A CANDLE THAT CANNOT BURN AT BOTH ENDS

1892, Budapest. A delegation from the Great School arrives to invite Nikola Tesla to visit Belgrade. Among them is the poet Laza Kostić. That’s where they meet.

Three years later, in June 1895, Laza writes Tesla a letter from Krušedol Monastery. He has a proposal: that Tesla marry Lenka Dunđerski, a young, wealthy, beautiful woman from one of the most respected families in Vojvodina. “Quelle idée!” — “What an idea!” — Laza writes, as if he himself can’t quite believe his own boldness. The reason he gives isn’t romantic matchmaking — Laza considers it a sin against the Serbian people that the “one and only Serb” of Tesla’s caliber should leave no descendants. “The greatest reason for your marriage would be so that the seed bearing such offspring is not lost,” he writes.

What Laza doesn’t tell Tesla: he himself has loved Lenka for years — silently, hopelessly, since the age gap makes it impossible. The marriage he’s proposing for someone else is, in its own way, an attempt to solve what he cannot solve for himself.

Tesla’s reply was never preserved. But it’s known what he said: that a candle cannot burn at both ends, and his flame was already spent on science.

Three months later, Laza married another woman. While on his honeymoon, news reached him, framed in black: Lenka Dunđerski had died, at twenty-five, after a short illness.

Fourteen years later, Laza wrote the poem he would be remembered for above all others — “Santa Maria della Salute.” The Dunđerski castle still stands today.

Tesla never married. He once said he wasn’t sure he could name many good inventions made by married men.

Some fires, it seems, simply cannot burn in two places at once.

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