Inthe nineteenth century, young women who kept diaries weren’t often taken seriously. Their thoughts and emotions were regarded as unimportant and unworthy of consideration, and they frequently lacked access to higher education and employment opportunities. Their male counterparts’ journals have traditionally gotten a lot more attention.
However, a few passages from the diary of Ukrainian-born artist student Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1844), who was raised during the Russian Empire’s rule over Ukraine, suggest that at least some of the young women of the time were living much richer inner lives than were generally believed by those around them.
There is nothing in the world to compare with Art… One forgets everything in one’s work; one regards those outlines, those shadings, with respect, with emotion — one is a creator, one feels one’s self almost great.
The prodigy Marie Bashkirtseff looked promising. She was a gifted young artist who enrolled in the esteemed Académie Julian to take advantage of the opportunities available to her in Paris, where her wealthy aristocratic family had made their home.
Unfortunately, only six of her paintings have survived, so her fame today is more based on her meticulously detailed diary, which chronicled her early goals and later daily activities as a serious art student.
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Bashkirtseff’s journal is described as “an example of a diary written by a woman in her adolescent years and early adulthood, in the mode of self-presentation, concentrating on explicating details of her most personal life”
~ Art Education scholar Enid Zimmerman.
Zimmerman emphasizes that the diary, like many others of its kind, is both a distinctive work of non-fiction writing and a priceless historical record.
The journal, which Bashkirtseff started when she was thirteen and ended when she was twenty-five, the year before she passed away from tuberculosis at a young age, serves as a form of preservation comparable to taxidermy and mummification.
It permanently freezes a single, fleeting life. Additionally, it provides readers with a fresh understanding of the specific, discriminatory challenges that earlier generations of women artists had to face, proving “that women art students suffered societal constraints and were not best served in respect to their art education.”
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The diary of Bashkirtseff was released in 1887 to both critical and commercial acclaim. Future writers were influenced by her unique writing style, which enables readers to journey alongside her as she achieves intellectual and artistic enlightenment.
These writers also used their journals as a creative outlet for turbulent emotions. The English diarist W. N. P. Barbellion, author of The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, whose journals served as a source of comfort in a brief, frequently lonely life, were also admirers.
Anas Nin, a serial diarist who chronicled her sexual adventures throughout the bohemian underworld of twentieth-century Paris, was also a fan.
The Canadian-American memoirist Mary MacLane, however, was arguably Bashkirtseff’s biggest admirer. H. L. Mencken even dubbed her “the Butte Bashkirtseff” because of her devotion to the author.
In her 1902 memoir, MacLane reflects, “But in her great passion — her ambition, Marie Bashkirtseff was beautifully consistent.” And when she knew that within a certain time, she would be dead — removed from the world, and her work left undone — what tremendous storms of woe and despair must have enveloped her!
A unique voice is necessary to transcend decades and elicit the empathy of other artists. Even though she was young, Bashkirtseff had it.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Joanna Kosinska on unsplash