Dalrymple Nails It: Rand as a Russians

I enjoy reading Theodore Dalrymple, but I try to keep my wits about me. He's a bit too emphatic, too grab-your-lapels and yell-in-your-face for my taste. He's a clear-eyed moralist but also a good hater and the two do not always sit well together.

But here for once, he nails it, with the shrewdest critique of Ayn Rand I've ever seen: she's a Russian. Okay, I knew that, but it took Dalrymple that she fits rather nicely into the long line of Russian moralists who, well, who grab your lapels and yell in your face.

The Russian tradition to which Rand belongs is not that of Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekhov but that of Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, and Chernyshevsky: that is to say, of angry literary and social critics, pamphleteers and ideologues. ... Her combination of vehemence, moral fanaticism, and mediocrity as a thinker was very characteristic of [that] earnest journalistic tradition ...

Great as far as it goes. I'd add that perhaps the best place to find all these hypnotically tiresome scolds together is in Dostoevsky's novel, The Devils, his savagely funny lampoon of so much that is unhinged in 19th Century Russian political thought And, dare it be said, there's more than a bit of it in Dostoevsky himself--an infinitely better writer or thinker than Rand ever thought of being, but possessed of (or by?) some of the same tendency to mania--the fanaticism, at least, though happily free of the mediocrity.

Dalrymple's comparison to Stalin is just stilly, though. Stalin was a thug, and he wrote like a thug. I've never been a Randian but when it comes to comparisons, she deserves better than that. See Dalrymple's whole piece here (no paywall!). H/T Steve.