From Anne C. Heller's "Ayn Rand and the World She Made", pp. 395-7 - when in 1973 her little sister turns out to be alive and Ayn sponsors her and her husband to come over to the U.S., hopefully to defect:
If Rand hadn't fundamentally changed, Nora had... Now she appeared to be an average, aging Russian woman, satisfied to be cared for by the state. She and Fedor were childless, and they lived in a one-room apartment that was regarded as luxurious in a period when many Russian families had to double or triple up... Although they were not communists, they thought of themselves as loyal Soviet citizens, attended shul, and were proud of their relatively comfortable position. When Rand or one of her circle argued against Soviet totalitarianism and in favor of individual liberties, Nora responded, "What good is political freedom to me? I'm not an activist." She quarreled with her sister over the benefits of capitalism and the evils of altruism, about which she later said, "It was the altruism of our entire family that enable Alyssa [=Ayn] to get out to the United States in the first place."
Worse, perhaps, Nora didn't approve of America. She disliked American conveniences, which left her with nothing to do all day; she preferred her old routine of waiting in food lines and gossiping with her friends...
Worst of all, Nora did not admire Rand's novels. On the Drobyrshevs' first evening in New York, Rand had proudly presented Nora with copies of all four... But she gained no recognition from Nora. With the exception of part of 'We the Living', she later said that the little she read was offensive and contrived... Nora borrowed or bought a volume by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose more subversive works were unavailable in Russia... Rand hated Solzhenitsyn for his outspoken anti-Western views and his religiosity, and when she discovered that Nora preferred his writing to her own, she demanded that Nora return her books. Nora complied. All told, the little sister pronounced her older sister's writing to be "fake" and "lacking in talent," and she paid no more attention to it...
She did not see them off. She did contact her lawyer, Eugene Winick, to assure herself that Nora would not automatically inherit any of her money when she died...
Even after Nora's return to Russia, Rand avoided speaking of her sister... Although childhood had been the time "when I liked everything about [my sister]," Nora recalled in 1997, "I was [merely] her shadow and yes-man... She always wanted adoring fans." Nora died in St. Petersburn in 1999, at the age of eighty-eight, without ever speaking again to Rand.
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3 comments:
No one knew her better. Though the one book I read by Solzhenitsyn was insufferable.
Ayn Rand last saw her sister before she left for the U.S. in the early 20s, and then she thought that she had died in the Siege of Leningrad with her parents, and then it turned out she was alive... I found that whole part of the book arresting.
Just think, if she'd died there might have been a heroine or two in her books.
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