How Bad Writing Destroyed the World

Literature can be used to disseminate ideas with devastating real-life consequences. In How Bad Writing Destroyed the World, Adam Weiner spans decades and continents to reveal the surprising connections between the 2008-2009 financial crisis and a relatively unknown nineteenth-century Russian author. A congressional investigation placed the blame for the financial crisis on Alan Greenspan and his deregulatory policies—his attempts, in essence, to put Ayn Rand’s Objectivism into practice. Though developed most famously in Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Objectivism sprouted from the Rational Egoism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to be Done? (1863), an enormously influential Russian novel decried by the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov for its destructive radical ethics. In tracing the origins of Greenspan’s ruinous ideology, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World combines literary and intellectual history to uncover the danger of hawking “the virtues of selfishness,” even in fiction.

Weiner’s is an intellectual history told as a horror story. The history is a deliberately ironic one: how "rational egoism," the doctrine of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel/manifesto "What Is to Be Done?," which was the inspiration for Russian revolutionaries from Bakunin to Lenin, migrated to the United States in the guise of Ayn Rand’s far-right objectivism. … Weiner rises to the challenge of paraphrasing Chernyshevsky and Rand and illustrating the clumsiness and incoherence of their books., Weiner’s literary criticism, focusing on political and philosophical themes, is solid up to and including his explication of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, written by a woman who, Weiner reminds us, grew up in St. Petersburg at a time when Chernyshevsky’s influence there was ‘ubiquitous and unassailable.’ Weiner’s conclusion that ‘unfettered capitalism is no more a utopia than the chained collective’ effectively damns both Chernyshevsky and Rand in one sentence., [Shows that] appalling fiction by an appalling woman is not only a reliable shelf-scanning test when sizing up dates for arrogance or stupidity, but literally toxic. Weiner's pugnacious look at the bad, bad, morally and stylistically bad books of Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum pans back to show us Alan Greenspan and the crash on one end of a comedy of horrors, and a key Rand influence, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, on the other, via Nabokov and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. You've got to love a scholar who starts with ‘On the Dubious Virtues of Selfishness’ - and ends with ‘In the Graveyard of Bad Ideas’, a closing shot of Atlas Shrugged's chain-smoking ghouls, a crack about lung cancer and the words ‘The vulture will always come home to roost.’, Weiner’s book succeeds in offering an entertaining, if sensationalist, introduction to the politics of literary radicalism for a non-academic audience., An enormously helpful study ... This book is essential reading for understanding the growth of Russian literature in its golden period during the nineteenth century – and for exposing the surprising origin and unsuspected genesis to the ideology behind Greenspan and Trump.

Adam Weiner is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Wellesley College, USA. He is the author of By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (1998).