[adavies42]

> 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.)

[gruseom]

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.

[adavies42]

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).