Anatolii Vasil'evich Lunacharskii (also Lunacharsky), the Marxist philosopher and literary critic and Soviet administrator, joined the Russian Social Democratic Party in Kiev in 1892. Because of his political activities as a secondary school student, he was denied admission to Russian universities. He attended lectures at Kiev University and at the University of Zürich, where in 1894–1895 he studied under Richard Avenarius, who converted him to empiriocriticism. Lunacharskii returned to Moscow in 1897, was exiled to Vologda (1899–1902), and spent several years in western Europe between 1904 and 1917. He was the first Soviet people's commissar for education (1917–1929).

Lunacharskii's contributions to philosophy are concentrated in value theory (which he rather misleadingly called biological aesthetics), ethics, and philosophy of religion. Like the positivists, he denied the adjudicability of value disputes. "In order to show," he wrote, "that a given type of valuation is in its...