Specificity of the National Character in the Description of Entrepreneurs in Cameron Hawley’s and Ayn Rand’ s Novels

The novels of the American writer Cameron Hawley (Cash McCall, Executive Suit) and the American writer and philosopher from Russia Ayn Rand (Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) are analyzed in the article. The entrepreneur image that has a brightly expressed national specificity is the key image for the comparison. In the first part of the research, a review of the genealogy of the national image of the entrepreneur as a character is done, and the evolution of this image in Russian and American cultures is traced. The conclusion here is that the image of a businessman in American literature was positive until the middle of the 20th century, the time of the crisis of the American dream, while the image of an entrepreneur in Russian literature was always primarily negative because of the gap between two types of rationality-practical and axiological (N. Zarubina). In the second part of the research, the roots of entrepreneur images of both authors are identified. The conclusion here is that, the basis of Rand’s latest characters is the image of a Russian revolutionist a la Kerensky (Leo Kovalensky in her first novel We The Living), which is expressed in their adventurism, irreconcilable individualism, and love of freedom. The genetic basis of Hawley’s characters is the image of the American superman limited in his ambitions (U. Eco), which is different from the Russian hero who always focuses on global achievements. In the third part of the research, the author distinguishes four types of entrepreneurs as characters in the both authors’ novels: a lucky businessman who runs a business behind the scenes, an authoritarian leader, a pragmatic fantasist, a symbiosis of a talented scholar and an entrepreneur. Despite the external resemblance of the two writers’ characters, the research shows that Rand’s character does not have the dichotomy of that of Hawley: Rand formulates the ideal of a “new intellectual” (For The New Intellectual) aiming to overcome Russian culture’s being torn between the two rationality types. Rand’s character, unlike Hawley’s, is an ideologist, and he has messianic features. Hawley’s attempt to combine the thinker and the businessman in the image of MacDonald Walling was unconvincing: Walling thinks only about his personal success and the company’s interests (the topics of American literature) while John Galts’s efforts focus on the improvement of the life of the country and humankind as a whole (the topics of Russian literature). In the conclusion, the author states that, despite the external similarity of the writers’ entrepreneur characters, Ayn Rand endows the entrepreneur image with features inherent in Russian literature, and Cameron Hawley depicts characters typical for American literature.

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