38 Facts About Anatoly Lunacharsky

Anatoly Lunacharsky's mother was then married to statesman Vasily Lunacharsky, a nobleman of Polish origin, whence Anatoly's surname and patronym.

Anatoly Lunacharsky later divorced Vasily Lunacharsky and married Antonov, but Anatoly kept his former name.

In 1890, at the age of 15, Anatoly Lunacharsky became a Marxist.

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

In March 1903, the governor of Vologda ordered Anatoly Lunacharsky to be transferred further north, to Totma, where they were the only political exiles.

Anatoly Lunacharsky turned out to be a brilliant orator and did a great deal to assist in strengthening the Bolshevik positions.

Anatoly Lunacharsky returned to Russia after the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution.

In 1908, when the Bolsheviks split between Lenin's supporters and Alexander Bogdanov's followers, Anatoly Lunacharsky supported his brother-in-law Bogdanov in setting up a new Vpered.

In 1909, Anatoly 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.

In 1911, Anatoly Lunacharsky moved to Paris, where he started his own Circle of Proletarian Culture.

Anatoly Lunacharsky was cultural editor of Novaya Zhizn, until forced against his will to sever this connection, because the paper took an anti-Bolshevik line.

Anatoly Lunacharsky was arrested with Trotsky on 22 July 1917, on a charge of inciting the "July Days" riots, and was held in Kresty prison until September.

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

On 10 November 1917, Anatoly Lunacharsky signed a decree making school education a state monopoly at local government level and said that his department would not claim central power over schools.

Anatoly Lunacharsky believed in polytechnic schools, in which children could learn a range of basic skills, including manual skills, with specialist training beginning in late adolescence.

Anatoly Lunacharsky directed some of the great experiments in public arts after the Revolution, such as the agit-trains and agit-boats that circulated over all Russia spreading Revolution and revolutionary arts.

Anatoly Lunacharsky wrote an "agit-comedy", which was filmed in the streets of Petrograd for the first anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution.

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

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

Anatoly Lunacharsky played a part in persuading the Moscow Art Theatre and its renowned directors Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko to end their opposition to the regime and resume productions.

Anatoly Lunacharsky was personally involved in the decision to allow the MAT to stage Mikhail Bulgakov's first play, The Days of the Turbins.

In 1924, Pasternak's wife wrote to his cousin saying "so far, Anatoly Lunacharsky has never refused to see Borya".

Anatoly Lunacharsky was the first Bolshevik to recognise the value of the composer Sergei Prokofiev, whom he met in April 1918, after the premiere of his Classical Symphony.

Anatoly Lunacharsky arranged a passport that allowed Prokofiev to leave Russia, then in July 1925 he persuaded the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to invite Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, and the pianist Alexander Borovsky to return to Russia.

Stravinsky and Borovsky rejected the offer, but Prokofiev was given permission to come and go freely while Anatoly Lunacharsky was in office.

In 1929, Anatoly Lunacharsky supported a change in the Russian alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin.

Anatoly Lunacharsky avoided taking sides when the Communist Party split after Lenin's death, but he almost became embroiled in the split by accident by publishing his selection of Revolutionary Silhouettes in 1923, which included portraits of Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Martov, but failed to mention Stalin.

Anatoly Lunacharsky became an editor for the Literature Encyclopedia.

Anatoly Lunacharsky represented the Soviet Union at the League of Nations from 1930 through 1932.

In 1930, Anatolii Anatoly Lunacharsky established a government commission to research satirical genres in all kinds of art.

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

Anatoly Lunacharsky claimed that Lunacharsky had previously been the lover of the ballerina Inna Chernetskaya.

Anatoly Lunacharsky was known as an art connoisseur and a critic.

Anatoly Lunacharsky could read six modern languages and two dead ones.

Anatoly Lunacharsky met numerous other famous cultural figures such as Rabindranath Tagore and Nicholas Roerich.

Anatoly Lunacharsky once described Nadezhda Krupskaya as the "soul of Narkompros".

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

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