Lev Natanovich Lunts, who died from an enigmatic ailment at the age of twenty-three, inevitably falls into the category of writer who reveals a remarkable talent at an early age, stuns contemporaries with his premature passing, and leaves posterity wondering what might have been had he lived. But unlike Novalis in German literature, Thomas Chatterton in English, and Kajii Motojiro in Japanese, who are mourned and even idealized for their unfulfilled promise, Lunts gained in literary, political, and historical significance for what he did live to do. As an ardent polemicist and writer of manifestos, he enunciated principles of literary freedom with all the certainty of youth; but unlike other outspoken talents of the period, he did not live on to more trying times. Lunts would not have been able to maintain his individualist stance in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the Bolshevik Party took control...