Description
The most famous diary of the nineteenth century — by a young woman who refused to be ordinary. Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884) was a Ukrainian-born Russian aristocrat who trained as a painter at Paris’s Académie Julian and exhibited at the Paris Salon. She died of tuberculosis at twenty-five. From the age of thirteen she had been keeping a diary of blazing honesty about her hunger for glory — and it made her immortal.
Published after her death, the Journal stunned Europe with its frankness: its ambition, its vanity, its intelligence, its refusal to apologize for wanting everything. Readers from Gladstone’s England to Chekhov’s Russia argued over it. Presented here in two volumes — I Am the Most Interesting Book of All and Lust for Glory — it remains one of the great self-portraits in literature.
Read it for the voice alone: fierce, funny, and centuries ahead of its time.
The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff
The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff: I Am the Most Interesting Book of All, Volume I & Lust for Glory, Volume II presents the legendary diary of one of the most extraordinary young women of the 19th century — a diary famous since its first appearance for its blazing honesty and ambition.
Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884) was a Ukrainian-born Russian artist who studied painting in Paris at the Académie Julian and exhibited at the Paris Salon, all before her death from tuberculosis at the age of 25. From the age of 13 she kept a diary that recorded, with startling frankness, her hunger for glory, her artistic training, her family conflicts, and her awareness of her own mortality.
This ebook collects two volumes of the journal — I Am the Most Interesting Book of All and Lust for Glory — covering the diary’s early years, when Marie’s voice is at its most passionate and confessional. Admired by writers from Gladstone to George Bernard Shaw, the journal remains one of the great documents of youthful ambition ever written.
Essential reading for lovers of art history, women’s writing, and the great diaries of literature.
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