Marie Bashkirtseff

Overview

Marie Bashkirtseff (Maria Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva; 12 November 1858 Old Style = 24 November 1858 New Style – Paris, 31 October 1884) is the author of the diary this project publishes. She was born at Gavrontsi near Poltava, in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine), left Russia as a child, grew up in Nice and Paris, trained as a painter at the Académie Julian, exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1880, and died of tuberculosis a few weeks before her twenty-sixth birthday. Her name is also spelled Bachkirtseff (the usual modern French form) and, in some older references, Bashkirseff; the diary itself uses Bashkirtseff, the form this project keeps in every language.

Early Life

She was the daughter of Konstantin Pavlovich Bashkirtsev and Maria Stepanovna, née Babanina. Her parents lived apart, and in her preface she tells how her father and grandfather tried again and again to win her mother back (000.0013). With her mother, her maternal grandfather, her brother Paul, her cousin Dina and other relatives she travelled west by way of Vienna (000.0022) to Baden-Baden in June 1870 (000.0023), fled to Geneva when the Franco-Prussian War broke out (000.0039), and then settled in Nice, where the surviving diary opens in January 1873.

The date of her birth is a small puzzle of its own. In the diary she gives it as "le 12 novembre 1858" (020.0245), the Old Style (Julian) date, which is 24 November in the Gregorian calendar. She also writes that she "was supposed to be born" only on 12 January, so the family counted her age from that day (068.0598). In the preface of 1884 she gives the year as 1859 (000.0005), and the 1887 edition printed 1860. Sources that give "11 November" or a year other than 1858 descend from these family fictions.

The Diary

The diary runs from January 1873 to 20 October 1884, eleven days before her death (106.0190–106.0194). It is preceded by a preface dated 1 May 1884 (carnet 000), in which she sets out why she wrote it and why she wanted it published whole. The manuscript is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The integral edition counts 105 notebooks, while the scholar Colette Cosnier, who read the manuscript at the BnF in 1985, described "eighty-four cahiers and carnets". This project arranges the text in 107 carnets (000–106).

What makes the diary matter is its completeness of attention. For twelve years Marie recorded her ambitions, her vanity, her reading, her family's scandals, her loves real and imagined, her work at the easel and her illness with the same candour. In the preface she calls it a "document humain" in the sense Zola, the Goncourts and Maupassant gave the phrase (carnet 000). Its best-known line is her complaint of 30 September 1878: "je sais que je pourrai devenir quelqu'un mais avec des jupes où voulez-vous qu'on aille ? Le mariage est la seule carrière des femmes" (082.0509).

Censorship and the Complete Text

The first edition, the two-volume Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, was published by G. Charpentier in 1887 and prepared by André Theuriet with her mother. Large passages judged immoral, improper or defamatory were removed. Theuriet also condensed and re-sequenced entries to give the book a narrative arc. The book was an international success. Mathilde Blind's English translation followed in 1890, and W. E. Gladstone called the diary "a book without parallel". Its cuts were not undone for more than a century.

The scale of the cuts can be measured from this project's paragraph tags. Of about 54,600 paragraphs in the complete text, roughly 5,700 appear in the 1887 edition in whole or in part. That is about one in ten (count of #Censored_1887 tags, October 2026).

The complete French text was published for the first time as Mon Journal in sixteen volumes (1995–2005) by the Cercle des Amis de Marie Bashkirtseff. Ginette Apostolescu transcribed the manuscript notebooks. In English, Katherine Kernberger's two volumes translate a selection from the uncensored text: I Am the Most Interesting Book of All (first published by Chronicle Books, 1997, translated with Phyllis Howard Kernberger) and Lust for Glory. This project cites both in the Fonthill Press editions (Kernberger 2013).

This project's French source is the complete text. In September–October 2026 a completeness sweep against the printed integral edition found that about 12.8% of its text (some 1.36 million characters, in 93 carnets) was missing from the project's earlier transcription. The affected carnets were rebuilt in manuscript order and renumbered, and a later sweep left only 0.2% of the printed text unmatched. The 2026 restoration therefore recovered roughly an eighth of the diary for this edition.

The Painter

Art became her vocation in the autumn of 1877. On 2 October she went for the first time to the women's studio of the Académie Julian, "le seul sérieux pour les femmes", which worked from eight to noon and one to five every day (075.0124). The next day Rodolphe Julian praised a head she had sketched in ten minutes (075.0128). Her teachers there were Tony Robert-Fleury and Jules Lefebvre. Jules Bastien-Lepage, whom she came to know in Paris, was her model and her measure. The full catalogue of her work, with images and locations, is in the works hub, Marie Bashkirtseff's works.

Her Salon career, year by year:

The mention belongs to 1883, not 1884 as is often said. The 1885 catalogue's notice places it at the Salon of 1883 with "un pastel", and the diary agrees. In 1880 and 1881 she signed with pseudonyms, and from 1883 under her own name.

Surviving and Lost Works

The posthumous exhibition of the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs opened in February 1885. Its catalogue, with a preface by François Coppée, lists 224 paintings, pastels and drawings and five sculptures, the nearest thing to an authorial checklist. Her mother placed works in French and Dutch museums. The best-known survivors are Un meeting (Musée d'Orsay) and the Autoportrait à la palette (Musée des Beaux-Arts Jules Chéret, Nice), and about fourteen works can be located in public collections today. Roughly 140 works went to the Museum of Alexander III in St Petersburg, and most of those were sent on to Kharkiv in 1932. Sixty-five canvases are itemised as lost there in the Second World War: looted by the occupiers or burned with the museum in August 1943, according to the Kharkiv Art Museum's own filings with the German Lost Art Foundation. The often repeated story that her paintings perished in a bombing of Gavrontsi has no source and should not be repeated. See The Kharkiv Lost Works.

Writing and Correspondence

Besides the diary she wrote for the press. In 1881 she contributed to Hubertine Auclert's feminist paper La Citoyenne, first an article she was pleased to see printed on 7 March (091.0273), then a Salon review (091.0631). The review was signed "P. Orell" in her spelling (092.0023), usually given as "Pauline Orrel".

In the spring of 1884 she began an anonymous correspondence with Guy de Maupassant. She wrote under assumed names; in one letter she signed herself "Joseph Savantin", per Wilson. She collected his replies from the poste restante ("La cinquième et la mieux", 27 April 1884, 104.0035) and read them aloud to Julian (104.0294). The letters were published in Lettres de Marie Bashkirtseff (Charpentier, 1891, preface by François Coppée).

Illness and Death

Her hearing began to fail by 1880: at the studio "on me dit que je suis sourde" (088.0165). On 28 December 1882 a doctor told her plainly that she was consumptive: "Je suis poitrinaire" (097.0297). From then on the diary is a race between work and illness. The last entry, of 20 October 1884, records Bastien-Lepage, himself dying, coming to see her almost carried by his brother, and her bed moved to the salon because she could no longer climb the stairs (106.0190–106.0194). She died in Paris on 31 October 1884; Bastien-Lepage died on 10 December. She is buried in the Passy cemetery (division 11) in a funerary chapel designed by Émile Bastien-Lepage.

Legacy

The 1887 Journal made her famous across Europe and America as a writer. Katherine Mansfield and Anaïs Nin wrote in their own diaries about reading her. The American Mary MacLane named Marie and Byron as the two minds most like her own. Simone de Beauvoir quotes her throughout Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), above all in the chapter "La narcissiste" ("I am my own heroine") and for the line "Where can one go in skirts?". The feminist art historians Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, introducing the 1985 Virago edition, wrote: "Never before had a woman so urgently proclaimed her ambition to excel, her hunger for public fame."

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