Anatole Vasilievich Lunacharsky

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For the last decade, political events have swept us apart and placed us in different camps, so that I have been able to keep up with the fortunes of Lunacharsky only through the newspapers. But there were years when we were bound by close political ties and when our personal relations, while not exceptionally intimate, were of a very friendly character.

Lunacharsky was four or five years younger than Lenin and about as many years older than L Though in itself not very great, this age difference nevertheless meant that we belonged to different revolutionary generations. When he entered political life as a high school student in Kiev, Lunacharsky could still be influenced by the last rumblings of the terrorist struggle of the "People's Will" [Narodnaya Volya] against czarism. For my closer contemporaries, the struggle of the "People's Will" was already only a legend.

From his student years on, Lunacharsky astonished people with his many-sided talent He wrote verses, of course; he easily grasped philosophical ideas, performed excellently at student cultural soirees, was an unusually good orator, and showed no lack of colors on his literary palette. As a twenty-year-old youth he was able to deliver lectures on Nietzsche, argue about the categorical imperative, defend Marx's theory of value, and compare Sophocles and Shakespeare. His exceptional gifts were organically combined with the wasteful dilettantism of the aristocratic intelligentsia, which at one time had found its highest journalistic expression in the person of Alexander Herzen.

Lunacharsky was connected with the revolution and socialism for a period of forty years, La, for his whole conscious life. He passed through prisons, exile and emigration, remaining {ill the while an unshakable Marxist During these long years, thousands upon thousands of his former comrades-in-arms from the same circles of the aristocratic and bourgeois intelligentsia migrated into the camp of Ukrainian nationalism, bourgeois liberalism or monarchist reaction. For Lunacharsky, the ideas of the revolution were not a youthful enthusiasm: they entered into his nerves and blood vessels. This is the first thing that must be said over his fresh grave.

However, it would be incorrect to represent Lunacharsky as a man of firm will and stern temper, as a fighter who was never distracted. No. His steadfastness was very — it seemed to many of us, excessively — elastic. Dilettantism possessed not only his intellect but also his character. As an orator and writer, he readily strayed from the subject A literary image not infrequently drew him far from the development of his basic thought As a politician, too, his glance wandered right and left Lunacharsky was too receptive to each and every philosophical and political novelty to fail to be attracted by it and to play with it.

Undoubtedly, this dilettantish generosity of his nature weakened his inner critical sense. His speeches were most frequently improvisations and, as always in such circumstances, were free neither of prolixity nor banality. He wrote or dictated with extraordinary freedom and barely corrected his manuscripts. His intellectual concentration, his ability to censor himself, were not sufficient for him to create those works of more lasting and indisputable value for which his talent and knowledge were fully adequate.

But however Lunacharsky digressed, he returned every time to his basic thought, not only in particular articles and speeches but also in all of his political activity. His various and sometimes unexpected fluctuations had a limited scope; they never went outside the boundaries of the revolution and socialism.

As early as 1904, about a year after the split of the Russian Social Democracy into the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, Lunacharsky, who had arrived in the emigre movement directly from penal exile within Russia, adhered to the Bolsheviks. Lenin, who just before that had broken with his teachers (Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich) and his closest co-thinkers (Martov, Potresov) was very much alone in those days.He was painfully in need of a collaborator to do work in the field, something that Lenin did not like to waste his powers on — nor was it in him to do so. Lunacharsky arrived as a true gift of fate. He had hardly stepped down from the railway carriage before he threw himself into the noisy life of the Russian emigration in Switzerland, France and all of Europe: he gave lectures, debated, polemicized in the press, led study circles, made jokes and witticisms, sang off-key, and captivated young and old with his many-sided education and his sweet reasonableness in personal relations.

A compliant softness was a not unimportant feature in this man's character. He was a stranger to petty vanity, but also to a matter of much greater concern: defending what he himself recognized as the truth, from friend as well as enemy. Throughout his life, Lunacharsky would fall under the influence of people who were not infrequently less knowledgeable and talented than he but of a firmer cast of mind. He came to Bolshevism through his older friend Bogdanov. The young scholar — scientist, doctor, philosopher, economist — Bogdanov (whose real name was Malinovsky) assured Lenin ahead of time that his younger friend Lunacharsky, on arriving abroad, would without fail follow his example and adhere to the Bolsheviks. The prediction was fully confirmed. But that same Bogdanov, after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution, drew Lunacharsky away from the Bolsheviks to a small group of super-intransigents that combined a sectarian "refusal to acknowledge?’ the victorious counterrevolution with abstract preaching of a "proletarian culture” cooked up by laboratory methods.

In the dark years of reaction (1908-12), when there was an epidemic collapse into mysticism on the part of wide circles of the intelligentsia, Lunacharsky, together with Gorky,to whom he was bound by a close friendship, paid tribute to the mystical searchings. While not breaking with Marxism, he began to represent the socialist ideal as a new form of religion and seriously occupied himself with the search for a new ritual. The sarcastic Plekhanov called him "the blessed Anatole." The nickname stuck for a long time. Lenin no less unmercifully flogged his former and future collaborator. Although it gradually softened, the enmity lasted until 1917, when Lunacharsky, not without resistance and not without strong external pressure, this time from me, again adhered to the Bolsheviks. He entered a period of tireless agitational work, which became the period of his political culmination. At this time, too, there was no lack of impressionistic leaps. Thus, he almost broke with the party in the most critical moment, in November 1917, when a rumor arrived from Moscow that the Bolshevik artillery had destroyed St Basil's Church. A connoisseur and admirer of art could not forgive such vandalism! Fortunately, Lunacharsky, as we know, was amiable and agreeable; and besides, St Basil's Church did not suffer at all in the days of the Moscow insurrection.

In his position of people's commissar of education, Lunacharsky was irreplaceable in relations with the old university circles, and pedagogical circles in general, who were convinced that they could expect the complete liquidation of science and art from the "ignorant usurpers." Lunacharsky, effortlessly and enthusiastically, showed this shut-in milieu that the Bolsheviks not only respected culture but were not unacquainted with it More than one academic druid had to stare open-mouthed at this vandal, who could read half a dozen modem languages and two ancient ones and, in passing, unexpectedly displayed such a many-sided erudition as to suffice without difficulty for ten professors. To Lunacharsky belongs much of the credit for reconciling the patented, diploma-bearing intelligentsia to Soviet power. But in the actual effort of organizing the educational system, he proved to be hopelessly incapable After the first ill-fated attempts, in which dilettantish fantasy was woven together with administrative helplessness, Lunacharsky himself ceased to pretend to practical leadership. The Central Committee provided him with assistants, who, screened by the personal authority of the people's commissar, firmly held the reins in their hands.

This gave Lunacharsky all the more leisure time to devote to art The minister of the revolution not only appreciated and understood the theater but also was a prolific playwright His plays disclose the variety of his knowledge and interests, the surprising ease of his insight into the history and culture of various countries and epochs and, finally, an unusual ability to combine invention and borrowing. But no more than that They do not bear the stamp of authentic artistic genius.

In 1923, Lunacharsky published a small volume entitled Silhouettes dedicated to the characterization of the leaders of the revolution. The book appeared at a very inappropriate time: suffice it to say that Stalin's name was not even mentioned in it By the following year Silhouettes had been withdrawn from circulation, and Lunacharsky himself felt he was half in disgrace. But here, too, he was not abandoned by his fortunate trait: compliancy. He quickly reconciled himself to the transformation in the personal composition of the leadership or, in any event, fully subordinated himself to the new masters of the situation. Nevertheless he remained to the end an alien figure in their ranks. Lunacharsky knew the past of the revolution and the party too well, pursued too many different interests, was, in the final analysis, too educated, not to be out of place in the bureaucratic ranks. Removed from the post of people's commissar, in which, by the way, he succeeded in fully accomplishing his historic mission, Lunacharsky remained almost without duties, right up to his assignment as ambassador to Spain. But he did not succeed in occupying his new posh death overtook him in Menton. Neither friend nor honest opponent will deny respect to his shade.