Word: lily
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Elsa and Lili were born in the 1890s, the daughters of a well-to-do Jewish lawyer in Moscow. Before the Revolution, Mayakovsky had courted Elsa, flouting her family's objections to the scruffy, hulking poet who had served a prison term at 16 for Bolshevik subversion. But when Elsa, who was quite plain, introduced him to her handsome married sister in 1915, Mayakovsky formed a passionate attachment to Lili that only his suicide in 1930 could terminate. After his death, these redoubtable sisters were to play key roles in the production of the Mayakovsky legend. Settling in France...
...book's few revelations concerns the extent of her involvement with the Soviet secret police. Her husband had been an early employee of the Cheka, and she pursued the association by welcoming agents to gatherings at the apartment the Briks shared with Mayakovsky. One of the lovers Lili took when Mayakovsky was still alive was a high-level secret police official. But the most shocking anecdote is provided by Rita Rait, now one of Russia's most distinguished translators from English. In the '20s, Lili sought to recruit Rait to spy on Russian emigres in Berlin...
There was nothing extraordinary about Lili's camaraderie with the secret police. After all, Soviet society, including the literary salons, was riddled with spies, as Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, recalled in her magnificent memoir Hope Against Hope. Had Mayakovsky not tak en his own life, he would surely have fallen victim to such informers, as Mandelstam and hundreds of other writers did during the Great Purges of the late '30s. But who could be held accountable for his actions? asked Nadezhda Mandelstam. Her answer may apply to all the characters...
...Petrograd apartment was a mixture of fashionable bohemianism and middle-class elegance ... The atmosphere was strained when Elsa and Mayakovsky came in. Unwilling to sit down to make polite small talk, he hulked in the doorway to the dining room as the others settled at the table for tea. Lili leaned over to Elsa and whispered, 'Please, I beg you, tell Mayakovsky not to bore us today. Tell him not to read us any poetry...
...overpowering whether they liked it or not... For Brik the poem was a brilliant revolutionary statement. Osip took the notebook that 'The Cloud in Trousers' had been copied into and read the poem over to himself, while Mayakovsky smiled, stirred jam into his tea, and looked at Lili and Elsa with his large brown eyes. Suddenly he took the notebook from Osip's hands, and asked Lili, 'May I dedicate...