Introduction: The Latvian Lācis

PAPIER UND SCHREIBWAREN… Sie lebt in einer Stadt der Parolen und wohnt in einem Quartier verschworener und verbrüderter Vokabeln, wo jedes Gäßchen und Farbe bekennt und jedes Wort ein Feldgeschrei zum Echo hat. CHINAWAREN… Alle entscheidenden Schläge werden mit der linken Hand geführt werden.

(Benjamin, Einbahnstrasse 56-57, 16)¹

Anna Lācis came to international attention as Asja, Walter Benjamin's Latvian Bolshevik love interest, and her reputation has tended to rest on that relationship rather than on her influential work mediating between the Weimar German and early Soviet cultural and, in particular, theatrical realms. She was the one, for example, who first introduced Benjamin to Bertolt Brecht and who motivated his trip to Moscow, which resulted in his Moskauer Tagebuch. That Lācis can be found among the "forgotten biographies" on a German website may seem indicative of the extent of the interest she has managed to generate (Krusen). However, while it might have been true of the German situation at the time (2001), the point of this special issue is to draw attention to the necessity of rigorously questioning and situating such forgettings, and to the limitations of monolingual approaches as well as the specificities of non-Anglo ethnonational discourse per se. Given that a not unsubstantial part of Lācis's life was spent, and most of her theatrical work done, in Latvia, it should not come as a surprise that Lācis has never been forgotten there. However, how has she been remembered, and why? This special issue begins to overcome the decided lack of availability of that knowledge in languages other than Latvian.

Lācis has long fascinated me because of the kind of litmus test her figure continues to function as, and the kind of cultural and academic work she made, and continues to make, possible. One can see very clearly the extent of the different types of engagement with Lācis in different languages by looking at the six Wikipedia entries that currently exist for her (see Ingram, "Lācis as a Multilingual Ecosophy" for a reading of them). As one gleans from the piecemeal, inaccurate nature of the information provided across Wikipedia, Lācis cannot be studied from a monolingual perspective, no matter what that language may be. The six entries are indicative of the way Lācis's work draws graphic attention to how language dynamics have shifted over the course of the past century and to how her work has been crossed by a number of academic and geopolitical fault lines underpinned by ethnolinguistic assumptions. While the politics of language relations may be more pronounced in places that were colonized by the European empires, they have also had an impact on cultural and academic production in the no-longer-so-new Europe, something Lācis scholarship underscores and something the study of it can help to unpack.

The contributions gathered together in this special issue are a sign of a resurgence of interest in Lācis in Latvia/n. Based for the most part on papers given at the International Comparative Literature Association conference in Vienna in 2016 in a section on "Leftism and Love: The Languages of Anna Lācis's Latvian Legacy," they follow up a multilingual international conference organized by the Latvian Academy of Culture and held in Riga in March 2015, entitled "Kreisuma ideja kultūrā. Parole Asja/Leftist Ideas in Culture: The Password Asja." Planned during, and following in the footsteps of, the year-long cultural program that accompanied Riga's stint as European Capital of Culture in 2014, the Riga conference offered, as its thematic suggests, an alternative narrative to the one implicit in the EU's celebration of culture, dedicated as it was to a woman who served as "a vivid example of how leftist ideas have influenced people's personal and creative biographies" (Pērkone-Redoviča 8). The conference marked an important moment in the reception of Lācis's work: the first time that she, her oeuvre, and her legacy had inspired such concentrated academic and cultural work in Latvia and in Latvian. An ambitious...