Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Bolshevik Soviet People's Commissar (Narkompros) responsible for Ministry and Education as well as active playwright, critic, essayist and journalist throughout his career.
Background
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (born Anatoly Aleksandrovich Antonov) was born on 23 or 24 November 1875 in Poltava, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) as the illegitimate child of Alexander Antonov and Alexandra Lunacharskaya, née Rostovtseva. His mother was then married to statesman Vasily Lunacharsky, whence Anatoly's surname and patronym. She later divorced Vasily Lunacharsky and married Antonov, but Anatoly kept his former name.
Education
In 1890, at the age of 15, Anatoly Vasilyevich 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 Labour Party.
Career
In 1896, Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky returned to Russia, where he was arrested and sent to Kaluga in Siberia through 1901–1902, when he returned to Kiev. In February 1902, he moved in with Alexander Bogdanov, who was working in a mental hospital in Vologda, Russia.
In 1903, the party split into Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin and Mensheviks led by Julius Martov and Lunacharsky sided with the former. In 1907, Anatoly Vasilyevich attended the International Socialist Congress, held in Stuttgart. When the Bolsheviks in turn split into Lenin's supporters and Alexander Bogdanov's followers in 1908, Lunacharsky supported his brother-in-law Bogdanov in setting up Vpered. Like many contemporary socialists (including Bogdanov), Anatoly Vasilyevich was influenced by the empirio-criticism philosophy of Ernst Mach and Avenarius. Lenin opposed Machism as a form of subjective idealism and strongly criticised its proponents in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908).
In 1909, Anatoly Vasilyevich joined Bogdanov and 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 1913, Anatoly Vasilyevich moved to Paris, where he started his own Circle of Proletarian Culture.
After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Anatoly Vasilyevich adopted an internationalist antiwar position which put him on a course of convergence with Lenin and Leon Trotsky. In 1915, Anatoly Vasilyevich and Pavel Lebedev-Poliansky restarted the social democratic newspaper Vpered with an emphasis on proletarian culture. After the February Revolution of 1917, he left his family in Switzerland and returned to Russia. Like other internationalist social democrats returning from abroad, he briefly joined the Mezhraiontsy before they merged with the Bolsheviks in July-August 1917. In July 1917, the Kerensky government jailed him.
After the October Revolution of 1917, Anatoly Vasilyevich was appointed as People's Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) in the first Soviet government and remained in that position until 1929. In 1921, The New York Times reported his resignation.
When Joseph Stalin came fully to power in 1929, Anatoly Vasilyevich was dismissed as commissar of culture and education. He 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). In 1930, Lunacharsky represented the Soviet Union at the League of Nations through 1932. In 1933, Anatoly Vasilyevich was appointed ambassador to Spain, a post he never assumed as he died en route. Anatoly Vasilyevich died at 58 on 26 December 1933 in Menton, France en route to take up the post of Soviet ambassador to Spain as the conflict that would become the Spanish Civil War appeared increasingly inevitable.
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky was known as an art connoisseur and a critic. He could read six modern languages and two dead ones.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Frederich Nietzsche, Richard Avenarius
Connections
In 1902, Anatoly Vasilyevich married Anna Alexandrovna Malinovkaya, Alexander Bogdanov's sister. They had one child, a daughter named Irina Lunacharsky. In 1922, he met Natalya Rozenel, an actress at the Maly Theater. He left his family and married her.