The Homeland

Lev Lunts was a playwright, essayist, prose writer, and literary translator of Jewish origin who wrote in Russian. A native of St. Petersburg, he was a leader of the Serapion Brothers literary school, a group dedicated to humanistic ideals, fantasy, narrative, and “radical apoliticism.” Scorned by the Marxist establishment, Lunts was nevertheless acclaimed by writers across Europe, including Maxim Gorky and Luigi Pirandello, who applauded his imaginative work for the stage and his essays on the printed page. He died in Hamburg, shortly after his emigration from Soviet Russia. Written out of official literary histories in the Soviet Union, Lunts’s work circulated in the postwar period in samizdat and was published in Russian in book form for the first time in 1994.