Strange Bedfellows: Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Strange Bedfellows: Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov

by D. Barton Johnson

This appeared in JARS and is now on the site linked. I did not want to lose sight of it, even though I haven't read it all (I just skimmed it), so I am giving the link above. Interesting, but it certainly is a strange idea. Strange bedfellows indeed.

Michael

[Danneskjold]

As I read through this, I notice that there are a lot of comparisons of Rand to other authors by either complete non-essentials or through techniques that are generally pretty common.

Both Chernyshevsky's opus and Rand's Atlas Shrugged center upon a young woman who is or becomes an entrepreneur. She is one of the new people who will, after the collapse of the old society, build a better, rational world. Just as John Galt displays his ideal community to Dagny Taggart, Chernyshevsky's heroine, Vera Pavlovna, offers her dream vision of a new perfect society. Each novel ends with the old world on the verge of being replaced by the new—although the message is obviously much muted in Chernyshevsky's work. Both novels are cast as mystery melodramas full of didactic harangues. And, not least, both have been seen as monuments in the women's rights movement.[10] The Soviet Short Literary Encyclopedia sums up What is to be Done? as a "publicistic, socio-philosophical, educational novel," something "almost unknown in earlier Russian literature." The description fits Rand's Atlas Shrugged like a glove, and if her opus is not the first American novel to do so, it is a fine example of that Russian genre transferred to American soil.

So, what is being said here is that the main characters are both women who run businesses, not uncommon, the person learns something from someone, involved in almost every literary work I have seen, the novel ends in triumph, again not uncommon, they are both seen to be help for the women's rights movement, if at all true for Atlas Shrugged then it is solely by virtue of the main character being a woman and has nothing to do with Rand's expressed-in-book view of being chained as the peak of femininity, and that both novels have political axes to grind, which also seems terribly non-essential and common to the style.

Rand would have been apoplectic at any comparison to Gorky, but Atlas Shrugged is not without its similarities to Mother. Atlas Shrugged, the premier novel of "Capitalist Realism," mirrors the Mother of Russian Socialist Realism both in technique and in its idea of the virtuous uniting to throw off the chains of their oppressors.

Seems to me this is a pretty common theme in all literature. It's called conflict resolution. All conflict act as oppressors to the main protagonist, if they didn't then the protagonist would not need to overcome this. Now, if you want to say that the similarity is held in a direct oppressor put into authority over them through conventional means such as government that might be more accurate. Then again that too seems like a pretty basic plot line.

Rand's Howard Roark and John Galt are poured from the same cultural mold as Chernyshevsky's Rakhmetov and Gorky's hero, Pavel Vlasov, and such worthy successors as Pavel Korchagin, the hero of Nikolai Ostrovsky's Socialist Realist classic How the Steel was Forged (1934).

This says that the heros are heroes. That's all it says. This is also inherent in any novel that is pushing a philosophy because when you are trying to make your philosophy look good you don't make your character fail.

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, nor ask any other man to live for me" (993).

I really am not sure I would call John Galt neo-Nietzschean.

Rand loathed all physical activity.

I would really like to see where he got that. I can imagine her not being the most physically active person herself, but I would hardly say she loathed it.

There are also striking parallels in the lives of the two Russo-American writers. Both born to comfort and affluence in Petersburg; lives disrupted and remade in consequence of the Russian Revolution; exile and writing in new languages; the loss of European family members in WW II; literary fame as English-language writers; that fame magnified by hit films—Rand's 1949 film The Fountainhead and Kubrick's 1962 Lolita; beatification through interviews in Playboy (1961 and 1964, respectively); and ultimate canonization through the establishment of Nabokov and Rand Archives in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress where the literary remains of the odd couple now rest side by side. And, Oh yes, The Resurrection: both Nabokov and Rand are now being published in their native land and language.

These all seem like very obvious things to happen. Both born to comfort and affluence? That would be the most advantageous situation to learn to write in. Lives disrupted and remade by the Russian Revolution? Theirs and everyone else's. Writing in new languages? That is what one does when they want to make a living in a different country? Fame as English language writers? That is why you are comparing them. Movies made after their books? Name a movie that wasn't modeled after a book. Playboy interviews? Result of them being popular writers. Archives in the Library of Congress? Another result of them being great writers.

Overall this essay did a very poor job of finding any common ground that wasn't a direct result of either their place on the best-seller list or their heritage. The differences that were mentioned far outweighed any similarity which makes me question why they were bedfellows any more than either of them and any other writer that has ever been put on the New York Times Best-Seller list.

[Laure]

I think that's a good analysis, Jeff.