The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff

Description

The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff: Abridged Overview

Marie Bashkirtseff, a beautiful, young Russian noblewoman, began her remarkable diary in 1873 at age 14. She lived in a sunny villa in Nice on the Mediterranean coast. Eleven years later, she died of consumption in Paris, but her writing left a vast self-portrait. She penned thousands of pages, documenting her life within the Belle Époque world. Bashkirtseff became a sensation in both artistic and feminist circles in early fin de siècle Paris.

Content and Publication History

Marie lived with a sense of impending death, making her passage through time swift and vivid. She left a legacy of extraordinary art and, most importantly, her magnificent journals. These writings are monumental, possessing the keen observation of Thomas Mann’s work. However, after her death, her mother heavily edited and censored the journals for the 1887 publication. Madame Bashkirtseff removed her daughter’s radical opinions and embarrassing family details.

• Original journals: Held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
• Initial publication: Posthumous, 1887, heavily expurgated by her mother.
• Modern edition: Restores the full, unsanitized literary self-portrait.

The True Self-Portrait

Despite the original suppression, the French press celebrated the journals as the true portrait of a great, dynamic young woman. Katherine Kernberger’s fresh, timeless translation returns to Marie’s original notebooks. Consequently, her decades-long, meticulous research resurrected the true, multifaceted literary self-portrait. Kernberger allows Marie to speak as she truly lived: ambitious, often scandalously funny, personal, and consistently mesmerizing.