Russian émigré best known for her sensitive and girlishly candid autobiography in French, Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff, avec un portrait, 2 vol. (1887; Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff).

Bashkirtseff was the daughter of Russian nobility, and she spent a peripatetic childhood with her mother in Germany and on the Riviera until they settled in Paris. Her earliest artistic inclination, toward a singing career, was succeeded by an interest in art. She studied painting at the Robert-Fleury studio in Paris and exhibited in the 1880 Salon. Just before her 24th birthday, she died of tuberculosis.

Bashkirtseff's diary, begun in her early adolescence, offers a frank picture of her artistic and emotional development and a strikingly modern psychological self-portrait of a young, gifted mind in the process of development.