Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [27]
Rand described herself in these years as solemn, even grim, and always engaged in serious discussion. She was aware that people often didn’t want to talk to her and that she was sometimes forcing conversations on her family and schoolmates. Where she had once seen laziness, indifference, or shallow-mindedness, however, she now saw envy: she grew convinced that she was actively resented, and not for her faults but for her best qualities, her virtues, as her rebellious heroes Howard Roark and John Galt would also be.
She had no known friends, but she did spend time with two maternal cousins, Vera and Nina Guzarchik, who lived above the Rosenbaum apartment. It was Vera who, while reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, remarked that Rand reminded her of Zarathustra, the German philosopher’s prophetic outlaw hero, or at least that Nietzsche had “beat me to all my ideas,” Rand recalled. The book describes the hero’s journey down a mountainside, after the death of God, to teach what he has learned to the people below. From now on, he tells the jeering masses, human beings will determine their own values and their own destinies, free of superstitious reliance on gods, conventional morality, and faith. Furthermore, people must learn to make way for the exceptional individual, the Superman of whom Zarathustra is the first example; through a “will to power” and a talent for “self-overcoming,” the Superman will establish a new morality of man.
Nietzsche’s work was popular among intellectuals in Russia at the time, especially his descriptions of master and slave psychology and of the absolute right of the superior individual to place himself in opposition to the common herd. The seventeen-year-old Rand immediately seized upon his ideas, including his call to discard old values and create new ones, his condemnation of altruism as a slave morality, and his argument for the inviolate rights of the gifted person, whose only obligation is to refine and use his gifts as he sees fit. One point, in particular, had an immediate influence on her thinking, she recalled. Until reading Nietzsche, she had assumed that in order to defend man against religion, she would have to defend all men, no matter how weak or strong; Zarathustra demonstrated “that it doesn’t have to be collective. In other words, that the species can be vindicated by one man.” She responded to his heightened language, his brilliance, his bold critique of Christianity, and his principled admiration of Jewish thought. From this point on, her major characters would be more or less overtly Nietzschean—and, because of their Superman aura, would often be wrongly seen as fascistic by her critics. It wasn’t until she was writing The Fountainhead that she was able to begin to loosen Nietzsche’s seductive hold on her imagination.
Vera’s younger sister Nina Guzarchik was the leader of a group of intellectual young people who called themselves “Uno Momento” and sometimes gathered for parties in the Guzarchik apartment. At one of these Rand met a handsome, brooding boy with whom she fell in love, the third great event of these years. His name was Lev Bekkerman, and not only did he resemble a fictional character (Cyrus), he would also become one (Leo Kovalensky, Kira’s dissolute lover in We the Living). An engineering student at St. Petersburg Technical Institute, he was four years older than she was, and, unlike the fictional character Leo, he was Jewish. “The first time I saw him, I remember being very startled by how good-looking he was,” she recalled when she was fifty-five. “It was