She and her older sister Lilya Brik received excellent educations; they were able to speak fluent German and French and play the piano.

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.

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.

In the early 1920s, Elsa described her visit to Tahiti in her letters to Victor Shklovsky, who subsequently showed them to Maxim Gorky.