First of all, in the ussrthey had Country Email List just begun to publish their collected works. That is to say, they were publishing the necessary material to develop an intellectual biography, which is what I initially intended to write. In the Oxford Country Email List libraries you could find much of the pre-revolutionary material, but then the Soviets were publishing a fairly comprehensive collection of his post-revolution writings. As I Country Email List delved into the subject, I became quite distant from Lunacharsky as an intellectual, and therefore from my initial biographical project.
He was a popularizer, basically Country Email List very eclectic, who collected many ideas and intertwined them very quickly in a kind of narrative that was not usually very deep. However, his activity as People's Commissar for Education (a sort of Enlightenment commissar),ussr to investigate. And I ended up writing my dissertation on that. There was another aspect that interested me in Lunacharsky and it was the one that was linked to his role as self-proclaimed mediator between the intelligentsia and the Communist Party. I think this Country Email List had something to do with my father, who had, in fact, developed an informal political role in Australia as a back room mediator.
Someone who was not a member of Country Email List any political party but had contacts with communists as well as with figures from the Labor Party and even with some Liberals. Today I'm not sure if he admired my father's role as Country Email List mediator or criticized it, but I was interested as a self-definition and modus operandi . In 1966 I went to the USSR for a year of research as a British exchange student, hoping to be allowed to work on Lunacharsky's personal papers, which were in the Communist Party archives. The Soviets Country Email List did not like to give access to Soviet-era archives to foreigners and they refused me the consultation.