It gives me great pleasure to announce that JSTOR has published the December 2021 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Project Muse will be publishing this issue soon.
Today, I’d like to begin a series of posts discussing the lead essay in the current issue. That essay, “The Rand Transcript Revealed,” coauthored by Pavel Solovyev and me, is currently available on the JSTOR site. For the benefit of all future scholarship on Ayn Rand, the article provides 28 archival images pertinent to Rand’s education in the Soviet Union. The images appear in color on all e-platforms, and in black and white in the printed hard copy that will be mailed to subscribers soon.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of this essay. My own former detective work, which investigated Rand’s education at the University of Petrograd (formerly the University of Saint Petersburg, later the University of Leningrad, and now the University of Saint Petersburg again), began with my book, published in 1995, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Penn State Press). In that book, I made a lot of educated guesses on what Rand studied and with whom she may have studied, based on my understanding of the enormous changes that were instituted at the University of Petrograd in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. I drew much from Rand’s own recollections, as recorded in a series of biographical interviews conducted by Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden in 1960-1961, as well as from contemporaries of Rand and scholars of the historical period in question.
A lot of what I suggested in that first approximation was given evidential support in the essay that opened the very first issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies: “The Rand Transcript,” published in the Fall of 1999, based on the Leningrad State University diploma of the young Ayn Rand, born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum. That was followed in the Fall of 2005, with “The Rand Transcript, Revisited,” an analysis of much more in-depth records of Rand’s courses, generously provided to me by Anne C. Heller, who wrote the biography, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (2010). Both of these articles were subsequently republished in 2013 as the first two of three appendices in the second edition of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. (The third appendix addressed criticisms of my historical work, followed by another “Reply to Critics” [pdf] published in the December 2017 JARS.)
Unable to digitally reproduce poor photocopies of all the records I had examined, I was elated to discover that in October 2020, Pavel Solovyev had begun to post to a public Ayn Rand group on Facebook many of those same documents, which he had obtained—in pristine color—through the website of the Saint Petersburg Archive. Subsequently, Pavel and I struck up a wonderful collegial friendship, which enabled us to work together toward the publication of this article.
I will have a lot more to say about the article—and the trailblazing analysis of the documents that it contains—over the next few days. For now, on behalf of Pavel and myself, I’d just like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the JARS editorial board and the entire Penn State Press family, especially Joseph Dahm, Rachel Ginder, and Komal Ganjoo, for their helpful guidance in the production of this important project.
Though some on Facebook may have previously seen this image (below), I reproduce here the cover of the personal file of Alissa Rosenbaum (as it appears on page 145 of our journal article)—still rendered in the pre-1918 alphabet—from the Saint Petersburg State Archive. Stay tuned … so much more to come!
Postscript: And check out the public Facebook discussion that followed.
