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Osip Maksimovich Brik (; – 22 February 1945) was a Russian avant garde writer and literary critic, who was one of the most important members of the Russian formalist school, though he also identified himself as one of the Russian Futurism.
He met his future wife, Lilya Brik, when he was 17 and she 14; they were married on 26 March 1912. (Her sister Elsa Triolet was a notable French writer and married to Louis Aragon)
The daughter of a prosperous Jewish jurist, the handsome, erotically obsessed, highly cultivated Lili grew up with an overwhelming ambition prevalent among women of the Russian intelligentsia: to be perpetuated in human memory by being the muse of a famous poet. ... The two made a pact to love each other "in the Chernyshevsky manner" – a reference to one of nineteenth-century Russia's most famous radical thinkers, who was an early advocate of "open marriages." Living at the heart of an artistic bohemia and receiving the intelligentsia in the salon of his delectable wife, Osip Brik, true to his promise, calmly accepted his wife's infidelities from the start. In fact, upon hearing his wife confess that she had gone to bed with the famous young poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Brik exclaimed "How could you refuse anything to that man?" ... In 1918, when Mayakovsky and the Briks became inseparable, he simply moved in with them. Throughout the rest of his life, he made his home at a succession of flats that the Briks occupied.Francine du Plessix Gray, Them, pp. 51–52.Mayakovsky's sexual relationship with Lili lasted from 1917 to 1923, and afterwards he continued to have a close friendship with the couple: "For the rest of his life, 'Osia' Brik remained the poet's most trusted adviser, his most fervent proselytizer, and also a co-founder with him of the most dynamic avant-garde journal of the early Soviet era, Left Front of Art,"Francine du Plessix Gray, Them, p. 51. or LEF, which was also an official publication for the group with the same name, and a platform for Russian Constructivist art.
Brik was not only a literary modernist, he was strongly left-wing in politics. In December 1918 Brik was involved with Mayakovsky in discussions with the Vyborg District party school of the Russian Communist Party (RKP(b)) to set up a Futurist organisation affiliated to the party. Named Komfut the organisation was formally founded in January 1919, but was swiftly dissolved following the intervention of Anatoly Lunacharsky.
Later, on 8 June 1920, he joined the Cheka. Jakobson wrote of this period:
It was from Petr Bogatyrev, who visited me in Prague in December 1921, that I learned Brik was in the Cheka. And he told me that Boris Pasternak, who often visited the Briks, had said to him: "Still, it's become rather terrifying. You come in, and Lili says: 'Wait a while, we'll have dinner as soon as Osja comes back from the Cheka.'" At the end of 1922 I met the Briks in Berlin. Osja said to me: "Now there's an institution where a man loses his sentimentality," and began relating to me several rather bloody episodes. This was the first time he made a rather repulsive impression on me. Working in the Cheka had ruined him.Roman Jakobson, My Futurist Years, p. 45.
After Joseph Stalin's rise to power, the Communist regime openly encouraged exclusively socialist realism methods and initiated a campaign to stamp out all culture the Communist Party perceived as dangerous. Most avant garde artists and thinkers suffered persecution, and Brik did not escape this fate. In the 1930s he eked out a living writing articles on Mayakovsky and book reviews; he died in 1945 of a heart attack while climbing the stairs to his Moscow apartment.Vahan D. Barooshian, Brik and Mayakovsky (Mouton, 1978: ), p. 122. His works were not republished in Russia until the mid-1990s. Edward J. Brown summed his career up thus: "He wrote little, but his articles on poetic form ... are brilliant formalist analyses of poetic language... and he was probably the most articulate exponent in Lef of the theories of 'social demand' and 'literature of fact.' A man of surpassing intelligence, he was apparently not strong either in performance or in principle."Edward J. Brown in Victor Terras (ed.), Handbook of Russian Literature (Yale University Press, 1990: ), p. 278.
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