Asja Lācis was a Bolshevik, a champion of revolutionary theatre and close friends of key intellectual figures in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany.
Lācis was born into the family of a factory worker and was raised and completed her early education in Riga, Latvia.
She would go onto study at the Bekhterev Psychoneurological Research Institute in St Petersburg, and then, in 1916, at the Fyodor Komissarzhevsky Studio in Moscow. As Asja recalled:
Fyodor Komissarzhevsky was convinced that there is no art without philosophy. The actor must first study philosophy and form a scientific worldview … I agreed with him that art must be taken seriously, that it can only be created by people with a certain worldview.1
In Moscow, a year later, she would recall sitting her final exams at the as “bullets whizzed” over her head as the Bolsheviks struggled to take control of Moscow (the revolution was not bloodless, as in St Petersburg, there).
Returning to St Petersburg, she lived at the Latvian refugee school in Petrograd – Latvia had become an independent, capitalist state initially under the protection of Imperial Germany. There, she read the proclamation, “To the People, To the People” signed by Lenin. She then joined the Bolsheviks.
She would write of that experience:
When I read the first proclamations addressed “To the People, To the People!” signed by Lenin and posted on the walls, I was completely for the Communists. I wanted to be a good soldier of the revolution and to change my life in line with it. And all around me, I saw life changing: the theater moved out onto the street, and the street moved into the theater. The “Theatrical October” burst forth.2
Lācis witnessed mass spectacles staged by the “Theatre of October,” including a re-enactment of the Winter Palace storming in 1920, and encountered the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
For them, the task of the theatre was to bring revolutionary ideas to the semi-literate masses. Lācis was particularly concerned with reaching children, including the huge number of homeless war orphans, the Besprisorniki.
Accordingly, she would recall:
In 1918, I went to Orel. I was supposed to work as a director in the municipal theater—in other words, to follow the traditional theatrical path and make my career. However, things turned out differently. On the streets of Orel, at the marketplaces and cemeteries, in cellars and destroyed buildings, I saw gangs of abandoned children: the Besprisorniki.
She noted that:
The Soviet government attempted to place these vagabond children in educational institutions and workshops. But they constantly ran away.
She decided on a different course. She staged a play by Meyerhold and described what happened next:
“The children knew nothing about my plans. I gave them a scene from the play as a task for improvisation: robbers sit around a fire in a forest and boast about their deeds. While working on this scene some time later, the first visit of the Besprisorniki took place in our house. The children jumped up and wanted to run away from the intruders who looked terrifying with paper helmets on their heads, armor made out of branches and pieces of lead, and sticks and spears in their hands. I convinced the children to continue improvising and not to pay attention to the intruders. After a while the Besprisorniki leader, Vanjka, strode into the middle of the group of children who were acting and signaled to his gang. They shoved the children aside and began to play the scene themselves. They bragged about murders, arson, robberies and, while doing this, they all sought to outdo one another in horror. Then they stood up and looked at our children with scornful condescension: “That’s what real robbers are like!” According to all the rules of children’s education, I should have interrupted their wild and shameless speeches—but I wanted to gain some influence over them. And I actually won the game: the Besprisorniki returned and became active members of our theater.3
In 1921 in her manifesto, New Tendencies in Theatre, published in Riga, Lācis wrote:
As a revolutionary politician protests against the old economical and social regime, which slays the free spirit of humankind, a revolutionary artist protests against old academic and frozen forms, which have grown out of capitalism, and rather moves toward the new, fresh forms of art.
She went on to state:
In times of struggle, art has to be both an ally and friend of those in conflict. In this century of struggle, we look for art in the magnificent, free life. In it the creative process reveals itself through an intense and free action of the spirit, through masses that flow united by a common exhilarating rhythm. This kind of art-making also finds frequent and manifold expressions in the theater of the century of struggle. Theater in its essence is a collective experience; it is a synthesis of arts, directed toward the future. Theater has an enormous impact on the masses, but in comparison to other art forms, such as painting, it has progressed to a much lesser extent, explored less, developed fewer traditions, especially here in Latvia.
In 1922, Lācis made her first visit first visit to Germany, home to the largest Communist Party in the world outside Russia. There she met major German intellectuals including the film director Fritz Lang, Max Piscator, the Communist theatre director and producer, and Bertholt Brecht, with whom she would later collaborate.
She also worked with Piscator in agitprop theatre, and adopted many of his ideas and techniques into her own theatre productions.
Two years later, in 1924, she holidayed on the Italian island of Capri where she met the German art critic, Walter Benjamin, with whom she had an affair.
Lācis re-called her conversations with Benjamin on Capri:
I told about my Children’s Theater in Orel. About my work in Riga and Moscow. Benjamin immediately supported the idea of a proletarian children’s theater and became inflamed for Moscow. I had to tell him in detail not only about the Muscovite theater, but also about the new socialist customs, the new writers and poets: I named Yuri Libedinsky, Isaac Babel, Leonid Leonov, Valentin Kataev, Alexander Serafimovich, Mayakovsky, Aleksei Gastev, Vladimir Kirillov, Mikhail Gerasimov—I talked about Alexandra Kollontai and about Larissa Reissner.4
Together they wrote the article “Naples,” which appeared on August 19, 1925, in the Frankfurter Zeitung.
Benjamin would begin his book, One Way Street, to her, writing:
This street is named Asja Lācis Street after she who like an engineer cut it through the author.5
Benjamin would visit her in Riga and Moscow, but their relationship was fraught and ended in 1926.
In 1925 and ’26, Asja was involved in an experimental community playground for children in Moscow. By 1928, her interest shifted toward children’s cinema, on which she worked with Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya. One of the first cinema theaters for children in Moscow was opened in the old cinema Balkan. She involved nearby besprisorniki creating a community of children who ran the cinema, chose repertoire, and promoted and reviewed films.
But by the 1930s the Stalinist dictatorship was imposing its control over the arts via Social Realism. In 1938 Asja was arrested and sentenced to forced labour in Kazakhstan.
On release in 1948 she returned to Latvia (now part of the USSR) and became the director of the Valmiera Drama Theatre until her retirement in 1958. She managed to resume contact with Brecht.
At the very end of her life she was interviewed by Hildegard Brenner, who had been a member of Brecht’s inner circle. These interviews were edited by Lācis and formed the basis for the 1971 book, Revolutionär im Beruf: Berichte über proletarisches Theater, über Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin und Piscator (Revolutionary at work: Reports on proletarian theatre, Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin and Piscator) which would be tranlated into Italian, French, and Spanish and included a partial reprint of her previously published Russian book on German revolutionary theater (Revolucionnyj teatr germanii [German revolutionary theater], published in Moscow in 1935).
The curators of the Benjamin estate, and editors of the first edition of Complete Writings, Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, decided to remove Asja’s name as a coauthor of Naples. They dismissed her as Benjamin’s “Bolshevik girlfriend.”
Such patronising guff could not stop Asja becoming rediscovered and providing a link to the days of hope in the revolutionary Soviet Union, and to revolutionary theatre in particular. She moved among a remarkable generation of Russian and German intellectuals and from all accounts could hold her own in that ring.
She deserves to be celebrated.
Notes:
1 Andris Brinkmanis, Constellation Asja, e-flux Journal, Issue 110, June 2020 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/110/337321/constellation-asja
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Andris Brinkmanis, Constellation Asja, e-flux Journal, Issue 110, June, 2020 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/110/337321/constellation-asja
5 Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead, The Actuality of Walter Benjamin, Lawrence & Wishart, 1998, P55