Elsa Triolet

Ella Yuryevna Kagan (; – 16 June 1970), known as Elsa Triolet was a Russian-French writer and translator. Biography Ella Yuryevna Kagan was born into a Jewish family of Yuri Alexandrovich Kagan, a lawyer, and Yelena Youlevna Berman, a music teacher, in Moscow. She and her older sister Lilya Brik received excellent educations; they were able to speak fluent German and French and play the piano. Ella graduated from the Moscow Institute of Architecture. Ella soon became associated with the Russian Futurists via Lilya, who was in 1912 married to the art critic Osip Brik; she befriended people of their circle, including Roman Jakobson, then a zaum poet, who became her lifelong friend. Elsa enjoyed poetry, and in 1911 befriended and fell in love with the aspiring futurist poet and graphic artist Vladimir Mayakovsky. When she invited him home, the poet fell madly in love with her sister, marking the start of a series of artistic collaborations involving the two that lasted until the poet's death. Ella was the first to translate Mayakovsky's poetry (as well as volumes of other Russian-language poetry) to French. In 1918, at the outset of the Russian Civil War, Ella married the French cavalry officer André Triolet, and emigrated to France, where she changed her name to Elsa, but for years admitted in her letters to Lilya to being heartbroken. She later divorced Triolet.