{"id":15173,"date":"2022-07-21T06:58:20","date_gmt":"2022-07-21T06:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/ru\/?post_type=product&p=15173"},"modified":"2022-07-21T06:59:30","modified_gmt":"2022-07-21T06:59:30","slug":"the-trailblazer","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/ru\/the-trailblazer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trailblazer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jelena J. Dimitrijevi\u0107, Serbia\u2019s first feminist author<\/h4>\n

This is a story about a Serbian<\/a> writer and traveller who chose to lead a very different life to the one expected of a woman born and raised in the patriarchal Serbian society of the 19th and early 20th century. Brave, educated and self-aware, this remarkable woman was a poetess, a novelist, and a writer of travelogues and she has remained an inspiration to this day. Jelena J. Dimitrijevi\u0107<\/a> (1862-1945) was born in Kru\u0161evac, a small town in central Serbia. Born into a wealthy family, Jelena was able to get a good education. However, when she was very young, an eye injury forced her to quit school and the doctors even forbade her from reading or writing. Disregarding the doctors\u2019 advice, Jelena continued her education at home with private tutors. She never stopped educating herself for her entire life.<\/p>\n

First books<\/h4>\n

Jelena and her husband moved to Ni\u0161 in 1881. Ni\u0161 had just been liberated from the rule of the Ottoman Empire<\/a> in 1878 and the town was still filled with Oriental flavours and ways of life. Jelena was fascinated with Ni\u0161 and its residents, especially with Muslim women. She managed to get a privileged look into the lives of Muslim women, went behind harem walls and discover their well-guarded secrets. In 1897, Jelena published \u2018Letters from Ni\u0161 about Harems\u2019 (\u2018Pisma iz Ni\u0161a o haremima\u2019), the very first Serbian prose book written and published by a female author. While she was still in Ni\u0161, Jelena also published her first book of poetry, signing it only with her first name. Immediately, rumours about the identity of the poetess started spreading all over Ni\u0161 and people claimed she was a runaway Turkish girl. Wanting to learn more about the life of Muslim women, Jelena later travelled further east and documented her travels and experiences in the travelogue \u2018Letters from Thessaloniki\u2019 (\u2018Pisma iz Soluna\u2019) as well as in the novel \u2018The New\u2019 (\u2018Nove\u2019). At the beginning of the 20th century, Jelena and her husband moved to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, where she quickly became a prolific writer and a member of the Serbian Writers\u2019 Society.<\/p>\n

A unique woman<\/h4>\n

Jelena J. Dimitrijevi\u0107 was well educated, talented, self-aware and very bold and, in the 19th century patriarchal Serbian society, this made her quite unique and very different from the majority of women. She was a polyglot and spoke German, French, Greek, Russian, English and, due to her fascination with the Orient, Turkish as well. Jelena travelled extensively – before the First World War, she visited Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and from 1919 to 1927, France, Spain, England and America. Her continued fascination with the Orient led her to explore not only Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon but also India, Japan and China. She funded the majority of her many travels herself.<\/p>\n

As a feminist, Jelena was proud to have met Mrs Hoda Sha\u2019arawi, the founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union. As a writer, she had an extraordinary opportunity to meet Rabindranath Tagore. Jelena\u2019s travelogues include works such as \u2018The Seven Seas and Three Oceans\u2019 (\u2018Sedam mora i tri okeana\u2019), \u2018Letters from India\u2019 (\u2018Pisma iz Indije\u2019) and \u2018Letters from Misir\u2019 (\u2018Pisma iz Misira\u2019).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"