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Contents

QuickStart Guide

Welcome to Amsterdam
Top Sights
Local Life
Day Planner
Need to Know
Amsterdam Neighbourhoods

Explore

Medieval Centre & Red Light District

Jordaan & the Western Canal Ring

Westerpark & Western Islands

Southern Canal Ring

Vondelpark & the South

De Pijp

Oosterpark & East of the Amstel

Nieuwmarkt, Plantage & the Eastern Islands
Amsterdam Noord

Best

The Best of Amsterdam

Amsterdams Splashiest Canals
Cheese, Gin & Monuments
Museums & Galleries
Parks & Gardens
Canals
Eating
Drinking & Nightlife
Shopping
For Free
For Kids
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Tours
Cycling

Survival Guide

Survival Guide
Before You Go
 Arriving in Amsterdam
Getting Around
Essential Information

Language
Behind the Scenes
Our Writers
Welcome to
Amsterdam
Amsterdam showcases its Dutch heritage in its
charming canal architecture, museums filled with
works by Old Masters, jenever (Dutch gin) tasting
houses and candlelit bruin cafés (traditional Dutch
pubs). Yet this free-spirited city is also a multinational
melting pot with an incredible diversity of cultures
and cuisines, along with some of Europe's hottest
nightlife venues, in a compact, village-like setting.

Dutch houses and houseboats on the Singel canal | KAVALENKAVA / SHUTTERSTOCK ©

 Amsterda
1 m
Top Sights
Royal Palace (Koninklijk
Paleis)
Amsterdam's resplendent palace is infused with history.

MARIA SWÄRD / GETTY IMAGES ©

Amsterdam Top Sights

Begijnhof
Historic central Amsterdam courtyard.

VICTORMASCHEK / GETTY IMAGES ©

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collection of eBooks, textbook
and enjoy exciting offers!
Amsterdam Top Sights

Anne Frank Huis

Amsterdam's most poignant history lesson.

DENNIS VAN DE WATER / SHUTTERSTOCK ©

Amsterdam Top Sights

Van Gogh Museum

World's greatest Van Gogh collection.

ALEXANDER TOLSTYKH / SHUTTERSTOCK ©

Amsterdam Top Sights

Rijksmuseum
Thrillingly fine national art museum.

DENNIS VAN DE WATER / 500PX ©

Amsterdam Top Sights

Vondelpark
Amsterdam's best-loved, chilled-out park.

GEORGE TSAFOS / GETTY IMAGES ©

Amsterdam Top Sights

Tropenmuseum
Fascinating tropical artefacts, creatively presented.

JEAN-PIERRE LESCOURRET / GETTY IMAGES ©

Amsterdam Top Sights

Museum het Rembrandthuis

Rembrandt's former house and studio.

WWW.HOLLANDFOTO.NET / SHUTTERSTOCK ©
 Amsterda
l m
Local Life
Insider tips to help you find the real Amsterdam
In between visiting the city's famous sights, seek out
the off-beat music clubs, bohemian artist quarters,
sweet patisseries and quirky local shops that make
up the locals’ Amsterdam. Count on bruin cafés
(traditional pubs) and canals making appearances.

Shopping the Jordaan & Western Canal Ring

y Small, oddball shops
y Bruin cafés
INNAFELKER / SHUTTERSTOCK ©

Exploring Westerpark & Western Islands

y Amsterdam School architecture
y Edgy cultural park
MARK READ / LONELY PLANET ©

Strolling the Southern Canal Ring

y Golden Age mansions
y Swanky antique shops

NICOOLAY / GETTY IMAGES ©

Discovering Bohemian De Pijp

y Flea market
y Cafes in historic buildings
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and enjoy exciting offers!
WOODY ALEC / SHUTTERSTOCK ©

Café-Hopping in Nieuwmarkt & Plantage

y Amsterdam’s biggest market
y Hip restaurants and bars
INNAFELKER / SHUTTERSTOCK ©

Other great places to experience the city like a local:

Chinatown

Lindengracht Market

Weteringstraat

NeL

Vondelpark Squats

Café Sarphaat

Baking Lab

Amsterdam Roest

Pllek
 Amsterda
R m
Day
Planner

Day One
M Begin with the biggies: tram to the Museum Quarter to ogle
the masterpieces at the Van Gogh Museum and
Rijksmuseum. They’ll be crowded, so make sure you’ve prebooked
tickets. Modern-art buffs might want to swap the Stedelijk Museum
for one of the others.

Spend the afternoon in the Medieval Centre. Explore the

R secret courtyard and gardens at the Begijnhof. Walk up the
street to the Dam, where the Royal Palace and Nieuwe Kerk provide
a dose of Dutch history. Bend over to sip your jenever (Dutch gin)
like a local at Wynand Fockink.

Venture into the Red Light District for an eye-popping array of

N fetish-gear shops, live sex shows, smoky coffeeshops and, of
course, women in day-glo lingerie beckoning from crimson windows.
Then settle in to a bruin café (traditional Dutch pub), such as In 't
Aepjen.
Day Two
M Browse the Albert Cuypmarkt, Amsterdam's largest street
bazaar, an international free-for-all of cheeses, fish,
stroopwafels (syrup-filled waffles) and bargain-priced clothing. Then
submit to the Heineken Experience to get shaken up, heated up and
'bottled' like the beer you'll drink at the end of the brewery tour.

Cross into the Southern Canal Ring and stroll along the grand
R Golden Bend. Visit Museum Van Loon for a peek into the
opulent canal-house lifestyle, or get a dose of kitty quirk at the
Kattenkabinet. Browse the Bloemenmarkt and behold the wild array
of bulbs.

When the sun sets, it’s time to par-tee at hyperactive, neon-lit

N Leidseplein. Paradiso and Melkweg host the coolest agendas.
Otherwise the good-time clubs and bruin cafés (traditional Dutch
pubs) around the square beckon.
Day Three
M Take a spin around beloved Vondelpark. Long and narrow
(about 1.5km long and 300m wide), it’s easy to explore via a
morning jaunt. All the better if you have a bicycle to zip by the ponds,
gardens and sculptures.

Immerse yourself in the Negen Straatjes (Nine Streets), a tic-

R tac-toe board of speciality shops. The Anne Frank Huis is
also in the neighbourhood, and it’s a must. The claustrophobic
rooms, their windows still covered with blackout screens, give an all-
too-real feel for Anne's life in hiding. Seeing the diary itself – filled
with her sunny writing tempered with quiet despair – is moving, plain
and simple.

Dine with a canal view at De Belhamel, then spend the

N evening in the Jordaan, the chummy district embodying the
Amsterdam of yore. Hoist a glass on a canal-side terrace at 't
Smalle, join the houseboat party at Café P 96, or quaff beers at one
of the many gezellig (cosy) haunts.
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
going style which is one of the forms of expression peculiar to the
Danish sceptics.
Fru Amalie Müller became Fru Amalie Skram, and the bold Bergen
woman, who was likewise the dissatisfied lady reformer of
Christiania, became the wife of a born critic, and went to live at
Copenhagen. She was an excitable little brunette, he a fair,
phlegmatic man, and together they entered upon the struggle for the
mastery, which marriage always is.
In this struggle Fru Amalie Skram was beaten; every year she
became more of an artist, more natural, more simple, more herself,
and more of all that a woman never can become when she is left to
herself. Her husband’s superior culture liberated her fresh, wild,
primitive nature from the parasites of social problems; the
experienced critic saw that her strength lay in her keen observation,
her happy incapacity for reasoning and moralizing, her infallible
memory for the impressions of the senses and emotions, and her
good spirits, which are nothing more than the result of physical
health. He cautiously pushed her into the direction to which she is
best suited, to the naturalism which is natural to her. Her books were
no longer drawn out, neither were they as poor in substance as
books by women generally are, even the best of them; they grew to
be more laconic than the majority of men’s books, but clear and
vivid; there was nothing in them to betray the woman. And after he
had done this much for her, the experienced man did yet one thing
more,—he gave her the courage of her recollections.

V
Amalie Skram’s talent culminated in “Lucie.” In this book we see her
going about in an untidy, dirty, ill-fitting morning gown, and she is
perfectly at home. It would scandalize any lady. Authoresses who
struggle fearlessly after honest realism—like Frau von Ebner-
Eschenbach and George Eliot—might perhaps have touched upon it,
but with very little real knowledge of the subject. Amalie Skram, on
the other hand, is perfectly at home in this dangerous borderland.
She is much better informed than Heinz Tovote, for instance, and he
is a poet who sings of women who are not to be met with in drawing-
rooms. She describes the pretty ballet girl with genuine enjoyment
and true sympathy; but the book falls into two halves, one of which
has succeeded and the other failed. Everything that concerns Lucie
is a success, including the part about the fine, rather weak-kneed
gentleman who supports her, and ends by marrying her, although his
love is not of the kind that can be called “ennobling.” All that does not
concern Lucie and her natural surroundings is a failure, especially
the fine gentleman’s social circle, into which Lucie enters after her
marriage, and where she seems to be as little at home as Amalie
Skram herself. Many an author and epicurean would have hesitated
before writing such a book as “Lucie.” But Amalie Skram’s naturalism
is of such an honest and happy nature that any secondary
considerations would not be likely to enter her mind, and in the last
chapter the brutal naturalism of the story reaches its highest pitch. In
the whole of Europe there are only two genuine and honest
naturalists, and they are Emile Zola and Amalie Skram.
Her later books—take, for instance, her great Bergen novel, “S. G.
Myre,” “Love in North and South,” “Betrayed,” etc.—are not to be
compared with the three that we have mentioned. They are
naturalistic, of course; their naturalism is of the best kind; they are
still unco in de la nature, but they are no longer entirely vu à travers
un tempérament. They are no longer quite Amalie Skram.
Norwegian naturalism—we might almost say Teutonic naturalism—
culminated in Amalie Skram, this off-shoot of the Gallic race.
Compared with her, Fru Leffler and Fru Ahlgren are good little girls,
in their best Sunday pinafores; Frau von Ebner is a maiden aunt, and
George Eliot a moralizing old maid. All these women came of what is
called “good family,” and had been trained from their earliest infancy
to live as became their position. All the other women whom I have
sketched in this book belonged to the upper classes, and like all
women of their class, they only saw one little side of life, and
therefore their contribution to literature is worthless as long as it tries
to be objective. Naturalism is the form of artistic expression best
suited to the lower classes, and to persons of primitive culture, who
do not feel strong enough to eliminate the outside world, but reflect it
as water reflects an image. They feel themselves in sympathy with
their surroundings, but they have not the refined instincts and
awakened antipathies which belong to isolation. Where the character
differs from the individual consciousness, they do not think of
sacrificing their soul as a highway for the multitude, any more than
their body—à la Lucie—to the commune bonum.
 V
A Young Girl’s Tragedy
 I
It seldom happens that a genuine confession penetrates through the
intense loneliness in which a person’s inner life is lived; with women,
hardly ever. It is rare when a woman leaves any written record of her
life at all, and still more rare when her record is of any psychological
interest; it is generally better calculated to lead one astray. A woman
is not like a man, who writes about himself from a desire to
understand himself. Even celebrated women, who are scarce, and
candid women, who are perhaps scarcer still, have no particular
desire to understand themselves. In fact, I have never known a
woman who did not wish, either from a good or bad motive, to
remain a terra incognita to her own self, if only to preserve the
instinctive element in her actions, which might otherwise have
perished. There is also another reason for this reticence. A woman
does not live the inner life to anything like the same extent as a man;
her instincts, occupations, needs, and interests lie outside herself;
whereas a man is more self-contained,—his entire being is
developed from within. Woman is spiritually and mentally an empty
vessel, which must be replenished by man. She knows nothing
about herself, or about man, or about the great silent inflexibility of
life, until it is revealed to her consciousness by man. But the woman
of our time—and many of the best women, too—manifests a desire
to dispense with man altogether; and she whom Nature has destined
to be a vessel out of which substance shall grow, wishes to be a
substance in herself, out of which nothing can grow, because the
substance wherewith she endeavors to fill the void is unorganical,
rational, and foreign to her nature. The mistake is tragic, but there is
nothing impressive about it; it is merely hopeless, chaotic, heart-
rending; and because it is chaotic in itself, it creates a void for the
woman who falls into it,—a void in which she perishes. The more
talented she is, and the more womanly, the worse it will be for her.
And yet it is generally the talented woman who is most strongly
attracted by it, and man remains to her both inwardly and outwardly
as much a stranger as though he were a being from another planet.
What can be the origin of this devastating principle at the core of
woman’s being? Among all the learned and celebrated women
whom I have attempted to depict in this book, there is not one in
whom it has not shown itself, either in a lasting or spasmodic form;
but neither is there one who did not suffer acutely on account of it.
How did it begin in these women, who were so richly endowed,
whose natures were so productive? Was it developed by means of
outward suggestion? Or does it mark a state of transition between
old and new? It is possible that it is not found only amongst women,
but that there is something corresponding to it in men. I shall return
to this subject afterwards.
Of all the books which women have written about themselves, I only
know of two that are written with the unalloyed freshness of
spontaneity, and which are therefore genuine to a degree that would
be otherwise impossible; these are Mrs. Carlyle’s diary and Marie
Bashkirtseff’s journal. The contents of both books consist chiefly of
the cries of despair which issue from the mouths of two women who
feel themselves captured and ill-used, and are consequently tired of
life, though they do not know the reason nor who is to blame. Mrs.
Carlyle was an imbittered woman, unwilling to complain of, yet
always indirectly abusing, that disagreeable oddity, Thomas Carlyle;
he was an egotistical boor, who required everything and gave
nothing in return, and was certainly not the right husband for her.
The two books stand side by side: one is the writing of a
discontented woman of a much older generation, whose long-
suppressed wrath, annoyance, and indignation, combined with bodily
and spiritual thirst, resulted in a nervous disease; while the other is
far more extraordinary and difficult to comprehend, as it is the writing
of a young girl who is rich, talented, and pretty, and who belongs
entirely to the present generation of women, since she would be only
thirty-four years of age were she living now. Both books are
confessions d’outre tombe, and they are both the result of a desire to
be silent,—a desire not often felt by women.
Mrs. Carlyle maintained this silence all her life long towards her
husband, and it was not until after her death that he discovered, by
means of the diary, how little he had succeeded in making her
happy; his surprise was great. Marie Bashkirtseff also maintained
silence towards an all too affectionate family, consisting of women
only. They both possessed a strength of mind which is rare in
women, and it was owing to this that they did not confide their
troubles to any one; theirs was the pride that belongs to solitude, for
they had neither women friends nor confidants, and it was only when
they were no longer able to contain themselves that some of their
best and worst feelings overflowed into these books,—in Mrs.
Carlyle’s case in a few bittersweet drops, but with Marie Bashkirtseff
they were more like a foaming torrent filled with thundering
whirlpools, with here and there a few quiet places where the stream
widens out into a beautiful clear lake, and thin willows bend over the
still waters. The one felt that she had not developed into a full-grown
woman by her marriage; the other was a young girl who never grew
to be a woman; but both are less interesting on account of what they
tell us than on account of that which they have not known how to tell.
Marie Bashkirtseff’s book, which in the course of ten years has run
through almost as many editions, is especially interesting in the latter
respect, and is a perfect gold mine for all that has to do with the
psychology of young girls.

II
Marie Bashkirtseff was descended from one of those well-
guarded sections of society from whence nearly all the women have
sprung who have taken any active part in the movements of their
time during the latter half of our century. Hers was more than
ordinarily happily situated. The two families from whose union she
sprang, the Bashkirtseffs and Babanins, were both branches of old
South-Russian nobility; but for some reason or other, which she
appears never to have ascertained, the marriage between her
parents was an unhappy one. They separated after having been
married for a couple of years, during which time two children, a son
and a daughter, were born, and her mother returned to her old home,
accompanied by little Marie. Petted and spoiled by her grandparents,
her mother, her aunt, and the governesses, who, even at that early
age, were greatly impressed by her numerous talents and
determined will, she spent the first years of her life on her
grandparents’ property; but in May, 1870, the whole family went
abroad, including the mother, aunt, grandfather, Marie, her brother,
her little cousin, a family doctor, and a large retinue of servants.
For two years they wandered from place to place, staying at Vienna,
Baden-Baden, Geneva, and Paris, and finally settling at Nice. It was
there that Marie, who was then twelve years of age, began the
journal, published after her death at four-and-twenty, which was to
be her real life work.
She has bequeathed other tokens of her labor to posterity. They
hang in the Luxembourg museum, in the division reserved for
pictures by artists of the present day which have been purchased by
the State. If we go into one of the smaller side rooms, we are
suddenly confronted by a picture of dogs barking in a desert place;
there is something so real and vivid about it that the rest of the State-
rewarded industry seems pale and lifeless in comparison. A bit of
nature in the corner attracts, while it makes us shiver; it is large,
bold, brutal,—and what does it represent? Only a couple of street
urchins talking to each other as they stand in front of a wooden
paling. There is no doubt but that the influence of Bastien Lepage
has been at work here. There is something that reminds us of him in
the hot, gray, sunless sky; but there is also a certain Russian
atmosphere about it that gives a dry look that contrasts strangely
with the French landscapes. And where would Bastien Lepage get
these contours? We have never seen lines more carelessly drawn,
and yet so true; there is real genius in them. This picture is a
primitive bit of Russian nature, child-like in its honesty, and the
painter is Marie Bashkirtseff.
Near the door hangs a little portrait of a young woman dressed in fur.
She has the typical Russian face, with thick, irregular eyebrows, from
under which a pair of Tartar eyes look at you straight in the face with
a curious expression. What can it be? Is it indifference, or defiance;
or is it nothing more than physical well-being?
Among all the pictures painted by women that I have ever seen, I do
not remember anywhere the temperament and individuality of the
artist are revealed with greater force. The touch is so primitive, so
uncultured in the best and worst sense of the word, that it surprises
us to think that it is the work of a woman, half child, who belongs to
the best society; it would seem rather to suggest the claws of a
lioness.
Yet Marie Bashkirtseff was a thorough lady, not only by birth and
education, but in her heart as well; she was a lady to the tips of her
fingers, to an extreme that was almost absurd; she was not merely a
fashionable lady, in the way that certain clever young men take a half
ironical pleasure in appearing fashionable, but a lady in real earnest,
with all the intensity of a religious bigot.
She had been educated by ladies, by a gentle and refined though
rather shallow mother, by an aunt whose vocation seems to have
consisted in self-sacrifice for others, a domineering grandmother, two
governesses,—one Russian and the other French,—and an
“angelical” doctor who lived in the house, and always travelled with
them, and who seems to have become somewhat of a woman
himself from having lived amongst so many women.
She was no more than twelve years old when she discovered that
her governesses were insupportably stupid, and that the only thing
that they understood was how to make her waste her precious youth.
There was no time for that. She was already aware of the shortness
of time, and it was her anxiety to make the most of it that afterwards
hurried her short life to its close. She was possessed of an intense
thirst for everything,—life, knowledge, enjoyment, sympathy. But
although her grandfather had been “Byronic” in his youth, the family
passed their lives vegetating with true Russian indolence; there was
no help for it; she knew that nothing better was to be expected of
them. And accordingly she hunted her governesses out of the house
and took her education into her own hands. A tutor was engaged,
and a list was made from which no branch of learning was excluded.
The tutor nearly fainted with astonishment when it was shown to him,
but he was still more astonished at Marie’s progress afterwards.
Drawing was the only lesson in which the future great artist did not
succeed; it bored her, and nothing came of it.
Her inner life, meanwhile, is stirred with tumultuous passions. She is
in love, as passionately and as truly in love as any matured woman.
And, after all, this thirteen-year-old girl is a matured woman; she is
more developed, more truly woman-like than the worn-out woman of
three-and-twenty, who only lived with half her strength. The man
whom she loves is a very distinguished Englishman, who had bought
a villa at Nice, where he spent a few months with his mistress every
year,—but this circumstance does not affect Marie in the very least;
she is experienced in her knowledge of the world, and by no means
bourgeois in her way of thinking. There is another reason, however,
that causes her intolerable suffering,—the handsome English duke is
too grand for her. She is troubled, not only because he pays her no
attention at present, but because she thinks that he is never likely to
esteem her sufficiently to wish to marry her, unless, indeed, she
could do something to make herself a name, and become
celebrated. Marie Bashkirtseff, accordingly, wishes to become
celebrated. She would like to be a great singer, who is at the same
time a great actress; she would like to have the whole world at her
feet, including the duke, and be able to choose between royal dukes
and princes, and then she would choose him. For a couple of years
or more she lives upon this dream, studies, reads, cries, and suffers
that unnecessary overplus of secret pain and anxiety which usually
accompanies the development of richly gifted natures.
She has a lovely voice and great dramatic talent, but the former is
not fully developed, and cannot be trained for some years to come.
She buys cart-loads of books; but as there is no one to guide her
choice, and her social intercourse does not diverge a hairbreadth
outside her family and a small circle of friends, consisting chiefly of
compatriots, it is only natural that her reading should be confined to
Dumas père, Balzac, Octave Feuillet, and such literary tallow
candles as Ohnet, and others like him. Her taste remains
uncultivated, her horizon bounded by the family, and her knowledge
continues to be a mixture of ancient superstitions combined with the
newest shibboleths.
Her most familiar converse is between herself and her Creator,
whom her imagination pictures as a kind of superior great-
grandfather, very grand and powerful, and the only One in whom she
can confide. To Him she lays bare her heart, beseeching Him to give
her that which is a necessity of life to her, and she makes numerous
promises, to be fulfilled only on condition that her prayers are
granted; she respects what she conceives to be His wishes with
regard to prayer and almsgiving, and overwhelms Him with
reproaches if these are of no avail. And they are of no avail. Her
voice, which has been tried and praised by the highest musical
authorities in Paris, is being gradually undermined by a disease of
the throat, and the duke marries; thus her hopes of becoming
famous and of gaining a great love are gone, gone forever.
Those were the first and second cruel wounds wherewith life made
its presence felt in this sensitive soul; they were wounds which never
healed, and which imparted hidden veins of venom to the healthy
parts of her being.
Does not this remind us of the fairy tale about wounds that never
heal? Is not this just the way that the wounds made by Fate, or by
human beings, in our souls continue to bleed forever? They are like
tender places, which shrink from the touch throughout a lifetime, and
wither if a breath passes over them. The more sensitive a person is,
the more painful they are, and nothing is so easily wounded as a
growing organism. The nerves have a good memory, better even
than the brain, and there are some wounds received in youth and
impressed during growth which seem to have been wiped out ages
ago, till suddenly they present the appearance of a putrefying spot, a
poisonous place, the point of disintegration of the entire organism.
Or there may be something crippled in the person’s vitality. They live
on, but one muscle, perhaps only a very small one, is strained and
just a little out of order, and the soul is compelled to replace what the
body lacks by means of extra exertion, which is afterwards paid for
by excessive weariness.
There are some sluggish natures, especially among women, who
exert their strength to the least possible degree, and do their work in
a half-hearted manner. There are also souls which seem all aglow
with the psychic and sensuous warmth of their natures, who carry
the whole substance of their being in the hand, and who give
themselves up entirely to the interest of what they are feeling and
wishing for at the moment. Their path is strewn with fragments of
their life, which fall off dead, and every stroke aimed at them hits the
heart. Their soul has no covering to protect them from
disappointment; neither have they the forgetful sleep of animals,
wherein the body is at rest. But such natures are generally
possessed of an endless supply of self-sustaining strength, which
imbues them with the power to grow again; and although their
wounds are plentiful, their germinating cells are plenteous also. The
parts that are crippled remain crippled still, but new possibilities are
continually developing in new directions.
The young girl of whose silly, half-fancied love story I have made so
much, was one of these natures. She was formed of the material out
of which destiny either moulds women who become the greatest of
their sex, or else casts them aside, discarded and broken. It
generally depends upon some very trifling matter which of the two
takes place. Marie was an exceedingly spoiled child when the first
blow fell; but there was something lacking in her nature—a dead
spot that revealed itself with the destruction of her voice—while her
body was blossoming into womanhood. There was a dead spot
somewhere without as well, something that lacked in life, else it were
not possible to long so ardently and not obtain. There was something
that gazed at her with evil, ghost-like eyes, causing her nerves to
quiver beneath its icy breath. She was a brave girl. She did not
complain, did not look back, but drew herself together, silent and
determined. Her passionate love of work took the form of painting,
and as she could not become a great singer, she meant to be a great
painter. But a part of her being congealed and withered away; her
young heart had expanded to receive a return of the love it had so
freely given, and was left unsatisfied.
The years passed in much the same way as they had passed before
for this spoiled child of fortune. A few people who were indifferent to
her died, and others came who were no less indifferent. They
travelled from Nice to Paris, and from Paris to Nice, but she was
equally lonely everywhere. She had no playfellows, no girl friends,
no school-room companions, and to life’s contrasts she remained a
stranger. Her cousin Dina was the only one who was always with
her, and she was the typical girl,—a pretty, good-natured nonentity.
And thus, though always lonely, she was never alone. Wherever she
went, her mother and aunt went with her, and wherever they did not
go, Marie Bashkirtseff did not go either. In all her journeyings, she
never received a single impression for herself alone; it was always
reflected at the same moment in the sun-glasses of her aunt and
mother, and never a word did she hear but was also heard by her
duennas. No man was allowed within the circle of her acquaintance
until he had first been judged suitable from a marriageable, as well
as a social point of view. The female atmosphere by which she was
surrounded paralyzed every other.
It was her destiny!
Life was empty around her, and in the void her excited nerves
became even more and more centred upon her own ego. Her
opinion of herself assumed gigantic proportions, and whatever there
had been of soul grandeur in her nature was changed into
admiration of self. And yet, in spite of all, this girl, who was
undoubtedly a genius, never realized her own power to the full. The
natural nobility of her feelings assumed a moral, bourgeois dress,
and her young senses, which had manifested such a passionate
craving at their first awakening, withered and grew numb.
She was sixteen when she experienced her second disappointment
in love, and it became for her the turning-point of her inner life.
At her earnest request the family had gone to Rome. It was the time
of the Carnival, and after the conventional life at Nice, the sudden
outbreak of merriment in the Eternal City called forth a frivolous
mood in every one. There was something delightful in the ease with
which acquaintances were made, and the simple, straightforward
manner in which homage was done. A young man makes love to
Dina; he belongs to an old, aristocratic, Roman family, and is the
nephew of an influential cardinal. Marie entices him away from her,
and the young Italian falls a prey to the brilliant fascination and wild
coquetry of her manner. He is dazzled by such aggressive conduct
on the part of so young a girl, and the equivocal character of it spurs
him on. He storms her with declarations of love, and Marie
reciprocates his passion,—not very seriously perhaps, but her
senses, her vanity, her pride, all are on fire. The young man
communicates to her something of his habitual good spirits, and her
head, no less than the heads of her mother and aunt, is completely
turned at the prospect of such a distinguished parti. The family set to
work in good earnest to bring matters to a climax, for which object
they employ suitable deputies, while Marie persistently holds the
legitimate joys of marriage before the face of her importunate lover.
The Italian slips past these dangerous rocks with the dexterity of an
eel. He knows what Marie and the house of Bashkirtseff, convinced
as they are of the grandeur of their Russian ancestry, cannot realize,
—that for him, the heir and nephew of the cardinal, no marriage will
be considered suitable unless it brings with it connection with the
nobility, or the advantages of an immense fortune; and in this opinion
he fully concurs. The result is that they are always at cross
purposes: he talks of love, she of marriage; he of tête-à-têtes on the
staircase after midnight, she of betrothal kisses between lunch and
dinner under the auspices of her family. When his allusions to his
uncle’s disapproval of a marriage with a heretical Russian lady from
the provinces do not produce any effect on the family other than
indignation, expressive of their wounded feelings, he goes away, and
allows himself to be sent into retreat in a monastery. While there, he
ascertains that the Bashkirtseffs have left Rome and given up all
desire to have such a vacillating creature for a son-in-law. They go to
Nice, and no more is said about him until Marie persuades her family
to return to Rome, where she meets him at a party, but only to
discover that he loves her when there, and forgets her again the
moment that she is out of sight. This was the second time that she
had knocked at the door of life; and, as on the former occasion, Fate
held back the joys which she seemed to have in store, only opening
the door wide enough to let in the face of a grinning Punchinello.
Few writers have attempted to describe the state of a young girl’s
mind on such occasions, when a thousand cherished hopes are
instantaneously charred as though struck by lightning, and, worse
still, all that she had wished for becomes hateful in her eyes, and the
shame of it assumes a gigantic scale, and continues to increase,
though maybe at the cost of her life. Men have no suspicion of this,
and they would find it hard to understand, even supposing that they
were given the opportunity of observing it. They grow up amid the
realities of life; a girl, in the unreal. The disappointments which a
man endures are real ones, and unless he is a fool, he is in a
position to form an approximate valuation of his own importance.
With a girl it is different; her opinion of herself is exaggerated to an
extent that is quite fantastical and altogether unreal, and this is
especially the case when her education is of a strictly conventional
character, and has been conducted mainly by women. The
preservation of her purity is the foundation of her creed, but she is
not told, nor does she guess, wherein this purity consists, nor how it
may be lost; and consequently she imagines that it can be lost in
every conceivable way,—by a mere nothing, by a pressure of the
hand, but in any case by a kiss. This kiss Marie Bashkirtseff had
actually given and received, and after it she had been forgotten and
despised! That kiss branded her in secret all her life. She never
forgot it.
This is not the only consequence of the change from the real to the
unreal which takes place when the outer world casts its reflection in
the mirror of a young girl’s soul. Every girl has an exaggerated idea
of the value of the mystic purity of her maidenhood in the eyes of
men; and when she makes a man happy by the gift of herself, she
imagines that she has given him something extraordinary, which he
must accept on bended knee. What words can describe the
humiliation which she feels if he does not set a sufficiently high value
on the gift, or if he thrusts it aside like a pair of old slippers that do
not fit! All girls are silly to a certain extent, even the cleverest; and
the girl who is not silly on this point must have lost something of her
girlish modesty.
In the case of Marie Bashkirtseff, a part of her being was blighted
after her encounter with the Italian, and she never entirely recovered
from the effects of it. This, her first acquaintance with a man, was so
full of racial misunderstandings and others besides, that it destroyed
her faith in man, as indeed it is doomed to be destroyed sooner or
later in every girl with a strong individuality and healthy nature. And
for her, as for many another, followed the lifeless years into the
middle of the twenties, when a new and very different faith begins to
show itself as the result of wider views of life and internal changes.
But with her this faith never came. Her vitality gave way too soon.
Those dead years which must inevitably follow upon an all too
promising and too early maturity, leaving a young woman apparently
trivial and devoid of any true individuality of character, and which
often last until the thirties, when the time comes for a new and
greater change,—those years with Marie, as with many another
“struggling” girl, were filled with an unnatural craving for work.
She wanted to be something on her own account, as an individual.
She compelled her mother and aunt to go with her to Paris, where
she could go to Julian’s studio, which was the only one for women
where painting was taught seriously. The working hours were from
eight to twelve, from one to five.
But she worked longer. This spoiled child, who had never known
what it meant to exert herself, was not satisfied with eight hours of
hard labor. She works in the evenings as well, after she comes
home; she works on Sundays; she is dead to the world, and with the
exception of her daily bath, she renounces every luxury of the toilet,
and succeeds in condensing into two years the work of seven. One
day Julian tells her that she must work alone, “because,” he says,
“you have learned all that it is possible to teach.”

III
Marie Bashkirtseff was not born an artist, with that stern
predestination with which nature determines the career of persons
with one talent. If her voice had not been destroyed during its
development, she would in all probability have become one of those
great singers whose charm lies not only in the outward voice, but in
the indescribable fascination of a deep, strong individuality. Her
journal, especially the first part, reveals an authoress with a rare
psychological intuition, an understanding of human nature, a deep
sympathy, a mastery of expression, and an early-matured genius,
which are unsurpassed even among Russians, well known for the
richness of their temperament. If this young woman, whose short life
was consumed by a craving for love, had gained the experience she
so greatly desired, where would the woman be found who could
have borne comparison with her? Who like her was created to
receive the knowledge whereby a woman is first revealed to herself,
and is developed into the being who is earth’s ruler,—the great
mother, on whose lap man reposes, and from whence he goes forth
into the world? All that she had was original; it was all of the best
material that the earth has to give; and therein lay the mystery of her
downfall.
The backbone of her nature was that indomitable pride whereby a
great character reveals the consciousness of its own importance.
The lioness cannot wed with the house-dog. The same instinct
which, in animals, marks the boundary line between the different
species, determines in a still higher degree—higher far than the
materialistic wisdom of our schools will allow—the attractions and
antipathies of love. The iron law which compels healthy natures to
preserve their distinction, prevented this girl from sinking to the level
of the men of her own class, amongst whom she might have found
some to love her. She tried it more than once, but it did not answer.
Her exceptionable nature required a husband superior to herself.
One or two such men might be found nowadays, who not only as
productive minds, but also in the subtle charm of their manly
characters, would have been the born masters of an enchantress
such as Marie Bashkirtseff. But these men are not to be met with in
the drawing-rooms and studios of Paris, nor yet in the Bois de
Boulogne; not in St. Petersburg either, nor on the family estates of
Little Russia, and she never got to know them.
This woman, who was born to become a great singer, a great
painter, a great writer, born—before all else—to be loved with a great
love, never learned to know love, and died without being great in any
way, because she was enchained all her life long to that which was
greater than all her possibilities,—a young girl’s infinite ignorance.
In spite of all the knowledge that she had acquired, in spite of all the
probings of her sensitive nerves and sharp intellect, she remained
always and in everything incomplete. It is one of the results of the
incompleteness of which unmarried women are the victims, that they
seek everywhere the complete, the perfected in man,—i.e., they
seek for that which is only to be found in men who are growing old,
and have nothing more to give; in whom there are no slumbering
ambitions, and no hidden aspirations. She must have passed by,
unheeding, many a young genius, who perhaps went to an inferior
woman to satisfy the passion which might have proved to both of
them an endless source of blessedness, health, and regeneration.
She must have felt many a look rest upon her, arousing sensations
which, to her white soul, were a mystery. For this girl, who had drunk
deeply of the literature of her time, and who knew theoretically
everything that there was to know, was yet unspoiled by a single
trace of premature knowledge. The pages of her journal are innocent
from beginning to end,—an innocence that is stupid while it is
touchingly intact. Marie Bashkirtseff’s journal is not merely a
contribution to the psychology of girls, it is a young girl’s psychology
in the widest, most typical sense,—the psychology of the unmarried
state, bequeathed by one who is ignorant to those who know, as her
only memorial upon earth, but a memorial that will last longer than
marble or bronze. She died young, but she had no wish to die. She
took twelve years to write this book, and she wrote it on her travels,
in the midst of her pleasures, in the midst of her work, in the despair
of her loneliness, and in her fear when she shrank from death; she
wrote it during sleepless nights, and on days passed in blessed
abstraction in the beauties of nature. She always addressed the
unknown hearers who were ever present to her imagination; she
spoke to them so that, in case she should die young, she might live
upon earth in the memory of the strangers who happened to read
her journal. A “human document,” by a young girl, she thought, must
be of sufficient interest not to be forgotten, and she promises to tell
us everything connected with her little person. “All, all,—not only all
her thoughts, but she will not even hide what is laughable and
disadvantageous to herself; for what would be the object of a book
like this, unless it told the truth absolutely, accurately, and without
concealment?”
The confessions are by no means a human document in the sense
that her three patron saints—Zola, Maupassant, and Goncourt—
would have used the word. They do not contain a single naked
reality. They are modest, not only with the modesty of a child of
nature, but with the modesty of a young hot-house beauty, a delicate
lady of fashion, beneath whose snow-white resplendent dress—the
work of a Parisian dressmaker—are concealed the bleeding wounds
and the pitiless signs of death. But she lets us follow her from the
rich beginnings of her youth onwards, until the stream of life trickles
away drop by drop, leading us on to the weary resignation of her last
days.
This exhaustion begins to show itself immediately after the two years
of reckless overwork and study in Julian’s studio; but the cause of it
was mental rather than physical. Julian’s last words were: “You have
learned all that it is possible to teach—the rest depends upon
yourself.” And Robert-Fleury, the principal academical professor,
nodded his approval. After that they left her. But where was she to
begin? Where was the rest to come from? What was she to do—she,
who had been such a phenomenal pupil? How was she to obtain
sufficient individuality for original production? Learn! yes, of course.
A girl can do that better than the most painstaking young man of the
faculty. There is nothing to prevent it; her sex will slumber as long as
the brain is kept at work. But artistic production is another matter.
Whence should it come? Not from herself, for she has nothing; she
has had no experience. She can represent what she has seen, or
she can imagine, but that is all. Marie’s nature was too truthful to be
satisfied with imitation. The old academical art did not appeal to her,
as was very natural, and the new was just bursting its shell, and
contained all the impurity and rubbish that belongs to a state of
transition. The imperfect in her desired the perfect; she who was an
incomplete woman felt the need of a perfected man.
She made no progress. She painted at home from models, and she
went out driving with her maid, accompanied by some young
Russian friends, and sketched street scenes from the carriage. So
great was her need for ideas that she attempted pictures on religious
and historical subjects, and with some difficulty she finished a picture
for the next Salon,—went half mad with empty pride, but had to
admit that it was very much inferior to the former one which she had
painted under Julian’s supervision. For two years she meets with no
success. Her pictures contain nothing that is characteristic; she has
no individual style, no personal experiences, and no original ideas.
But her individuality, though dormant, is too strong to allow her to
imitate the style of other lady artists, one half of whom are too
amateurish, and their painting too devoid of character, to content her,
while the others have betrayed their sex, and adopted a severe,
masculine style.
At last the day came when Bastien Lepage was a public celebrity.
Marie Bashkirtseff saw his pictures, became his pupil, worshipped
him, and ever after sang his praises.
Yet, in all this, there was something lacking.
His bright coloring, and the atmosphere of his landscapes, with their
pale, sultry heat, the aggressive physical character of his people,
etc.,—all these points appealed strongly to her South-Russian
nature. He set free her national feelings, which had hitherto been
bound and suppressed beneath academical influences, and she
discovered a kindred spirit in him, a primitive element at the root of
his being, which made her tenderly disposed towards him. But she
had no intention of remaining his pupil. She was too deeply
conscious of the difference between them, and saw clearly that his
influence was not likely to be more than a passing phase.
She worshipped him from a long-suppressed desire to worship some
one, but her worship was calm and passionless. This little Bastien
Lepage was not the man to arouse her deepest affections; he was
too bourgeois, and his fine art was too tame.
And yet she praised him, half mechanically. Saint Marceaux, the
sculptor, had appealed to her feelings more deeply than he had
done.