Lev Natanovich Lunts (; May 2, 1901 – May 10, 1924) 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.
Biography
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. Completing his courses in the spring of 1922, Lunts was retained for graduate school and began reading the novels of Balzac. 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. 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.Kern, Gary, Lev Lunc: Serapion Brother (Princeton University, Ph.D dissertation, 1969).
Theater
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. 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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. Decades had to pass before such a conception could be realized, and then only with CGI ─ computer generated images.Things In Revolt: The Theater of Lev Lunts (Xenos Books, 2014).
His other screenplay, Zaveshchanie tsarya [The Tsar's Treasure], is closer to the typical silent films of the time, with a young Bolshevik hero trying to get a treasure map for the Reds and prevent the Whites from getting it to finance their counterrevolution. There are chases, motorcycle races, shootings. It is based on his single novella of the same name.
Prose
The prose of Lev Lunts consists of literary articles, polemical articles, book reviews, stories and the one novella.
Although an atheist, Lunts was steeped in Jewish culture and dedicated to it. He expressed his Jewish concerns most openly in a letter sent to Maxim Gorky dated August 16, 1922:
“Was I right in setting out into literature? Not that I do not believe in my powers: I believe in myself, perhaps too boldly. But I am a Jew. Convinced, steadfast, and glad of it. But I am a Russian writer. And then I am a Russian Jew. Russia is my native land, I love Russia above all countries. How can one reconcile these things? For myself I have reconciled everything, for me all this is plain and clear, but others think differently. Others say: ‘A Jew cannot be a Russian writer...’” In the Wilderness: The Prose of Lev Lunts (Xenos Books, 2014), 3.
Lunts's concerns with his Jewish heritage are revealed in three stories written in a Biblical style that draw on separate episodes from the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), but give them a modern and even post-revolutionary slant. They are: “In the Wilderness” (March 1921), “The Castrate” (Dec. 1921) and “The Homeland” (July 1922). Each creates its own intonation and system of refrains, and each uses Biblical material or classical sources, such as Herodotus, for its own purposes. A different purpose can be seen in each story, and a different approach to the short-story genre.
The first describes the Jews of Exodus dragging through the desert, starving and groaning under the whips of Aaron and the Levites, then rebelling. The second is most mysterious, as it concerns a castrate with childish laughter who wins the maternal heart of a man's barren wife, is adopted by her, and thus overcomes adversity. The story has parallels with the Book of Ruth and also with his own essay, "Detskii smekh" (Children's Laughter), which glorifies that laughter as pure innocence. The third story is autobiographical science-fiction, involving a time warp inside a synagogue and the transmigration of Lunts and his friend Veniamin Kaverin to ancient Babylon, where their alienation as Jews in Petrograd becomes more manifest.All three stories are translated in the collection In the Wilderness: The Prose of Lev Lunts (Xenos Books, 2014). One or another of these stories has been anthologized in collections of Jewish literature. The first one, "In the Wilderness," can be read in English online."In the Wilderness" online : http://home.earthlink.net/~gwkern/Lunts.htm
The other stories pose a sharp contrast to the Biblical, being sketches and satires of the new Soviet society. “Outgoing No. 37” takes aim at the petty bureaucrat uplifted by revolutionary ideals. The long epistolary story, “Crossing the Border,” mixes Jewish subjects with Soviet reality, with the result that the actions of nearly all of the characters are completely illogical. Lunts places himself in the story as a trickster who gets everyone into trouble. The story “The Man in a Coat” emphasizes this irrational and even demonic element, drawing on Gogol's classic stories “Nevsky Prospekt” and “The Overcoat.” A bathroom story called “A Patriot” draws on the tradition of showing Russians befuddled by Western inventiveness, in this case a pay toilet in the Berlin train station. Lunts also wrote a couple of skaz pieces, little stories illustrating the street argot of ordinary people, in this case a fickle woman with pretensions to culture (French expressions). They appear to draw inspiration from stories of seduction by Maupassant.
His longest work of prose is Zaveshchanie tsarya [The Tsar's Treasure], a novella in twenty-two chapters dating from late 1922 to early 1923. Previously unpublished, it was rescued from the archive and printed for the first time in Moscow in 2007. The screenplay based on the novella is all action and emotion in the manner of early silent films, but the novella, while moving swiftly, is complex, psychological and challenging. Within a strongly developed plot and a standard battle of Reds vs. Whites, it presents scenes of early Soviet society unlike any in the Socialist Realism literature that followed. The themes of rape and revenge, sadism, masochism, Bolshevik naivete, homosexuality, Jewish upbringing, poverty and filth in the capital are combined with a sincere attempt to portray the experience of young people growing up in the Revolution and Civil War. The result is awkward and unsettling, but strikingly realistic.