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.

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.

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.

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 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.

(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.

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.

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.

Others say: ‘A Jew cannot be a Russian writer...’” [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.

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 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.

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 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).

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.

Funding was obtained, and in 2013 the whole collection was published in Russian under the title Serapionovy brat'ya: Al'manakh 1921 [The Serapion Brothers: Almanac 1921] (St. Petersburg: Limbus Press, 2013).

There are other reviews and articles among his works that are expert and varied, including assessments of poets, but Lunts did not live to write a book-length study or collection of essays.

During the Cold War Lunts was known to professors and students of Russian literature abroad as the author of daring polemical articles that aroused the most powerful Bolshevik critics against him.

The second article answered critics of the first and raised the question whether readers in the Soviet Union would be permitted to read writers with bad ideology, such as Kipling and Shakespeare.

The Party closed down the House of Arts and turned it into an apartment complex, in large part because of the free spirit of the Serapion Brothers, who held their meetings there.

Russian scholar Mariya Chudakova observed: “Lunts was not read (there was nowhere to read him), but he was always recalled whenever the subject turned to the 1920s ─ in articles, monographs, lectures, presentations and private judgements of other people’s works on the literary history of that time.” [9] Former Serapions Konstantin Fedin (1892-1977), Mikhail Slonimsky (1897-1972) and Veniamin Kaverin (1902-1989), in particular, when writing their memoirs in the 1960s, unfailingly recalled the Serapion Brothers and Lunts.

A commission was formed in 1967, headed by the journalist Solomon Podolsky (1900-1974), to collect all of Lunts's works, together with the literature about him, and to publish a commemorative volume, thus finally to realize the plan of the "brothers" that was snuffed out in the Stalin-Zhdanov years.

Kaverin managed to republish Lunts's last play, Gorod Pravdy [The City of Truth], in a theatrical journal in 1989, one year after he had helped to effect the first publication in the Soviet Union of Yevgeny Zamyatin's anti-utopian novel, My [We, 1920].

[10] The four complete plays, together with six stories and three polemical essays, published individually in Russia during the 1920s, were republished by Michael Wainstein (M. Veinshtein) in Israel as Лев Лунц, Родина и другие произведения [The Homeland and Other Works] (Jerusalem: Seriiya: 1981), 356 pages.

Some of the lesser-known works were published by Wolfgang Schriek in Germany as Lev Lunts, Zaveshchanie tsarya: Neopublikovannyi kinostsenarii, rasskazy, stat’i, retsenzii, pis’ma, nekrologi [The Tsar's Testament: An Unpublished Film Script, Stories, Articles, Reviews, Letters, Obituaries] (München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 1983), 214 pages.

Wainstein's collection was republished in Russia by Sergei Slonimsky under the title Лев Лунц, Вне закона: Пьесы, рассказы, статьи [Outside the Law: Plays, Stories, Articles] (St. Petersburg: Kompozitor, 1994).

All the plays, stories and articles (including the incomplete ones), plus the novella, were published in a one-volume complete works as Л. Н. Лунц, Литературное наследие [Literary Legacy] (Moscow: Nauchyni mir, 2007), 710 pages.

Early in 1964 she opened it and shared unpublished materials with a visiting graduate student from Manchester University, Gary Kern, who sorted them into folders and used them in his dissertation on Lunts and the Serapion Brothers.

(3) Boris Frezinsky: Борис Фрезинский, Судьбы Серапионов: Портреты и сюжеты [The Fates of the Serapions: Portraits and Particulars] (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2003), 592 pages.