“Why lie and boast? Yes; it is obvious that I have the desire, if not the hope, to remain on this earth by any means necessary. If I do not die young, I hope to remain a great artist; But if I die young, I want to leave, for publication, my diary, which can only be interesting. The one who introduces herself is the young painter Marie Bashkirtseff (Gavrontsy, Russian Empire, 1858 – Paris, 1884), a woman of the old aristocracy who frequented the European bohemian world of the last third of the 19th century and was one of the first girls to study Fine Arts at the Académie Julian in Paris, a pioneer in the training of women. The fragment is dated May 1884, shortly before his death from tuberculosis, when he was not yet 26 years old.
It is not surprising that at that time he had already had thoughts related to death and, faced with the possibility of seeing his future as an artist cut short, he delegated his memory to the diary he had cultivated throughout his life. “I hate prefaces, so I preferred to make my own introduction,” he wrote. An introduction in which, without the slightest false modesty, he confesses his desire not to fall into oblivion and assures the reader of the transparency of the pages that follow. “I consider myself too admirable to censor myself,” he says.
The whole diary has that insolent tone, which conflicts with the restraint and perhaps the restraint of many contemporary testimonial texts. The author began it in his childhood, but decided to make his role known only from the age of 14, between January 1873 and October 20, 1884, a few weeks before his death.
Of the French original, 16 volumes have been preserved, including this one. Diaryits first translation into Spanish, includes a selection by Alicia de la Fuente, editor of Espinas. It has the particularity that in addition to the editor’s clarifications, it contains notes by Maria herself, who, over the years, with that awareness of wanting to be read, has returned to what had been written and put it into perspective.
Born to be a star
Let’s not be mistaken: Marie has a personality that, especially at first, can seem arrogant. Her voice, so delighted to meet herself (or this image that he intends to convey), clashes with the more moderate words, often prey to the imposter syndrome of many contemporary artists. Since childhood, she has expressed a penchant for grandeur, even in the type of toys, which has turned into an obsession with posterity. To complete his myth, he says that his mother’s fortune read like this: “You have two sons. […]. The son will be like everyone else, but the daughter will be a star…” True or not, she took it for granted that circumstances would work in his favor. And at least he lived by those principles.
Born into a family of artists, she was educated by Russian and French governesses, as was common in what was then called “Little Ukraine,” where she grew up. While her education, as well as her travels throughout Europe, gave her a cosmopolitan outlook, with an emphasis on art and literature, her lineage left its mark on a conservatism that led her to reject the emerging class of the wealthy bourgeoisie and to venerate the elderly, customs and certain objects.
In this sense, he embodies the old order that collapsed with the Russian Revolution; his writings provide a testimony that is not abundant, not in the voice of a teenager. However, not everything is black or white: for example, he has an ambivalent relationship with religion: on the one hand, he confesses to being a believer, he prays, he asks God with great faith; but he is also wary of certain dogmas, such as using the argument of the “will of God” to justify everything. When he falls ill, he questions these convictions.
Reading her biography, one expects this diary to focus on art and what surrounds it (and this is partly the case, no doubt), but perhaps the most precious, the most authentic – among other things because of her premature death – is that before being a painter, she was a teenager, and what she left in her papers is her adolescent voice, with its immediate impressions, its ups and downs, its passing infatuations. Because, as passionate as she was about art, Marie never stopped living, enjoying youth, flirting.
The beauty of the diary is that these experiences are captured with the freshness of age intact, without the filter of someone who remembers their maturity. And there are things that don’t change: the feeling of knowing that your latest love interest is committed; the moments when, despite bragging about her “golden hair” and “pink skin,” she looks ugly; the irritations of everyday life at home or at school… Love, above all love; or what she thinks love is.
The discovery of art
A French governess encourages him to draw; that’s where your path begins. The climax comes later, with a trip to Italy where his team resides. stendhalazo: the wonder before the paintings and sculptures of Florence and Rome changes forever your way of being in the world. What is precious in his testimony is that he approaches the works with naivety, without having received any formal education.
He is amazed by art by pure instinct, like a child who immerses himself for the first time in a novel that captivates him. Today, accustomed to seeing a substitute for everything on the screen, it is difficult to imagine what a girl could feel when she contemplates the world for the first time. duomo Florentine, without preconceived ideas. Moreover, cities, before the tourist boom, were not so uniform; and stepping on foreign soil for the first time caused a much stronger impact.
His concerns are not limited to art: he expresses his judgments on literature, philosophy and even politics. He has the increasingly costly ability to appreciate the value of the work independently of his opinion on the author. De Zola states that “he has decided to attack […] Republican individuals with a tasteless ferocity that does not go with their great talent.
The question of the creative woman is not lacking, a source of contradictions: “She could become something; But, having skirts, where do you want me to go? And yet: “I am not so crazy that I claim this stupid equality, which is a utopia.” […]since there can be no equality between two such different beings. Act like a feminist before the letter in his artistic effort, while his mind tries to reconcile the education he received with his high aspirations.
The diary also recounts his training at the select school of Paris and his friendships with the cultural milieu of the time, the artists and intellectuals he became friends with and corresponded with until his death. He painted a lot, spending long days working hard. The illness extinguishes his body – there are frequent references, in the last entries, to fatigue, to the frustration of wanting to do things and not being able to, especially when it comes to painting – but not his mind, which is even more awake in the face of the realization that those childhood dreams for which it always seemed there would be time will never come true. The imminence of death makes him change his mind on many aspects; and it is moving to read how, in a final gesture of nobility, he uses his little strength to write about art so as not to dwell on his ills.
Chronicle of a life
After his death, his diary enjoyed considerable commercial success; he did not have time to build a long career, but he had already become a legend. He had talent for both disciplines, painting and writing. One cannot know to what extent the truth is told – one never knows when reading a diary or an autobiography, no matter who it is –; although it matters little: even if he conscientiously fables, the exercise of writing daily for so many years already implies the progressive construction of a memoir or testimony. And the diaries of young painters of Parisian high society of the 19th century are not abundant, at least in bookstores. Whatever the prestige she acquired as an artist, the diary is a precious document in itself, because it reflects the way in which a young girl of her class opens up to life, professionally and intimately.
Virginia Woolf, in A room of your ownencourages women to write about anything that concerns them; there are no minor or worse subjects, but writers of genius and mediocre writers. In some sections, Marie’s concerns may seem vain or superficial; However, the fact of not writing to please and not repressing her emotions gives value to the journal.
It is the testimony of a lost time, but it is above all the documented life of a young girl that we follow in her process of maturation as a privileged spectator. Reading how he grows, how he becomes passionate about art and expands his world, contaminates this desire to live that he had until the end. “You have to love your interior,” he wrote at the age of 20, “there is nothing sweeter than resting in yourself; dream of things different from those that have been done, with people different from those you have known… and rest eternally.
Marie rested too soon, but her art and her voice continue to speak for her.
