Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia

Abstract
In her novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) and in other writings, the American novelist Ayn Rand put forward a utopian vision of a society with an unregulated free market in which superior humans could reach full self-realization by living for no-one but themselves. In exalting individualism and capitalism, Rand believed she was reminding Americans of the heroic spirit of their nation’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century founders and frontiersmen and that she was countering the moral and economic damage being done to the country by the rampant socialism emanating from Europe in the second quarter of the twentieth century. At the same time, Rand – a Russian-Jewish émigré born in St Petersburg in 1905, who did not set foot in America until 1926 – engages in her writings 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, she 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. Prof. Offord's paper outlines the numerous ways in which Rand’s influential anti-liberal ideology, which continues to have topicality in the twenty-first century West, is shaped by the intellectual and cultural currents of late imperial Russia.

Speaker bio
Derek Offord is Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. He has published books on the Russian revolutionary movement, early Russian liberalism, Russian travel writing, and the broader history of Russian thought, as well as two books on contemporary Russian grammar and usage. His monograph The French Language in Russia: A Social, Political, Cultural, and Literary History, co-authored with Vladislav Rjéoutski and Gesine Argent, was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2018 and republished in Moscow in 2022 in Russian translation. His most recent publication is an article written for a general readership (https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2022/regathering-the-russian-lands/) which examines the national story woven by Putin and his apologists in support of the invasion of Ukraine and the varieties of Russian nationalism propounded over two centuries that inform their justification of the invasion.