За книгою (At a Book)
Culture *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](./KHARKIV_LOST_WORKS.md)*). 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.