Born: 12 November 1858, Ukraine
Died: 31 October 1884
Country most active: France
Also known as: Maria Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva, Мария Константиновна Башки́рцева, Башкірцева Марія Костянтинівна
From Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company:
Marie Bashkirtseff, a Russian artist and writer, one of the most individual characters in the literary annals of the nineteenth century, born near Poltava, Russia, and died of consumption in Paris.
Her parents were wealthy and of noble descent, and their daughter, who was gifted with beauty, an unusual voice, and a mind of remarkable maturity, had the advantage of residence in Rome, Nice, Paris and other cities where she moved in the highest society.
A weakness of throat obliged her to abandon the hope of achieving fame as a singer, and in her seventeenth year she began the study of art in Paris under Robert-Fleury, pursuing it later under Bastien-Lepage until her death, and producing, in spite of her physical disabilities, several paintings of of rare merit.
Her distinctive work, however, was a journal begun in her thirteenth year and faithfully continued through life. It was destined for publication after her death, and intended to be, to use her own words, “the transcript of a woman’s life – her thoughts and hopes, her deceptions, weakness, good qualities, sorrows and joys.” She herself believed it to be unparalleled in literature, and the same opinion was expressed by Gladstone, one of her many sympathetic reviewers.
Consult: The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, translated with an Introduction, by Mathilde Blind (two volumes, London, 1890).
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
Marie was a very talented daughter of a Russian noble family of means. She traveled much with her mother, to Nice, Rome, Baden, Switzerland, Paris. At the latter city, she remained the longest. She studied music and voice but through some throat trouble she was obliged to give it up. At a very early age she gave promise of a great intellect. When her teachers could not satisfactorily furnish the answer for her extraordinary questions, she thought time was wasted to study under their tutelage. After she gave up the study of music and song she took up drawing and painting and left some very fine specimens of her exquisite art. But the outstanding accomplishment was her diary or journal started in her thirteenth year and faithfully kept up till within eleven days of her death. She was beautiful, charming, and had great culture, but the premonition of a short life haunted her throughout her career. She called her journal The Transcript of a Woman’s Life. She intended to have it published after her death. She said: “To live, to suffer, to struggle, and at the end oblivion, oh, that is horrible.” Her writings are sometimes a confession, at other times an elaborate criticism of something beautiful where she goes into minutest detail. Her visions and day dreams are romantic and fearful. But at all times she is honest, censuring herself more than she would anyone else.
Woman’s emancipation, party strife in politics, religion, the fine arts, beauty, fine clothes, commerce, nothing escapes her. But of all this it is self-culture that received the greatest attention. Ill and weak, she prepares her last picture for the Salon. One of her great teachers, Bastien Lepage, is dying and her last entry in her journal October 20-October 31, was: “The great soul is at rest.”