A search for roots with a happy ending

The life of Princess Jelisaveta Karađorđević, extremely active, as attractive as it was, stopped, in fact, at the focal point, which was constantly hovering in the being of the author - and that is the return to the place and country of birth, Beograd and Yugoslavia, that is, Serbia, after many decades, which she finally achieved. Her autobiography Far away (Vukotić media) composed of diary entries, narrative units and travelogues, can therefore also be read as a drama about uprooting and the search for identity, with a ring-like composition like a folk tale, because the heroine, after many vicissitudes and obstacles she has to overcome, returns to the place from where she started a long time ago, i.e. plucked out, and which, nevertheless, had a happy ending. Princess Jelisaveta has been our fellow citizen for almost 30 years.

photo: promo

In these memories of Princess Jelisaveta, the most exciting literary places are those "end" places, from the beginning and the end of the story: the first child's memories of the White Court and the fairytale childhood in a large and harmonious family, because childhood is always unadulterated like the first sensations of life, which are forever remembered in their purity and the beauty of the first pictures. But, like Svetlana Velmar-Janković in hers Through the air, that "glass ball" of happiness, protection, in which she also spent the first years of her life, suddenly, in both years in 1941, shattered - never to be put together again. It can also be called the primary experience of the girl, Princess Jelisaveta. There are also extremely vivid, as well as traumatic descriptions of Africa, to which Prince Paul's family was deported with the treatment of political prisoners by the British government: first in Kenya, at Lake Naivasha 70 miles from Nairobi, with many dangers and exotic wild animals, and then in the inhospitable civilization of the South African Republic, in Johannesburg, with the first experiences and rebellions at school in front of unjust teachers and girls, where the princess stayed until she was 12. until 1947.

AGAINST INJUSTICE

The girl then discovers two important things in herself: she realizes her rebellious nature, through the initiatory blow addressed to the girl who called her father a Nazi, with the awareness "that I will always fight against injustice" and secondly: "Even then I knew that I like to travel". They will be the two main drivers, the two guiding stars in the crucial formation of the young personality of Princess Jelisaveta. Of course, in that period of strengthening self-awareness, the development of imagination through the books of Pearl Buck, the discovery of movies and comics, along with the favorite cat Frisky and the beloved nanny Id, who soon left them, was also crucial. Only the interventions of her mother, Princess Olga and the then British King George, whom she and her family had the opportunity to see in Johannesburg in 1947, caused Prince Pavle's family to move to Western Europe - at the very moment when they were declared enemies of the people in the new FNR Yugoslavia. Schooling in Switzerland, which resembled "a true paradise", was replaced by a dreary Catholic boarding school in Paris, then by "Tudor Hall" in England, with the young cadet's strong resistance to rigid rules, and very poor and inhumane schooling conditions.

Finally, there are also emotional "handovers" in this prose through the people and peers she loved - above all Aunt Marina, Duchess of Kent, her daughter Alexandra, or the Russian Irina, as well as her father's aunt, Countess Demidov, whose Pratolino estate near Florence at least briefly extended the illusion of a warm, cozy and pre-war life during the summer, so that the girl would not sink completely into disappointment and depression. Nevertheless, she finished the "hated school", as she herself claimed. A huge number of important figures that he meets on his life's journey may be more at the level of sketches, and they lack something to grow into real literary portraits. Certainly, the list of people, contemporaries of the second half of the 20th century whom Princess Elizabeth met on her way, is fascinating in this book: from the British royal family, with whom she maintained close contact all her life (Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, Lady Diana), the former King Edward and Mrs. Simpson, through dancing in the White House with John Kennedy, meeting Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, for whom she had an emotional crush, Grace Kelly, Warren Beattie, to the guest at the reception of Donald and Ivanka Trump, Jean Cocteau, Benazir Bhutto, Boutros Ghali and many others. She witnessed many great events: she attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, the wedding of Crown Prince Alexander with Princess Maria in Seville, etc. as a girl.

MAIN HEROES

However, if we were to choose the most important person, and in a way the main character of this prose, then it would certainly be her father, Prince Pavle. With the introductory, literary and prose scene, the conversation between father and daughter, many years later, when she only realized the core of the family's (and her own) fate and asked her father about it - this book begins, and with the transfer of his remains to the mausoleum on Oplenac, symbolically, this book could be considered complete and completed. In the same way, Princess Olga could also be called the main heroine of this prose at one point, when, as Princess Elizabeth writes, "the mother rolled up her sleeves" and began to put in order the abandoned house in Kenya, after exile - when she sews torn sheets, copes with a leaking roof, tends the garden and vegetables, and finally cooks, teaching the little girl and the nanny to "knit dishcloths from twine", and even in the evening, with a squinting light, she reads selected pages from a book to her depressed and utterly sunken, beloved husband (damaging her eyesight).

In this, in fact, one can read the vitalist female principle, the self-sacrifice that copes in all conditions and when the (un)opportunities demand it, she turns from an elegant beauty in the European aristocracy - by origin, a cousin of the last Russian emperor of the Romanov dynasty (on the mother's side) and a granddaughter of the Greek king (on the father's side) - then she turns into a fearless guardian of her family, offspring, as a primordial sign of maternal rights. In a way, this prose is also an ode to her mother, even though Princess Jelisaveta occasionally honestly stated that she did not have such close contact with her mother, nor with her older brothers, who were often absent.

During the period of growing up and forming the girl's identity, it was, above all, a female rebellion and the need for freedom, against the figure of her father, who was otherwise adored, but who nevertheless limited her, for example in her studies. Early marriage to the American Oxenberg and departure from dreary Paris to free America, which she called "I woke up in a new life" (March 13, 1960) and further: "I wanted to enjoy myself, I had nothing planned but to enjoy my freedom", was then the only way to emancipate the young princess from her father's authority, but soon after she rebelled against the patriarchal marriage in which she found herself, and which soon ended fell apart ("I wasn't ready for new slavery"). The search for identity was later realized in other loves, where Princess Jelisaveta is often brutally honest in this autobiography, but she was actually guided only by the feminine, Amazonian principle, because in gynecocratic societies, where the mother is the founder of the family, the woman chose the husbands of her children, and it was not the other way around, as has been customary in patriarchy for thousands of years.

Therefore, this principle was unknowingly followed by Princess Jelisaveta, becoming the mother of three successful children from different husbands. She was attracted to film, the glamor of Hollywood, acting, receptions, dancing, horseback riding, driving a convertible, exotic trips. Finally, her empathy, enormous work and participation in various foundations, for example against globalization and climate change, which were already seen as a danger, years spent in airplanes and flights from one end of the world to the other, at conferences with notable meetings and performances related to those issues, is also a typical scope of the feminine principle - because it is altruism - to help others, but also to fight to save this planet.

FINALLY IN BELGRADE

Along with the initial pages about her childhood in the White Palace, the best can be considered the last chapters, when the princess (thanks to the Peruvian embassy and the citizenship of her husband at the time and the obtained visa) left Budapest by train and set foot again on the soil of Yugoslavia and Belgrade for the first time, in 1987, after 46 years. The moment of seeing the White Palace, some people who were still alive and remembered her, her and her family, working in the White Palace, the return of the forgotten language (Serbian) to consciousness, belong to the strongest, most exciting and most authentic pages of these memoirs. Calling that moment "like when a person steps into a long-dreamed dream", always with his father in his mind ("so many things I would ask him"), and then, coming more and more often ("that May 1988, in Belgrade, I felt as if I didn't even exist, I was just a ghost wandering in an unknown city") strengthened more and more in his decision - to return to his roots and his native country and city forever.

The feminine principle is always the one that is literally rooted in the land, space and language, the woman is always the faithful guardian of the home, faith, tradition, and offspring and it is difficult to adapt to other people's spaces, always striving to return to her domicile, to her language and culture, where she came from. This was perfectly embodied in the life path of Princess Jelisaveta, which we read in this book. She chose Serbia and Belgrade, so that, as soon as circumstances allowed, she would return and continue to live there, to rehabilitate her parents, and even to transfer them to the mausoleum on Oplenac, as well as her brothers, who died abroad, so that they would be rebuked by life and death forever in these areas, i.e., near the place where her famous ancestor Karađorđe Petrović started the First Serbian Uprising in 1804, which was and remains the beginning of a free and modern Serbian state.

Moreover, at the moment when she decided to settle permanently in Belgrade, gaining a partner and friends for life (Dragan Babić, Anika Skovran, Mima Popović, Mira Adanja Polak and others), Yugoslavia was falling apart again. Even regardless of the new war, when many fled the country, she fearlessly dedicated herself to her people, her country with the desire to visit everything, make up for lost time and in all (un)conditions personally examine, feel and experience every foot of the country of Serbia, and help with her foundation children's hospitals, young talents, as well as Serbian refugees from the former Yugoslavia. Sitting in the monastery dining rooms of Studenica, Žiča and Ćelija, she mastered a unique state of which she says: "I felt that I was finally among my own." She visited Kosovo and Metohija, as a guest of the Karić brothers in Peja, when many others did not dare, because it was impossible for her for decades, and in that one should read a great saga about the establishment and return. "In Gračanica, on a pillar in the church, I saw a small steep staircase that leads nowhere, and which I also often dreamed about! Two dreams have turned into reality!"

Also, looking at Terazije from the "Moskva" hotel, she wrote: "I thought that the circle had closed and wished that my father would see me from somewhere." Having found her baptismal certificate and received a Serbian passport, wandering the streets of Belgrade where "everything new and interesting" was for her, doing a lot to ensure that the book of Neil Balfour, her ex-husband about Prince Pavlo, supplemented by many secret British documents, appeared in Serbia as well, Princess Jelisaveta made another significant lyrical observation:

"I realized that it is December 31 and that I am in Belgrade. Through the window of my room in the hotel 'Moskva' I watched the snowflakes fly by. It was her first New Year after so many decades (since Christmas 1941) in Belgrade. "My greatest New Year's gift was that view of Terazije and the thought that I was at home."