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."

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?"

[2] 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, Osip Brik, Lilya's husband, 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.

After June 1915, Mayakovsky's lyrical poetry was almost exclusively devoted to Lilya (with notable exception of late 1920s to Tatyana Yakovleva).

He frequently explicitly dedicated his poems or referred in them to Lilya by name, for example in his "Облако в штанах" ("A Cloud in Trousers", 1915), "Флейта-позвоночник" ("The Backbone Flute", 1916), "Про это" ("About This", 1922), "Лилечка!

In 1928–1929, Lilya turned to directing a half-fiction-half-documentary motion picture "Стеклянный глаз" (The Glass Eye), a parody on "bourgeois cinematography".

Some authors consider that his passion for Lilya was one of the motives that drove Mayakovsky to suicide in 1930 at his Moscow apartment immediately after his breakup with Veronika Polonskaya.

Recently published letters between the sisters in the course of more than five decades (except six years of World War II) reveal insights into life and cultural exchange across the Iron Curtain.

According to the Swedish critic and Mayakovsky's biographer Bengt Jangfeldt [sv], Boris Pasternak once told Roman Jakobson that Lilya Brik "frightened" him by saying that her guests would start supper "right after Osya returns from Cheka", and that he later called their apartment "Moscow police department".

[9] In her memoirs the artist Elizaveta Lavinskaya, a friend of Briks and Mayakovsky, mentions that at some point new persons started visiting the LEF meetings, including Yakov Agranov, Zakhar Volovich and some other people later identified as high-ranking NKVD officers.

[10] A number of people also speculated about the sexual relationships between Lylia and Agranov, including the Soviet ballet dancer Maya Plisetskaya in her book.

She helped many aspiring talents and was acquainted with many leading figures of Russian and international culture, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Boris Pasternak, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Kazimir Malevich, Sergei Paradjanov, Maya Plisetskaya, Rodion Shchedrin, Andrei Voznesensky, Yves St. Laurent and Pablo Picasso.