Our Notes & References

Beautiful copy of the rare first Russian edition of Rand’s celebrated novel, translated by a ‘randian’ follower and character.

Gradually, after its publication in 1943, the novel The Fountainhead — about a gifted architect resisting the compromises of a collectivist establishment — became a bestseller and brought fame to Alisa Rozenbaum, the Russian lady born in St. Petersburg who became famous in America as Ayn Rand (1905–82). Despite her international fame, “Rand remained entirely unknown in the USSR. Her books were not translated into Russian in the West […] The first brief references to Ayn Rand in Russian literature — mostly negative — began to appear in the 1980s and early 1990s. Literary scholars and political scientists, who naturally had not read her works but had merely heard of her, criticised her for her extreme individualism and anti-communism” (Nikiforova, our translation here and below).

The first Russian translations of Rand’s works became possible thanks to Dmitrii Kostygin (b. 1972), who in the 1990s was working as a tour guide when he met Ken Schoolland on his travels/ Schoolland had formerly been an economist at the US Department of Commerce and was now Associate Professor of Economics and Director of the Entrepreneurship Center at Hawai’i Pacific University. “After visiting the United States in 1993 at Schoolland’s invitation, the 21-year-old Kostygin raised several tens of thousands of dollars from private investors” to publish his translations of Rand’s books in Russia: first We the Living, then The Fountainhead, and, around 1997, Atlas Shrugged (Zinchenko). The publisher of our edition is indeed an ‘Association of Businessmen of St. Petersburg’. Wider awareness of Rand’s work in Russia, however, came more than a decade later, with the second edition of The Fountainhead, alongside other titles in the early 2010s.

While translating Rand’s books, Kostygin also established several successful retail businesses, meeting one of his principal partners and investors through their shared admiration for Ayn Rand. He appeared in the Russian Forbes top 200 on several occasions in the late 2010s. From 2020 onwards, however, he and his partner, the US investor August Meyer, faced prosecution in Russia on fraud charges.

Very rare, as we could trace only two copies in libraries worldwide (Giessen in Germany with WorldCat, to which we could add the St. Petersburg Herzen University) – apparently none in America. We couldn’t trace any copies at auction since publication, even in Russia.

Bibliography

Nikiforova, Liudmila, Kizilov, Mikhail. Ain Rand, ZhZL, Molodaia gvardiia, 2020; Zinchenko, Galina. «Atlant» rasstavil seti: kak perevodchik sozdal biznes s oborotom 70 mlrd rublei // Forbes, 26 Aug. 2013.