Lilya Brik - With Mayakovsky

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 Neptune–produced by a private movie company–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 "Еврей и земля". (The Jew and the Land) about Jewish communal farming in the USSR, with the script 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.