What good is lying or striking poses?� If I do not die young, I hope to remain as a great artist, but if I die young, I want my journal to be published. If this book is not the exact, absolute, strict truth, it has no reason for being. Painter, sculptor, proto-feminist and creator of one of the most extraordinary examples of belles-letters ever written, Marie Bashkirtseff (November 24, 1858�October, 31 1884) was born in Ukraine to a somewhat nomadic and eccentric family of�petite noblesse. From an early age, Marie�s intelligence and the force of her personality held sway over her wandering, expatriate family. And wander they did, back and forth across the face of Europe and Russia. In 1873 she was 14 years old, living in a sun swept villa on the Mediterranean�along with her mother, aunt, brother, grandfather, family doctor, a train of servants, a monkey and dogs (always her beloved dogs)�when she began inscribing a record of the events of her seaside days: her infatuations, acute and precocious observations, passions, dreams, radiant artistic notions, loves�every topic that fell into the ken of her luminous vision. Eleven years later when she died in Paris of consumption, she had already achieved growing fame as an artist�and she had written thousands of pages, weaving a vast, multifaceted portrait of her life and loves in the radiant�Belle �poque�world in which she lived. TRANSLATOR: Katherine Kernberger received her B.A. from Scripps College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has taught at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon, for over 30 years. Drawing on her mother�s materials and returning to the original French, Dr. Kernberger has prepared a translation of the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff that does justice to the realities of Marie�s life and speaks directly to Marie's readers in the here and now, worldwide.
