Lola Montez, donna fatale e figura indomita nella letteratura serba

Considered a minor work in Miloš Crnjanski’s literary production, the novel Kap španske krvi (A Drop of Spanish Blood), written in 1932 and published in the Belgrade newspaper “Vreme” that same year, has been overlooked by Crnjanski scholars and ignored and forgotten by critics and readers alike, not to mention by the author himself. In this paper we seek to understand why a novel, albeit one whose subject matter - the love affair between King Ludwig I of Bavaria and the dancer Lola Montez - was deemed, on publication, trivial, minor and unworthy of the great Crnjanski’s pen, has continued to be completely overlooked. Our analysis will focus on the key figure and protagonist of the novel, Lola Montez – constructed on the model of the femme fatale, and as such atypical of and alien to the female canon of traditional, patriarchal Serbian literature bound up with images portraying women exclusively as daughter, sister, wife and mother, and always displaying positive values. Crnjanski’s reworking of the story draws the novel away from the well-worn paths of Serbian literature as well as from the author’s usual homeland concerns. For this reason we analyze the narrative and its themes and iconography from the starting point of what may be defined as an “inconvenient” figure in Serbian literature, highlighting the means by which the novel’s negative female image is constructed.