Serapion Brothers
Party critics, including the head of the censorship board, debated with Lunts in print. The Commissar of Education banned his plays. 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. Lunts did not recant, but died young, so that his arguments remained inviolate for the extent of the Soviet period. The American scholar Victor Erlich characterized these arguments as “the most forthright plea for creative freedom to be found in the annals of Soviet literature."