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In 1915 Elsa befriended aspiring futurist poet and graphic artist Vladimir Mayakovsky and invited him home, but he fell in love with Lilya. Despite the calamities of World War I, Russian Civil War and throughout 1920s, their love affair caught and stayed in public attention, possibly because she did not divorce her husband. 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! Вместо письма" ("Lilechka! Instead of a Letter"). In 1918, Mayakovsky wrote the scenario for the movie "Закованная фильмой" (Chained by the Film), in which he and Lilya starred. The movie Neptune— produced by a private movie company — has been lost, with the exception of a few tri...

Later in 1930, after divorcing Osip earlier that year, she married Soviet General Vitali Primakov. Primakov was arrested in 1936 and executed in 1937 in relation to the Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization, a part of the Moscow Trials. The charges were dropped and he was rehabilitated posthumously in 1957. In her 1935 letter to Joseph Stalin, Lilya Brik complained that Mayakovsky's poetic heritage was getting neglected. Stalin made a famous remark to Nikolai Yezhov: "Comrade Yezhov, please take charge of Brik's letter. Mayakovsky is still the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime. Brik's complaints are, in my opinion, justified..." In 1938, she married writer Vasily Abgarovich Katanyan and they spent forty years together. Lilya Brik committed suicide at the age of 87 when she was terminally ill. She left sculptures and writings. Recently published letters between the sisters in the course of more than fi...

There were attempts to present her as greedy and manipulative femme fatale, but those who knew her, noted her altruism and intelligence. 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. Lilya Brik's idiomatically posed portrait graced the cover of LEF magazine (Leftist Front of Arts) in the 1920s, a magazine concerning Dada and Constructivist art. The portrait, designed by Alexander Rodchenko, has been reworked into other designs, including as cover art for Franz Ferdinand and Robyn.

The main subject of this epic poem was love in itself. After a brief separation, at a Christmas-time before 1922, Mayakovsky wrote a kind of proto-surrealist poem in which he allegorized the feeling of missing Lilya. Some parts reflect themes akin to what Angelo Maria Ripellino once called the "revolt of the objects". In a telephone conversation, for example, the poet sees the spoken word as a dinosaur that crawls through the line, whereas the entire house shakes as the phone bell rings.