Anna (Asja) Lācis versus Jūlijs Lācis: a Conversation in the Language of Irreconcilable Otherness

Ieva E. Kalniņa Previous researchers have focused mostly on the relationship of the stage director Anna (Asja) Lācis with B. Brecht, B. Reich, W. Benjamin and the Latvian poet L. Laicens. Jūlijs Lācis along with the role he played in the life of Anna Lācis is much less discussed. But it was him who, when they both in their youth admired I. Turgenev’s Asya, gave Anna this name, and – later, after their marriage – also her surname. In order to characterize the complicated relationship of Anna and Jūlijs Lācis the term “otherness” seems to be the most appropriate, providing some understanding of the irreconcilable difference between them as a married couple. They differed in their political, moral, and artistic views. They never succeeded in overcoming the limits of their personal identity to become a joint „we”. This relationship sheds light on a different Anna Lācis, removing her from the pedestal, so to speak, when viewed from the aspect of humanity. Jūlijs Lācis (1892–1941) met Anna Liepiņa at the age of 19 around the year 1911, when he was still a student at a gymnasium. They got married in 1914. In 1919 their daughter Dagmāra was born. In 1920 they divorced, because Jūlijs could not put up with Anna’s attitude towards her daughter – she showed no motherly feelings. That this was not just a presumption of Jūlijs, was proven by Dagmāra (Dagmāra Ķimele) herself, who in the later years of her life wrote a memoir about her mother, entitled „Asya: The Eventful Life of the Stage Director Anna Lācis” (1997), thereby creating a real revolution in the Latvian literature describing childhood memories, as without any remorse, she destroyed the traditional requirements to describe one’s childhood as the luckiest time in one’s life and to praise one’s mother After their divorce Jūlijs Lācis became a journalist (studied in Paris) and a writer. He was the editor of a very popular Latvian magazine Atpūta (1937–1940), and has published travelogues and feuilletons. After the Soviet Union occupied Latvia on 17th of June, 1940, he became a minister in the soviet government. Lācis was among those representatives of the government who in August of 1940 went to Moscow with the formal request to include Latvia into the USSR. The former spouses never met again, as Anna Lācis had been interred in a camp in Kazakhstan since 1938. Jūlijs Lācis asked the Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of People’s Commissars to review the case of Anna Lācis. On 8th January 1941 Jūlijs Lācis was arrested, he died on 15th December 1941 in a prison in Astrakhan.