Marc Chagall's strange, vibrant, and poetic autobiographical essay on his early life, containing illustrations, has established itself as a unique document in 20th-century literature

Completed by the artist in 1922, this memoir became available in English in 1965 when Peter Owen published this translation, and it has remained in print ever since. Lyrical and evocative, it is a key work in Chagall studies for the light it sheds on the shaping of the artist’s creative genius. His deep roots in Jewish tradition—religious and secular—are reflected in these recollections of his poverty-stricken youth from Witebsk, White Russia, to the Parisian art world. Together, his words and pictures paint an incomparable portrait of one of the greatest artists of this century, and of the now vanished milieu that inspired him.