Elena Guro, known as a professional painter and a writer of poetry and lyrical prose, is associated with the Russian avant-garde--specifically, Russian Futurism. Although she published in various Futurist miscellanies, her writing, worldview, and poetics show a turn from Symbolist aesthetics--especially its impressionistic phase--to a metonymic representation. She also contributed to the experiments of zaum' (transrational language) and tried to re-create the onomatopoeic sounds of nature and the language of children in her writing. She played a significant role in experiments to determine interrelationships between sound and color.

Elena Genrikhovna Guro was born in St. Petersburg on 10 January 1877 (other sources list 18 May). Her father, Genrikh Stepanovich Guro, a colonel and later a lieutenant general, was a descendant of a French nobleman who had emigrated from France in 1793. Guro's mother, Anna Mikhailovna (Chistiakova) Guro, died in 1906. This gifted woman, who drew well, was a daughter of Mikhail Borisovich Chistiakov...