.jpg)
I am my own hero
In May 1884, an unknown young woman named Marie Bashkirtseff staked her desire for fame on publishing her personal diary. She knew she would have little time because of advanced tuberculosis. Her right lung had already been damaged, while his left was slowly deteriorating.
She wrote what would become the definitive version of the preface to her diary, getting straight to the point: she desired immortality, by any means possible. If she had enough time left before her death, she would wish to gain posthumous renown through her painting. In case of premature death, her diary should be published.
Despite her efforts, Marie did not achieve her goal because she was not part of the literary or artistic circles of the time. From minor Russian aristocracy, her maternal family had left what is now called Ukraine in 1858, traveling around Europe with the family doctor and a retinue of servants. She began writing her diary at the age of fourteen.
Desire for glory and fame
She elaborated in detail how she sought glory and fame. First, she tried to achieve celebrity through her voice, consulting singing experts in Nice, Paris and Rome, imagining herself celebrated on the stages of Europe. Chronic laryngitis, probably the first symptom of the tuberculosis that would end her life, nullified this desire.
In her Diary, she wrote long, glowing descriptions of her face and nakedness, passing off this undue attention to herself as a grand gesture toward posterity. She slyly noted that she would be spared the trouble of talking about her physical appearance.
In front of the mirror, she described herself in the act of admiring her "incomparable arms", the whiteness and delicacy of her hands, or the shape of her breasts, effectively transforming the pages of the Diary into places to display her physical appearance that she did not I could show it in public.
In the studio (1881). Bashkirtseff portraying herself as the central figure seated in the foreground.
Letters sent to famous writers
Anonymously, Marie first wrote to Alexandre Dumas son (illegitimate son of writer Alexandre Dumas), author of The Lady of the Camellias. In 1883, she sent letters to Émile Zola, a 19th-century French writer and one of the main writers of French naturalism, author of Germinal, The Experimental Novel, and The Human Beast.
Likewise, she contacted Edmond Goncourt, a French writer, author of an intimate diary, novels and plays. In 1884, he published Chérie, a novel she had first announced in her preface to La Faustin in 1882.
Describing it as "a psychological and physiological study" of a girl's first steps toward womanhood, he solicited what she called a "feminine collaboration," directing his readers to write down their teenage memories and send them anonymously to his editor.
With her characteristic frankness, Marie informed him that Chérie was full of inadequacies. She said that she herself had been writing her own impressions since an early age and now proposed to send them to him. Whether Goncourt received this letter no one knows; if he did, she did not respond.
In 1884, months before his death, she and French writer and poet Guy de Maupassant exchanged nineteen letters that years later were revealed in the press. There was much speculation about whether the painter and the writer met, and, around this hypothesis, the most romantic hypotheses were woven.
Undaunted by her lack of success in inscribing herself into the lives of literary greats, she promptly signed their names in her preface. The value of the diary as reading material lay, she claimed, in its status as a human document: the public had only to consult Messrs. Zola, Goncourt, and Maupassant. It was an exaggeration, as she well knew.
The Diary, last attempt to go down in history
Facsimile of Marie Bashkirtseff's handwriting on a page
of her Diary and photography of the author as a teenager.
Now I no longer write only at night, but also in the morning, in the afternoon, in every free moment. I write how I live. Marie Bashkirtseff, Diary, Wednesday, April 5, 1876. Like Marie, the Japanese writer Higuchi Ichiyô and the Brazilian Carolina Maria de Jesus had their diaries published. The Japanese writer also had a very intense and rapid production because, like Marie, she was a victim of tuberculosis and died young, at 24 years old.
I, as an object of interest, may be very insignificant for you, but imagine that it is not me, imagine that this is a human being who tells all his impressions since childhood. It will then be an extraordinary human document. Excerpt from Marie Bashkirtseff's diary.
Abridged and censored view of your manuscripts
After the writer's death, her mother fulfilled her wishes. From an editorial point of view, there was a material impossibility of printing the Diary in full. For the task, her mother had the support of the prestigious poet, novelist, and playwright André Theuriet. The result of this partnership was an edition that, in addition to being a summary, ended up being a mutilation.
Foreword to Marie Bashkirtseff´s Journal
Published in France, in 1887, by the publisher Fesquelle for the Bibliothèque Charpentier collection. The two volumes, however, represented only around 20% of the manuscripts left by the writer. Considering that she wrote daily, gaps involving weeks and months were repeatedly left.
Characters that are fundamental to understanding both the author's personality and her behaviors have completely disappeared. Even so, it was an unusual bestseller. All the layers of that cosmetic could not hide what was essential in the text that captured its readers.
The Diary gave her the fame she longed for, but she did not achieve in her lifetime. It was one of a woman's first attempts to secure celebrity through personal brand curation – and the shape it gave to female ambition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Literature, her innate gift
As for writing, she said more than once that it was her innate gift, an activity for which she did not need to work hard to study, as she had to do with music or painting. She confesses that if she had had time, a less limited life, she would have dedicated herself to journalism or literature.
A trunk in her quarters housed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of drafts of articles, plays, and novels that she never had time to finish. The chronicles she left in her Diary about the stories of her trip through Spain or the art criticism she wrote for the anarchy-feminist newspaper La Citoyenne, about the death of Léon Gambetta, a French republican statesman who helped direct the defense of France during the Franco-German War of 1870 – 1871, testify to his literary power.
Other publications
The Diary soon began to be reproduced in different languages around the world and the echo of her voice was heard in places as far away as Japan, Argentina, the United States, and the rest of Europe. For more than half a century, young women read those pages with ardor to venerate her life and mourn her tragedy.
In the twilight of a dark century in which girls only learned to speak from their hearts, Marie spoke from her body. Pierre-Jean Remy, French writer, prologue to the full version of the Diary published by Marie Bashkirtseff's Cercle des Amis (Circle of Friends).
In 1925, five years after Madame Bashkirtseff's death and thirteen since she deposited the original manuscripts in the National Library of France (1912), a clause prevented them from being released until 1930. But, Pierre Borel, a minor writer, began to publish a series of volumes with unpublished texts from the Diary:
Cahiers Intimes Inédits de Marie Bashkirtseff (unpublished intimate notebooks by Marie Bashkirtseff);
Les Confessions de Marie Bashkirtseff (The Confessions of Marie Bashkirtseff);
Le Premier et le Dernier Voyage de Marie Bashkirtseff (The first and last voyage of Marie Bashkirtseff);
La Véritable Marie Bashkirtseff (The real Marie Bashkirtseff), and probably a few more.
Scholars are convinced that Pierre Borel never worked with the original manuscript. He probably used the copy that Madame Bashkirtseff and her niece Dina had made in the late 1880s, also a censored text.
Borel has long been a hero to scholars of the life of Marie Bashkirtseff. However, although a profusion of censored texts from this first edition appears in these books, the real Marie Bashkirtseff remained unknown.
In the 1960s she fell into oblivion, precisely because for those women who freed themselves from concealment and prejudice, her innocent image submerged her in the shadows. Her status as an aristocrat, when it had already fallen into obsolescence, did her no favors either. With few exceptions, readers and editors turned their backs on her.
The search for recognition in painting
Marie's ambitions became more focused at the age of nineteen. In 1877, she entered the Académie Julian in Paris, the studio for European girls with serious artistic ambitions and who, because they were women, were not admitted to the École des beaux arts. She worked doggedly for long hours in the studio during the day and night, calculating how many months it would take to catch up and surpass the most talented students.
She stood out for the social meaning she wanted to give to her work, this reflection on her commitment to the new political conceptions she had embraced, and which made it possible for her to understand the painful reality of those defenseless people she chose as models.
As a painter, she subscribed to naturalism, a literary and artistic movement that defended an authentic vision of the reality of the time. She painted the humble people of the Paris suburbs. Marie met the young Jules Bastien-Lepage, leader of this current, to whom she joined through a friendship that was accentuated by the illness and the proximity of their death.
At the Paris Salon in 1878, Bastien-Lepage presented his much-discussed painting Les foins (Fields of hay), the first in a series of works that would make him a star and guide for many young painters of the time.
Bastien-Lepage's work is a peasant couple taking a midday break, and the realism of the image leaves little room for beauty as understood by academic painters. Impressed by the rawness of naturalism, she must have been attracted to Bastien-Lepage's naturalist painting.
Les foins (hayfields), work by Bastien-Lepage – oil on canvas
It was, at this time, the turning point between traditional painting that still presented historical or mythological themes or beautiful girls and naked angels and the new currents, among which impressionism was already appearing in full force.
Five years later, at the 1883 Salon, Marie presented three works. Her expectations were in the oil painting Jean et Jacques, two kids on their way to school, her debut as a naturalist painter.
Jean et Jacques (detail), oil on canvas.
The portrait of these two students has little or nothing to do with grace. But it is precisely this characteristic that the author wanted to highlight. She paints neither little angels nor blond cherubs on the Champs-Elysées, but two poor, stained boys from the seedy suburbs of Paris.
The jury, however, only gave her an honorable mention for the portrait of her cousin Dina, a work in pastel, a minor genre that more appropriately fit the archetype of a respectable young artist. Deeply angered, she hung the honorable mention on her dog's tail. The jury never forgave her for that.
From 1883 onwards, among the few works of hers that have not disappeared, we have two other testimonies of her commitment to naturalism: The Umbrella, one of the many girls who housed the asylum next to her house, on Rue Ampère in Paris.
Marie Bashkirtseff, The Umbrella (detail), oil on canvas 74 x 93 cm, 1883,
State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
For her last Paris Salon, she prepared her most recognized painting, The meeting. A group of six underprivileged children from the asylum at 18 Rue Ampère, which she, with both lungs removed and going through the last months of her life, painted life-size and outdoors.
The painting earned her acceptance from the public and critics, with which she hoped to obtain the long-awaited medal. However, the Salon jury, perhaps still offended by the previous year's rudeness, and demanding about the topic, turned their backs on her.
Devastated, she could no longer paint because of her illness. The attempt to hand over his Diary to a talented executor, such as Maupassant or Goncourt, also failed. She gathered her last energies to console her admired Jules Bastien–Lepage, who was also dying. This unexpected altruism took the place of the egomania that dominated her throughout her short life.
From that moment on, the last pages of the Diary light up with the glow of twilight. Until then, Maria Bashkirtseff had only known ambition: since that visit, she had known kindness. Aníbal Ponce, Argentine thinker, and essayist.
The meeting - oil on canvas.
Did the edition of the Diary influence her notoriety as a painter?
Maybe a little. However, a few years before her death, the public and critics had already recognized her talent. The French State acquired her painting The Meeting for the Luxembourg museum two years before the appearance of the Diary.
Could it be that her feverish work, her meteoric career in painting, was due solely to the perception of an approaching death? She herself confessed that since she was little, she felt called to become an exceptional being, something that in her early years she identified with royalty or the lights of the stage.
The lament for the female condition of her century
Perhaps now it is difficult for us to understand how much contempt there was in her disqualification at the Paris Motor Show, the election of Marie Bashkirtseff, in a universe in which even women themselves accepted their role as secondary protagonists — mere spectators most of the time. The right to vote was just the tip of an iceberg of limitations, prohibitions, and submissions that the stronger sex imposed very naturally.
Women had no civic rights, a decent young woman could not propose marriage, every young man could and should lead a life of levity, but a respectable girl had to be a virgin, a young artist could not address transgressive themes.
Marie Bashkirtseff lamented this with a game of consonances, l'honneur et le bonheur (Honor and happiness) as she shed disconsolate tears over the death of her admired Leon Gambetta, the republican leader: what I cry now... could only describe him correctly if I had the honor of being French and the happiness of being a man.
She interacted with Parisian high society by joining a feminist association with a socialist nature. There she promoted and funded the creation of a newspaper in which she stood out as a journalist, another of her great vocations.
If, in the classical sense, tragedy is the death of the hero, in that memory revered by its readers, Marie Bashkirtseff's unhappy epic was its main substance. "I do not give up!", she once wrote standing up, pen and brush in hand, like a mythical Amazon faced with the evil that would take her to the grave.
At the moment when a new feminine paradigm emerged - exactly the one that today's women defend - to inaugurate the rebellion against a world dominated by men who established marriage as their only and immemorial destiny, girls trembled at the battles of this fragile girl who He fought his crusades deploring the female condition of his century.
Marie Bashkirtseff as a child.
֎
Did you like this post? Do you have any suggestions or criticism? Write your comment below and, if you want, you can share it. All of this helps a lot in my work.
Links used and suggested
֎ Diário
Comments