In Search of La Gloire

Nineteenth century Russian creative genius Maria Bashkirtseva may not be a household name. But interest in her all too short life (she lived only to the age of 24) has resurfaced. Bashkirtseva was forgotten for 50 years after her premature death in 1884, until poetess Marina Tsvetayeva dedicated her first book of poetry Evening Album to Bashkirtseva, and corresponded with her mother. Then followed another 50-odd years of oblivion. This has now been broken by another, post-perestroika, reassessment of this multi-talented child prodigy.

Why so much interest in a girl who lived only 24 years? Perhaps because of her early maturity and perspicacity, and ideas well ahead of her time, which made her alone to, and incomprehensible to, her contemporaries.

Maria Bashkirtseva was born in 1860 near the Ukrainian town of Poltava in her family’s luxurious estate. At the age of ten she was sent to Nice, where she spent the rest of her life except for three brief visits to Russia.

She had a rare ability to live fast, compressing time to the full, perhaps because she sensed she did not have long. By the age of five she was already dancing. At twelve she had her first major dancing success.

She also became a singer at 13, writing that year in her diary: “I was made for triumphs and strong feelings, so the best thing I can do is become a singer.”

Then, a short while later, she turned seriously to painting. She took the seven year course at the Academy of Fine Arts in just two years, stunning the teachers with her talent and technique. She took part in numerous exhibitions, and got prizes and rapturous praise from the writers Emile Zola and Anatole France. Most importantly, she came to a revelation that usually comes to artists only in their mature years, a “sudden understanding of everything that is simple, in art, in everything.”

At 15, she wrote: “Ever since I became aware of myself at the age of three, my thoughts and desires have been directed towards greatness.” Statements like these made critics often allude to Bashkirtseva’s excessive self-love and unusually potent desire to achieve. This all-consuming desire came to be expressed as a single word, La Gloire (glory).

In a prologue to her posthumous catalog of paintings, the French critic Francois Coppe, who met Maria several months before her death, gave perhaps the most perceptive and psychologically precise portrait of her:

“She was quite small, thin, very beautiful, with a heavy knot of golden hair and a piercing charm, but gave the impression of strength hidden behind the gentleness, energy behind the grace. All this revealed in this charming girl a higher intellect. Beneath her feminine charm you could sense an iron, purely masculine strength, reminiscent of the present given by the young Odysseus to Achilles: a sword hidden among women’s garments... At the sight of this pale, passionate girl you could imagine a rare hothouse flower, so wonderful and fragrant as to make your head spin, and a secret voice whispered in the depths of her soul: too much at once.”

Perhaps this superstitious ‘too much at once’ contained a warning from fate: the talents given her so generously were gradually taken away. At the age of 14 she was found to have consumption, at 18 she began to go deaf, and at 19 she lost her wonderful soprano voice after an illness.

In her diary, she suffers, comes to terms and protests against the unfairness of her fate: “How can I get used to this? It’s one thing if this happens to an old person... but to a young person, alive, trembling and delirious with life!!”

Providence was unkind to her after death as well. Her parents brought over 100 of her paintings back from France, but they were destroyed during the Second World War at her Poltava estate. Now only a handful remain — they can be seen in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, in the Luxembourg Palace in Paris and in Nice.

— Valentina Kolesnikova

In Brief

The 11th month of the year was called noyemvry. This name comes from the Latin number novem (nine), as it was the ninth month in the Roman calendar, which came to Russia from Byzantium. It replaced the Russian name gruden or grudny (from gruda, meaning a heap or clod of earth mixed with ice and snow). A wintry road in the countryside was called grudny put (muddy clay path) — an inalienable part of a Russian landscape in November. There were also other folk names like listognoi (rotten leaves) or poluzimnik (half-winter).

A 19th century book of Russian medical tips called Source of Health had this advice to offer people in November:

“You should not bleed yourself this month without a specific reason, nor should you sweat too much at the bath house, for this can give rise to many diseases, especially eye ailments. Instead you are highly recommended to stay in dry and warm air, keep away from frost and fog in the morning, not go out with an empty stomach but breakfast beforehand, and, with the climate we live in, it would not hurt to put on a fur coat when going out. It is also recommended to consume millet, barley, goat’s milk and small amounts of vodka.”

Photos courtesy of Great Encyclopedia of Russia.

History has made two Russian names inseparable — Mikhail Petrashevsky and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Both dreamed of liberating Russia from serfdom, both were exiled to Siberia. And both were born 175 years ago this month.

Yet, while Dostoyevsky is known throughout the world, Petrashevsky (1821-1866) is familiar only to a few historians. Born near Krasnoyarsk territory, the son of a nobleman doctor, Petrashevsky studied law at St. Petersburg University. Having served as interpreter in the Foreign Ministry, in 1846 he wrote the Pocket Book of Foreign Words.

For most Russians, Petrashevsky is known for his ‘circle’ — a group of activists that have come to be known as petrashevtsy and included writers like Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Dostoyevsky. All those who frequented the Petrashevsky Circle were united by liberal ideas, though their sympathies often conflicted.

Petrashevsky and his friends were arrested on April 23, 1849. Of the 123 under investigation, 21 were condemned to death, including Petrashevsky and Dostoyevsky. On December 22, the day of their execution, Nicholas I changed his mind and exiled them to Siberia — Petrashevsky was sentenced to life and died in exile. Dostoyevsky got 10 years.

Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), like Petrashevsky, was born into a doctor’s family. He spent his childhood among the poor, whose fate he described with all the force of his talent in his later work. After graduating from St. Petersburg Engineering College he served as state employee for a few years.

His first work — Poor Folk (1845) earned him praise from the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, who called him the ‘New Gogol.’ He proved a talented and also prolific writer — in the next four years he wrote The Double (1846) and other short works.

After his sufferings in exile, Dostoyevsky radically changed his views, abandoning Western socialist sympathies for Slavophilism. In his Notes from the House of the Dead (1861-1862), an account of penal servitude in Siberia, he professes two fundamental ideas — that sin will inevitably be punished and that redemption can be expiated only by conscience.

Later he created four masterpieces which earned him world recognition and soon became classic novels — Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils and The Brothers Karamazov.

During the Soviet era, the interpretation of Dostoyevsky’s role in Russian literature changed regularly. Soviet leaders never particularly liked him, and Lenin found his novels boring. However, he was always too big to be ignored, so his work is well-known but often arbitrarily interpreted. Thus Soviet schoolchildren studied novels in which he sympathizes with the downtrodden — like The Insulted and Injured. Crime and Punishment, however, whose ending preaches Christian submissiveness, was often interpreted as naive and feeble. The Devils, meanwhile, his most virulent critique of materialist socialists, was never highly praised until the 80s. Then, during glasnost, writers began citing The Devils as an ingenious prediction of Russia’s tragic fate in the 20th century.

This November, Russian cinema celebrates the 95th birthday of film director Ivan Pyryev (1901-1968) who skillfully portrayed Dostoyevsky’s heroes on the big screen. His films The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov were among the career highlights of popular actors like Yuri Yakovlev, Mikhail Ulyanov and Kiril Lavrov.

November has a couple of dates connected with Russia’s matriarchs. While Catherine the Great died 200 years ago this month, another Russian Empress, Elizabeth I, daughter of Peter the Great, came to the throne 155 years ago.

It was in Elizabeth’s reign that Russia’s ‘all-round genius’ Mikhail Lomonosov founded Moscow University (1755). Born 285 years ago, Lomonosov combined many talents — he was a chemist, physicist, geographer, ethnographer, historian, and much more. He also wrote books like Grammar and Rhetoric, used as textbooks by Russian students for many decades. Lomonosov also set rules for Russian poetry, promising that “the Russian soil will give birth to its own Platos and Newtons.” Subsequent developments proved him right.