Subject
VN & Ayn Rand (fwd)
Date
Body
---------- Text of forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1993 16:29:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: Donald Barton Johnson <chtodel@humanitas>
To: Donald Barton Johnson <chtodel@humanitas>
Subject: VN & Ayn Rand
The Odd Couple: Vladimir Nabokov & Ayn Rand
D. Barton Johnson
[CAVEAT LECTOR: The following remarks stem from a conversation between
the author and Charles Schlacks, the publisher of numerous scholarly
journals in the Slavic field and an Ayn Rand buff. I thought it might
be of interest to Nabokv-L and Amlit subscribers. Do NOT quote any of
the contents in print. Firstly, because I intend to develop them for
publication elsewhere; secondly, because most of this is off the top
of my (and Charles') head, and has NOT been checked for accuracy. Nor
are sources given. Your comments are invited and, if later
incorporated, will be credited. -- DBJ]
------------------------------------------------
Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand (nee Alisa Rozenbaum), both born in
imperial Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1905 and 1899 respectively,
became bestselling American writers in the 1950's. Occupying polar
positions on the literary spectrum, they indeed make strange bedfel-
lows.
Most of Ayn Rand's admirers and detractors are, I suspect, little
aware of the impact of her Russian background and its role in her
intellectual and literary development. Rand, who briefly went to
school with one of Nabokov's sisters, grew up in a very different
cultural milieu from that of the Nabokov family. If the aristocratic
young Nabokov breathed in the recherche atmosphere of the Symbolists,
Alisa Rozenbaum was of the petite bourgeoisie. Such bestselling
writers as Anastasiya Verbitskaya (who far outsold Tolstoy) or Mikhail
Atsybashev (_Sanin_) supplied the reading matter of the pseudo- (and
not so pseudo-)intelligentsia, a far less elitist group than their
Western counterparts. Their ideological potboilers featured socially
and sexually emancipated heroines and heroes spouting half-baked
Nietzscheanism. With strong characters, sensationally overwrought
plots, crude didacticism, and clumsy prose their novels, at least in
part, find their Russian origin in Nikolai Chernyshevsky's famous
1863 novel _What is to be Done?_ (_Chto delat'?_). The literary line
of descent from Chernyshevsky's mess of pottage to Gorky's 1905
_Mother_, and with a segue through the Verbitskaya and Artsybashev
school, to Ayn Rand's epics of the forties and fifties is clear
enough.
Rand left Bolshevik Russia shortly after graduating from Petrograd
University. Arriving in the U.S. two years later in 1926, she got var-
ious jobs in the film industry by sheer drive and persistence, despite
her with minimal English. (Coincidentally, the young emigre Nabokov
was to find occasional employment in the German film industry.) She
also began writing in English. For a time, she had been in the studio
script department, and her first successful effort was a mystery play
called _The Night of January 16th_. The 1935 play which ends in a
trial with the jury played by members of the audience has left its
trace in literary history due to a single improbable fact. A strug-
gling young attorney named Richard Nixon played the role of the D.A.
in a Whittier local, little theater production.
Ayn Rand was never expansive about her Russian (or Jewish)
origins. Russia does not, so far as I recall, figure in any of her
blockbusters. It is directly present only in one of her early works.
Rand's first, and least known novel, _We the Living_ (1936) depicts
young Russian individualists being destroyed by the Bolshevik regime.
Although the novel did not do well in the U.S., it was made into a
war-time film extravaganza in Italy before being withdrawn when it was
realized that its theme might be taken as anti-Fascist, as well as
anti-Soviet. Two years later, her short novel _Anthem_ appeared in
England. This tale of a lone dissenter in a monolithic future
totalitarian state has marked, if unacknowledged, similarities to
Evgeny Zamyatin's brilliant novel _We_. Zamyatin's manuscript, writ-
ten in Petrograd in 1921, circulated among students at Petrograd
University where Rand was studying. (It was published only in the
West some years later, and it is known that Nabokov read it not long
before begining his own dystopia, _Invitation to a Beheading_.) In
the forties, Rand turned away from her Russian background and began
writing the novels that made her name--_The Fountainhead_ (1943), and
_Atlas Shrugged_, a bestseller the year before Nabokov's _Lolita_ hit
the list in 1958.
Nabokov and Rand shared more than just the happenstance of time
and place of birth. They both attended Russian secondary schools in
which Chernyshevsky was a figure in the pantheon of the anti-
establishment intelligentsia. Doubtless, neither found much to fancy
in Chernyshevsky's socialism. Yet in a sense, both writers-to-be
responded to the Chernyshevsky tradition in ways that fundamentally
shaped their future work. Rand took her utilitarian view of literature
(and literary style) from Chernyshevsky--although substituting a very
different ideological content. Chernyshevsky became the progenitor of
both Socialist Realism and Rand's Capitalist Realism--although in both
cases the "realism" was anything but "real".
Nabokov much more explicitly took Chernyshevsky as the starting
point of his evaluation of the Russian literary tradition and his own
place in it. In his novel _The Gift_, Nabokov incorporates a biography
of the martyred Chernyshevsky which intimates that he was "the bad
seed" in XIXth and XXth century Russian cultural (and political) his-
tory. It was, according to Nabokov, Chernyshevsky's example that dis-
placed the aesthetically-based Pushkin tradition and supplanted it
with the utilitarian anti-aesthetic tradition that enshrined Gorky's
_Mother_ and ended in Socialist Realism. Nabokov, reacting against
the Chernyshevsky tradition, saw his own work as an attempt to reas-
sert and advance the aesthetically based view. Chernyshevsky was thus
a touchstone for both Nabokov and Rand.
Nabokov's and Rand's Russian background led to a very strange
situation in American literature in the late 1950s. Rand's _Atlas
Shrugged_ (1957) and Nabokov's _Lolita_(1958). were both highly con-
troversial, albeit for very different reasons. One was a stylistic
masterpiece that was widely condemned for its affair between 12-year-
old Lolita and Humbert Humbert; the other--the clumsy mega-epic of
tycoon Dagny Taggart and John Galt, the neo-Nietzschean superman who
proclaims "I will never live for the sake of another man or ask any
other man to live for me." Both Humbert and Galt became cult figures.
Lo was everywhere, as was the graffito "Who is John Galt?" Actually,
Humbert Humbert and John Galt are not totally incongrous figures. Both
are moral solipsists, although Rand presents her hero as a positive
force, while Nabokov's Humbert is a villain. In most respects,
however, the two novels are antithetical in both style and substance.
What very few American readers were aware of was that the two
authors were Russians, born in the same city only six years apart.
More importantly, Rand and Nabokov were, respectively, continuing
and/or reacting against aspects of their native Russian literary
traditions: Rand--the realist utilitarian la Chernyshevsky, and
Nabokov--the modernist aesthetic inherited from the Symbolists, who
arose in revolt against the Chernyshevskian tradition.
We know what Ayn Rand thought of Nabokov and _Lolita_. In a 1964
interview in _Playboy_, she was asked for her evaluation of the cur-
rent literary scene. Her favorite was Mickey Spillane. When asked
about Nabokov, she replied: "I have read only one book of his and a
half -- the half was _Lolita_, which I couldn't finish. He is a bril-
liant stylist, he writes beautifully, but his subjects, his sense of
life, his view of man, are so evil that no amount of artistic skill
can justify them." (One wonders which book she finished.) We can onlyimagine
what Nabokov might have said about _Atlas Shrugged_.
----------------------------------------------------
POSTSCRIPT: Nabokov has now been published in Russia and his world
stature is generally recognized (if often not condoned) there. Ayn
Rand, so far as I can discover, has not been published in Russia. I
would suggest that her time there has now come. She writes from the
dominant Russian cultural tradition--the social utilitarian. Her
novels, unlike Nabokov's, are comprehensible to a mass audience. Most
of all, Russia is in backlash from the collectivist ideal. Who could
be a better spokesperson for individualism and a market economy?
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1993 16:29:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: Donald Barton Johnson <chtodel@humanitas>
To: Donald Barton Johnson <chtodel@humanitas>
Subject: VN & Ayn Rand
The Odd Couple: Vladimir Nabokov & Ayn Rand
D. Barton Johnson
[CAVEAT LECTOR: The following remarks stem from a conversation between
the author and Charles Schlacks, the publisher of numerous scholarly
journals in the Slavic field and an Ayn Rand buff. I thought it might
be of interest to Nabokv-L and Amlit subscribers. Do NOT quote any of
the contents in print. Firstly, because I intend to develop them for
publication elsewhere; secondly, because most of this is off the top
of my (and Charles') head, and has NOT been checked for accuracy. Nor
are sources given. Your comments are invited and, if later
incorporated, will be credited. -- DBJ]
------------------------------------------------
Vladimir Nabokov and Ayn Rand (nee Alisa Rozenbaum), both born in
imperial Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1905 and 1899 respectively,
became bestselling American writers in the 1950's. Occupying polar
positions on the literary spectrum, they indeed make strange bedfel-
lows.
Most of Ayn Rand's admirers and detractors are, I suspect, little
aware of the impact of her Russian background and its role in her
intellectual and literary development. Rand, who briefly went to
school with one of Nabokov's sisters, grew up in a very different
cultural milieu from that of the Nabokov family. If the aristocratic
young Nabokov breathed in the recherche atmosphere of the Symbolists,
Alisa Rozenbaum was of the petite bourgeoisie. Such bestselling
writers as Anastasiya Verbitskaya (who far outsold Tolstoy) or Mikhail
Atsybashev (_Sanin_) supplied the reading matter of the pseudo- (and
not so pseudo-)intelligentsia, a far less elitist group than their
Western counterparts. Their ideological potboilers featured socially
and sexually emancipated heroines and heroes spouting half-baked
Nietzscheanism. With strong characters, sensationally overwrought
plots, crude didacticism, and clumsy prose their novels, at least in
part, find their Russian origin in Nikolai Chernyshevsky's famous
1863 novel _What is to be Done?_ (_Chto delat'?_). The literary line
of descent from Chernyshevsky's mess of pottage to Gorky's 1905
_Mother_, and with a segue through the Verbitskaya and Artsybashev
school, to Ayn Rand's epics of the forties and fifties is clear
enough.
Rand left Bolshevik Russia shortly after graduating from Petrograd
University. Arriving in the U.S. two years later in 1926, she got var-
ious jobs in the film industry by sheer drive and persistence, despite
her with minimal English. (Coincidentally, the young emigre Nabokov
was to find occasional employment in the German film industry.) She
also began writing in English. For a time, she had been in the studio
script department, and her first successful effort was a mystery play
called _The Night of January 16th_. The 1935 play which ends in a
trial with the jury played by members of the audience has left its
trace in literary history due to a single improbable fact. A strug-
gling young attorney named Richard Nixon played the role of the D.A.
in a Whittier local, little theater production.
Ayn Rand was never expansive about her Russian (or Jewish)
origins. Russia does not, so far as I recall, figure in any of her
blockbusters. It is directly present only in one of her early works.
Rand's first, and least known novel, _We the Living_ (1936) depicts
young Russian individualists being destroyed by the Bolshevik regime.
Although the novel did not do well in the U.S., it was made into a
war-time film extravaganza in Italy before being withdrawn when it was
realized that its theme might be taken as anti-Fascist, as well as
anti-Soviet. Two years later, her short novel _Anthem_ appeared in
England. This tale of a lone dissenter in a monolithic future
totalitarian state has marked, if unacknowledged, similarities to
Evgeny Zamyatin's brilliant novel _We_. Zamyatin's manuscript, writ-
ten in Petrograd in 1921, circulated among students at Petrograd
University where Rand was studying. (It was published only in the
West some years later, and it is known that Nabokov read it not long
before begining his own dystopia, _Invitation to a Beheading_.) In
the forties, Rand turned away from her Russian background and began
writing the novels that made her name--_The Fountainhead_ (1943), and
_Atlas Shrugged_, a bestseller the year before Nabokov's _Lolita_ hit
the list in 1958.
Nabokov and Rand shared more than just the happenstance of time
and place of birth. They both attended Russian secondary schools in
which Chernyshevsky was a figure in the pantheon of the anti-
establishment intelligentsia. Doubtless, neither found much to fancy
in Chernyshevsky's socialism. Yet in a sense, both writers-to-be
responded to the Chernyshevsky tradition in ways that fundamentally
shaped their future work. Rand took her utilitarian view of literature
(and literary style) from Chernyshevsky--although substituting a very
different ideological content. Chernyshevsky became the progenitor of
both Socialist Realism and Rand's Capitalist Realism--although in both
cases the "realism" was anything but "real".
Nabokov much more explicitly took Chernyshevsky as the starting
point of his evaluation of the Russian literary tradition and his own
place in it. In his novel _The Gift_, Nabokov incorporates a biography
of the martyred Chernyshevsky which intimates that he was "the bad
seed" in XIXth and XXth century Russian cultural (and political) his-
tory. It was, according to Nabokov, Chernyshevsky's example that dis-
placed the aesthetically-based Pushkin tradition and supplanted it
with the utilitarian anti-aesthetic tradition that enshrined Gorky's
_Mother_ and ended in Socialist Realism. Nabokov, reacting against
the Chernyshevsky tradition, saw his own work as an attempt to reas-
sert and advance the aesthetically based view. Chernyshevsky was thus
a touchstone for both Nabokov and Rand.
Nabokov's and Rand's Russian background led to a very strange
situation in American literature in the late 1950s. Rand's _Atlas
Shrugged_ (1957) and Nabokov's _Lolita_(1958). were both highly con-
troversial, albeit for very different reasons. One was a stylistic
masterpiece that was widely condemned for its affair between 12-year-
old Lolita and Humbert Humbert; the other--the clumsy mega-epic of
tycoon Dagny Taggart and John Galt, the neo-Nietzschean superman who
proclaims "I will never live for the sake of another man or ask any
other man to live for me." Both Humbert and Galt became cult figures.
Lo was everywhere, as was the graffito "Who is John Galt?" Actually,
Humbert Humbert and John Galt are not totally incongrous figures. Both
are moral solipsists, although Rand presents her hero as a positive
force, while Nabokov's Humbert is a villain. In most respects,
however, the two novels are antithetical in both style and substance.
What very few American readers were aware of was that the two
authors were Russians, born in the same city only six years apart.
More importantly, Rand and Nabokov were, respectively, continuing
and/or reacting against aspects of their native Russian literary
traditions: Rand--the realist utilitarian la Chernyshevsky, and
Nabokov--the modernist aesthetic inherited from the Symbolists, who
arose in revolt against the Chernyshevskian tradition.
We know what Ayn Rand thought of Nabokov and _Lolita_. In a 1964
interview in _Playboy_, she was asked for her evaluation of the cur-
rent literary scene. Her favorite was Mickey Spillane. When asked
about Nabokov, she replied: "I have read only one book of his and a
half -- the half was _Lolita_, which I couldn't finish. He is a bril-
liant stylist, he writes beautifully, but his subjects, his sense of
life, his view of man, are so evil that no amount of artistic skill
can justify them." (One wonders which book she finished.) We can onlyimagine
what Nabokov might have said about _Atlas Shrugged_.
----------------------------------------------------
POSTSCRIPT: Nabokov has now been published in Russia and his world
stature is generally recognized (if often not condoned) there. Ayn
Rand, so far as I can discover, has not been published in Russia. I
would suggest that her time there has now come. She writes from the
dominant Russian cultural tradition--the social utilitarian. Her
novels, unlike Nabokov's, are comprehensible to a mass audience. Most
of all, Russia is in backlash from the collectivist ideal. Who could
be a better spokesperson for individualism and a market economy?