Gala Dalí — muse (salvador dali) with roots in the Russian Empire
Gala was born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova in Kazan, in the Russian Empire, on 7 September (26 August, Old Style) 1894, the date given in her teacher's diploma; other dates appear in the literature. She was the third of four children of Ivan Diakonov, a civil servant at the Ministry of Agriculture, and Antonina Deulina. Her father died when she was eleven, and her mother made a new life with Dmitri Ilyich Gomberg, a Moscow lawyer, from whom Elena took the patronymic Dmitrievna and who gave her a good education.
She grew up in Moscow among books, was an excellent pupil, and was friendly with the sisters Marina and Anastasia Tsvetaeva. Ill with tuberculosis, she was sent in 1912 to the Clavadel sanatorium near Davos, in Switzerland, where she met a young French patient, Eugène Grindel, who was writing poetry. She encouraged him, helped copy his verses and wrote, under a pseudonym, the preface to his Dialogue des inutiles; he would become known as Paul Éluard. She returned to Russia, completed her education with a teacher's diploma in 1915, and in 1916 left Moscow to join him in Paris. They married in 1917, and their only child, Cécile, was born in 1918.
Through Éluard she entered the circle of the Surrealists, who called her by the name Gala; André Breton described her as la femme éternelle. In the summer of 1929 the couple visited the young painter Salvador Dalí at Cadaqués, and Gala stayed with Dalí. They married in a civil ceremony in 1934 and in a Catholic ceremony at the sanctuary of Els Àngels near Girona in 1958, after receiving a papal dispensation.
She became Dalí's model and the figure of many of his paintings, including The Madonna of Port Lligat, and she managed his career, dealing with galleries and collectors; Dalí signed works with both their names. They spent the Second World War in the United States, returning in 1948, after which they divided their years between Portlligat, New York and Paris. In 1968 Dalí bought her the medieval castle of Púbol.
She died at Portlligat on 10 June 1982, aged eighty-seven, and is buried at Púbol, which since 1996 has been open to the public as the Gala-Dalí Castle House-Museum.
Tracing the roots — Kazan, Kazan Governorate (Russia); raised in Moscow
Born Elena Diakonova in Kazan in 1894 and raised in Moscow, where she trained as a teacher, she met Paul Éluard at a Swiss sanatorium in 1912 and left Moscow for Paris in 1916.
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Kazan, Kazan Governorate (Russia); raised in Moscow. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"I will be your Gradiva — the one who moves forward."