Lev Lunts

Lev Natanovich Lunts was a Russian playwright, proser and critic. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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