The novel "Theory of Grief"
When Einstein wanted to turn his mathematician wife into a maid
?Croatian novelist Slavenka Drakulić brings back...
Constructing the circumstances that characterized the life of Einstein’s first wife, which contributed greatly to the development of his theories, in her novel “The Theory of Grief.”
In July 1914, Albert Einstein sent his wife, the mathematician Mileva, a letter through a mutual friend, explaining what she had to do so they could continue living together: wash his clothes, prepare three meals a day, clean the bedroom, and tidy the house. He told her, according to what was reported by the Spanish newspaper El Pais: “You will refrain from any relationship with me unless it is necessary for social reasons,” which forced her to give up spending time with him at home and take trips together. These were his conditions and he asked Mileva to accept them.
The couple settled in Berlin, and Einstein was appointed a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, a professor at Humboldt University and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. He would finally have the time and resources to conduct his research, but Mileva heard rumors that Albert was in love with his cousin, Elsa Lowenthal (they would end up By marriage in 1919), with whom he spent some time while living at his mother's house.
These events, which Slavenka Drakulić recounted, were quoted from one of the few real documents that she explicitly cites in her novel, where the wife was sure that she would surrender in the end and that she would agree to those conditions that would make her a servant of the “great man,” but in the end she did not do that, and it ended with her. The order stood up to him and shortly thereafter, she made him accept a different set of conditions, with Albert promising a sum of money for the care and education of his children, and Mileva then taking them with her to Zurich.
They arrive a day after the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia while Belgrade has just been bombed and Slavenka Drakulić, 74, takes the opportunity to point out the tragic similarity between the collapse of ancient Europe and the catastrophe that has just occurred between a man and a woman, A few years ago they established an affinity fueled by their shared passion for mathematics and physics.
Mileva belongs to a wealthy Serbian family living on the Austro-Hungarian side of the border, in Novi Sad. They were Orthodox Christians and her father pushed her to study, which was rare for women at the time. She had a limp which meant she had difficulty in her childhood. However, her intelligence opened doors for her, and in Zurich she was able to come into contact with a distracted, immature, and brilliant young man from the Jehu family. He has (even though he did not practice his faith).
Albert Einstein was four years younger than her, but they understood each other perfectly. They got together, fell in love, engaged in various scientific speculations, and grew together across unexplored terrain. Mileva worked on the mathematical part of Albert's theories, and wrote reviews for specialized journals. (on which he put his name), She even prepared notes for his classes when he got a teaching position.
Many books and films have highlighted the important contributions made by Mileva Maric to the scientific work of Einstein, who won the Nobel Prize in 1921 but Croatian novelist Slavenka Drakulić with a long body of work behind her, which includes titles such as "The Bait" "Man" (1997) and How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1991) reconstructed the entire existence of a woman, struck by life in a way that transformed her experiences into a “theory of grief,” as the title asserts.
One day, when they were out for a walk with Marie Curie, Albert Einstein was flirting with the nanny who was looking after the pharmacy children, and suddenly, “it seemed to Mileva that she had become something that no one looked at, like an old armchair.” This is what this novel is about.
Mileva was unable to obtain her degree in physics and mathematics at the same time as Albert, because she had to sit the exams in a poor emotional state but, more devastatingly, she lost her young daughter Lieserl to scarlet fever.
Mileva knew firsthand the hell her parents went through with her sister, who suffered from schizophrenia. She herself was on the verge of being strangled by her young son who had the same condition and her other son ended up despising her and even went through a time when she was moving from one hospital to another, trying to overcome some strange paralysis that might have come from that “inner cell,” and he became sad. Her heart is also because of her love for that man, Albert.
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