Nikola Tesla Articles
You see how long I hesitated and agonized before I finally decided to send you that black-bordered letter anyway. She was like a sister to me. As you can see, even your biography will not remain without romance — the most beautiful but also the saddest.
And I have left my wife — even before Lenka’s death — I actually ran away from my mother-in-law; I have two of them. Now I am back in the Krušedol monastery. My wife is calling me home. Now we are negotiating. And that is romance too, isn’t it?
Merry Christmas and may God grant that in the new year you achieve everything you have planned. Forever your friend, Laza Kostić.”
Thus Laza Kostić failed, despite all his effort, to marry off Nikola Tesla. Not that it was the end. But that is exactly where the poet started from. Why?
The answer was given by the writer Stanislav Vinaver. In his text “How the Poem Santa Maria della Salute Was Born,” he uses this correspondence between the great scientist and the great romantic poet because Lenka Dunđerski is at its center. And that unfortunate young girl became immortal only in Kostić’s swan-song poem, by which, as some literary historians point out, Serbian romanticism in literature ended in the most beautiful way.
Vinaver wrote:
“The correspondence between Laza and Tesla gives insight into the core of both of these enchanted souls, one of whom wanted to believe only in romance, and the other only in ancient primal causes and dawns. In short: Laza is in love with Lenka Dunđerski. But, worn out, he does not feel worthy of her. He seeks a worthy husband for her. He finds one: Laza filled romantic Lenka’s head with Tesla’s image. She, consequently, loved him — Laza: he, Laza, got scared and fled from her in Goethean fashion to Krušedol. Lenka believes Laza. If not Laza — then let it be Laza’s Tesla.”
But until Vinaver published this correspondence — and one can safely say even after that — beside Tesla’s name there was hardly any mention of Laza or Lenka. In fact, with Nikola Tesla’s name there still exists something that is almost a stereotype. On the basis of that it is believed that, as a confirmed bachelor, he lived the solitary life of an eccentric filled with great phobias and many quirks, that he spent his twenty-hour working day in strict asceticism dedicated to the deity of science and new inventions, shunning male company and completely neglecting female company, that he tore up contracts worth millions of dollars and remained until the end of his life without property, without family, and without anyone of his own…
All of that, however, is only part of the legend. Beneath it stood Tesla’s sublime inventive genius. Few people looked beneath the surface. Neither the numerous journalists nor his biographers paid any special attention to his private personality. Even he himself, in his autobiography which he simply and modestly called “My Inventions,” did not find anything else, personal or private, more important than his inventions.
