11 November] 1875 – 26 December 1933) was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and the first Soviet People's Commissar (Narkompros) responsible for the Ministry of Education as well as an active playwright, critic, essayist, and journalist throughout his career.

[1][2][3][4][5][6] Lunacharsky was born on 23 or 24 November 1875 in Poltava, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), as the illegitimate child of Alexander Antonov and Alexandra Lunacharskaya, née Rostovtseva.

In Zürich he met European socialists, including Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

In 1899, Lunacharsky returned to Russia, where he and Vladimir Lenin's sister revived the Moscow Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), until they were betrayed by an informant and arrested.

He was allowed to settle in Kyiv, but was arrested again after resuming his political activities, and after ten months in prison he was sent to Kaluga, where he joined a Marxist circle that included Alexander Bogdanov and Vladimir Bazarov.

Lunacharsky, who by now had ended his period in exile and was back in Kyiv, originally believed that the split was unnecessary and joined the 'conciliators', who hoped to bring the two sides together,[9] but he was converted to Bolshevism by Bogdanov.

In Moscow he co-edited the journal Novaya zhizn and other Bolshevik publications, which could be published legally, and gave lectures on art and literature.

Lenin opposed Machism as a form of subjective idealism and strongly criticised its proponents in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908).

In 1909, Lunacharsky joined Bogdanov and Maxim Gorky at the latter's villa on the island of Capri, where they started a school for Russian socialist workers.

[5] After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Lunacharsky adopted an internationalist antiwar position, which put him on a course of convergence with Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

[12] From 1915, he also worked for the daily newspaper Nashe Slovo, sometimes acting as peacemaker between the two editors, Trotsky and the Menshevik internationalist Julius Martov.

Lunacharsky opposed the decision in 1918 to transfer Russia's capital to Moscow and stayed for a year in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) and left the running of his commissariat to his deputy, Mikhail Pokrovsky.

In June 1919, The New York Times decried Lunacharsky's efforts in education in an article entitled "Reds Are Ruining Children of Russia".

In the week after the revolution, he invited everyone in Petrograd involved in cultural or artistic work to a meeting at Communist Party headquarters.

Although the meeting was widely advertised, no more than seven people turned up, though they included Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Larissa Reissner.

He also gave support to constructivism's experiments and the initiatives such as the ROSTA Windows, revolutionary posters designed and written by Mayakovsky, Rodchenko and others.

In 1918, when most Bolsheviks despised experimental art, Lunacharsky praised Mayakovsky's play Mystery-Bouffe, directed by Meyerhold, which he described as "original, powerful and beautiful".

Lunacharsky was associated with the establishment of the Bolshoi Drama Theater in 1919, working with Maxim Gorky, Alexander Blok and Maria Andreyeva.

He also played a part in persuading the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) and its renowned directors Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko to end their opposition to the regime and resume productions.

[20] He was also personally involved in the decision to allow the MAT to stage Mikhail Bulgakov's first play, The Days of the Turbins (usually known by its original title, The White Guard)[21] Despite his belief in 'proletarian' literature, Lunacharsky also defended writers who were not experimental, nor even sympathetic to the Bolsheviks.

In February 1927, he sat with Prokofiev during the first Russian performance of The Love for Three Oranges, which he compared to "a glass of champagne, all sparkling and frothy".

[5] Though he was influential in setting Soviet policy on culture and education, particularly in the early years while Lenin was alive, Lunacharsky was not a powerful figure.

Trotsky described him as "a man always easily infected by the moods of those around him, imposing in appearance and voice, eloquent in a declamatory way, none too reliable, but often irreplaceable.

[2][5] Lunacharsky died at 58 on 26 December 1933 in Menton, France, while travelling to Spain to take up the post of Soviet ambassador there, as the conflict that became the Spanish Civil War appeared increasingly inevitable.

[36] Lunacharsky's remains were returned to Moscow, where his urn was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, a rare privilege during the Soviet era.

He wrote literary essays on the works of several writers, including Alexander Pushkin, George Bernard Shaw and Marcel Proust.