Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America by Aaron Weinacht

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America by Aaron Weinacht Helen Stuhr-Rommereim Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Ayn Rand: Russian Nihilism Travels to America. By Aaron Weinacht. London: Lexington Books. 2021. xiii+167 pp. £73. ISBN 978–1–7936–3477–1. In this volume Aaron Weinacht sets out to argue that Chernyshevskii, a foundational figure in the history of Russian socialist thought, was a crucial influence on Ayn Rand. Rand was a Russian émigrée to the United States; her novels preaching radical capitalism were treated as gospel by some sectors of the American right in the twentieth century, just as Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? (Chto delatʹ?, 1863) became gospel for young Russian radicals in the 1860s. As Weinacht shows, there are myriad similarities between Rand’s themes and Chernyshevskii’s, although definitive evidence that Rand read Chernyshevkii does not exist (p. 13). However, Weinacht goes beyond making a case for influence to argue that Chernyshevskii’s and Rand’s ideas are actually the same, that ‘the differences between [End Page 726] Rand and Chernyshevskii are less significant than the similarities’ (p. 144). He holds that concern over the significance of the ideological differences between Rand and Chernyshevskii amounts to mistaking ‘the flag for the goods’ (p. 47), thus obscuring their essential oneness. The comparative impulse that grounds Weinacht’s project is laudable: when intellectual history is viewed only within the silos of national traditions, important connections across national boundaries are obscured. Weinacht’s account makes it clear that scholars have not paid sufficient attention to the ways in which Rand’s ideas were forged in relation to the intellectual culture in which she was raised. Certainly the meaning of Chernyshevskii’s famous novel has too often been defined by its reception among Bolshevik revolutionaries. In this context, the parallels that exist between these ideologically opposed thinkers—their common valorization of economic productivity over parasitism (pp. 60–66), for instance—are worth investigating. But the similarities that Weinacht identifies beg analysis in the context of both thinkers’ distinct concerns—analysis which he does not offer. Weinacht fails to give a coherent account of Chernyshevskii’s ideas, discussing only the novel What Is to Be Done? He neither explains this choice nor notes that a greater body of work by Chernyshevskii exists that could have served as evidence for Weinacht’s account. Further, the author does not distinguish between Chernyshevskii’s thought and ‘1860s nihilism’ as a general cultural phenomenon. Weinacht then argues that ‘Rand’s philosophy is a conceptual and functional reproduction of the “nihilism” of the Russian 1860s’ (p. 2). Because he does not separate ‘nihilism’ from Chernyshevskii’s thought, he explicitly contends that Rand reproduced Chernyshevskii’s ideas. This flattening of intellectual history is, I believe, a result of Weinacht’s analytic method. His Introduction articulates an approach borrowed from semiotics as well as from the discourse analysis of Michel Foucault. In seeking to attend to social and cultural context, Weinacht assumes that ‘ideas themselves take on the role of active historical agents, in their own right’ (p. 12). By way of articulating the historical trajectory of ‘nihilism’ as a discrete set of consistent concepts moving through time, Weinacht constructs what he refers to as an ‘edifice of themes’ shared by Chernyshevskii and Rand (p. 137). He stacks quotations and themes from What Is to Be Done? alongside analysis of writings by Fedor Dostoevskii, the critic Dmitrii Pisa-rev, the philosopher Vladimir Solovʹev, the Symbolist poets and theorists Zinaida Gippius and Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, the early twentieth-century novelist Mikhail Artsybashev, the Soviet philosopher and science fiction writer Alexander Bogdanov, and of course Rand herself, in thematically organized chapters. The result is a range of intriguing echoes and reformulations of ideas, but Weinacht’s neglect of how the meaning and significance of concepts and themes change through their reception history limits the insight his observations offer. Rand spent her childhood in the Russian Empire and came of age during the Russian Revolution. Her ideas were forged initially in a Russian intellectual ferment, where discussion of questions such as the utopian potential of love, the relationship between art and life...