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| Directions: Use the links on this page to explore the influences on and impact of the writer Ayn Rand and her work. |
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I. Her Parents: Anna and Fronz Rosenbaum
Ayn's mother and father had a tremendous impact on the artistic and philosophical development of their daughter. Anna Rosenbaum realized very early on that Alisa (Ayn) was a shy, but bright child. She had her governess teach her both German and French, and supplied her with a myriad of French magazines and books. These magazines allowed Ayn to practice her French and enabled her to get lost in their heroic western European tales. She developed a love of authors such as Maurice Champagne and Victor Hugo.
Rand's father, Fronz, was a chemist who owned a shop in St. Petersburg. He was considered to be anti-communist, interested in individualism and reason. These qualities eventually were all key ingredients into the developing philosophies of their daughter. Fronz was also special because he was a self-made Russian man whose business had been taken from him, for the benefit of the entire proletariat. Additionally, he did not truly mesh with his daughter until she was a teenager, during their Crimean years.
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Links
Ayn Rand Biography
Ayn Rand Chronology
Research Hub for Victor Hugo
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II. Russian Politics 1917 - 1924
As an observant, intelligent girl of twelve, living in St. Petersburg, Russia, Rand witnessed the abdication of the last Romanov Czar, and the beginning of a brutal civil war. In early 1917, she supported the emergence of Alexander Kerensky. Her feelings for the Bolshevik movement that followed were the exact opposite; she went on to despise it. Rand's family would eventually lose virtually everything they had worked for up until that time. The Bolshevik movement had a huge influence on the person Alisa Rosenbaum would evolve into. In her view communism meant living for the state, rather than for the self and family. They moved to Odessa where the family's main goal was simply to survive. They would remain in the Crimea for three years, living in miserable conditions. Rand was developing her concept of individuality.
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Links
Alexander Kerensky
Russia in Revolutionary Times
Russian and Soviet History Internet Links
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III. Operettas and Western Movies
Her love of the arts played a major influence on Ayn Rand, most notably operettas and movies.
Rand once stated that operettas saved her life. A few of her favorites included: Millocher's The Beggar Student; Offenbach's Grand Duchess; and Kalman's The Bayadere.
Movies also offered Rand a portal to escape the wretchedness of her late teenage days. The foreign movies she saw (German silent movies, Siegfried and The Indian Tomb and The Oyster Princess, for example) offered glimpses and experiences of glamour, action and freedom.
Shortly after arriving in the United States, she moved to Hollywood to pursue a career in screenwriting.
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Links
The Library of Congress
Film Professor's History of Cinema
Operettas and their History
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IV. Friedrich Nietzsche
During Ayn Rand's University days she discovered a love for the Greek philosopher Aristotle, and also Friedrich Nietzsche. At first she was drawn to Nietzsche's ideology, finding common ground, seeing and wanting the "heroic" in man, elevating the "superior" man of the mind. It was appropriate that man should have a selfish purpose, living by his own efforts and for his own purposes.
Later in life Rand commented that she had lost her affection towards the philosophy of Nietzsche. In fact, she disagreed so much with a major portion of his thinking that she went back and altered one of her books, We The Living, in a new edition without explanation. Unlike Nietzsche, she rejected the ideas that man had a right to assert force over another man.
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Links
Nietzsche Biography and Overview
Information on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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