This is my response to Gary Morson’s critique of my biography Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success. My letter appeared in the 2025 winter issue of Jewish Review of Books, under the title “Life and Capital”.
An amusing quote attributed to Reverend Sydney Smith and later appropriated by Oscar Wilde says: “I never read a book before reviewing it: it prejudices a man so.”
This fully applies to Gary Morson’s review of my biography of Ayn Rand, published by Jewish Lives. Morson is captivated by an article of psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, “Ayn Rand: Engineer of Souls” –– a discussion of the 2009 biography of Rand by Anne Heller. It’s Daniels’ article, rather than my book, that has provided major arguments for Morson’s piece “Atlas Schlepped,” in the previous issue of JRB.
Among the most divisive American writers, Rand had inspired her critics’ polarizing views. My goal was to write about her without preconceptions, while examining Jewish influences on her life and prose. Unlike Anne Heller, I received access to the Ayn Rand Archives in California. I’m the only biographer to have studied a large cache of Russian letters from Rand’s birth family to her in America, beginning in 1926. I wrote of her traditional family (Rand knew some Yiddish); her Jewish friends and milieus. Rand did not describe herself as a Jew and married a lapsed Catholic, but felt more comfortable with ethnic Jews. Her major followers in New York, the circle of Objectivists, were descendants of East-European Jewry, as was her lover Nathan Blumenthal (Branden).
Morson reiterates the argument made by Daniels that Rand’s literature and thought belong to the Russian rather than American tradition. Like Daniels, he divides Russian nineteenth-century writers into two opposing camps: the greats, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky –– on one side, and angry revolutionary radicals, such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky whose socialist utopian novel What Is to Be Done? influenced Lenin –– on the other.
Whereas the radicals expressed their views with total certainty, the great writers embraced nuance and complexity. This is a faulty theory, for both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were drawn to extremes. Tolstoy, during his religious phase, was intolerant and dogmatic, and had renounced all social institutions. If the world was built on his moral principles there would be anarchy. Dostoevsky was virulently anti-Semitic. In his “Notebooks” (I’ll quote from David Goldstein’s Dostoevsky and the Jews) he wrote: “The Yid and his bank are now reigning over everything: over Europe, education, civilization, socialism—especially socialism, for he will use it to uproot Christianity and destroy its civilization.” Anti-Semitic poison even penetrated his best fiction.
According to Morson, all Russian radicals admired Chernyshevsky’s tendentious novel, whereas the great writers despised it. Rand, by virtue of being a radical, falls into the first category: “Anyone who knows Chernyshevsky’s book will recognize its enormous influence … on Rand’s fiction.” I grew up in the Soviet Union where this abominable novel was mandatory reading, but fail to see similarities. True, both were bad stylists and moralists, but not every author of stilted prose owes it to Chernyshevsky. There is no proof that Rand read it. If she had, she would have despised the socialist writer rather than imitate him. But Chernyshevky is still rescued from obscurity by Western professors: Derek Offord in his short book Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia mentions him eighty-four times.
“Rand’s fiction,” writes Morson, “closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism.” In fact, Rand’s novels (with the exception of Atlas Shrugged, which can be ironically described as “capitalist realism”) were influenced by the works of Soviet ideological enemies –– Nietzsche and Evgeny Zamyatin (his dystopian novel We), and, as apparent from her novel Anthem, also by the Torah.
Rand, whose family was dispossessed by the Bolsheviks, witnessed the 1917 Revolution and the Russian Civil War, with its violence and hunger. These experiences determined her Manichean view of the world. She was not in the habit of reading Chernyshevsky or Lenin. Regardless, Morson proceeds to quote passages from Lenin matching them with quotations from Rand’s prose to reveal that both have demeaned their political opponents. He doesn’t hide his contempt for the writer when referring to “Rand and her Soviet counterparts.” Unlike Daniels, who discusses both Rand’s virtues and vices, Morson focuses on the vices alone, presenting her as a hopeless writer and shallow thinker. This fails to explain her broad appeal in America. Rand’s political philosophy, best analyzed in Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market, was influential among the American right; her moral philosophy, written in late life, was indeed murky and dogmatic. Her major novels were endorsed by the Austrian Jewish economist Ludwig von Mises, who believed that Atlas Shrugged contains “a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society.”
When Morson turns to my biography, he deals offhandedly with my text: “As Popoff observes, [Rand] attributed all doubt to wickedness, much as Lenin deemed it counterrevolutionary.” I checked my book –– I didn’t write this. Rand “never wrote about Jews,” Morson insists; he proceeds to say that her characters have Russian or American names. Rand’s first novels appeared during the interwar period and the peak of anti-Semitism in America when Jewish studios in Hollywood also avoided using Jewish names and portrayals –– although films were made by Jews. But a number of Rand’s characters had Jewish prototypes.
Rand’s novel We the Living captures her experiences under the Bolsheviks. I wrote that “the Jewish theme of choosing life is most perceptible in this novel.” Morson comments: “It is true that the book of Deuteronomy advises its readers to ‘choose life,’ but it is doubtful that Rand knew that…” If she referred to the book of Genesis and the book of Ruth in her prose, how would she miss the book of Deuteronomy? Speaking of the Jewish tradition in The World as I See It, Einstein observed: “Life is sacred — that is to say, it is the supreme value, to which all other values are subordinate.” This major value is emphasized in Atlas Shrugged where Rand advocates “a single choice: to live.”
As a lecturer Rand kept her audiences spellbound. Her 1961 talk “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business” defends her cause of laissez-fare capitalism and makes an explicit reference to Jews. American businessmen, she maintained, are a small and productive minority who hold the economy on their shoulders, but who nonetheless, have to function under especially restrictive laws. Like the bourgeoisie in Soviet Russia or the Jewish people in Nazi Germany, they are penalized exclusively for their virtues. According to Morson, there are no Jewish themes in this passage, either.
Morson writes: “Popoff detects Jewishness in Rand’s support of capitalism (and her dollar sign jewellery)…” Here is what I wrote: “For a Jew to endorse wealth in defiance of the stereotype of ‘selfish greed’ manifested chutzpah.”
In Morson’s view, it would be better if Rand’s Jewish background remained hidden. Here’s his rationale: “The less this terrible author of lifeless prose and repellent ideas owes to Judaism, the better.” Rand was an atheist, and I have not written about Judaism. In the end he proposes to “assign” Rand “to the Russian tradition, which features so many repellent thinkers…” One’s identity cannot be assigned or reassigned: Rand said she felt Jewish when faced with anti-Semitism; she also supported Israel.