Lev Lunts

Lev Natanovich Lunts (Лев Ната́нович Лунц; May 2, 1901 – May 10, 1924) was a Russian playwright, proser and critic.

Lunts was born in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, into a middle-class Jewish family on May 2, 1901.

His father, Natan Yakovlevich, an emigrant from Lithuania, was a pharmacist and seller of scientific instruments.

His mother, Anna Efimovna, was an accomplished pianist.

As a child, Lev was delicate but very lively; he contracted pneumonia and diphtheria, which may have weakened his heart.

At a very early age he began to write humorous stories for the amusement of friends and family; in his teens, he was attracted to Western adventure novels and classical plays, especially of Italian and Spanish literature.

Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto he considered a great discovery of his youth.

He took his school work very seriously, and in the summer of 1918 graduated from the Petrograd First Gimnaziya with a gold medal.

In September of the year he enrolled in the Philological Faculty (Romance-Germanic Department) of Petrograd University.

Here he studied Italian, Spanish, German, French, Latin and the histories and literatures of these languages.

His term papers were so outstanding that he was considered "a future light of science," as Kornei Chukovsky recalled in his memoirs.

Highly active in the years 1919-1924, he completed five plays, two screenplays for the silent film, eight articles on the theater, one novella, a dozen stories and a dozen essays, in addition to learning languages, completing his undergraduate courses and participating in the lively activities of the Serapions.

His first play, The Son of the Sheik (1919), of which only fragments survive, concerns an ageing sheik who fears for the survival of his newborn son and heir.

He therefore decides to keep him away from all women, including his mother, and even to prevent him from learning of the existence of a second sex.

This situation provides the setup for a series of theatrical pieces (the expulsion of a loving wife, the worries of a doting father, the discovery of feminine charm by an innocent boy), which are treated in a stylized and humorous fashion.

The manuscript states that the theme was taken from an Arabic legend.

All four of the complete plays, despite their heterogeneity, explore the conflict between the individual's rage for freedom and society's need for order.

Read separately, they evoke the excitement of the avant-garde theater in early post-revolutionary Russia, but taken together develop a philosophical theme to a surprising depth for a writer so young.

Their theme of anarchic freedom vs. imposed social control carries over into Lunts's spectacular screenplay, Vostanie veshchei [Things In Revolt], a silent-film scenario discovered forty years after his death.

Its basic idea is a revolt of inanimate objects to establish law and order over lawless and inconsistent mankind.

Outside the Law (1920), set in an abstract, conventional Spain, presents a Robin Hood bandit who is declared by the authorities to be outside the law.

He wittily turns this declaration into a formula for freedom, unpredictable action and revolution with himself as the leader of the masses.

The Apes Are Coming! (1920-1923), written under the influence of radical directors like Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Radlov, is a wild burlesque of the Bolshevik revolution with a tumultuous conclusion that tears down the set.

He was a founding member of the Serapion Brothers (1921-1929), a group of young writers who emerged from the literary studio at the House of Arts in Petrograd.

After his death, his works were censored in Russia for the full extent of the Soviet period (1921-1991), but he was remembered for his daring defense of creative freedom against Bolshevik Party demands for political commitment.

His worsening health at the end of that year, however, compelled him to seek care in Germany, to which his parents had emigrated early in 1921.

Completing his courses in the spring of 1922, Lunts was retained for graduate school and began reading the novels of Balzac.

The hero of Bertrand de Born (1922) is a historical figure of the 12th century, a seditious troubadour at the court of King Henry II in Argentan, France.

Lunts appended an afterword to the play presenting his credo of a new romantic tragedy for revolutionary times.

The harsh conditions of the time and his hectic literary activity thoroughly exhausted him and ruined his health, and he sought medical care abroad in June 1923.

After several months in a sanatorium in southern Germany, he died of heart failure and a brain embolism in the city hospital of Hamburg, a week after his twenty-third birthday.

With a commission from the university to study Italian and Spanish in Europe, and recommendations from influential writers, he was permitted to leave Russia, and took a steamship to Hamburg on June 1, 1923.

Lunts was an experimental writer who tried a great variety of forms.

His theatrical compositions present his most impressive body of work.

He wrote five plays, two screenplays, a half-dozen articles on the theater and a couple of play reviews.

As a fervent Westernizer among the Serapion Brothers, Lunts advocated that they learn from the adventure literature of Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexandre Dumas père, and by way of example wrote two romantic plays filled with intrigue and action.

The last play, The City of Truth (1923), is a parable of the revolution in which homesick soldiers stumble into a calm and reasonable utopia, and get bored with the peace.

Written in less than three weeks during the summer of 1923, while Lunts was gravely ill, it depicts a whole city of things moving by themselves and attacking people, both on the street and in their apartments.

Finally in 2003 and 2007, well after the collapse of the Soviet Union, his complete works were published in Russia.

A three-volume edition of his collected works appeared in English translation in 2014-2016.