За книгою (At a Book)

Overview

За книгою ("At a Book"), an oil on canvas of about 1882, 63 × 60,5 cm, is the only Bashkirtseff painting still in Kharkiv — the one survivor of the roughly 127 works sent there from Leningrad in 1932, of which some sixty-five were lost in the Second World War (see The Kharkiv Lost Works). It is held to be a self-portrait, and if that is right it is the closest thing we have to a picture of Marie at her real occupation: not posed with a palette, but bent over a page.

The attribution as a self-portrait comes from Ukrainian museum wall texts rather than from a signed or documented identification, and this entry passes it on as such — believed, not established.

Description

A young woman in a plain black dress with grey cuffs sits close to the picture plane against a ground of near-total darkness. An open book lies on a bare wooden table, its pages catching what light there is; she leans on her left forearm, presses her right hand into her hair above the temple, and looks down at the page with her eyes almost closed. Almost the whole canvas is black — the composition is carried by three lit shapes, the hand, the face, and the book, arranged in a descending diagonal. There is a ring on the finger of the raised hand.

The mood is neither decorative nor sentimental: it is a picture of concentration, and of the small physical postures of someone who has been reading a long time. Marie's own diary is the record of a formidable reader — Latin, Greek, Zola, Musset, the newspapers, everything — and the picture belongs beside that reading self rather than beside her Salon exhibits.

Making of the Work

The diary is silent about it. Sweeps of carnets 060–106 turned up no passage that can be attached to this canvas: it is one of the many works she painted without naming, and 1882 — the year she spent partly in Nice and partly ill in Paris — produced a great deal she never catalogued. What is documented is what happened to the picture afterwards.

It went with her mother's gift to the Museum of Alexander III in St Petersburg (the present State Russian Museum) in the first decade of the twentieth century, and then, in the transfers of 1930–1932, to the Kharkiv State Art-Historical Museum. In October 1941 only 4,711 items out of some 75,000 were evacuated from Kharkiv; the Bashkirtseff canvases were not among them. Under the occupation the building served as an officers' billet and an open warehouse, consignments went west to Germany, and a few days before the liberation of 23 August 1943 the occupiers burned the five-storey museum with what was left inside. За книгою is the one Bashkirtseff that came through.

Its condition today is not known. The Kharkiv Art Museum was shelled on 2 and 8 March 2022 and again on 31 December 2023, and on 14 June 2026 it took a direct hit from a Shahed drone: the roof burned, second-floor ceilings collapsed, some 1,200 m² were alight and roughly a thousand works were damaged by blast, fire or firefighting water, several canvases destroyed outright. The best-known works had been evacuated by the state in 2022 to destinations that are deliberately undisclosed, but the collection runs to over 26,000 items and much stayed in the building. No source names this painting in connection with either the evacuation or the damage. It is reasonable to suppose it was in the first evacuation tier. It is not a fact, and any statement that it survives should be dated to the day it is written.

References in Diary

None identified. The mention-map sweeps of carnets 060–075, 076–086, 087–096 and 097–106 all record this work as absent from the diary; the works of 1882 that she does name and describe are Thérèse, the Nice campaign of ¶ 090.0492–0493, La Parisienne and Les Saintes Femmes.

Related Entries

- #Kharkiv_Lost_Works — the collection this picture belonged to, and what became of it
- #Sorrow — the surviving canvas at Sumy, from the same Ukrainian dispersal
- #Reading — Marie as a reader
- #Art_Practice

Sources

- Wikimedia Commons — At a book (1889 × 2000, public domain; the file used here is a downscaled copy)
- Kharkiv Art Museum — historical note (the 1941 evacuation figures and the August 1943 burning)
- Suspilne, 14 June 2026 — fire at the Kharkiv Art Museum after the Russian strike and Gwara Media — evacuating pictures from the damaged museum
- S. I. Bocharova, Велика українська енциклопедія — Башкирцева, Марія Костянтинівна (the transfers to Ukraine)