Barbara Branden: The Passion of Ayn Rand

That summer, with its pure, ecstatic sense of adventure, ended in terror. As the family was traveling from Switzerland to Paris, World War I began. The family hurried to London to find a ship which would take them across the North Sea, the only route to Russia left open. They returned to Russia across a sea treacherous with German mines; the ship that had left just before theirs hit a mine and exploded, as did the one that followed them. It was a journey filled with fear and the imminence of death. "The war marked the end of the world," she later remarked.

If one world ended for Alice, another had just begun. Walking along a London street with her governess, while the family awaited the ship that would take them home, Alice stopped before a theater featuring a musical revue; she stared in fascination at a poster that showed attractive, blond young women with pageboy haircuts. When she returned to her hotel room, she began inventing stories about the girls in the poster, telling their adventures to her spellbound sisters, who always demanded to hear her latest story. As she talked and happily invented, it suddenly occurred to her for the first time: "This is what people do — people become writers, and they spend their lives writing stories." She stopped to examine the thought, as a wondrous possibility.

Writing was not merely the most interesting activity of all — it could be a way of life. Her next thought was: This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to be a writer. The nine-year-old girl felt very solemn. Now I have a purpose, she told herself. I'm going to be a writer.

Arriving home in St. Petersburg, Alice turned to her new purpose with a blinding absorption. She wrote at home, in school, at night, whenever she was free of the demands of childhood and family and school, demands which she resented and despised more bitterly than ever. "The Mysterious Valley" was the symbol of what she wanted, the standard toward which she intended to grow. When she heard that two other girls wanted to be writers, she felt both a professional solidarity and a sense of rivalry. She was eager to learn what kind of stories they were writing, like — she later said — a businessman wanting to know what the competition is doing.

She was fully aware, she would always insist, that the motor moving her in devising her stories was, above all, the vision of the heroic she had found in Cyrus. She wanted to see heroes, so she invented characters who were daring, independent, courageous. She wanted life to be interesting, so she invented characters pursuing demanding goals and overcoming obstacles. She had been bored by the plot-less mood stories she had read, so she struggled to invent dramatic events that led to unexpected climaxes. She disliked the sentimental tragedy of Russian children's stories, and her own stories had a sunlit, benevolent quality and culminated in the success of her heroes.

Convinced she could not find in the life around her the heroism, the drama, the benevolence that she had found in Cyrus — it stood in her mind as "My kind of people don't exist around me, but they exist somewhere, and when I grow up and am on my own, I'll find them" — she turned increasingly to books for the emotional nourishment she required.

One of the stories she found remained in her memory because it seemed to sum up her attitude toward her present and her future. It was a child's biography of Catherine the Great, the little German princess who became an empress. Catherine was presented as an intelligent child, more active than the other children of her background. But she was seen by her parents and others around her "as something between a misfit and an ugly duckling, because she didn't behave like a conventional little princess." At a royal party given for children of the German nobility, a fortune-teller was summoned to tell them what their futures would be. The reigning favorite among the children was a very beautiful little princess, so beautiful that everyone was sure she would marry a great king and have a glorious life. No one had great expectations for Catherine; her parents were of the second rank, and she was not beautiful. The children stood around the fortune-teller. "Do you see a crown on her brow?" asked one of the adults, pointing to the beautiful little princess. "No," answered the fortune-teller — then suddenly she turned to Catherine and cried, "But here is a girl on whose forehead I see the mark of two crowns."

"This was my feeling as a child," said Alice many years later. "I thought that I was exactly like Catherine. I didn't fit into their schemes, and they didn't know that there was a mark on my forehead — and how much I wished that somebody would see it." Then Ayn Rand, aged fifty-five, remarked sadly, "You know something — I'm still waiting, to this day..."

3 In all of my conversations with Ayn Rand about her years in Russia, she never once mentioned to me — nor, to the best of my knowledge, to anyone else — any encounter she might have had with anti-Semitism. It is all but impossible that there were not such encounters. One can only assume that, as with the pain caused by the indifference of her parents, the pain and terror of anti-Semitism was ultimately blocked from her memory — in both cases, perhaps, because the memory would have carried with it an unacceptable feeling of humiliation.

4 In his autobiography, Memoirs of a Polyglot, published in 1931, the eminent British novelist William Gerhardi wrote about his family and about Daisy. Alice never learned that the girl she admired was her neighbor in St. Petersburg; the Gerhardis owned the largest cotton mill in Russia, situated on the Nevsky Prospect; the family had migrated to St. Petersburg from England two generations earlier. William Gerhardi, like his youngest sister Marguerite, called Daisy, was Russian-born. Daisy, "a courageous little girl," was William's favorite of his five siblings, and his playmate. One summer, he wrote, "we all went tennis mad" and the family spent the summer playing their favorite game at a seaside resort. Daisy suffered from a lung disease, and later was sent to school in Switzerland; when the family lost its mill and its wealth after the Bolshevik revolution, they left Russia. Daisy ultimately settled in Paris, where she married a Frenchman.

The destiny that young Alice awaited seemed to recede farther into the future when the family returned to St. Petersburg in the late summer of 1914. A tragically unprepared Russia was at war with Germany and Austria. The front was eight hundred miles away, weapons were outdated and inadequate, the army command was disorganized and incompetent. By the end of the year, Russian losses were staggering, averaging more than three hundred thousand men a month. Their weapons nearly exhausted, soldiers were lighting with clubs, searching for rifles among the bodies of enemy soldiers; around their feet, instead of the shoes which had long ago disintegrated, they wrapped shreds of newspaper.

By the following summer, 1,400,000 men had been killed or wounded in the terrible cold and icy storms of the front, almost a million more were prisoners of war. St. Petersburg — now Petrograd, its Germanic name changed by the Czar to the more Slavic Petrograd — stirred uneasily and prayed for an ever-receding victory.

The events seething in the world outside her barely penetrated Alice’s consciousness in the years from 1914 to 1916. Children should not know about the terrible carnage in the world, her protective parents believed, and the war rarely was discussed in the presence of the Rosenbaum children; nor were they permitted to read newspapers. But perhaps more relevantly, her major focus continued to be on her writing. "I was writing in every spare moment. I felt I was preparing for the future, for the world I would enter when I grew up." Nothing could be allowed to distract her from the dedicated singleness of purpose that was to guide her life for more than forty years.