Elena Guro

In 1912 Elena Guro published Autumnal Dream, a book dedicated to her son, a young man she mourned in its pages as if he had died. She had no children. The son was her own invention, a literary mystification that outlived her, and some scholars read him as a mask for the poet herself.

Guro painted and wrote at the same time, and in St Petersburg she stood close to the centre of the new art. With her husband, the painter and musician Mikhail Matyushin, she was among the founders of the Union of Youth, an artists' society registered in 1910 whose exhibitions ranged from Symbolism to Cubo-Futurism. She was also one of very few women in the circle of the Cubo-Futurist poets.

She died in the spring of 1913, aged 36, at her country house in Uusikirkko, a village on the Karelian Isthmus, then part of the Grand Duchy of Finland. Matyushin went on to apply her ideas about colour in his own later work.