Lilja Jurjewna Brik

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Lilya Brik ( Russian Лиля Юрьевна Брик ; born October 30 . Jul / 11. November  1891 greg. In Moscow as Lilja Kagan , Лиля Каган ; † 4. August 1978 in Peredelkino near Moscow) was a Soviet film director and sculptor . She was the sister of Elsa Triolet , married to Ossip Brik and the lover of Vladimir Mayakovsky . Pablo Neruda described her as "the muse of the Russian avant-garde ".

Lilja Brik with Vladimir Mayakovsky

Life

Lilja Kagan came from a Jewish intellectual family in Moscow. Her father was a lawyer, her mother a music teacher. As a child she received private lessons and spoke fluent German and French in addition to Russian and Yiddish, later she studied art and architecture at the Moscow Architecture Institute.

Lilja and her younger sister Elsa Kagan , who later married the writer Louis Aragon in France , found access to the cultural circles of Moscow and Saint Petersburg at an early age . The sisters were portrayed by painters and photographers such as Dawid Burljuk , Alexander Rodchenko , Fernand Léger , Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall .

On February 26, 1912 Lilja Kagan married the poet and literary critic Ossip Brik in Moscow . The couple moved to Levashovo , a suburb of Saint Petersburg. There she met an admirer of her sister Elsa, the 21-year-old futuristic poet Vladimir Mayakovsky , in June 1915 . They fell in love and had a relationship, even if Lilja continued to live with Ossip Brik. Beginning with his volume of poems Cloud in Pants ( Облако в штанах ), the publication of which Ossip Brik financed in 1915, Mayakovsky's poems were often dedicated to and inspired by Lilja Brik. In 1918 Mayakovsky wrote the screenplay for a silent film, Captivated by the Film ( Закованная фильмой ), in which he and Lilja Brik played the leading roles.

During the October Revolution , the Briks continued to live in Petrograd, as St. Petersburg was now called, and in June 1920 they moved back to Moscow. Her apartment became a central meeting place for the Russian avant-garde , where cultural workers such as Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, Boris Pasternak , Maxim Gorki , Sergei Eisenstein , Kasimir Malewitsch , Yuri Tynyanow , Vsevolod Meyerhold and many others came and went. Lilja and Ossip Brik were among the most active promoters of Russian formalism and futurism in art, literature, theater and film.

Her husband Ossip Brik found a permanent job with the secret police, which was initially called Cheka , then GPU , as a “legal consultant”. As only became known after the archives were opened in the 1990s, the GPU listed Lilja Brik as an informant under number 15073. She referred to the GPU officer Jakow Agranow , who was responsible for controlling the writers, as her friend. Boris Pasternak later said: "The Briks' apartment was basically nothing more than a department of the Moscow police" - by which he meant the GPU.

In 1922/23 the Brik couple went on a trip to Germany with Mayakovsky, they spent several weeks in Berlin and visited Wassily Kandinsky at the Bauhaus in Weimar . According to reports from contemporary witnesses, Lilja Brik, on behalf of the GPU, had to ensure that Mayakovsky stayed away from writers from Russian emigration and from the Russian exile press that appeared in Berlin.

In 1926 Lilja Brik made a documentary film, Jews in the Country ( Евреи на земле ) about Jewish kolkhozes in the Crimea . She wrote the script together with Mayakovsky and Wiktor Schklowski . This was followed by a semi-documentary parody of "bourgeois cinema" under the title Das Glasauge ( Стеклянный глаз , 1928/29). According to the secret service files, she repeatedly asked Agranov to use the secret police to ensure that Mayakovsky could no longer get a visa to travel to Western Europe, as she feared that he would remain in exile.

In February 1930 Lilja and Ossip Brik divorced. During a stay in Berlin , she learned of Mayakovsky's suicide through a telegram from Agranov in April 1930, which, according to her own statements, had already prevented her from suicide twice. In November 1930 she married the General of the Red Army Vitaly Primakov . As part of the secret military cooperation between the German Reich and the Soviet Union in 1931/32, he took part in a leadership training course in Berlin, his wife accompanied him. In 1937 Primakov fell victim to the Great Terror : he and other military leaders, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky , were convicted and executed in a secret military trial.

Lilja Brik's letter to Stalin became famous in 1935, which she sent to him through Agranov, who had meanwhile risen to become deputy head of the NKVD secret service . In it she lamented the neglect of Mayakovsky's poetic legacy. Stalin then instructed Nikolai Jeschow , the second deputy chief of the NKVD, to ensure that a Mayakovsky complete edition was published and that his works were treated in school lessons. Stalin also later held his protective hand over Lilja Brik by personally struck her name ( according to the historian Roy Medvedev ) from one of the death lists of Yezhov, who headed the NKVD from 1936 until his liquidation in 1938.

In 1938 Lilja Brik married the writer and literary critic Vasily Katanjan , with whom she spent the rest of her life. The Katanyans' house was also a meeting place for the young Moscow literary, film and art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Lilja Brik played an important role in promoting young artists such as Andrei Vosnesensky and Sergei Parajanov .

As only became known through publications at the beginning of the 21st century, Lilja Brik regretted her work for the secret police in the 1970s. The occasion was the publication of the documentary The Archipelago Gulag by dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the west. Lilja Brik said at the time that for her the Chekists were “holy people” and “good friends”, whom she had occasionally done “a little favor”.

In 1978, in the late stages of an incurable disease, Lilja Brik committed suicide with sleeping pills. Since she had decreed not to be buried, her friends scattered her ashes as requested near Moscow on a bend in the river and at this point placed a boulder that they had brought with them.

Speculation about menage à trois

The alleged love triangle between Lilja Brik, her husband Ossip Brik and Mayakowski is the subject of much speculation. Lilja Brik herself noted in her notes that she had not had any intimate relationships with her husband Ossip Brik for more than a year when her relationship with Mayakovsky began. In the last years of her life she confessed time and again that she only loved Mayakovsky. From her own notes, however, according to the biography written by her last husband, Vasily Katanjan, it is clear that she ended her sexual relationship with Mayakovsky in 1925. After returning from his long trip to the USA, he confessed to having had an affair there.

Katanjan, citing his conversations with her, reported that her relationship with Mayakovsky had been one-sided: he loved her, but she did not reciprocate that feeling, but was happy to accompany him on trips abroad. She described Ossip Brik as her only true love. But he was not physically interested in her or other women. In Katanyan's words, it had been natural for her to spend the night with a man she liked. The records of contemporary witnesses show that the GPU officer Agranow was also counted among her lovers.

Her first husband Ossip Brik always stayed by her side: he was given a room in Primakov's apartment, as he did later with Katanyan.

Works

  • Lilja Brik: Write verses for me. Memories of Mayakovsky and letters . Edited by Vasily Katanjan . Translated by Ilse Tschörtner . Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-353-00874-8 .
  • Bengt Jangfeldt (Ed.): В.В. Маяковский и Л. Ю. Брик, переписка 1915–1930 (= Stockholm studies in Russian literature; 13). Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm 1982, ISBN 978-91-22-00575-9 . Kniga, Moscow, 1991, ISBN 5-212-00601-5 ( VV Majakovskij i L. Ju. Brik: perepiska 1915–1930 ; correspondence between Mayakowski and Lilja Brik 1915–1930).
    • Bengt Jangfeldt (Ed.): Vladimir Mayakovsky: love is the heart of everything: correspondence between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik 1915–1930. Polygon, 1986, ISBN 978-0-948275-04-3 .
  • Anatoly Valjuschenitsch (Анатолий Валюженич): Пятнадцать лет после Маяковского. (Kabinetnij Utschenij) Кабинетный ученый, Moscow / Yekaterinburg 2015, ISBN 978-5-7525-2923-8 (correspondence between Lilja and Osip in two volumes: vol. 1: 1930–1937, vol. 2: 1938–1945).

literature

Web links

Commons : Lilja Brik  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Valentin Skorjatin (Валентин Скорятин): Тайна гибели Владимира Маяковского: новая версия трагических событий, основанная на последних находках в секретных архивах. Звонница (Swonnitsa), Moscow 2009, ISBN 978-5-88093-185-9 , p. 121 (“The secret of the death of Vladimir Mayakovsky: a new version of the tragic events based on the latest finds in the secret archives”) .
  2. ↑ Arkadi Waksberg: Пожар сердца. P. 169.
  3. ↑ "Квартира Бриков была в сущности отделением московской милиции". Quoted in: Roman Gul (Роман Борисович Гуль): Дзержинский: Начало террора. Most, New York, 1974 (= Paris 1938; Moscow 1991), OCLC 495202815 , p. 155.
  4. ^ Thomas Urban : Russian writers in Berlin in the twenties. Berlin 2003, pp. 171-174.
  5. ↑ Arkadi Waksberg: Пожар сердца. P. 209.
  6. ↑ Arkadi Waksberg: Пожар сердца. P. 213.
  7. ↑ Arkadi Waksberg: Пожар сердца. P. 254.
  8. ↑ Arkadi Waksberg: Пожар сердца. P. 312.
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Kasack: The classics of Russian literature. Düsseldorf 1986, p. 123.
  10. ↑ Not to be confused with his son, the director Wassili Wassiljewitsch Katanjan (1924–1990).
  11. ↑ Arkadi Waksberg: Пожар сердца. P. 103.
  12. ↑ Lilja Brik: Write verses for me. Memories of Mayakovsky and letters. P. 9.
  13. ↑ Arkadi Waksberg: Пожар сердца. Pp. 41, 117.
  14. ↑ Wassilij Katanjan: Лиля Брик: жизнь. Pp. 72-73.
  15. ↑ Wassilij Katanjan: Лиля Брик: жизнь. P. 61.
  16. ↑ Arkadi Waksberg: Пожар сердца. P. 166.
  17. ↑ Wassilij Katanjan: Лиля Брик: жизнь. P. 62.
personal data
SURNAME Brik, Lilja Jurjewna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Брик, Лиля Юрьевна
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet film director and sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH November 11, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow
DATE OF DEATH 4th August 1978
Place of death Peredelkino near Moscow