MARIE BASHKIRTSEFF

A YOUNG RUSSIAN ARISTOCRAT AND ARTIST

1860-1884

(INTRODUCTORY NOTE)

To not many young women has it been given to move the world so deeply, or to acquire such wide posthumous fame, as did Marie Bashkirtseff by the publication of her "Journal" shortly after her death. She was of a Russian family of rank and wealth, was a pure and noble woman, possessed of a powerful intellect and of such unusual artistic talent that before her early death she had already won high repute as a painter.

Future ages, however, will remember her chiefly for her "Journal." As a mere child of twelve she conceived the idea of becoming famous by keeping a diary in which she would record the exact truth about herself, so that after her death the world might really know just how one woman had thought and felt. This idea she carried persistently onward. All her little girlish love affairs are set down, all her furious rages over trifles, her alternate ecstasies and depressions, her absorbing passion for fame. Even the slow approach of death is here made visible, the last entry being recorded but a few days before the end. Wherever we can test the "Journal" by a comparison with outside facts, it speaks truly; wherever we measure it by human experience, it rings true. So the world has come to accept this glowing book for what it claims to be, the true soul-history of a very able and high-souled young woman.

THE JOURNAL OF A YOUNG ARTIST

Or what use were pretense or affectation? Yes, it is evident that I have the desire, if not the hope, of living upon this earth by any means in my power. If I do not die young I hope to live as a great artist; but if I die young, I intend to have my journal, which cannot fail to be interesting, published. Perhaps this idea of publication has already detracted from, if not destroyed, the chief merit that such a work may

be said to possess? But, no! for in the first place I had written for a long time without any thought of being read, and then it is precisely because I hoped to be read that I am altogether sincere. If this book is not the exact, the absolute, the strict truth, it has no raison d'être. Not only do I always write what I think, but I have not even dreamed, for a single instant, of disguising anything that was to my disadvantage, or that might make me appear ridiculous. Besides, I think myself too admirable for censure. You may be very certain, then, charitable readers, that I exhibit myself in these pages just as I am. As a subject of interest for you I may appear to you of little consequence; but forget that it is I; think simply that a fellow-being is recounting to you her impressions from her infancy. Such a document is very interesting from a human standpoint. Ask M. Zola if this be not so, or even M. de Goncourt, or Maupassant himself! My journal commences at my twelfth year, but begins to possess some value only from after my fifteenth or sixteenth year. There is in it, therefore, a blank to be filled up; so that I shall write a sort of preface in order to render this monument of human and literary interest intelligible.

Assume, then, that I am of noble birth, and let us begin: I was born on the 11th of November, 1860. Only to write it down is frightful. But then I console myself by thinking that I shall be of no age at all when you read my journal.

My father was the son of General Paul Gregorievitch Bashkirtseff, a provincial nobleman who was of a brave, obstinate, severe, and even ferocious nature. My grandfather was raised to the grade of General after the Crimean war, I think. He married a young girl-the adopted daughter of a grand seigneur; she died at the age of thirty-eight, leaving five children -my father and four daughters.

Mamma was married at the age of twenty-one, after having rejected several very good partis. She was a Babanine. On the side of the Babanines we belong to an old noble family of the provinces; and grandpapa has always boasted of being of Tartar origin (his ancestors having come to Russia at the time of the first invasion). Baba Nina are two Tartar words -for my part I laugh at all this. Grandpapa was the contemporary of Lermontoff, Poushkine, etc. He was an admirer

of Byron, a poet, a soldier, and a man of letters. He married, while quite young, Mademoiselle Julie Cornélius, a girl of fifteen, very sweet and very pretty. They had nine children-if you will pardon the smallness of the number!

After two years of marriage mamma went, with her two children, to live with her parents. I was always with grandmamma, who idolized me. Besides grandmamma to adore me, there was my aunt, when mamma did not carry her off with her my aunt, who was younger than mamma, but not so pretty; who sacrificed herself to and was sacrificed by everybody.

In May, 1870, we set out to travel. The dream so long cherished by mamma was realized. We remained a month in Vienna, making ourselves dizzy with novelties of every description-fine shops, theaters, etc. We arrived at BadenBaden in June, at the height of the season, and found ourselves in the midst of a luxury truly Parisian. Our party consisted of grandpapa, mamma, my aunt Romanoff, Dina (my cousin-german), my brother Paul, and myself; and we had with us a doctor, the angelic, the incomparable Walitsky. He was a Pole, but without any exaggerated patriotism, of a sweet nature, and very winning manners. He spent all his income on his profession. At Achtirka he was the physician of the district. He attended the University with mamma's brother, and was always treated as one of the family at our house. At the time of our setting out on our travels a physician was needed for grandpapa, and for that reason we took Walitsky with us. It was at Baden that I first became acquainted with the world, and with the refinements of polite society, and that I suffered the tortures of vanity.

But I have not said enough about Russia, and about myself, which is the principal thing. I had two governesses, one a Russian, the other a French woman. The former, whom I remember very well, was a certain Madame Melnikoff, a woman of elegant manners, well educated, romantic, and who was separated from her husband. She became a governess on a sudden impulse, after reading a great many romances. She was regarded by the family as a friend, and treated by them as an equal. All the men paid court to her, and one fine morning, after a certain romantic adventure, she disappeared. She

might have bade us good-by and gone away quite naturally, but the Slav nature, with French civilization grafted on to it and influenced by romantic reading, is a curious compound. In her character of unhappy wife this lady had at once set herself to adore the little girl confided to her care. I had returned her adoration through an instinctive feeling of dramatic fitness, and my family, poseuse and simple-minded, thought her departure ought to make me ill; they all regarded me with compassionate looks that day, and I remember that grandmamma ordered a certain soup-a soup for invalidsto be made expressly for me. I felt myself grow quite pale before this exhibition of sensibility. I was, indeed, sickly looking, fragile, and not at all pretty-all which did not prevent every one's regarding me as a being destined to become one day beautiful, brilliant, and magnificent. Mamma once went to a Jew who told fortunes.

"You have two children," he said to her; "your son will be like everybody else, but your daughter will be a star!" One evening at the theater a gentleman said to me, laughingly:

"Show me your hand, mademoiselle. Ah, by the style in which you are gloved, there is not the slightest doubt but that you will one day be a terrible coquette."

I was for a long time very proud of this. Since I have been able to think, since I was three years old (I was not weaned until I was three and a half), I have always had aspirations toward greatness of some kind. My dolls were always kings or queens; all my thoughts, everything I heard from those who surrounded mamma, always bore some reference to this greatness which must one day inevitably come to me.

When I was about five years old I dressed myself one day in mamma's laces, put flowers in my hair, and went to the drawing-room, to dance. I was the great danseuse. Petipa, and all the household were there to look at me. Paul was nobody beside me, and Dina, although the daughter of the dearly beloved Georges, did not put me in the shade. One more incident: When Dina was born, grandmamma took her from her mother, and kept her from that time forth with herself. This was before I was born.

After Mme. Melnikoff I had for a governess Mlle. Sophie Dolgikoff, a girl of sixteen-blessed Russia!-and another, a Frenchwoman called Mme. Brenne, who wore her hair in the style of the Restoration, had pale blue eyes, and was a sorrowful looking creature with her fifty years, and her consumption. I was very fond of her. She taught me how to draw. I drew a little church under her instructions. drew at other times also. While the grown-up people played cards I would often draw on the green cloth.

All this brings us back to Baden in 1870. War having been declared, we had betaken ourselves to Geneva, I with my heart filled with bitterness, and cherishing projects of revenge. Every evening on going to bed I recited in my own mind the following supplementary prayer:

"My God, grant that I may never have the small-pox; that I may grow up pretty; that I may have a beautiful voice; that I may be happily married; and that mamma may live for a long time to come!"

At Geneva we put up at the Hôtel de la Couronne on the borders of the lake. There I had a professor of drawing who brought designs with him for me to copy-little chalets in which the windows were like trunks of trees, and did not at all resemble the windows of real chalets, so I refused to draw them. The good man then told me to copy them from nature, just as they appeared to me. Just then we left the hotel to live in a family boarding-house, with Mont Blanc in front of us. I therefore copied scrupulously all that was visible of Geneva and the lake.

When I am dead, my life, which appears to me a remarkable one, will be read. (The only thing wanting is that it should have been different.) But I detest prefaces (they

have kept me from reading a great many excellent books), as well as the notices of editors. For this reason I write my own preface. It might have been omitted if I had published the whole of my journal, but I limited myself to beginning at my twelfth year; to give what precedes would render the book too long. Besides, I give you glimpses enough into it in the course of the journal. I go back to the past very often, apropos of anything or nothing.

What if, seized without warning by a fatal illness, I should