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As a result of that dictum, Lili was soon presiding over a veritable industry devoted to Mayakovskyana. A museum was established in the apartment where Mayakovsky had lived in a menage a trois with Lili and her husband Osip Brik, who had been the poet's first publisher. Lili officiated at the unveiling of innumerable statues in Mayakovsky's image. She attended ceremonies in connection with the renaming of streets, squares and subway stations in Mayakovsky's honor. She published his love letters and telegrams (signed "Puppy") and edited a twelve-volume collected works. To date, some 75 million copies of the poet's books have been published in the U.S.S.R. as part of this vast propagation effort. Mayakovsky "began to be introduced forcibly, like potatoes under Catherine the Great," said Boris Pasternak. "This was his second death; he had no hand in it."
Then, in 1968, when Lili was 77 years old, her position as the reigning muse of Soviet poetry was threatened by a bizarre combination of people and circumstances. Two strikingly anti-Semitic magazine articles appeared claiming that Mayakovsky's true love had been Tatiana Yakovleva, a genuine ethnic Russian, not a Jew like Lili. The Briks, the article suggested, had conspired to wreck the romance, thus driving the poet to suicide.
Most of the story was as preposterous as it was invidious. It had been inspired by Mayakovsky's sister, Liudmila, who loathed Lili. Liudmila's hostility had been exploited by cultural bureaucrats desirous of seizing the vast and profitable Mayakovsky publishing concession for themselves. In a period of heightened Soviet anti-Semitism following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, nothing could save Lili. Even Aragon, whose influence had waned, was helpless. By 1972 the Mayakovsky Museum and Library had been moved from the Briks' old flat, while all traces of Lili's 15-year connection with the poet were eliminated from the new premises.
It was at this juncture that Lili turned to two American tourists in Moscow who happened by with a letter of introduction. Desperate to restore her name to the rec ord, she offered Ann and Samuel Charters a series of interviews with herself and other old friends of Mayakovsky's, and produced some unpublished materials documenting her association with him.
The book resulting from these efforts would undoubtedly have displeased Lili, who committed suicide last year at the age of 86. In spite of the evident bias of their informants, the authors were able to maintain their objectivity about a love affair between two exceptionally over wrought Russians. The Charterses' lively, gossipy account offers hardly any in sight into Mayakovsky's poetry, but it does provide some nuggets of new information that supplement or corroborate aspects of Edward J. Brown's splendid critical biography of Mayakovsky, published in 1973.
What the Charters book demonstrates best is the difficulty of presenting Vladimir and Lili as an engaging couple. Still, Mayakovsky's appalling self-absorption is at least partly redeemed by his genius, his misery and his irrepressible sense of humor. Lili, however, emerges as a frivolous, tough and faintly sinister character.