'My beloved, only brother! With tearful eyes I write this letter': The Epistolary Character of Nikola Tesla in Marica Kosanović’s Letter Writing

• In Event: Gender and Post-Imperial Legacy in Early 20th Century East and Southeast Europe

Abstract

Nikola Tesla’s nachlass, kept in the archives of the inventor’s eponymous Museum in Belgrade, houses his lively correspondence with a variety of people during his long life. A few dozen of these letters were written by the inventor’s younger sister, Marica Kosanović (née Tesla; 1858–1938). In this paper, I will provide a close reading of Marica’s letters to her brother and the ways in which they construct a certain version of Tesla that goes against the grain of the larger-than-life collective memory that emerged during the twentieth century. Among other things, these letters paint a picture of Tesla as a fragile young man, a distant brother, a rich uncle, a precocious nephew, and a sickly son. Marica’s letters remained mostly unanswered since, according to Tesla’s archive, the inventor’s part of the correspondence was destroyed when the Kosanović’s Rijeka apartment was ransacked by D’Annunzio’s soldiers. If Marica is to be believed, however, Tesla mostly never meant to answer them in the first place. In Marica’s letters, we encounter the voice of a woman trying to counteract her brother’s disinterestedness and desperately trying to keep a family together by epistolary means, telegrams and gifts sent across great distances amidst the disintegrating devastation of an imperial frontier.

Author

• Ivan Flis, U of Rijeka (Croatia)