Marc Chagall's folkloric depictions of his home, Vitebsk, have become archetypes of East European shtetl imagery. The twenty etchings illustrating his autobiography represent the artist's first attempts at printmaking. After studying the process in Berlin with Hermann Struck, Chagall executed these works within a few weeks.
Although the prints were designed to accompany the memoirs he had previously written in Russian, they were published as a separate portfolio, Mein Leben, by Paul Cassirer in Berlin in 1923. The complete autobiography appeared nine years later as Ma Vie, a French translation made by his wife, Bella.