Living On: Forms of Cultural Afterlife

Surveying the small but growing number of publications that Bashkirtseff's diary has generated in the past decade, it seems safe to conclude that her wager paid off: the diary does indeed seem to have secured ongoing readership. While Bashkirtseff is by no means the household name she once was, there are nevertheless several websites paying homage to her; ¹ a conference in her name was held in Nice in 1995; ² publication of the first unabridged edition of her diary was completed in 2005; a second unabridged edition, this time fully annotated, is currently under way, ³ and an initial volume of the first English translation to be based on the manuscript of the diary was published in 1997. ⁴ Bashkirtseff's various discursive experiments seem, we might conclude, to have worked. Her cultivation of suspense, her musing upon the uses of secret staircases, her writing out of diary entries as dialogue on the one hand, and on the other her increasing exploitation of the framing potential afforded by the fragmented nature of the genre as a means of showcasing not just her day, but also her writing of it, all seem to have functioned successfully as so many means of mediating between the private context of the diary's keeping and the public context of its reading.