The prose mirrors the paintings: episodic, mythic, devotional. It sits alongside Klee’s diaries and Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art as a key first-person document of early modernist self-theorisation.

Originally published in Russian in 1922 and later translated via the French Ma Vie, My Life is Chagall’s idiosyncratic autobiographical account of childhood in Vitebsk, exile, Jewish identity, and the emergence of a modernist painterly language that refused both realism and strict abstraction. 

This English edition, translated by Dorothy Williams and published by Peter Owen, belongs to the post-war Anglophone recovery of émigré modernism, when small presses mediated continental avant-garde figures for British and American readers. The volume is illustrated with Chagall’s own drawings, making it as much an artist’s book as a literary memoir.

Edition note: Peter Owen English-language edition. Printed in Great Britain. Dust jacket present with visible wear and toning; interior appears clean.