Anna "Asja" Lācis (née Liepiņa; , ; ; October 19, 1891 – November 21, 1979) was a

Latvia Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is one of the three Baltic states, along with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south. It borders Russia to the east and Belarus to t ...

n actress and theatre director.

Biography

She was born into the family of a factory worker. A Bolshevik, in the twenties she became famous for her proletarian theatre troupes for children and agitprop in Soviet Russia and Latvia. She believed that children's theater could be used as the cornerstone for the children's general education, which was especially important with poor, proletarian children who often had little or no other educational opportunities. In 1922 she moved to

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

where she got to know Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, to whom she introduced the ideas of Vsevolod Meyerhold and

Vladimir Mayakovsky Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky ( – 14 April 1930) was a Russian poet, playwright, artist, and actor. During his early, Russian Revolution, pre-Revolution period leading into 1917, Mayakovsky became renowned as a prominent figure of the Ru ...

. In 1924 she met the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin in Capri, and the duo would have an intermittent affair for the next several years as he visited her in Moscow and Riga. She has been cited as a factor in Benjamin's embracing

Marxism Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflict, ...

. In 1928, Benjamin dedicated a collection of essays to her.National Library to recount the fabulous story of Latvian pioneer of the avant-garde
Public Broadcasting of Latvia. January 17, 2018 In 1938 during Stalin's Great Purge she was deported to Siberia. Lācis was released and returned to Soviet Latvia in 1948 and spent her old age together with her husband, the German theatre critic Bernhard Reich. From 1948 to 1957 she was the main director of Valmiera Drama Theatre and used the leftist avant-garde techniques in her stage productions. Lācis' granddaughter is the acclaimed Latvian theatre director Māra Ķimele.

References

Sources

* *(memoirs) * Ķimele, Dagmāra and Strautmane, Gunta. ''Asja: režisores Annas Lāces dēkainā dzīve'' sja: The Stormy Life of the director Anna Lāce Riga: Likteņstāsti, 1996. * Asja Lacis, ''Revolutionär in Beruf: Berichte über proletarisches Theater, über Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin und Piscator''. München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1971. 1891 births 1979 deaths Latvian theatre directors Latvian women theatre directors Latvian stage actresses 20th-century Latvian actresses Soviet theatre directors {{Latvia-bio-stub