Elsa Triolet (1896-1970) was a Russian-French writer. Born Elsa Yureyevna Kagan in Moscow, the daughter of Jewish intellectuals, she married a French naval officer, André Triolet, in 1918 and lived in Tahiti for their two-year marriage. She then went to Berlin and, encouraged by Maxim Gorky, published her first book in the Soviet Union, Na Taiti (1925).
She moved to Paris and met Louis Aragon, the Surrealist poet, in 1928. They married in 1939 and, through him, Elsa came to know the major writers and artists of the time, including Matisse and Picasso. In the 1930s, together with Salvador Dali, Giacometti, Leonor Fini and Meret Oppenheim, she produced jewellery and accessories for the fashion house of Schiaparelli. She published three further books in the Soviet Union, but increasing censorship prompted her to turn to the French language.
By this time Aragon and Triolet had become affiliated to the Communist party. In 1939 Triolet’s book on Mayakovsky was seized and destroyed by the government, and when France surrendered to the Nazis, she and Aragon fled to the unoccupied zone. In 1942 they were forced underground. Important figures of the French Resistance, they edited and contributed to Les Lettres Françaises and Elsa wrote stories of Occupied France, published illegally by Underground presses. Three of these interlinking stories, later published in book form as Le Premier accroc coûte deux cents francs (A Fine of Two Hundred Francs, 1945), were awarded the Prix Goncourt.
Following the war, Elsa was decorated as a heroine of the French Resistance. She became a leader of the National Council of Writers and the Union of French Women, and a delegate to various peace conferences. She was awarded the Prix de la Fraternité for her novel on anti-Semitism and refugees, Le Rendez-vous des étrangers (1956). She published 27 books in all, the last, Le Rossignol se tait à l’aube, in 1970, the year she died of heart disease.
