I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, Vol. 1 [Hardcover]

Marie Bashkirtseff (Author), Phyllis Howard Kernberger (Translator), Katherine Kernberger (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1997

Marie Bashkirtseff's diary is one of the great journals of all time: a Russian girl, transplanted to France, begins a little diary at the age of fourteen. Eleven years later, upon her death, she has written thousands and thousands of pages, creating an obsessively detailed monument to her own life. ."..because I hope that I will be read...I am absolutely sincere. If this hook is not the exact, absolute, strict truth, it has no reason to be." But Bashkirtseff was betrayed by her own family. The diary, published posthumously in 1887, was expurgated, sanitized, and denuded. Marie's mother made sure that none of her daughter's more radical opinions - and more importantly, their strange family history - appeared in the diary's pages. Even so, it was hailed as the true portrait of a woman by the French press, and Bashkirtseff was alternately canonized as a misunderstood genius and damned as a self-absorbed misfit. Now, in this new translation, Phyllis Howard Kernberger has returned to the original text - Marie's notebooks, held in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Her scrupulous, decades-long research has unearthed the true self-portrait that Marie Bashkirtseff hoped to reveal. Marie was enraptured with her own beauty, enraged by the constraints of society (especially for women), and determined to achieve success and fame at any cost, and her diary is a vivid portrait of a free-thinking woman born before her time. Working straight from the source, Kernberger has revived the honest image of Marie - in a seductively funny, warmly personal, and thoroughly mesmerizing account of a life lived to its fullest.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The thousands of pages 25-year-old Marie Bashkirtseff left behind upon her death from tuberculosis in 1884 were so frank in their depiction of her family's scandalous history and so radical in their complaints about women's confined sphere that her mother censored the diaries heavily before they were published in 1887. The first volume of this new translation, covering the years 1873-1876, does full justice to Bashkirtseff's vibrant, intimate account of aristocratic émigré's roaming across Europe and to the operatic emotions of Marie and her quarrelsome relatives.

From Library Journal

Ukrainian-born Bashkirtseff, who emigrated to France in 1870, began a diary at the age of 13 and continued writing until her death from tuberculosis at age 25 in 1884. This is a smooth English translation of the first 59 of 106 notebooks of her detailed, frank, stream-of-consciousness diary. The translation is based on the original manuscripts in the Bibliotheque Nationale, with the exception of Book 1, which disappeared from the library and whose translation is based on the extracts published in Pierre Borel's Le Visage Inconnu (Garnier, 1925). Comfortable with herself while uncomfortable with the constraints of society, Bashkirtseff exudes strength, vitality, honesty, wit, and talent in her diary. Readers will find themselves forgetting that this is a young woman of the 1800s, not 1990s. The translator, a retired English teacher, died in 1991, but her commitment to providing an uncensored, "true" translation was continued by her daughter, Katherine. Readers will eagerly anticipate the next volume, whose publication is not yet scheduled. Highly recommended.?Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; 1ST edition (June 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811802248
• ISBN-13: 978-0811802246
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 7.1 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,310,114 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary journal, February 27, 2000

By 

Rinze Mozes (Leiden, Holland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, Vol. 1 (Hardcover)

Ever since 1980, when I first read the French version of this diary, I have been hooked. It was indeed, as Marie Bashkirtseff herself wrote, a book in which she wrote herself down, all her dreams, her good and bad behavior, the good and the bad traits of her character. Later I learned that the diary had been badly cut by editors, first in Doris Langley Moore's book on Marie, later in the very interesting documentary by Colette Cosnier (1985) Since that time I had the (slight) hope that the diary would appear uncut. I am very glad that Phyllis and Katherine Kernberger took up this job and give us now the first half of the diary. They have done it exceptionally well (even before the uncut French edition which is now underway), and Chronicle books have taken care to make the book look right. I understand why some people find this first volume boring, but they are wrong however, particularly when we interpret it in the light of the tragic events to come in its sequel. I hope the 2nd volume will appear soon. I am a real fan: I went to Paris to visit the streets mentioned in the book (and her enormous tomb), I even went to her birthplace in Ukraine!

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You will fall in love with Marie, July 13, 2004

By 

I ain't no porn writer (author, "Crippled Dreams") - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, Vol. 1 (Hardcover)

I first became interested in Marie Bashkirtseff and her diary after I read about her in Anais Nin's early diary! haha. Anais Nin seemed to be deeply inspired by Marie, so I too wanted to know more about her. Reading her journals makes you feel like you really know her, like you're really there spying and eavesdropping, an invisible observer, seeing all these events in her life unfold, probing her deepest thoughts and desires. At least that's how I felt. And as a young man, I guess I find myself drawn to these 19th century heroines, with their intriguing personalities, strong intellects, and passionate love-affairs. I'd love to see Marie's paintings. Are they in the Louvre or Musee d'Orsay? I heard many of them were destroyed in the air-raid bombings of World War 2, unfortunately. Was she a Classicist or Realist? It seems she was very good, but just how good? What's her rank among the great artists of her day? And would she have been even greater had she lived to fulfill her full potential? And it's too bad we'll never know what her voice sounded like, apparently she was a fine singer too. I was also pleased to read that Marie got a little chubby in her final years. I'm into slightly plump chicks haha.

I didn't really understand the "half the face showing" for the front cover iof this book. I think it would've looked better with her whole face. Oh, and the title gives me a wry smile. I was totally enamoured with Marie, the only thing I found a bit off-putting was her pride and shallow social ambition, eg. to marry for status and money. That's all she seems to care about, besides being noticed and adored. But she also shows that she has many positive qualities and these far outweigh the negative. When it comes to her love-life, she had a few suitors but from what I gather, she doesn't seem to have ever fallen in love, even though she occasionally used the term loosely with regard to men like Audiffret, Antonelli, or her childish teenage infatuation with the Duke of Hamilton. It even appears that when she died a month shy of her 26th birthday, she died a virgin.

Anyway, a few years ago I was aquainted with Katherine Kernberger, who along with her mother translated this Volume One of Marie Bashkirtseff's diaries. She kindly sent me the as yet unpublished diaries that would make up a second volume, the rest of the diaries. Reading this manuscript was an amazing experience. I literally put my own life on hold for weeks and just got lost in the intriguing life of a pretty, talented, exceptional, young woman named Marie Bashkirtseff. I do hope this second volume of Marie's diaries will be published soon, so that eager readers will be able to see the rest of her true story.

Oh, one other thing. Since reading the diaries, I've discovered that Marie's close friend in her final days, the painter Jules Bastein-Lepage, with whom she was so obsessed, actually died the same year as her--1884. It must have been very soon after, perhaps prompted by Marie's own death? In the end he was ill and bed-ridden, and she would sit with him in bed, keeping him company. I wonder if he felt about her the same way she felt about him. What a tragedy if they had both been in love with each other and yet neither of them knew it! And to die in such a short space of time apart! I wish someone could tell me something about Marie's funeral--the public reaction, people who attended, where she's buried, etc? There's an old bio by a Stanley Jackson called "Guy de Maupassant"; the chapter titled "Moths" sheds some interesting light on Marie and her correspondence with literary men. It's interesting to note the things she left out of her diary. And she was a painter, so why was she writing to novelists rather than painters like Renoir and Monet?? She had a very interesting letter correspondence with the famed fiction writer Guy de Maupassant. There's a tiny book called "I Kiss Your Hands" which has all their letters to each other. It's very interesting. But it ends very vaguely, a letter by Maupassant offering to meet her (sort of) at a theatre, and then nothing. No surviving response. This was close to the time that Marie died though, of tuberculosis. If you hunger for more on Marie, I encourage you to read this correspondence.

David Rehak
author of "A Young Girl's Crimes"

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting book, May 3, 2004

By 

H. Salisbury (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: I Am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, Vol. 1 (Hardcover)

I am not quite finished with the book and am very much enjoying it. I cannot wait to see the next volume and am happy to hear it will be published soon. The book is a fascinating insight into the everyday lives of Marie and her family in the 1800's.