Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia: The Origins of an Icon of the American Right

by Derek Offord, Stephen M. Norris (Editor), Polly Jones (Editor)

Overview

This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand, especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an unregulated free market in which superior humans could fully realize themselves by living for no-one but themselves. It explores Rand's conception of American identity, which exalted individualism and capitalism, and her solution for saving the modern American nation, which she believed was losing the spirit of its 18th- and 19th-century founders and frontiersmen, having been degraded morally and economically by the rampant socialism of the mid-20th-century world.

Derek Offord crucially goes on to analyse how Rand's writings functioned as a vehicle in which she, a Russian-Jewish writer born in St Petersburg in 1905, engaged with ideas that had long animated the Russian intelligentsia. Her conception of human nature and of a utopian community capable of satisfying its needs; her reversal of conventional valuations of self-sacrifice and selfishness; her division of humans into an extraordinary minority and the ordinary mass; her comparison of competing civilizations – in all these areas, Offord argues that Rand drew on Russian debates and transposed them to a different context. Even the type of novel she writes, the novel of ideas, is informed by the polemical methods and habits of the Russian intelligentsia. The book concludes that her search for a brave new world continues to have topicality in the 21st century, with its populist critiques of liberal democracies and acrimonious debates about countries' moral, social, and economic priorities and their identities, inequalities, and social tensions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350283947
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/02/2022
Series:	Russian Shorts
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.05(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Derek Offord is Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at University of Bristol, UK. His publications include Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing (2006), Nineteenth-Century Russia: Opposition to Autocracy (1999), and (with W. Leatherbarrow) A Documentary History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (1987).

Stephen M. Norris is Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Russian History and Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University (OH), USA. He is the author and editor of seven books, including A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945 (2008) and Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, Patriotism (2012).

Polly Jones is Professor of Russian at University College, Oxford, UK. She has published extensively on Soviet literature and memory politics, including two monographs Myth, Memory, Trauma (2013) and Revolution Rekindled (2019), several edited volumes, including The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization (2006) and numerous articles. She is embarking on a new collaborative project about the concept of the '101st kilometre' in Soviet penal policy and practice.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Ayn Rand and her Russian Background
2. Rand and the Russian Intellectual Tradition
3. Rand and Russian Literary Models
4. Ethical, Metaphysical, and Epistemological Questions
5. Politics and Economics
6. Geopolitics
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Derek Offord's lively, authoritative and controversial book underscores Ayn Rand's Russian intellectual roots and - more importantly - the habits of mind that she applied later in writing her famous American novels. Offord highlights aspects of American (and not only American!) radical libertarian politics that have been little recognized up to now but deserve remembering.” —Gary Hamburg, Otho M. Behr Professor of the History of Ideas, Claremont McKenna College, USA

“The high priestess of American capitalism was actually a Russian Nihilist gone rogue. That is the unlikely message of Derek Offord's challenging and engrossing study, which shows how Ayn Rand turned upside down the utopian dreams and literary traditions of Russian radicals and wrote a series of 'capitalist realist' novels. Although living more than fifty years in American emigration, she remained, Offord argues, 'a typical representative of the Russian intelligentsia'.” —Geoffrey Swain, Emeritus Professor (School of Social & Political Sciences), University of Glasgow, UK

From the Publisher