Youtube/Milan Sljapic
Milica Stojadinović Serbian
Milica Stojadinović Srpkinja is known in the history of literature as Vrdnička vila. Neglected and insufficiently studied, it is not particularly close to today’s lovers of poetry.
The first woman among Serbs to write songs, a priest’s daughter, represented a kind of miracle in her time. Her pictures were published in literary magazines, she was widely talked about in public, people, as Jovan Skerlić notes, went to see her. She delighted contemporaries not only with her poetry, but also with her unusual beauty, so she was also known as Milica, a beautiful songwriter.
A talented child
Milica spent most of her life in Vrdnik. The fourth of five children in the family, even as a girl, was very serious and never played with her peers. This was especially evident when her brother drowned. To the invitation of the village children, she would answer: “How can I play and be happy when my father and mother are crying.”
She was a very talented child and easily mastered the set tasks, that the teacher from Banovci regretted that he was not a boy, so she went on to study. She continued her education in Petrovaradin privately. She learned German, probably Slovak, as well as playing the guitar. Later, she mastered French and Italian on her own, which can be seen from her correspondence with friends. When she returned home, she spent her days doing housework, reading and writing poetry, so she wrote several poems.
She began her literary work on the slopes of her native Fruška gora. “I started singing my songs when I didn’t even know how to write anything other than on the playground, and the first song became just when the thread was being wound,” she wrote to Vuk Karadzic much later.
Her favorite literature was numerous foreign and Serbian poets, but none of them, her colleagues in the pen, left a memory of Milica, our first poetess. Well, if Njegos may have said “I sang, she sang, that I am not a bishop, here is the princess of Montenegro”, that story remained only as a tradition. She met him at the Karadžić family home in Vienna, and on that occasion he gave her a copy of “Gorski vijenac”. She corresponded with him for a long time afterwards.
Severe poverty
Milica was a great patriot. Following the example of Jovanka Orelanka’s exploits, she wanted, in the revolutionary years of 1848, when conflicts raged in Vojvodina, to go to the battlefield and sing heroic songs to the insurgents with a guitar in her hand. Later, in 1862, she came to Belgrade while the bombing was still going on. She wrote about it and her texts are considered to be the first records of the “wife of a war correspondent”. It remains in the memories of her contemporaries that a woman in an unusual black suit, with a candle in her hand, walked the streets of Belgrade and called on the people to sanctify Kosovo.
Many years later, in 1876, during the Serbian-Turkish war, when she was already living in Belgrade, she applied to work as a nurse, but at that time she was already in poor health and very poor.
Left by everyone, she was torn apart by numerous family quarrels over property, which began in 1855 with the death of her mother, when, as Milica notes, “one star went out”. She poured her pain on paper by writing to her friend Mini Karadzic.
When her father died in 1864, she wrote the song “Black Spring Again”, and then moved to Belgrade, which she called her city. She arrived too late to enjoy the beauty of the Serbian capital, which for her was the notion of freedom. She lived in Savamala, in the house of a Greek merchant, where she died on July 25, 1878, in severe poverty.
The literary work of Vrdnička vila ends with the transfer to Belgrade, and that part of her life remained a secret forever. Only a few preserved letters and some memories of her once close friends, who often met her, but did not hang out with her in her misery, testify to him.
Cooperation with Vuk
It is not known exactly when Milica met Vuk Karadzic. Acquaintance with the “father” of Serbian literature meant a lot to her: “And the day of my acquaintance with you remains an unforgettable day until my death, a famous day and perhaps the happiest in my life.” Milica did much more for Vuk than he reciprocated and more than he ever mentioned. She recorded unfamiliar words for him for the second edition of the Dictionary, as well as folk customs in Srem, folk tales and songs – love, wedding, funeral. She also wrote to him about folk tales, about maiden charms, magic, picking St. John’s wort flowers. All rituals are very faithfully described because the poetess herself participated in them.
Unhappy love
In her opinion, Milica met her only love, Ljubomir Nenadović, in her opinion the greatest Serbian poet, in 1851 in Belgrade. From that moment on, she lived in dreams, hovering between friendship and love. He was the most present person in her life. She first sent the poems she was preparing for publication to him to read. She called him the brother of Avala and the poet of Avala. And in her diary, she often mentions Ljubo, from the first song “Letters to a Poet”, to the last page, words of tenderness and warmth are intertwined.
Vuk Karadzic escorted Milica to marry Nenadovic, and as she wrote, after that she was ashamed to “behave like a sister” towards the poet. As she never married, Ljubomir Nenadović, Milica’s great longing and great set, never married.
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