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Comment by adavies42 | Hacker News Reader

> The speech reads like an English translation of an ideological Russian novel, which I suppose in some sense it is. Rand comes across as a shrill and graphomanic anti-Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky was a polar opposite kind of conservative to AR, if she can be called conservative, and boy would he have had a field day with this.)

Rand was a fan of Dostoevsky (see The Romantic Manifesto http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451149165). (By comparison, she couldn't stand Tolstoy, and considered Anna Karenina one of the (morally) worst books ever written.)

Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical http://www.amazon.com/dp/0271014415 considers her from a perspective that sounds similar to yours. (I haven't read it myself.)

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Rand was a fan of Dostoevsky

That's emotionally unsurprising but ideologically weird, since for Dostoevsky money is anything but "the product of virtue" and wealth creation is the last thing his characters are interested in. They kill for money, gamble for it, burn it, tear it up and throw it away, but the one thing they never do is rationally invest it.

Dostoevsky lived on the edge financially until late in life and thought that a society based on "wealth creation" was vulgar and spiritually dead. He critiqued it hilariously in The Gambler.

a perspective that sounds similar to yours

Yes, what I'm saying is that Ayn Rand was probably a Russian radical who merely flipped the high-order ideological bit. In other words, she's closer to Stalin than to Adam Smith.

Rand also liked Victor Hugo and Mickey Spillane.

If you're at all interested in her aesthetic principles, give The Romantic Manifesto a try--it's an essay collection, and quite short (by her standards at least--about 200 pages).

My point is that she had at least as much cause to reject Dostoevsky on "moral" grounds as Tolstoy. I'd bet a fiver that she has to twist herself into quite some contortion to justify that one.

Ayn Rand is interesting, in my opinion, as a pathological case. In that respect she's very interesting - like, super weird. As I said, she and the social ripples around her would make a brilliant subject for a great comic novelist, if there were one around with the depth to get it right psychologically. But I'm not going to work on anything like that, so I have little reason to read her. Sorry if I'm offending you by being so dismissive. I do appreciate your comments.

Thanks for the rather punchy, refreshing literary and ideological analysis of Rand in this thread. It's a pity you're not going to contribute more words to a critique of her ideas, but I can certainly understand why.

In one brief excursion you've managed to survey the land of Rand and come away with the essence of what I found so absurd about Atlas Shrugged, the only book of hers I've read.

As a young pup I found it enjoyable, and her relentless romanticism did manage to cultivate within me an appreciation of capitalism, industry, and money at some emotional level (that was not unlike jaysonelliot's experience with more traditional financial self-help books).

However I left the novel amused by its absurdity and extremism and promptly discovered the world of Objectivists and the cult of Rand. At that point amusement turned to bemusement at the ideological adoration heaped on her by what seemed to be a whole intellectual movement. Eek.

As you mention, it's easy to see why the greed-is-good financialization crowd go in for Rand - she provides a satisfactorily-sized ideological fig-leaf for naked greed.

I'm off to read some Dostoevsky.

I'm off to read some Dostoevsky.

In that case I've done some good! If you want his critique of capitalism, The Gambler is pretty good. But if you want sheer entertainment, I think The Double is one of the best things Dostoevsky ever wrote. It was only his second novel, and before he was sent to Siberia. His first novel Poor Folk had made him a huge star (even though it's no longer thought to be very good). So he thought he'd top that and came out with The Double which was so weird and out-there that everybody immediately pronounced him a has-been. It's complete genius, though, and very funny.

Edit: if on the other hand you want the classics then Crime and Punishment is likely your best bet. It's all about what happens when someone takes an idea to its extreme conclusion and acts on it. And it's his easiest big novel from a story point of view.

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