Ayn Rand and the Russian intelligentsia : the origins of an icon of the American right / Derek Offord.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Offord, Derek, author.

Series:

Russian shorts

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rand, Ayn--Criticism and interpretation.

Rand, Ayn.

National characteristics, American, in literature.

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Intellectuals--Russia.

Intellectuals.

Russia--Intellectual life--20th century.

Russia.

Intellectual life.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xiii, 130 pages ; 20 cm.

Place of Publication:

London [England] : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Summary:

"This book examines the writings of the American novelist Ayn Rand, especially The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), which Rand considered her definitive statement about the need for an unregulated free market in which superior humans could fully realize themselves by living for no-one but themselves. It explores Rand's conception of American identity, which exalted individualism and capitalism, and her solution for saving the modern American nation, which she believed was losing the spirit of its 18th- and 19th-century founders and frontiersmen, having been degraded morally and economically by the rampant socialism of the mid-20th-century world. Derek Offord crucially goes on to analyse how Rand's writings functioned as a vehicle in which she, a Russian-Jewish writer born in St Petersburg in 1905, engaged 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, Offord argues that Rand 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. The book concludes that her search for a brave new world continues to have topicality in the 21st-century, with its populist critiques of liberal democracies and acrimonious debates about countries' moral, social, and economic priorities and their identities, inequalities, and social tensions."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Ayn Rand and her Russian background

Upbringing, education and personality

Russia's Jewish minority

Russian culture in the twilight of the old regime

Intellectual and literary influences

2. Rand and the Russian intellectual tradition

The Russian intelligentsia and its outiook

The intelligentsia's way of thinking and writing

The novel as a vehicle for philosophical polemic

3. Rand and Russian literary models

Rand as a dystopian novelist

Rand as a revolutionary novelist

Rand and the Socialist Realist novel

4. Ethical, metaphysical and epistemological questions

Altruism is bad and egoism is good

Ordinary and extraordinary members of the human race

Dualism and monism, determinism, reason and volition

5. Politics and economics

An anarchist's Utopia?

The exclusivity of Rand's New Jerusalem

Democracy and economic distribution in Rand's ideal world

6. Geopolitics

Russia and Europe in Russian thought

A war of the worlds

Making America great again.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 115-118) and index.

Other Format:

ebook version :

ISBN:

9781350283954

1350283959

9781350283947

1350283940

9781350283961

1350283967

9781350283930

1350283932

OCLC:

1264714826