Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the 223rd episode of the Atlas Society asks. My name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. You know, my friends call me Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. We're the leading nonprofit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand, often in fun, creative, artistic ways, like our graphic novels, our animated book trailers, even music videos. Today, we are joined by Alexandra Popoff. Before I even begin to introduce our remarkable guest, I want to remind those of you who are joining us on YouTube, LinkedIn X, Facebook, Instagram. You can use the comment section to get to your questions, and we will try to get answers to as many of them as we can. So many of you enjoyed my previous interviews with Ayn Rand biographers Ann Heller and Jennifer Burns. So naturally, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to interview the author of the latest edition to this genre with Alexander Popoff's Ayn Rand. Writing a gospel of success, Popoff began her career as a journalist working in Moscow, later emigrated to Canada, where she lectured in russian literature and history, and went on to publish award winning literary biographers Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century 2019, Sophia Tolstoy, 2010, the wives of the women behind Russia's literary giants 2012, and Tolstoy's false disciple, the untold story of Leon Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Chekhov in 2014. So, Alexandra, I've been so looking forward to this. Thanks for joining us.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Hello, Jack, and hello, everybody. Good to be here.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Fabulous. So I heard you remark on another interview that you, if you had the chance to ask Ayn Rand a question, you'd ask her about her family, in particular her grandfather, who was a lawyer. So since I do have the question to ask you about your family, tell us a bit about where you grew up and any early influences.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: This is a very good question because I believe that early influences determine many things that later happen in your life.
I grew up in Moscow in family of a writer.
My father was a novelist.
He wrote novels about the Second World War, in which he participated.
He volunteered for the war in 2019.
Sorry. He volunteered for the war in 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked the soviet Union. And he was 17 at the time.
And he wrote novels that later were translated and published in 36 countries and were translated into English as well. His novel Forever 19 was translated by Antonina Boas into English. And so this was an important, my father was an important influence in my life. And this explains why later on in 2019, I published a biography of Vasily Grossman, a soviet jewish writer and journalist who wrote about the Second World War, the Holocaust, Ukraine's famine, and Stalin's purges. And these were the experiences, actually, that affected my parents generation. And they have experienced both the war and my mother experienced Holodomor.
So in Ukraine, she grew up in Ukraine.
She grew up in, she was born in Kharkiv and later lived in Kiev. And both my mother and grandmother have experienced witness Khalid Amor.
So I grew up with these stories. And so later, this explains why I began to research and write a biography of Vasily Grossman.
I was like, I graduated from the literary institute in Moscow, and then because I was interested in literature, and I joined the literary Gazette in 1982. This was a newspaper for intelligence, and it was actually a very popular newspaper. Its circulation was in millions.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: So, you know, working in the Soviet Union growing up, I mean, I can hardly imagine your mother and your grandmother's experience in Ukraine. But what was life like for you? You left Moscow, I think, in 1991, after the end of the soviet regime. What was it like growing up there and pursuing a career behind the Iron Curtain?
[00:06:10] Speaker B: Well, I actually, in 1991, I was on fellowship in America, and fellowship was in the Philadelphia Inquiry newspaper. So in August 1991, we were standing in the newsroom in the Philadelphia Inquirer and watching the events of the anti Gorbachev hard lion coup which took place in August.
It weakened.
It was a failed coup, of course. And on the one hand, it inspired the democratic movement, and it also weakened Gorbachev. So when I returned to Moscow in December 1991, this is when the Soviet Union disintegrated, and I practically returned to a different country. It was already not the USSR. It was the Russian Federation. I returned to Moscow.
Now to the question how I was growing up. I can remember how we lived in those days. And it was just like in Orwell's 1984, double think, double speak. We, of course, were all thirsting for truth, but we knew that you could not utter it in official settings, like in school and so on. So I remember my father would walk me to school and would prepare me for a political information report that I had to make in school. And he would give me two accounts.
Now, one account of events, world events, would be what I was supposed to say in school, and the other account would be what was really happening at this time in our country and in the world. And the way he would know the actual events, the factual did not appear in our newspapers. And he listened to the Voice of America.
Through jamming, he would be able to hear what was actually happening in our country. And.
And in the world and in newspapers, there was a joke, not an anecdote, that there was no truth in Pravda newspaper and no news in isveste translates as latest news.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Wow. All right.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: I.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: Yes, it's, you know, I think for those of us who've also read we the living, I think that that sheds light that, you know, plus a change, plus est le mem shows things didn't change all that much.
So when speaking of we the living, when did you first read Ayn Rand? Was it early on, or was it later as part of the research for this biography?
[00:09:41] Speaker B: So, in 2019, after a successful launch of my Vasily Grossman biography, it was produced by Yale University Press.
Yale up jewish lives approached me and suggested to write a biography of Ayn Rand.
And at that time, I knew really very little about Rand. I did not read her works.
And I think they approached me also because, like Rand, I came. Yeah, I came from the same part of the world, and I was an immigrant to North America. So maybe. And also because I previously wrote for Yale University Press. So I began my research by reading a brilliant biographies by Jennifer Burns and Heller. And then I read all of Rand's works, her fiction, her nonfiction and letters and published journals. And in early 2020, I was very concerned with that, whether the Ayn Rand Institute would give me access to the archives, because my previous books were written, I worked in russian archives, and I couldn't imagine not contributing anything new.
So in early 2020, via and Rand archives gave me access to research Rand's papers remotely. It was during the pandemic when I could not travel to California. So it was very beneficial because I was able to. To read in original all of the letters written by Rand's family and her cousins and extended family.
So there are hundreds of pages, and I did not have to rely on any translation. And I was reading letters, mostly written by her mother, also by her father. And I was able to find some new information, and that is what I was able to contribute because the Jewish Life series, these are concise, interpretive biographies exploring jewish experience. So I was able to see how Rand was growing up, precisely how traditional was her family, and find new information.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: So I'm curious about where there restrictions to your access conditions. Jennifer Burns wrote about her access to the archives. She had to say this quote of, after several years working in Rand's personal papers, I can confirm that the published versions of Rand's letters and diaries have been significantly edited in ways that drastically reduce their utility as historical sources. Did you.
Was that your experiences did you ever have cause to compare the published versions with the archives? And if so, did you find any discrepancies?
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Yes, I read Jennifer Burns's blog and on her website early on, and so I knew about that, and I did compare the letters, but I quoted the letters from the published version after comparing not all letters. Like, if changes were insignificant, just in style. It didn't matter to me because I realized that all quotations have to be later submitted to the Ayn Randy Institute. And they could pass it. They could not pass it, but there was nothing substantial in these published letters. And, you know, it's not the family letters that I really cared about. It's later in life. It's Ren's correspondence beginning in, I think, in early 1930s. So I did compare that, and I used quotations that I thought were accurately represented what she was thinking about and what she.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, just for those of you who are just joining us, the focus of this particular biography, Ayn Rand writing the gospel of success, is a bit different. You know, Jennifer Burns was part of her focus, was looking at these different writers in the context of their intellectual movements of the day.
And Alexandra's book is focused much more on her early experience and how that may have influenced her. So let's talk about the Russia and specifically the St. Petersburg into which Ayn Rand was born. What were some of the restrictions, for example, on jewish residents?
[00:15:50] Speaker B: Ren was born in 1905, when Jews were supposed to live in the pale of settlement, and exceptions were made only for the wealthiest jews and those whose professions were in demand. So, as we know, her grandfather was Berkokaplan, was a skillful tailor.
He was making manufacturing military uniforms.
And these were in demands in the capital, where there were many parades and military reviews.
So, by the way, my great grandfather was a merchant, a wealthy merchant who came. He was not in the pale of settlement. He came from Lithuania, and he was allowed to open his business in St. Petersburg.
So just the wealthiest people and the most successful doctors, dentists, say lawyers, were allowed to settle in St. Petersburg at that time, even earlier.
They began to settle in early 19th century.
And so the quotas were on jewish education, for example, anti jewish quotas. And these affected Rand's family.
Her father, for example, who was a pharmacist and studied at the University of Warsaw, who could not enroll properly at the university, had to audition because of a quarters. And Rand, because of a quarters for jews on education, was enrolled in a private Stiunina gymnasium, where there were no quarters for jews.
So that's how she was growing up.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: Yeah. And her education. That's very interesting. It almost sounded like a version of a Montessori school in which the students were given a lot of independence and could direct their own projects and even how they dressed. So you write about something called the Bialis affair, of which I am embarrassed to say, I was nothing. I was completely ignorant. So what was it? And why did you decide to include it in this biography?
[00:19:02] Speaker B: Mendel Bayliss was a jewish clerk. Now, the Bayliss affair in Russia, which took place before the First World War, is usually compared to the Dreyfus affair in France that dragged on for many years and was concluded in 1906. Alfred Dreyfus was an artillery french artillery officer of jewish descent, and he was falsely accused of treason. So the two affairs exposed government antisemitism, and that's why they were compared. Mendel Bayless affair was about the most infamous re emergence of blood libel since the Middle Ages in Russia. And it divided the society almost precisely the way the french society was divided during the Dreyfus affair. So the intellectuals and jewish lawyers were defending this innocent clerk who was accused of ritual murder, and government lawyers were accusing him of something he had not done. In stiunin, a gymnasium where Rand would study, beginning in 1914, girls discussed this affair. They knew about it. Every jewish family knew about it. And the outcome of this affair, their lives, would be affected by the outcome. So in the end, Mendel Bayless was found innocent. However, you see a double thing. Even back then, it was ruled that this was a ritual murder, even as the christian boy was killed by criminals. So I included that to provide some background, because everyone at this time, before World War one, would know about this affair.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: So you write that Rand's paternal grandfather and great grandfather were lawyers, though, unfortunately, we know very little about them. How might this family history have possibly influenced Rand's literary choices later on?
[00:22:02] Speaker B: This was the information, some of the information that I found in the letters. In 1933, when Ren produced her play, Night of January 16, she sent it to her family, and her father was delighted with her knowledge of jurisprudence, as he said. And he wrote to her, my father and grandfather were lawyers, and he did not, unfortunately, he did not say where they practiced law, and he did not give their names. But I believe that following this instance of the inclusion of trial and I in detail, you know, all of the action of a play is taking place in the courtroom that later on, Rand includes trials in her major novels.
She includes these court speeches by Rourke, and there are court speeches also in Atlas Shrugged.
So I believe it was her way of fighting for justice of something that influenced her, that she knew that her father, grandparents were on her father's side, were lawyers, and that was, I think, part of the influence. Even as I'm not saying this in my book, but there is a suggestion there. So I want the reader to make this connection.
[00:24:10] Speaker A: Ayn Rand's relationship with her mother was at times contentious. And in we the living, her depiction of Kira's mother is not particularly flattering. That's why I was impressed how in your biography, you bring out several examples of Anna Boris Sovna's practicality, the lengths that she went to try and care for her children and provide for their education. What are some of those examples?
[00:24:43] Speaker B: Yes, well, I think that we believe in is, of course, the most autobiographical of Rand's works. However, we cannot assume that Rand, you can rely on Rand's description there of her family. I think her family is dwarfed in this novel. Her mother was a very talented woman. I could see that from the letters. She cared deeply about Rand's talent.
Rand alone had a separate room in their apartment.
The mother really was following and encouraging Rand's writings. Not the father, but the mother. She was.
I think she had literary talent, judging by the letters. So when Rent produced her first play, called Balaganchik, Anna Borisovna took that play to her friends, who were well known theater directors and who praised that play. And so that was Ren's first success. But even earlier, when Ren was growing up, at age seven, she later recalled, in one of her columns written for Los Angeles Times, she said that at age seven, she would be in bed and would hear her mother read the novel 93 by Victor Hugo, about counter revolutionary revolts during the French Revolution of 1793, and that she remembered that sense of drama. She could only hear some snatches of that reading. And then later herself, she read Hugo. Hugo was the writer who influenced, she believed, her career. He influenced her to become a writer, she would say so and when. So that was one of the influences. And then, when she was also small, her mother subscribed to a french children's magazine where Rand read an adventure story in mysterious Valley. She remembered that story her whole life. Her heroic characters, the archetypes for her heroic characters came, she thought, were inspired by the story. So those were early influences. And I think her mother did a very good job there. But I also think that, you know, that education doesn't start in school, it starts at home. And that's where influences you become influenced by what Albert Einstein, I want to read about his words about jewish tradition, the moral tradition. He said in the. The book, the world as I see it, a moral tradition of respect for cultural values and achievements. And I think that that's what Rand absorbed in childhood.
He also says in the same book about jewish tradition and values. Life is sacred. This is to say, it is the supreme value to which all other values are subordinate. And in we will living, we remember Rand's words, you and I, we believe in life.
And John Galt, in his speech, speaks of a single axiom, existence exists and of single choice to live.
The rest proceeds from this.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: Yeah. I was also impressed just by some of the more prosaic things that her mother did, again, coming from a rather impressive background and relative affluence, but found herself raising chickens, and I finding, you know, melons and feeding those to her family when that was the cheapest food available and keeping them alive.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: So, yes, her mother kept kashrut, so observed kashrut. Kosher diets.
She, you know, there were these traditional values they did not influence.
Rand later became natives, and she rejected all that. But she was growing up with this and her family, I know from the letters for the first time, were eating non kosher in a restaurant already when Rand left home in 1926.
[00:30:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So I want all of you watching. I see your questions. I'm not ignoring you. I'm going to get to them, but I just want to stay on this theme of Rand's jewishness and her relationship with that, particularly not just in the context of anti semitism in Russia, but also here in the United States. Alexandra, you write that quote. Rand did not openly identify with jewish issues, but when she spoke on american capitalists defending ability, profit, wealth, she was also fighting against jewish stereotypes. How so?
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Yes.
If we look even at what she wrote during.
In the 1940s, when she wrote a screen guide for Americans, she was associated with emotion, picture alliance.
She wrote, these were a number of don't the guide for american filmmakers.
Don't smear wealth, don't smear success, don't smear a profit motif.
So these were principles.
Anti communist and in defense of capitalism, but also against stereotyping Jews as greedy businessmen.
One of stereotypes of Jews, another was as capitalist. But we know that Jews were stereotyped both as communists and as capitalists.
There is no rational explanation to that, because antisemitism is a conspiracy theory.
[00:32:58] Speaker A: So.
But, yeah, anti Semitism in the United States reached its peak during the 1920s and during the 1930s. I'd like to think that given that we're living through a renaissance of anti Semitism right now, the attraction of the Ku Klux Klan in the mid 1920s, the anti semitic works of Henry Ford, and the radio speeches of Father Coughlin in the late 1930s. This was when Ayn Rand had just arrived in America in 1926 and was beginning to make her way. How did this show up for her? How did she deal with it?
[00:33:42] Speaker B: Anti Semitism always existed, and it existed in America. It was strong during the interwar period that you mentioned. It also existed in the 1940s. We can remember Charles Lindbergh, the aviator who produced his fame, by the way, could compare with that of President Roosevelt. And he produced a Jewish.
He produced an anti semitic newspaper.
But even in the 1960s, Rand resigned as a speaker from a radio radio station after an obscene anti semitic poem was read on the air. Now, how she dealt with that, we know that Rand chose a pseudonymous. Many of Hollywood producers and actors and writers did not reveal very jewish names at the time. They did not produce films about jews.
And Rand's characters do not have jewish names, but typically, they're modeled often on Jews. For example, the character of Keating. We know that the inspiration for this character was a phrase by Marcella Rabwin, who was jewish and who. Who worked in Hollywood.
And then that was, of course, that.
[00:35:53] Speaker A: Was the exchange in which Rand asked her about, you know, what would make her happy. And she said, well, if my neighbor didn't have a car, I would want to have a car. My neighbor had two cars, and I would want to have three cars. That it was really based on this second handed sense of self esteem. All right, I'm getting to the questions, guys.
Let's see. We'll try to get to them quickly, because there are quite a few, Alexandra, so don't feel like you need to give a particularly long answer. We can always pass on ones if they are something you'd rather not talk about. My modern gal always regular, asks, Alexandra, did you have to actively self censor yourself while working on soviet newspapers? And have you ever had to do that in western newspapers?
[00:36:47] Speaker B: Well, in soviet newspapers, everything was simple. You write what you write, and then later, it has to go. I worked for a weekly newspaper, so later it had to go through all these stages. And of course, there was soviet censorship, and of course, they would take things out and certain stories would never appear. Like in 1982, when I joined the newspaper, many of my stories did not appear.
But already in 1985, Gorbachev Glasnes.
That doesn't mean that there was no censorship. There was still censorship, but we were able to say more. And at this time, during Gorbachev Glasnes, the circulation of this newspaper rose to 6 million copies because we were able to publish stories about the actual soviet history, styles, purges, and so on.
Now, I did not censor myself, but they say that people during that time wrote with kind of an inner censor. I cannot remember that, frankly.
I wrote what I wanted to write, but, yeah, not everything would be published. Not at all.
And then later. Later, when I became a biographer here, began to publish my stories again. I chose my topics.
This biography is.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: Okay. Alan Turner asks, looking at the Russia of the past 20 years, do you think it still resembles anything like the Soviet Union?
[00:38:44] Speaker B: Well, we're all the way back to the Soviet Union right now with Putin.
Putin gradually was bringing back all.
All the negative things that we had in the Soviet Union.
So right now, there is.
If we are talking about writing and writers, there is censorship, of course, but there is no freedom in the country anymore. There is a list of almost 900 foreign agents, that is, people who do not think like Putin, who oppose his war.
So life is. And there are around 900 political prisoners, even more than during the time when I was growing up under Brezhnev, we had political prisoners, but these were numbered, not the same numbers as now. So it's probably closer to Stalin's era.
That's how far Putin went.
[00:40:11] Speaker A: That's remarkable.
All right. Jackson Sinclair asks Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, big names as russian writers.
Were they rivals since they lived around the same time?
[00:40:30] Speaker B: Yes, of course they were rivals. Tolstoy had said that all writers are jealous.
It's not his exact words, but.
And he said something about that. And I was such a writer. Yes. The two writers, you can say the two greats, they never met. They never met in person because they were jealous of each other, of course, but they produced. They produced great works.
And personally, I believe they were very difficult people. But you know that talented people are rarely, rarely sympathetic characters, very rarely easy to understand.
[00:41:22] Speaker A: And, of course, we have that example as well, with the architect.
Well, and Ayn Rand, to an extent. I think that to an extent, when somebody has a lot of power, and that power can come either from a political power to be able to force people to do things, or they have a lot of wealth, or, you know, they have intellectual power, they have charisma, they have influence.
They're just kind of on a different level that they may not be getting the feedback that they need.
People won't tell them, hey, that's really obnoxious. Or that wasn't particularly funny. All right, getting back into the questions here. Yes, Kingfisher 21. I see your sarcastic comment, which was very funny, but it's not a question, so I'm not going to read that.
My modern Gaul asks, have you read current russian literature? How do you think it has evolved since the time of Tolstoy?
[00:42:28] Speaker B: I'm not an expert on current russian literature, but I know there are some writers who had to immigrate.
Sergei Lebedev, for example. I reviewed one of his novels. He lives in Germany right now. His novel Oblivion was a great novel about Stalin's purges, and it was translated by Antonina Bois, so it's available in English.
He is concerned with memory, how his generation is living in the country where memory was prohibited. You know, it's only during Gorbachev Perestroika that it was allowed for us to explore what? How millions perished in the gulag. And we oftentimes don't know their names. So Stalin committed similar genocides to Hitler. But if we know about the Holocaust, we do not know in the world. The world doesn't know very much about Stalin's repressions and Stalin's genocide. So this is one writer who is trying to fathom it.
There were certainly other writers, but I.
[00:44:12] Speaker A: Level of Rand or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.
I guess that's the takeaway. So Alexander Cohen says, alexandra, you published a bio of Rand as part of a series of jewish biographies. He wants to know how much of a background in Judaism and or Yiddishkite did she get. Growing up in St. Petersburg, for example, did she know any Hebrew or Yiddish?
[00:44:45] Speaker B: This is what I learned from the letters. No, Ren did not know Hebrew, but she knew some Yiddish.
Her yiddish speaking grandfather, maternal grandfather, lived with a family. And Rand's first telegram from America to her grandfather was in Yiddish, and it's in this book.
So she did know some Yiddish.
[00:45:16] Speaker A: All right, so I'm gonna. We have just 15 minutes left, so I'm gonna return to some of my questions.
In setting the stage for Rand's anti communist political activity in Hollywood, you reveal some history of the era, including the many Americans who emigrated to the Soviet Union, inspired by apologists for Stalin and the soviet system. Of course, many in our audience will know of Walter Durantes. Apologies, but who were some of the others? And whatever happened to those Americans who fled the horrors of american capitalism for the glories of soviet communism?
[00:46:02] Speaker B: So, there is a book by Tim Tsuliades.
It's a.
Oh, sorry.
It's about the Americans who perished. It's called forsaken, about Americans who perished in the gulag. In the early 1930s.
There were thousands of Americans who.
Just regular people during the Great Depression who were looking for jobs. And in search of jobs, thousands of Americans sailed to the Soviet Union, and they never returned. They perished in the gulag. So team Sulliades did a marvelous job researching that story.
What happened to these Americans? Their passports, their papers were seized upon arrival. And when the Stalin's purges began and they wanted to flee, many of them were forced to accept soviet citizenship. And so not even american embassy that was opened by then in Moscow could help, or was willing to help.
Now, with other names, I can probably mention such apologies as George Bernard Shaw.
He traveled to the Soviet Union. He was one of the biggest apologists for Stalin. Others were Anatole France, Romaine Roland, american journalist, Ann Louise Strong, Ella Winter.
And in Hollywood, there were anti nazi leagues and other leagues, joined by famous playwrights and scriptwriters.
For example, Lilian Hellman was part of that. And she also traveled to Stalin's Russia.
So all of these people with, you know, with their fame, they kept this myth of Stalin's Russia alive, Stalin's achievements. And Rand, when hearing that, of course, was beside herself.
[00:49:14] Speaker A: I can imagine. Yeah, I was just watching a movie called Mister Jones. It's about the exploits of Jeffrey Jones, who went to Russia, a Soviet Union, and managed to get the truth out about the Holodomor and everything that was happening. When he came back, he said something like, there is no great experiment. There are no stunning achievements of Stalin's, unless you consider the murder of millions to be an achievement.
So let's turn now to.
Boy, we are running out of time. You write that Rand's lecture, America's most persecuted minority, big business, essentially presented a jewish theme. How so?
[00:50:18] Speaker B: Yes.
She was saying that businessmen, the most productive minority, hold the economy on their shoulders. And she compared.
She compared them with racial minorities. Such as.
Just a second.
Such as Jews, because she was saying that american businessmen are penalized for their achievements, not faults, penalized by various government regulations. And there is a phrase where, in her lecture that in Soviet Russia, the escape goat was the bourgeoisie, Nazi Germany, the jewish people. And in America, this is a businessman. So this is one of the rare direct references to jews in her works.
[00:51:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting that she was making those connections there. And one of the commonalities was, of course, achievement. And in talking about envy, she talks about the hatred of the good for being good. And we can see that in terms of the animus against very successful business entrepreneurs. So, as we're wrapping up here, I have a theory about Ayn Rand and about people in general, that sometimes the qualities that are our greatest strengths can also become among our greatest weaknesses. Of course, Ayn Rand, in order to overcome the many barriers that a young jewish russian immigrant would find on her ultimate path to success, to pursue her mission in presenting this singular radical vision of egoism, self interest, and capitalism, she had to find a way, to a certain extent, to tune out the detractors, to tune out even her own self doubts. And that helped her walk this tightrope when many people were hoping that she would fall or fail.
But if this approach hardens over time, then to the extent that you become close to even important feedback, it causes you to break with allies over the slightest disagreement or ignore nagging inner voice that, you know, maybe whatever you're currently engaged with is not going to work out too well, then really, you're setting yourself up for a fall in the end anyway. Do you think any of that applies to Ayn Rand?
[00:53:36] Speaker B: Well, I think absolutely. You're absolutely right about that. And it is important for a writer, especially to keep to writers, especially to keep their mind open. And, you know, Ren was not the only one there, I think, when Tolstoy, in similar circumstances, there was a movement in his name, like a movement in Rand's name, and there was a movement in Tolstoy's name when Tolstoy, Rand was a naevist. But Tolstoy was a religious writer beginning in 1880s, during his religious phase. And during that time, a religious movement in his name was founded. And so he, too, became constricted in what he could say, and that constricted his thought. And he stopped writing fiction. And only later, you know, there were some instances when he would return to writing fiction, there were some stories he would write and his late novel of a late period. But otherwise, his thought became constricted, and the same thing happened, I think, with Rand.
[00:55:02] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's interesting that youre a biography has received some detraction from some quarters, as if this idea of Ayn Rand, the great Ayn Rand, actually having any influences at all, is heretical. When, you know, influences are a good thing, right? You draw inspiration. You get an idea, you have an exchange.
It doesn't mean it doesn't take away from the originality of your ideas and your work.
But I think closing oneself off to influences can sometimes be a short sighted thing. So, as we're wrapping up here. Alexandra, this has been an absolutely delightful hour to spend with you, and I do want to remind all of you to go out and get your copy of Ayn Rand writing the Gospel of success. I can also highly recommend the audio version, and I'm grateful for that because it helps me get through these, you know, weekly books that I read for these interviews is, I guess, just to wrap up, is there anything else that you want to add, anything that we didn't touch on that you'd like to cover?
[00:56:25] Speaker B: Well, I was wondering about some critics of this book who found it difficult to fathom that Rand's biography could come out in jewish lives. And because, yes, Rand did not admit that she was jewish, but on the other hand, Lewand Trotsky never called himself jewish, and he said that his nationality was social democratic. But I think that it is important that the book identifying Rand as jewish comes out today, comes out now during unprecedented rise of anti Semitism in both North America and the world. And I think that because Rand said that she only felt jewish when faced with antisemitism, and moreover, she said it was one's moral obligation to identify oneself as a jew when faced with antisemitic vitriol. So I think she was a fighter, and I think it's good that she's identified.
[00:57:58] Speaker A: I agree.
I had never worn a Star of David in my life, and I was even a little reluctant to wear one now because I want to be clear about the fact that as an objective, I am an atheist. But I felt, like Ram said, a moral obligation to start wearing it in order to just signify solidarity and show that, you know, we will not be afraid. So, Alexandra, what is next for you, and what is the best way for us to follow your work?
[00:58:39] Speaker B: I am researching another biography, a biography of one of Putin's major critics, Anna Plutkowski, a journalist who was killed in 2006, actually on the day when Putin was celebrating his birthday.
And so I'm researching this book.
The way to follow me, you can find my website.
It's one word, russian literature and biography.com. and also you may follow me on Goodreads or on Amazon or on, say, to find out about my books on library thing.
[00:59:33] Speaker A: And perhaps you'll do us the honor of coming back once your next biography is published. It sounds fascinating. So, again, thank you, Alexandra. Thank you for joining us today. And thanks, all of you who asked so many great questions. Apologies that I didn't get to as many of them as I would have liked. Again, if you enjoy this video or any of the other materials programming at the Atlas Society, please remember we are a nonprofit, so go ahead to Atlas society.org. donate. Put a little something in the tip jar. If you've never donated to the Atlas Society, it will be matched by our board of trustees and make sure to join us next week when I will be off. But Atlas society senior scholars Stephen Hicks and David Kelly will host a webinar discussing the Philadelphia Declaration, what it is, and its vision for cooperation across the religious and secular spectrum of the liberty movement. So hope to see you then.
