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Asja Lacis Between Germany and Russia THE NEW WOMAN REVISITED: ASJA LACIS BETWEEN GERMANY AND RUSSIA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Master of Arts in Cultural Studies in the University of Canterbury by Natalia Managarova University of Canterbury 2019 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr. Evgeny Pavlov and Prof. Dr. Henrietta Mondry, for their interest and faith in my project, and very high standards for research. Their valuable assistance, enthusiasm and prolonged support have helped me immeasurably in the difficult birth of this thesis. In particular, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Prof. Dr. Henrietta Mondry, who has gently been leading me into the academic world. This project would have been very different without her guidance. I would also like to extend my appreciation to Katrina Edwards for proofreading parts of this thesis. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my family, who have sustained me over these years and provided with steadfast support. ii ABSTRACT Although there has been much research on the construct of the ‘New Woman’ in Weimar Germany (1918-1933), there is much less study of the ‘New Woman’ in Soviet Russia of the same time period. To compare and contrast these two construct variants, I examine a concrete example of a ‘New Woman’, the renowned theatre director, Asja Lacis (1891-1979). Similarly, there has been relatively little scholarship on her, with the existing work being predominantly limited to presenting her either as a Bolshevik muse to the German philosopher and critic, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), or as a theatre director. This thesis attempts to investigate what the ‘New Woman’ concept means in the two vastly different political and cultural contexts. To conduct my analysis, I examine Asja Lacis’ two autobiographies, Revolutionär im Beruf (A Revolutionary by Profession, 1971) and Krasnaia gvozdika: Vospominaniia (The Red Carnation: A Memoir, 1984), Moskauer Tagebuch (Moscow Diary, 1926-27, printed in 1980) by Walter Benjamin, and Asja: režisores Annas Lāces dēkainā dzīve (The Stormy Life of the Director Anna Lacis, 1996) by Lacis’ daughter, Dagmāra Ķimele. In this thesis, I discover that Lacis, as an embodiment of the ‘New Woman’ concept, presents no continuity from its Weimar to its Soviet version. Nevertheless, the ‘life-creation’ model, in which Lacis engages, can be constructively applied to her case. One of the main arguments I make in this work is that the discontinuity of Lacis as a Weimar/Soviet ‘New Woman’ is conditioned not only by her reluctance to adhere to one particular model, or by her pragmatism, but also by the important external factors. These latter include the inability of men to change overnight, along with the constraints of the genre of female autobiography in different cultural contexts. Ultimately, however, Asja Lacis exemplifies the agentivity, which was not typical of women before the spread of the ‘New Woman’ model of behaviour that allowed women’s becoming a subject and enabled them to become ‘directors’ of their lives. Additionally, Lacis’ case clearly demonstrates that conceptualisation of any artist’s or intellectual’s ‘whole’ identity is produced in both public and private contexts, rather than in the separation of public from private. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................. II ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... III LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................................... VI INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................. 1 EARLY LIFE ........................................................................................................................................ 2 LACIS AS AN EMBODIMENT OF THE ‘NEW WOMAN’ CONCEPT ...................................................................... 3 LACIS’ MULTI-CULTURAL IDENTITY ......................................................................................................... 4 THE ‘NEW WOMAN’ OF THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC ....................................................................................... 4 ‘NEW WOMEN’ OF RUSSIA ................................................................................................................... 5 THE MODEL OF LIFE-CREATION ............................................................................................................. 6 HOLISTIC HISTORICAL APPROACH .......................................................................................................... 7 OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS ...................................................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER ONE. THE ‘NEW WOMAN’: WHO IS SHE? ....................................................................... 12 GERMANY’S ‘NEW WOMAN’ .............................................................................................................. 13 SOCIO-HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE ‘NEW WOMAN’ OF GERMANY .......................................................... 13 FEMINIST MOVEMENT IN GERMANY ............................................................................................................ 15 MARXISM ON THE ‘WOMAN QUESTION’ ...................................................................................................... 18 THE IMPORTANCE OF WEIMAR DEBATE ON SEXUALITY .................................................................................... 19 THE ‘NEW WOMAN’ AND FASHION ............................................................................................................. 21 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ‘NEW WOMAN’ ................................................................................................... 22 THE WEIMAR ‘NEW WOMAN’ REPRESENTED IN MODERNISM ......................................................................... 23 RUSSIA’S ‘NEW WOMAN’ .................................................................................................................. 25 SOCIO-HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE ‘NEW WOMAN’ OF RUSSIA ............................................................... 25 FIRST ATTEMPTS AT THEORISING ON THE ‘WOMAN QUESTION’ ....................................................................... 26 MARXISM ON THE WOMAN QUESTION AND THE VISION OF RUSSIAN MARXISTS ................................................. 27 WOMEN AND WAR .................................................................................................................................. 28 ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI AND THE ZHENOTDELS AS TRANSMITTERS OF THE ‘NEW WOMAN’ IDEAL ......................... 30 WHY WAS THE DISCOURSE ON SEXUALITY SO LOUD IN EARLY SOVIET RUSSIA? .................................................... 32 AVANT-GARDE FASHION AND ASPIRATIONAL CONSUMPTION .......................................................................... 34 THE ‘NEW WOMAN’ REPRESENTED IN MODERNISM ...................................................................................... 37 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................... 39 CHAPTER TWO. ASJA LACIS AS SEEN BY HERSELF .......................................................................... 40 WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHIES ............................................................................................................ 40 ASJA LACIS’ LIFE PERFORMANCE: SEXUALITY .......................................................................................... 45 ASJA LACIS AS A PROFESSIONAL ........................................................................................................... 51 EDUCATION; FORMATION OF ATTITUDE TO ART ............................................................................................ 51 WORK: VIEWS ON ART .............................................................................................................................. 54 iv POLITICAL ACTIVITY .................................................................................................................................. 61 BECOMING A WOMAN ...................................................................................................................... 64 CHILDHOOD: BEING SHAPED BY PARENTS ..................................................................................................... 64 MAN. HUSBAND. MARRIAGE ..................................................................................................................... 67 CHILDREN ............................................................................................................................................... 74 BYT. DOMESTICITY ................................................................................................................................... 76 FEMININITY. BEAUTY ................................................................................................................................ 78 SELF-REALISATION .................................................................................................................................... 81 CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................................................
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