Lilya Brik
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Lilya Yur'evna Brik (alternatively spelled Lili or Lily, Russian: Лиля Юрьевна Брик; 1891 - August 4, 1978) is known best as a muse of Vladimir Mayakovsky. She was an older sister of Elsa Triolet and wife of Osip Brik. Pablo Neruda called her "muse of Russian avant-garde". Her name was frequently abbreviated by her contemporaries as "Л.Ю." or "Л.Ю.Б." which are the first letters of a Russian word «любовь» — love.
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[edit] Early life
She was born Lilya Kagan (Лиля Каган) into a Jewish family of a lawyer and a music teacher in Moscow. Both sisters received excellent education and were able to speak fluent German and French languages and play piano. Lilya graduated from Moscow Institute of Architecture.
The sisters were famous for their beauty. Their portraits were done by Alexander Rodchenko, Alexander Tyshler, David Shterenberg, David Burlyuk, Fernand Léger, Nadezhda Léger-Hodasevich, Gary Blumenfeld, and later by Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall. In 1912 Lilya married poet-futurist and poetry critic Osip Brik.
[edit] With Mayakovsky
In 1915 Elsa befriended an aspiring futurist poet and graphic artist Vladimir Mayakovsky and invited him home, but he fell in love with Lilya. Despite the calamities of World War I, Russian Civil War and throughout 1920s, their love affair caught and stayed in public attention, possibly because she did not divorce her husband.
After June 1915, Mayakovsky's lyrical poetry was almost exclusively devoted to Lilya (with notable exception of late 1920s to Tatyana Yakovleva). He frequently explicitly dedicated his poems or referred in them to Lilya by name, for example in his "Облако в штанах" (A Cloud in Trousers, 1915), "Флейта-позвоночник" (The Backbone Flute, 1916), "Про это" (About This, 1922), "Лилечка! Вместо письма" (Lilechka! Instead of a Letter).
In 1918, Mayakovsky wrote the scenario for the movie "Закованная фильмой" (Chained by the Film) in which he and Lilya starred. The movie (produced by a private movie company "Neptune") has been lost, with the exception of a few trial shots. Gianni Totti used them in his 1980s movie.
In 1926, after visiting Jewish kolkhozes in Crimea, she produced a documentary "Евреи на земле" (Jews on the ground) about Jewish communal farming in the USSR,[1] with scenario cowritten by Mayakovsky and Victor Shklovsky. In 1928-1929, Lilya turned to directing a half-fiction-half-documentary motion picture "Стеклянный глаз" (The Glass Eye), a parody on "bourgeois cinematography".
Some authors consider that his passion for Lilya was one of the motives that drove Mayakovsky to suicide in 1930 at his Moscow apartment immediately after his breakup with Veronika Polonskaya. Lilya, who at the time was in Berlin, denied this and wrote that earlier she twice saved him from committing suicide.
[edit] After Mayakovsky's death
Later in 1930, Lilya Brik married Soviet General Vitali Primakov. Primakov was arrested in 1936 and executed in 1937 in relation to the Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization, a part of the Moscow Trials. The charges were dropped and he was rehabilitated posthumously in 1957.
In her 1935 letter to Joseph Stalin, Lilya Brik complained that Mayakovsky's poetic heritage is getting neglected. Stalin made a famous remark to Nikolai Yezhov:
"Comrade Yezhov, please take charge of Brik's letter. Mayakovsky is still the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime. Brik's complaints are, in my opinion, justified..."[2]
The historian Roy Medvedev wrote in the 1970s in The Continent (magazine) that Lilya's name, listed in Yezhov's execution list, possibly as a Traitor of Motherland Family Member, was crossed out personally by Stalin.
In 1938, she married writer Vasily Abgarovich Katanyan and they spent forty years together.
Lilya Brik committed suicide at the age of 87 when she was terminally ill. She left sculptures and writings. Recently published letters between the sisters in the course of more than five decades (except six years of World War II) reveal insights into life and cultural exchange across the Iron Curtain.
[edit] Influence
There were attempts to present her as greedy and manipulative femme fatale, but those who knew her, noted her altruism and intelligence. She helped many aspiring talents and was acquainted with many leading figures of Russian and international culture, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Boris Pasternak, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Kazimir Malevich, Sergei Paradjanov, Maya Plisetskaya, Rodion Shchedrin, Andrei Voznesensky, Yves St. Laurent and Pablo Picasso.
 1918. Lilya Brik in the movie "Chained by the Film" |
 1924 portrait of Lilya Brik by Alexander Rodchenko |
 1928. Editing film |
 Lilya Brik and Sergei Paradjanov |
[edit] Mayakovsky's poem 'Про Это' (About This)
The main subject of this epic poem was love in itself.
After a brief separation, at a Christmas-time before 1922, Mayakovsky wrote a kind of proto-surrealist poem in which he allegorized the feeling of missing Lilya. Some parts reflect themes akin to what Angelo Maria Ripellino once called the "revolt of the objects". In a telephone conversation, for example, the poet sees the spoken word as a dinosaur that crawls through the line, whereas the entire house shakes as the phone bell rings.
[edit] Works
- "Щен" (The Pup)
- "С Маяковским" (With Mayakovsky)
- "Пристрастные рассказы" (Passionate Stories)
- Letters between Lilya and Elsa, 1920s-1970
