd, raised his sword, and brought it down.”)
ceded his right of succession: Nabokov wrote Mikhail’s abdication letter with the help of another lawyer, Baron Boris Nolde (A People’s Tragedy, p. 345; Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, p. 129).
Russia cheered the fall of the czar: A People’s Tragedy, p. 346. Alexander Blok, the man who AR would later tell friends was her favorite poet, wrote to his mother, “A miracle has happened!” (A Peoples Tragedy, p. 351).
a period of unparalleled excitement: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
“synchronized with history”: Stephen Cox, Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Ayn Rand,” Gale Literary Databases, volume 279, “American Philosophers, 1950–2000,” Philip B. Dematteis and Leemon B. McHenry, eds. (California State University, Northridge: Gale Group, 2003), pp. 255–72.
“flare up and fume”: Red Victory, p. 43.
stockpiling cash: AR, p. 16.
one of the happiest summers of Rand’s childhood: AR, p. 14.
was reading Ivanhoe: Chronology, Michael S. Berliner, The Letters of Ayn Rand(NewYork: Dutton, 1995), p. xix.
“need, not achievement, is the source of rights”: “Check Your Premises: Is Atlas Shrugging?” The Objectivist Newsletter, August 1964 (vol. 3, no. 8), p. 29.
confer equal rights on Jews: Jews in Soviet Russia, p. 5.
granted basic freedoms: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, p. 126.
began to ration bread: A People’s Tragedy, p. 358.
running on a promise to end the war: A People’s Tragedy, pp. 457–58.
sure his troops could defeat the radicals: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, p. 132, citing V. D. Nabokov.
Then, to worldwide dismay: A People’s Tragedy, pp. 483–94.
spent the rest of his life: In 1918, Kerensky fled to Paris and then, in 1940, to the United States. For many years he divided his time between Paris, New York City, and northern California, where he was a fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Though AR lionized him in 1917, she later viewed his performance as prime minister as having been weak and unprincipled (Ayn Rand, “Cashing In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’” in For the New Intellectual [New York: Signet, 1963], p. 25). He would be Russia’s last prime minister for seventy-four years, until the election of Boris Yeltsin in 1991.
Rand kept a diary: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
God was obviously an invention: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
she burned it: In “Ayn Rand’s Life;” AR is quoted as saying that she kept her diary for a year, then burned it. JB quotes AR as recalling that she kept the diary through mid-1921 and burned it as she and her family were returning from the Crimea to St. Petersburg (AR, p. 18).
People have a right to live for themselves: “Ayn Rand’s Life.”
“Whoever tells you to exist for the state is, or wants to be, the state”: The Phil Donahue Show, broadcast from Madison Square Garden, May 1979.
she began making notes for We the Living: She began making notes in 1929 (EOWWTL, p. 3).
As scholars have noted: A People’s Tragedy, p. 129.
referred to her own novels as anti-Communist propaganda: Letter to Gerald Loeb, August 4, 1944 (LOAR, p. 157).
viewed national politics as a morality play: In Politics and the Novel, Irving Howe writes, “In 19th-century Russia, the usual categories of discourse tend to break down. Politics, religion, literature, philosophy—these do not fall into neat departments of the mind. Pressed together by the Tsarist censorship, ideas acquire an