Culprit Without Guilt, Sacrifice Without Reward, Venice Without Princess Jelisaveta's Venice

Abstract

Th is paper determines the problems of private and public beings, that is, the aspects of individual and collective spheres, for the purpose of indirect genre determination, using the drama Jelisaveta, kneginja crnogorska written by Djura Jakšić (1832-1878) as an example. Furthermore, they are enlisted, and their interaction and synergy in the form of exerting pressure on the individual are presented. Thus, it is proven that, on the level of the presented mode of existence, there is a possibility of neglecting the collectiveness, its transition in the domain of the personal sphere, which further enables the development of tragedy that goes beyond the historical drama. In order to capture accurately the collective consciousness of a Montenegro mountain dweller, as a representative of the enslaved people, it is necessary to examine the structural elements of drama, and to explain the stereotyped notions of “the cursed foreign woman”, also “the cunning Latin woman”. All are tightly linked with the motif of betrayal, which appears here as the other side of the already mentioned notions.

The outcome of the struggle for identity preservation is suffering. In this paper, mechanisms of the fall are also highlighted, in particular the ones that deepen the characterisation of the drama’s heroine. Space displacement gives rise to different types of violence and moral corruption of procedures that, at the moment of anagnorisis, draw the heroine into madness. The connection of the sacred and the profane – the combination of morality and tradition, on the one hand, and erotic, demonic and destructive on the other hand, achieves its fullness within the contact of two worlds, two cultures, where everyone in an uncertain battle for dominance, heads towards a total collapse and absolute destruction.