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extraordinary concentration; the novel, which in the West is generally regarded as a means of portraying human behavior, acquires the tone and manner of prophetic passion. … Where ideas cannot be modulated through practice, they keep their original purity.” Howe quotes Nikolai Chernyshevsky as saying, “Literature in Russia constitutes almost the sum-total of our intellectual life” (Irving Howe, “Dostoevsky: The Politics of Salvation,” Politics and the Novel [New York: Columbia University Press, 1957], p. 51).

no copies and few accounts of these exist: AR:SOL, p. 38.

immigrated via Constantinople: Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, pp. 133–40.

Rand never saw any of them again: Author interview with AR’s friend, the author JKT, May 21, 2004. It was in 1962, when JKT was soliciting AR’s advice about whether to interview Vladimir Nabokov for a New York City radio program she hosted, that AR first mentioned her friendship with Olga. Chris Sciabarra unearthed many details of that friendship in 1998 (“The Ayn Rand Transcript,” p. 6).

consciously initiated the Red Terror: A People’s Tragedy, p. 525. Figes also observes that at the beginning of the Red Terror, Jews were strongly identified with the targeted middle class and that “the words ‘burzhooi’ [Russian for “bourgeois”], ‘speculator,’ ‘German’ and ‘Jew’ were virtually synonymous” (p. 523).

Rand was in the store: TPOAR, p. 21.

began to read the novels of Victor Hugo: “I discovered Hugo when I was thirteen, in the stifling, sordid ugliness of Soviet Russia,” she wrote in an introduction to the Lowell Bair translation of Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three (New York: Bantam Books, 1962); her introduction is reprinted in Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet, 1971), p. 160.

only novelist she ever acknowledged: Ayn Rand, lecture on “The Art of Fiction,” January—June 1958, New York, private notes courtesy of John Allen.

Anna would read aloud: Ayn Rand, “Victor Hugo Allows a Peek at Grandeur,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1962, p. 12.

The first one of his novels she read: WIAR, p. 158.

she retained traces of the plotting techniques: For an excellent discussion of Hugo’s influence on AR, see Shoshana Milgram’s “We the Living and Victor Hugo” in EOWTL, pp. 223–56.

“greatest novelist in world literature”: Ayn Rand, introduction to Ninety-Three, The Romantic Manifesto, p. 154.

spent in search of rationed millet, peas, and cooking oil: 100 Voices, NR, p. 14; WTL, p. xv.

forced to walk all the way from Leningrad: JH, “Conversations with Ayn Rand,” p. 32; details provided in a telephone interview with author, December 13, 2004.

she told another friend: TPOAR, p. 30.

robbed by a gang of bandits: EOWTL, p. 61.

Zinovy managed to safeguard his savings: TPOAR, p. 30.

“not of Russia nor the horrors”: EOWTL, p. 243; TPOAR, p. 30.

where a number of Zinovy’s cousins practiced medicine: Issues of the Russian Medical List, 1905–08, 1910, 1916, and The Directory of the St. Petersburg Merchant Administration, 1901, 1906–11, 1915. These cousins included Iosif Wolfovitch Rosenbaum, a pharmacist in Rostov; Feiga Aronovna Rosenbaum, a dentist in Poltava; and Leia Jankelevna Rosenbaum, a dentist in Odessa.

she believed that Olga and her family had left the country in 1917: BB reports on p. 27 of TPOAR that the Nabokovs left Russia in 1917, presumably based on AR’s belief that this was so.

found a small, damp, unheated house in which to live: TPOAR, p. 30.

opened a pharmacy: AR, p. 17.

looted and shut down: Red Victory, p. 477; A People’s Tragedy, p. 717.

Rand remembered the terror of the Red Army: Ayn Rand, “The Lessons of Vietnam,” in Leonard Peikoff, ed., The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (New York: New American Library, 1989), pp. 138–39.

The family lived “on a battlefield”: “Ayn Rand,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, pp. 255–72.

attended a private girls’ school: From the Crimea Department of the State Archive of the Ukraine, Simferopol, fond 72, inventory 1, file 15, pp. 3–7, and fond 72, inventory 1, file 160, pp. 159, 160, 170.

free of the Communist