Elena (Eleonora) Genrikhovna Guro was born on May 18 (30), 1877 in Saint Petersburg into the family of General of Infantry Genrikh Gelmut (Georgy Stepanovich) Guro, the son of a French emigrant from the family of the Marquis de Méricourt. Elena’s mother was Anna Mikhailovna, maiden name Chistyakova — the daughter of the writer and teacher Mikhail Borisovich Chistyakov, a publisher of the “Zhurnal dlya Detey” (Magazine for Children).

Elena Guro spent her childhood at the Pochinki estate near the village of Novoselye in the Sosednenskaya Volost, Luga Uyezd, Pskov Governorate. At the age of eight, she became interested in painting; in 1890, she entered the drawing school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. From 1903 to 1905, she attended Jan Ciaglinski’s workshop, where she met Mikhail Matyushin.

They got married in 1904, and the following year her first story “Early Spring” was published in the “Collected Works of Young Writers”. During the same time, she also created illustrations for Georges Sand’s book “Tales of a Grandmother”.

The collection of the State Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg contains an album of photographic portraits of Elena Guro, taken by Mikhail Matyushin in the 1900s. It is a family photo album where the artist’s wife poses in various styles and locations, wearing a summer dress or a winter coat, with or without a hat, in the apartment at Litseyskaya Street, 4 (now known as Rentgen Street) where Matyushin and Guro lived from 1907 to 1912, in their country house in Uusikirkko, in Martyshkino or the estate of the poetess’s parents.

Matyushin perpetuated the image of this petite and fragile-looking young woman, who was burning with immense inner and creative energies of a poet and an artist and was the only female member of the “pathfinders of the new literary school” — Cubo-Futurists.