After Mayakovsky's Death
Later in 1930, after divorcing Osip earlier that year, she 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 was 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..."
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.
Read more about this topic: Lilya Brik
Famous quotes containing the words mayakovsky and/or death:
“Comrade life,
let us
march faster,
March
faster through what’s left
of the five-year plan.”
—Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930)
“I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating; but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of God is still ahead of us; perhaps we shall have to colonize the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that God is not out there.”
—R.J. Hollingdale (b. 1930)