Anatoly Lunacharsky

Anatoly Lunacharsky Анато́лий Лунача́рский
Lunacharsky in 1925
In office October 26, 1917 – September 1929
Preceded by	None (position established)
Succeeded by	Andrei Bubnov
Born	November 23 [O.S. November 11] 1875 Poltava, Russian Empire
Died	26 December 1933 (aged 58) Menton, Alpes-Maritimes, France
Political party	RSDLP (Bolsheviks) (1903–1918) Russian Communist Party (1918–1933)
Alma mater	University of Zurich
Occupation	Politician essayist journalist

Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (Russian: Анато́лий Васи́льевич Лунача́рский) (born Anatoly Aleksandrovich Antonov, November 23, [O.S. November 11] 1875 – December 26, 1933) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Bolshevik Soviet People's Commissar (Narkompros) responsible for the Ministry of Education. In addition to his government functions he was an active playwright, critic, essayist, and journalist throughout his career.

His brother-in-law was Alexander Bogdanov, a close associate of Vladimir Lenin prior to the revolution and a Minister of Culture after the revolution. After Lenin's death, he avoided taking sides in the leadership struggle, representing the Soviet Union in the League of Nations in the early 1930s. Appointed Ambassador to Spain in 1933, he died en route.

Background

Lunacharsky was born as the illegitimate child of Alexander Antonov and Alexandra Lunacharskaya, née Rostovtsevaon on November 23 or 24, 1875 in Poltava, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire). His mother was then married to statesman Vasily Lunacharsky, a nobleman of Polish origin. Anatoly took her husband's surname and patronym. She later divorced Vasily Lunacharsky and married Antonov, but Anatoly kept his former name.

In 1890, at the age of 15, Lunacharsky became a Marxist. From 1894, he studied at the University of Zurich under Richard Avenarius for two years without taking a degree. In Zürich he met European socialists, including Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. He also lived for a time in France.

Early career

Lunacharsky in 1899

In 1899, Lunacharsky returned to Russia, where he and Vladimir Lenin's sister revived the Moscow Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), until they were betrayed by an informant and arrested. He was allowed to settle in Kyiv, but was arrested again after resuming his political activities. After ten months in prison he was sent to Kaluga, where he joined a Marxist circle that included Alexander Bogdanov and Vladimir Bazarov.

In February 1902, he was exiled to Kushinov village in Vologda, where he again shared his exile with Bogdanov, and with the Legal Marxist Nikolai Berdyaev and the Socialist Revolutionary terrorist Boris Savinkov among others. He married Anna Alexandrovna Malinovskaya, Alexander Bogdanov's sister that year. They had one child, a daughter named Irina Lunacharsky. After the first issue of Lenin's newspaper Iskra (The Spark) had reached Vologda, Bogdanov and Lunacharsky organized a Marxist circle that distributed illegal literature, while he also legally wrote theater criticism for a local liberal newspaper. In March 1903, the governor of Vologda ordered Lunacharsky to be transferred further north, to Totma, where they were the only political exiles.

In 1903, the RSDLP split between the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, and the Mensheviks. Lunacharsky, who by now had ended his period in exile and was back in Kyiv, originally believed that the split was unnecessary and joined the "conciliators," who hoped to bring the two sides together, but he was converted to Bolshevism by Bogdanov. In 1904, he moved to Geneva and became one of Lenin's most active collaborators and an editor of the first exclusively Bolshevik newspaper, Vpered (Forward). According to Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya:

Lunacharsky turned out to be a brilliant orator and did a great deal to assist in strengthening the Bolshevik positions. From then on Lenin became on very good terms with Lunacharsky, became jolly in his presence, and was rather partial towards him even at the time of the difference with the Vpered-ites. Anatoly Vasilyevich was always particularly eager and witty in Lenin's presence.

Lunacharsky returned to Russia after the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution. In Moscow he co-edited the journal Novaya zhizn (New Life) and other Bolshevik publications, which could be published legally, and gave lectures on art and literature. Arrested during a workers' meeting, he spent a month in Kresty Prison.

Soon after his release, he faced "extremely serious" charges, and fled abroad, via Finland, in March 1906. In 1907, he attended the International Socialist Congress held in Stuttgart.

Vpered

In 1908, when the Bolsheviks split between Lenin's supporters and Alexander Bogdanov's followers, Lunacharsky supported his brother-in-law Bogdanov in setting up a new Vpered. During this period, he wrote a two-volume work on the relationship between Marxism and religion, Religion and Socialism (1908, 1911), declaring that god should be interpreted as "humanity in the future." This earned him the description "god builder."

Like many contemporary socialists (including Bogdanov), Lunacharsky was influenced by the empirio-criticism philosophy of Ernst Mach and Avenarius. Lenin opposed Machism as a form of subjective idealism and strongly criticized its proponents in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908).

In 1909, Lunacharsky joined Bogdanov and Maxim Gorky at the latter's villa on the island of Capri, where they started a school for Russian socialist workers. In 1910, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky and their supporters moved the school to Bologna, where they continued teaching classes through 1911. In 1911, Lunacharsky moved to Paris, where he started his own "Circle of Proletarian Culture."

World War I

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Lunacharsky adopted an internationalist antiwar position, which put him on a course of convergence with Lenin and Leon Trotsky. In 1915, Lunacharsky and Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky restarted the social democratic newspaper Vpered with an emphasis on proletarian culture. From 1915, he also worked for the daily newspaper Nashe Slovo (Our Word), sometimes acting as peacemaker between the two editors, Trotsky and the Menshevik internationalist Julius Martov.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Lunacharsky left his family in Switzerland and returned to Russia on a sealed train - though not the same train that Lenin had used earlier. Like other internationalist social democrats returning from abroad, he briefly joined the Mezhraiontsy before they merged with the Bolsheviks in July–August 1917. He was also cultural editor of Novaya Zhizn (New Life), until forced against his will to sever this connection, because the paper took an anti-Bolshevik line.

Even before he formally joined the Bolsheviks, he proved to be one of their most popular and effective orators, often sharing a platform with Trotsky. He was arrested with Trotsky on July 22, 1917, on a charge of inciting the "July Days" riots, and was held in Kresty prison until September.

People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros)

After the October Revolution of 1917, Lunacharsky was appointed head of the People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) in the first Soviet government. On November 15, after eight days in this post, he resigned in protest over a rumor that the Bolsheviks had bombarded St Basil's Cathedral on Red Square while they were storming the Kremlin, but after two days he withdrew his resignation. After the creation of the Soviet Union, he became People's Commissar for Enlightenment, which was a function devolved to the union republics, for the Russian Federation only.

Lunacharsky opposed the decision in 1918 to transfer Russia's capital to Moscow and stayed for a year in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) and left the running of his commissariat to his deputy, Mikhail Pokrovsky.

Lunacharsky once described Nadezhda Krupskaya as the "soul of Narkompros."

Lunacharsky, People's Commissar for Education on 13 Congress of Soviets of the RSFSR, April 1927

Education

On November 10, 1917, Lunacharsky signed a decree making school education a state monopoly at local government level and said that his department would not claim central power over schools. In December, he ordered church schools to be brought under the jurisdiction of local soviets.

He faced determined opposition from the teachers' union. In February 1918, the fourth month of a teachers' strike, he ordered all teachers to report to their local soviets and to stand for re-election to their jobs. In March, he reluctantly disbanded the union and sequestered its funds. Largely because of the opposition from teachers, he had to abandon his scheme for local autonomy.

He also believed in polytechnical schools, in which children could learn a range of basic skills, including manual skills, with specialist training beginning in late adolescence. All children were to have the same education and would automatically qualify for higher education, but opposition from Trotsky and others later compelled him to agree that specialist education would begin in secondary schools.

In July 1918, he proposed that all university lecturers should be elected for seven-year terms, irrespective of their academic qualifications, that all courses would be free, and that institutions would be run by elected councils composed of staff and students. His ideas were vigorously opposed by academics.

In June 1919, The New York Times decried Lunacharsky's efforts in education in an article entitled "Reds Are Ruining Children of Russia." It claimed that he was instilling a "system of calculated moral depravity [...] in one of the most diabolical of all measures conceived by the Bolshevik rulers of Russia."

Culture

Lunacharsky alongside Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1924

A week before the October Revolution, Lunacharsky convened and presided over a conference of proletarian cultural and educational organizations, at which the independent art movement Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) was launched, with Lunacharsky's former colleague, Bogdanov, as its leading figure. In October 1920, he clashed with Lenin, who insisted on bringing Proletkult under state control. Though Lunacharsky believed in encouraging factories to create literature or art, he did not share the hostility to "bourgeois" art forms exhibited by RAPP and other exponents of proletarian art.

In the week after the revolution, he invited everyone in Petrograd involved in cultural or artistic work to a meeting at Communist Party headquarters. Although the meeting was widely advertised, no more than seven people showed up, though the seven included leading figures such as Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Larissa Reissner.

Art

Lunacharsky directed some of the great experiments in public arts after the Revolution, such as the agit-trains and agit-boats that circulated over all Russia spreading revolutionary ideas and arts. He also gave support to constructivism's experiments and the initiatives such as the ROSTA Windows, revolutionary posters designed and written by Mayakovsky and Rodchenko among others. With his encouragement, 36 new art galleries were opened between 1918 and 1921.

Cinema

Mayakovsky stimulated Lunacharsky's interest in cinema, which was an emerging art form. Lunacharsky wrote an "agit-comedy," which was filmed in the streets of Petrograd for the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. Soon afterwards, he nationalized the film industry and founded the State Film School. In 1920, he told George Lansbury: "So far, cinemas are not much use owing to shortage of materials. ... When these difficulties are removed ... the story of humanity will be told in pictures."

Theater

In the early 1920s, theater appears to have been the art form to which Lunacharsky attached the greatest importance. In 1918, when most Bolsheviks despised experimental art, Lunacharsky praised Mayakovsky's play "Mystery-Bouffe," directed by Meyerhold, which he described as "original, powerful and beautiful." But his main interest was not experimental theater. During the civil war, he wrote two symbolic dramas, "The Magi" and "Ivan Goes to Heaven," and a historical drama "Oliver Cromwell." In July 1919, he took personal charge of the theater administration from Olga Kameneva, with the intention of reviving Realism on stage.

Lunacharsky was associated with the establishment of the Bolshoi Drama Theater in 1919, working with Maxim Gorky, Alexander Blok and Maria Andreyeva. He also played a part in persuading the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) and its renowned directors Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko to end their opposition to the regime and resume productions. In January 1922 he protested vigorously after Lenin had ordered the Bolshoi Ballet to close, and succeeded in keeping it open.

In 1923 he launched a Back to Ostrovsky movement to mark the centenary of Russia's first great playwright. He was also personally involved in the decision to allow the MAT to stage Mikhail Bulgakov's first play, "The Days of the Turbins" (usually known by its original title, "The White Guard.")

Literature

Despite his belief in 'proletarian' literature, Lunacharsky also defended writers who were not experimental, nor even sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. He also helped Boris Pasternak. In 1924, Pasternak's wife wrote to his cousin saying "so far, Lunacharsky has never refused to see Borya.".

In 1929, Lunacharsky supported a change in the Russian alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin.

Music

Lunacharsky was the first Bolshevik to recognize the value of the composer Sergei Prokofiev, whom he met in April 1918, after the premiere of his "Classical Symphony." In 1926, he wrote "the freshness and rich imagination characteristic of Prokofiev attest to his exceptional talent." He arranged a passport that allowed Prokofiev to leave Russia, then in July 1925 he persuaded the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to invite Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, and the pianist Alexander Borovsky to return to Russia. Stravinsky and Borovsky rejected the offer, but Prokofiev was given permission to come and go freely while Lunacharsky was in office. In February 1927, he sat with Prokofiev during the first Russian performance of "The Love for Three Oranges," which he compared to "a glass of champagne, all sparkling and frothy."

Personal Characteristics

Lunacharsky was known as an art connoisseur and a critic. Besides Marxist dialectics, he had been interested in philosophy from his student days. He was fond of the ideas of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Avenarius. He could read six modern languages and two dead ones. Lunacharsky corresponded with H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Romain Rolland. He met numerous other famous cultural figures such as Rabindranath Tagore and Nicholas Roerich.

Though he was influential in setting Soviet policy on culture and education, particularly in the early years while Lenin was alive, Lunacharsky was not a powerful figure. Trotsky described him as "a man always easily infected by the moods of those around him, imposing in appearance and voice, eloquent in a declamatory way, none too reliable, but often irreplaceable." But Ilya Ehrenburg wrote: "I was struck by something different: he was not a poet, he was engrossed in political activity, but an extraordinary love of art burned in him," and Nikolai Sukhanov, who knew him well, wrote that

The great people of the revolution - both his comrades and his opponents - almost always spoke of Lunacharsky with sneers, irony or scorn. Though a most popular personality and minister, he was kept away from high policy: 'I have no influence,' he once told me himself ... But that is his historical role; for the brilliance of talent, to say nothing of culture, he has no equal in the constellation of Bolshevik leaders.

Later career

In 1922, he met Natalya Rozenel, an actress at the Maly Theatre. He left his family and married her. Sergei Prokofiev, who met her in 1927, described her as "one of his most recent wives," and as "a beautiful woman from the front, much less beautiful if you looked at her predatory profile." He claimed that Lunacharsky had previously been the lover of the ballerina Inna Chernetskaya.

Lunacharsky avoided taking sides when the Communist Party split after Lenin's death, but he almost became embroiled in the split accidentally by publishing his selection of Revolutionary Silhouettes in 1923, which included portraits of Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Julius Martov, but failed to mention Stalin. Later, he offended Trotsky by saying at an event in the Bolshoi Theater to commemorate the second anniversary of Lenin's death, that "they" (he did not say who) were willing to offer Trotsky "a crown on a velvet cushion" and "hail him as Lev I."

After about 1927, he was losing control over cultural policy to Stalinists like Leopold Averbakh. After he was removed from office, in 1929, Lunacharsky was appointed to the Learned Council of the Soviet Union Central Executive Committee. He also became an editor for the Literature Encyclopedia (published 1929–1939).

Lunacharsky represented the Soviet Union at the League of Nations from 1930 through 1932.

In 1930, Lunacharsky established a government commission to research satirical genres in all kinds of art.

Death

Grave of Anatoly Lunacharsky in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis

In 1933, he was appointed ambassador to Spain, a post he never assumed. Lunacharsky died at 58 on December 26, 1933 in Menton, France, while traveling to Spain to take up the post of Soviet ambassador there, as the conflict that became the Spanish Civil War appeared increasingly inevitable.

A monument to Lunacharsky in Menton, France

Legacy

Lunacharsky's remains were returned to Moscow, where his urn was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, a rare privilege during the Soviet era. During the Great Purges of 1936–1938, Lunacharsky's name was erased from the Communist Party's history and his memoirs were banned. A revival came in the late 1950s and 1960s during the period of de-Stalinization, with a surge of memoirs about Lunacharsky and many streets and organizations named or renamed in his honor. During that era, Lunacharsky was viewed by the Soviet intelligentsia as an educated, refined and tolerant Soviet politician.

Soviet stamp portraying Lunacharsky in 1979

In the 1960s, his daughter Irina Lunacharsky helped revive his popularity. Several streets and institutions were named in his honor. In 1971, Asteroid 2446 was named after Lunacharsky. Some Soviet-built orchestral harps also bear the name of Lunacharsky, presumably in his honor. These concert pedal harps were produced in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg, Russia).

The New York Times dubbed Nikolai Gubenko, last culture commissar of the Soviet Union, "the first arts professional since Anatoly V. Lunacharsky" because he seemed to "identify" with Lunacharsky.

Works

Lunacharsky was also a prolific writer. He wrote literary essays on the works of several writers, including Alexander Pushkin, George Bernard Shaw and Marcel Proust. However, his most notable work is his memoirs, Revolutionary Silhouettes, which describe anecdotes and Lunacharsky's general impressions of Lenin, Leon Trotsky and eight other revolutionaries. Trotsky reacted to some of Lunacharsky's opinions in his own autobiography, My Life.

In the 1920s, Lunacharsky produced Lyubov Popova's The Locksmith and the Chancellor at the Comedy Theater.

Some of his works include:

• Outlines of a Collective Philosophy (1909)
• Self-Education of the Workers: The Cultural Task of the Struggling Proletariat (1918)
• Three Plays (1923)
• Revolutionary Silhouettes (1923)
• Theses on the Problems of Marxist Criticism (1928)
• Vladimir Mayakovsky, Innovator (1931).
• George Bernard Shaw (1931)
• Maxim Gorky (1932)
• On Literature and Art (1965)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Braun, Edward. The Theatre of Meyerhold, Revolution on the Modern Stage. London, U.K.: Methuen, 1986. ISBN 0413411206
• Brown, Stuart, Diane Collinson, and Robert Wilkinson. Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers. London, U.K.: Taylor & Francis, 2003. ISBN 978-0203014479
• Carr, Edward Hallett. Socialism in One Country, volume 2. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1970. ISBN 978-0140210392
• Clark, Katerina, and Evgeny Dobrenko. Soviet Culture and Power, A History in Documents, 1917-1953. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0300106466
• Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Armed, Trotsky: 1879-1921. London, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1954.
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila. The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002 (original 1970). ISBN 978-0521524384
• Gérin, Annie. Devastation and laughter: satire, power, and culture in the early Soviet state, 1920s–1930s. Toronto, CA, University of Toronto Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1487502430
• Gorchakov, Nikolai A. The Theatre in Soviet Russia. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1957.
• Haupt, Georges, and Jean-Jacques Marie. Makers of the Russian Revolution, Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders (includes a biographical essay by Lunacharsky published in 1927). London, U.K.: George Allen & Unwin, 1974. ISBN 0049470213
• Krupskaya, Nadezhda. Memories of Lenin. London, U.K.: Panther, 1970. ISBN 978-0586032756
• Leyda, Jay. Kino, A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. London, U.K.: George Allen & Unwin, 1973. ISBN 0047910275
• McSmith, Andy. Fear and the Muse Kept Watch, The Russian Masters - from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein - Under Stalin. New York, NY: New Press, 2015. ISBN 978-1595580566
• Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge, translated by George Shriver. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989. ISBN 978-0231063517
• Nestyev, Israel V. Prokofiev, translated by Florence Jonas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960.
• Prokofiev, Sergei. Soviet Diary 1927 and Other Writings. London, U.K.: Faber and Faber, 1991. ISBN 0571161588
• Rollberg, Peter. Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. ISBN 978-0810860728
• Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer. New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2002 ISBN 0271025336
• Sukhanov, N.N. The Russian Revolution, 1917. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1962.
• Trotsky, Leon. History of the Russian Revolution, volume 2. London, U.K.: Sphere, 1967.
• Woroszylsk, Wiktor The Life of Mayakovsky. New York, NY: Orion, 1970. ISBN 978-0670463510

External Links

All links retrieved August 24, 2023.

• Works by Lunacharsky at Marxist internet archive
• Lunacharsky, Anatoly, "Revolutionary Silhouettes: Vladimir Ilych Lenin," translated by Michael Glenny, Marxist Internet Archives.
• Lunacharsky, A.V., "Theses on the Problems of Marxist Criticism," translated by Y. Ganuskin, Marxist Internet Archive, 1928.
• Lunacharsky, Anatoly, "Vladimir Mayakovsky: Innovator," translated by Y. Ganuskin. Marxist Internt Archive, 1931.
• Lunacharsky, Anatoly, "George Bernard Shaw," translated by Y. Ganuskin. Marxist Internet Archive, 1931.
• Lunacharsky, Anatoly, "Maxim Gorky," trans. Y. Ganuskin, Marxist Internet Archive, 1932.
• Lunacharsky, Anatoly, "On Literature and Art," translated by Avril Pyman and Fainna Glagoleva, edited by K. M. Cook, Marxist Internet Archive, 1965.
• Williams, Robert C., "From Positivism to Collectivism: Lunarcharsky and Proletarian Culture," in Williams, Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1905-1925. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977, ISBN 978-0253061294.
• Lunacharsky, Anatoly, Vasilisa the Wise: a dramatic fairy tale 192?.
• Anatoly Lunacharsky at the Internet Movie Database

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