Anatoly Lunacharsky
1875–1933
Anatoly
Lunacharsky was the USSR’s first Commissar of Education. He was born in 1875 in
Poltava (Ukraine) to minor nobility with an educated radical consciousness. It
was an environment not unlike Lenin’s, though less provincial. “I became a
revolutionary so early in life that I don’t remember when I was not one.”
In 1894, he left Russia for Switzerland and was a pupil of Avenarius. In 1896, he returned to Russia – and was arrested for party building activities. He was exiled to Kaluga. In 1901 or 1902, he returned to Kiev.
Isaac Deutscher wrote in a 1967 intro to this book:
“His role in the events of 1917 was quite outstanding, as all eye-witnesses testify. The ‘soft’ ‘God-seeker’ with the air of the absent-minded professor, surprised and astonished all who saw him by his indominable militancy and energy. He was the great orator of Red Petrograd, second only to Trotsky, addressing every day, or even several times a day, huge, hungry and angry crowds or workers, soldiers and saolors ...”
He was jailed by Kerensky in July 1917. Made Commissar of Education in Lenin’s first government. Died in 1933, just before taking the station of Ambassador to Spain.
WORKS
Revolutionary Silhouettes, 1923
Public Education in the Russian Socialistic Federation of Soviet Republics, 1926 [pdf]
On Literature and Art, 1965
Other Writings:
Self-Education of the Workers. The Cultural Task of the Struggling Proletariat, 1918
To All Who Teach, 1918
Smolny on the Night of the Storm
Vasilisa the Wise, a dramatic fairy tale [pdf]
Dostoyevsky as an Artist and Thinker, 1921
On Pushkin, 1922
Prohibition of public display of the swastika, 1922
The Italian Question, 1923
Byron, Shelley and Heine, 1924
German Classical Literature, 1924
Romantic Literature, 1924
Lecture on Dostoyevsky, 1926
Romanticism, 1928
Hamann, 1929
On Walter Benjamin’s Goethe article, 1929
Dostoyevsky’s Worldview and Creativity, 1931
Leo Tolstoy, 1931
Holderlin, 1931
Goethe and His Age, 1932
Ibsen, 1934