Description: An innovative interpretation of the US novelist Ayn Rand as a pre-revolutionary Russian intellectual.
Brief description: Derek Offord is Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at University of Bristol, UK. His publications include Journeys to a Graveyard: Perceptions of Europe in Classical Russian Travel Writing (2006), Nineteenth-Century Russia: Opposition to Autocracy (1999), and (with W. Leatherbarrow) A Documentary History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (1987).
Review Quotes:
"Offord's treatment is much more successful because he focuses more on the general milieu of the Russian intelligentsia ... [Offord] book raises an important question: what does it say about the level of culture in the US whenRand could come here and pass herself off as unique and original when sheclearly was not?" --Slavic Review
"Derek Offord's lively, authoritative and controversial book underscores Ayn Rand's Russian intellectual roots and - more importantly - the habits of mind that she applied later in writing her famous American novels. Offord highlights aspects of American (and not only American!) radical libertarian politics that have been little recognized up to now but deserve remembering." --Gary Hamburg, Otho M. Behr Professor of the History of Ideas, Claremont McKenna College, USA "The high priestess of American capitalism was actually a Russian Nihilist gone rogue. That is the unlikely message of Derek Offord's challenging and engrossing study, which shows how Ayn Rand turned upside down the utopian dreams and literary traditions of Russian radicals and wrote a series of 'capitalist realist' novels. Although living more than fifty years in American emigration, she remained, Offord argues, 'a typical representative of the Russian intelligentsia'." --Geoffrey Swain, Emeritus Professor (School of Social & Political Sciences), University of Glasgow, UK