Determinism, the irreducible feature of a Marxist view of history, was on the rise at the university. Rand found the notion offensive, and not merely because “historical necessity” was the battle cry of the Bolsheviks. She recalled sitting outraged through a lecture in which the instructor offered proof that individuals act without free will. If a young man, he said, standing at the doorway of his home, could turn either left or right to reach a destination in the same amount of time, but knew that he would see a pretty waitress in a restaurant if he turned right, he would turn right. He would have no choice; his action would be determined by his nature. Rand thought, If you have a reason for what you do, you are making a choice. Later, she would define free will as the freedom to think or to avoid thinking in any particular situation.
During her stay in the Crimea and as a university student, she grew closer to her silent and usually inexpressive father, who was almost always at home while her mother worked. It was only after she and he began to be allies in opposition to the Bolsheviks, she later said, that she felt real love for him, a love that meant something beyond family affection and abstract respect. She and he shared a disgusted contempt for Communist ideology, which was perhaps best summarized by the slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” and their contempt grew deeper and more acrid as “need” was increasingly revealed to be a euphemism for the demands of those in power—those exerting “pull,” as Rand would memorably write in Atlas Shrugged. Somewhat unreasonably, both father and daughter considered Anna much too eager to defend and appease her Communist employers, just as she had once been pleased to emulate the city’s intellectual elite. In fact, Zinovy severely disapproved of his wife’s working for the Communists at all, and Rand’s sister Nora once remarked that Anna was a little “pink.” Young Rand and her father proudly endorsed individualism and free will.
Most important, the father was openly supportive of his daughter’s brilliant analytical intelligence, drive, and vocation as a writer. He must often have encouraged her as he did in the late 1920s, when he wrote to her in America: “You must see clearly that you are not like everybody else and be proud of it. Eschew all doubts and continue firmly and with assurance to walk toward your goal.” She clearly returned his love and admiration. “She spoke about him with more respect than I can recall her ever speaking about anybody,” said a friend who knew Rand in the 1950s.
There was one area of conflict between the girl and her father: He opposed her chosen course of study at the university. Without asking her to give up writing, he wanted her to apply her math training and love of the scientific method to a more remunerative occupation, such as engineering. This would have been an unusual profession for an early-twentieth-century Jewish father to urge on any daughter other than Rand, who was to make it Kira’s frustrated calling in We the Living. Having grown up in the Russian Pale, he was more aware than Anna or the children of the crucial role that work and money played in protecting against the onslaughts of anti-Semitism. As Rand and her sisters grew older, he urged them to choose occupations that would always allow them to earn a living. All three chose to be artists. Natasha studied piano at Petrograd Conservatory, the nation’s most distinguished school of music, along with fellow students Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich and former student Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Anna approved of Natasha’s choice, unlike Rand’s, because music was a properly ladylike career. Nora, the youngest, studied to be an artist, though she later became a teacher like her mother and, finally, a graphic designer. Rand argued with her father that, as a future writer, she had to study history in order “to have a factual knowledge of man’s past” and understand philosophy in order “to achieve an objective definition of my values.” She promised him that she would one day make a living as a writer, and, as always when hard work and force of will were the deciding factors, she was right.
In her first two years at the university, a number of events took place that solidified her “sense of life” and influenced her for years to come. The first was taking a course called Ancient World Views, probably the last class taught by the distinguished professor N. O. Lossky before he was deported. The course surveyed the pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato, and Aristotle. This may sound innocuous, but not for Rand; by now, ideas of every kind and vintage earned her passionate assent or disapproval. In Lossky’s class she was dazzled by Aristotle, particularly his logical starting point of the axiomatic existence of objective reality and his belief in human reason as the only means to understand the world; for him, as for Rand, man was a rational animal. She learned to detest Plato and his mysticism, which is how she regarded the Platonic belief that the observable world is a mere shadow of ideal forms that can’t be seen; she associated this, rightly, with mystical Christianity. And she learned from Lossky an intensely dialectical method of thinking—“thinking in principles,” she called it—which helped her to construct a worldview that was radically individualistic and seemingly Western but in some ways Russian to the core.
Rand described herself in these years as solemn, even grim, and always engaged in serious discussion. She was aware that people often didn’t want to talk to her and that she was sometimes forcing conversations on her family and schoolmates. Where she had once seen laziness, indifference, or shallow-mindedness, however, she now saw envy: she grew convinced that she was actively resented, and not for her faults but for her best qualities, her virtues, as her rebellious heroes Howard Roark and John Galt would also be.
She had no known friends, but she did spend time with two maternal cousins, Vera and Nina Guzarchik, who lived above the Rosenbaum apartment. It was Vera who, while reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, remarked that Rand reminded her of Zarathustra, the German philosopher’s prophetic outlaw hero, or at least that Nietzsche had “beat me to all my ideas,” Rand recalled. The book describes the hero’s journey down a mountainside, after the death of God, to teach what he has learned to the people below. From now on, he tells the jeering masses, human beings will determine their own values and their own destinies, free of superstitious reliance on gods, conventional morality, and faith. Furthermore, people must learn to make way for the exceptional individual, the Superman of whom Zarathustra is the first example; through a “will to power” and a talent for “self-overcoming,” the Superman will establish a new morality of man.
Nietzsche’s work was popular among intellectuals in Russia at the time, especially his descriptions of master and slave psychology and of the absolute right of the superior individual to place himself in opposition to the common herd. The seventeen-year-old Rand immediately seized upon his ideas, including his call to discard old values and create new ones, his condemnation of altruism as a slave morality, and his argument for the inviolate rights of the gifted person, whose only obligation is to refine and use his gifts as he sees fit. One point, in particular, had an immediate influence on her thinking, she recalled. Until reading Nietzsche, she had assumed that in order to defend man against religion, she would have to defend all men, no matter how weak or strong; Zarathustra demonstrated “that it doesn’t have to be collective. In other words, that the species can be vindicated by one man.” She responded to his heightened language, his brilliance, his bold critique of Christianity, and his principled admiration of Jewish thought. From this point on, her major characters would be more or less overtly Nietzschean—and, because of their Superman aura, would often be wrongly seen as fascistic by her critics. It wasn’t until she was writing The Fountainhead that she was able to begin to loosen Nietzsche’s seductive hold on her imagination.