Overshadowed: The Life of Hortense Rand (Part the First)

You've probably heard of the famed author and philosopher Ayn Rand, but few people know of her sister, Hortense. Born a mere fourteen months apart, Ayn and Hortense could not have had more disparate childhood experiences.

According to a new biography by Odette Salerno, Overshadowed: The Life of Hortense Rand (Vintage Press, 2010, $24.99), Ayn enjoyed all of the luxuries of aristocratic life while her younger sister was mysteriously shunted off to live with distant relatives. Odette Salerno provides two possible reasons for this: (1) Zinovy Rosenbaum (Rand's father) agreed to hand the girl over in exchange for his cousin Yuri Oglivich's silence regarding Zinovy's bizarre sexual practices (which are unknown but may have involved "the prying of cobblestones from busy streets" and "improper use of the imperfective aspect tense of the Russian language," Salerno, p. 34) or (2) Zinovy and his wife Anna were so repulsed by the "fleshy hook" Hortense had in place of a right hand that they sold her off to Yuri Oglivich. Either way, Hortense spent the first fifteen years of her life in Bashkortostan with the Ogliviches, where she worked many grueling hours a day in her uncle's makeshift animal rendering plant.

In 1921, pressure from the Bolshevik regime in Petrograd forced Uncle Yuri to close the plant after, literally, hundreds of complaints were filed about the putrid stink of animal carcasses wafting into the nearest town, Oktyabrskiy, over seven hundred miles away.

The next year, Hortense, at the age of 16, moved to Paris in search of work and a rare artifact called the Eye of Djoser. Although she never found the artifact, she found work as a personal food taster for General Charles de Gaulle, who insisted that all of his food be tested for hints of penguin dust---a substance he claimed to be violently allergic to.

Despite his arcane fears, Hortense found de Gaulle to be quite agreeable. In fact, the two may have, at one point, had more than just a professional relationship. In an interview given in 1973, Hortense claimed to have once had torrid affairs with both Charles de Gaulle and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons---the latter of which her sister called "about as convincing as the ethic of altruism displayed by my character James Taggart in Atlas Shrugged, on sale now in Bantam paperback, $8.99."

Hortense left France in 1931 under mysterious circumstances and moved to Baltimore, Maryland. This marked a turning point in young Hortense's life. Up until this moment, she had thought she was an only child and that her Uncle Yuri was not her uncle by blood. Apparently, Yuri Oglivich told Hortense he had found her as an infant, lodged in the asshole of a dead circus elephant.

The discovery of her true identity, the first meeting with her sister Ayn, their friendship, subsequent falling-out, and the formation of Hortense's philosophical movement, Subjectivism, will be the focus of Part Two of Overshadowed: The Life of Hortense Rand. Stay Tuned!