Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff ( PDF)
Bashkirtseff's writing showcases her passionate personality, intellectual depth, and struggles with identity and purpose. The journal not only documents her artistic journey but also reflects her observations on the broader cultural and social issues of the 19th century.
It serves as an important contribution to feminist literature and the history of women artists, showcasing her desire for independence and recognition in a male-dominated society.
Preface by the translator
Since Jean Jacques Rousseau published his Confessions, probably there has not appeared in literature a personal analysis so frank, honest, and merciless as this Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff. A beautiful, high-born girl, endowed with a passionate nature to begin with, thirsting eagerly for life and experience, feeling in her nature both the will and the power to place her name with the immortals, she received, at the very beginning of her career, the cruel arret-de-mort, and under the wings of the angel of death, carved, with unfaltering hand, on her own monument, a name that will live.
Her one fear, reiterated in every tone of passionate protest, was that, dying, she might be forgotten; and to defeat, in advance, the envious assaults of time, she studied, labored, suffered, laid bare her very soul for the world's perusal, xin her own preface she confesses: "This is the thought that has always terrified me: To live, to be so filled with ambition, to suffer, to weep, to struggle; and, at the end, oblivion! oblivion — as if I had never existed!"
And so, in order that her name may be remembered; that the story of her life may interest the curious at least, she takes the world into her woman's confidence, and, as she says, tells " everything, everything, everything! Otherwise," she adds, "what use were it to write?"
In view of her piteous appeal, and of the fact that to mutilate her journal by omissions, would be like cutting the details from a picture, the translator has conscientiously endeavored to render the young artist's thoughts as she wrote them,omitting nothing, altering nothing, but aiding her to tell toher English, as to her French readers, " everything, everything,, everything." Besides, there is not a page — it might almost be said, not a line — in Marie Bashkirtseff's journal that the reader can afford to lose. As it stands, it is an intimate record, tracing step by step the unfolding of a unique character; and in every word throbs an eager young heart, in every line beat the passionate pinions of a woman's soul. Grace to the dead! mutilated translations of the journal have been published, but the translator of this edition has not found it in his heart to resist the mute pleadings of that stilled voice, and so, with the best skill at his command, he has transferred to the following pages every thought confided by the author to her own journal.
A. D. Hall,
Translator