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Video: The muse of the Russian avant-garde Lilya Brik: Little-known facts and images on the canvases of artists
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The beloved muse of Vladimir Mayakovsky and the "muse of the Russian avant-garde" Lilya Brik had a very contradictory opinion about herself: one called her a witch, others - a wise inspirer. There were also those who tried to erase all traces of her life from history. So who was this femme fatale Lilya Brik?
Lilya Yurievna Brik was a Russian writer and secular figure. She was in close contact with many of the leading figures of the Russian avant-garde between 1914 and 1930. She gained fame as the muse of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Lilya Brik was married for a long time to poet, editor and literary critic Osip Brik, and was also the older sister of the French-Russian writer Elsa Triolet. Many artists depicted Lilya Brik on their canvases, consider the most famous portraits.
It was Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet and diplomat, who called Lilya "the muse of the Russian avant-garde." Contemporaries often wrote her name "L. Yu." or "L. Yu. B.", which were the first part of the word "love". But the communists have been trying for decades to erase the name of Lilia Brik from the collective memory of the people. Brick was one of the symbols of free love and female power in post-revolutionary Russia.
Biography
Lilya Brik was born in 1891 into a wealthy Jewish family. She received her name in honor of Johann Goethe's beloved Lily Scheenemann. Her father was a lawyer, the family lived in the very center of Moscow. Parents often took little Lily and her younger sister Elsa with them to European resorts (Elsa Triolet is the future heroine of the French Resistance). Parents were able to give their children a quality education: the girls were fluent in German and French, learned to play the piano, studied at the gymnasium. At the age of 13, Lilya began attending political education clubs, where she met her future husband Osip Brik, the son of a jewelry merchant.
“All our girls were in love with him and even carved Osip's name with a penknife on their tables,” recalls Lilya. His discreet courtship of Lily lasted seven years, and then they got married. When the young husband began serving in the Petrograd Automobile Company, Lilya moved to Moscow with him and founded a "salon for the creative intelligentsia" in their apartment. However, the marriage did not last long. Already in 1914, Lilya wrote: “I was already leading an independent life, and physically we somehow parted … A year passed, we no longer lived as husband and wife, but we were friends, perhaps even more than before. It was then that Mayakovsky entered our life."
Meeting with a poet
By that time, Vladimir Mayakovsky had been in a relationship with his younger sister Lily for two years. But, having met Lilya, he parted with Elsa and dedicated the poem "A Cloud in Pants" to his new muse. For a long time Mayakovsky could not find a publisher who would publish "Cloud in Pants". Then Osip Brik decided to publish the poem at his own expense. The book was published with a circulation of 1,050 copies with the mark “For you, Lilya”. In the meantime, Lilya began to work on the poet's image: she seriously preoccupied his appearance, forced him to change his brightly colorful cubo-futuristic mantle for a coat and a formal suit, and also to restore her teeth. Impulsive Mayakovsky wrote letters to her every day, called her all the time and waited under the windows. The stormy romance between the legendary "singer of the revolution" Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik lasted 15 years until the poet's suicide in 1930. He dedicated hundreds of poems and letters to her. Probably, it was thanks to the dedicated works of the popular poet that Lilya Brik went down in history.
- I loved, I love and will love him more than my brother, more than my husband, more than my son. I have not read about such love in any poetry, anywhere. I love him since childhood, he is inseparable from me. This love did not interfere with my love for Mayakovsky, - wrote Lille.
She maintained friendly relations with Brik until his death in 1945, which was a great shock for her: "When Mayakovsky died, it was he who died, and when Osya died, I died."
Memory of Brick
Lilya Brik was fond of many activities. I tried myself in ballet, studied to be a sculptor, wanted to become an actress, a writer, and even worked in advertising. She did not become successful in any of these fields. However, one achievement of Lily Brick cannot be hidden: she managed to create one of the most popular salons of the 20th century in the capital. Many representatives of the intelligentsia of that time singled out the Brik salon as one of the most interesting and eventful.
Yes, Lily Brick's nature is controversial. Opinions differ about her. Whatever they called her … The second Beatrice, a wise inspirer, and others - a witch and a vampire, who took all the creative energy from the genius Mayakovsky and brought him to a tragedy.
Nevertheless, when after death the poet began to be quickly forgotten, it was Lilya who disposed of the organization of his legacy and made a lot of efforts to preserve the memory of Mayakovsky. it is impossible: without her, the best works of Vladimir Mayakovsky would never have appeared.
And in continuation of the theme of such a complex relationship, the story of what actually connected Mayakovsky with Osip Brik.
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