Double-Censored Freedom? 
Cultural Memory’s Censorship of 
Intimacy Writing in Moj život by 
Maga Magazinović
Natalia Panas
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Wieniawskiego 1, 61-712 Poznań, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0900-9998
natalia.panas@amu.edu.pl
115
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 46.1 (2023)
Maga Magazinović (1882–1968) was a Serbian dancer artist and teacher. In this 
article, I analyse her little-known ego-document Moj život (2000), considering it as 
an example of first-person narrative due to her strategies of presenting intimacy in 
literature through genres such as diary and confession. I use cultural memory to 
research Magazinović’s contribution to the cultural life of Serbia (memory object), 
what she transferred to her intimate description (memory medium), and then has 
been deliberately excluded by censorship from collective memory as inconsistent 
with the canon of Serbian cultural memory. Magazinović’s intimacy writing 
broke all cultural taboos by describing close relationships and emphasizing the 
romantic ones, through her free thinking, blatantly advocating for feminism, and 
exposing the female private realm so far isolated against both the prudish nature 
of patriarchy and the new socialist reality. Therefore, I show the emancipatory 
perspective of a woman’s body that frees itself from censorship limitations and 
its unconventional expression of intimate emotions through modern dance and 
writing. Moreover, I underline that this perspective in cultural memory was 
regulated by two censorship systems: that of moral/erotic nature in Kingdom of 
Yugoslavia and ideological/political one in socialist Yugoslavia.
Keywords: Serbian literature / autobiography / intimacy / cultural memory / censorship / 
Magazinović, Maga / emancipatory discourse
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
116
Maga Magazinović (1882–1968) was a pioneering Serbian dancer, art-
ist and teacher.1 Her little-known ego-document Moj život (My life), 
was written in the 1950s and not published until 2000. In Moj život, 
Magazinović describes her life from childhood and for the subsequent 
forty-five years (1882–1927). It is an example of first-person narra-
tive, a narrative presenting intimacy in literature through genres such as 
memoirs and confession. It opens with an introduction by Jelena Šantić, 
“Maga Magazinović—Luk vekova” (Maga Magazinović—The Arch of 
the Ages). Šantić, a ballerina, dance historian and critic, was supported 
in her work on Magazinović by three generations of Magazinović’s 
family: Rajna Gazeman, Maga’s daughter; Radmila Popović, Maga’s 
daughter-in-law; and Marijana Popović, Maga’s grand-daughter. She 
did not live, however, to see the completion of her work and it was 
Marija Janković who prepared it for publication in 2000. Moj život 
therefore has many authors, but its protagonist, her autobiographical 
text and her contribution to Serbia’s cultural heritage are the subject 
of this discussion in the context of the work of cultural memory and 
the role of censorship towards unconventional figures in this country 
of former Yugoslavia. I use the model of Małgorzata Czermińska’s au-
tobiographical triangle (Czermińska 2020) to assess the spectrum of 
author-reader relations and, therefore, to indicate the possible reasons 
for absence from the cultural memory. In Magazinović’s many ego-
document stances and her balancing of the triangular strategies of tes-
timony, confession and challenge in her autobiography I see one of the 
reasons for the censorship process. The second reason is her-story, the 
subject of this intimate description.
Autobiographical herstory
Magazinović was born in Užice in the western part of the Kingdom of 
Serbia, where she spent her childhood and attended school (Viša žen-
ska škola). She studied philosophy (Filozofski fakultet) in Belgrade, 
where she had moved with her family. Upon graduating from the 
University of Belgrade (1904), she began working at the National 
Library, where she was the first woman to do so, and on the old-
est Serbian newspaper Politika, where she was the first woman jour-
1 This text was created within the project Preludium Bis 2 number UMO-
2020/39/O/HS2/02719: “Cultural memory and the Serbian emancipatory discourse 
in autobiographical texts by Female Authors (nineteenth and twentieth centuries)” 
and financed by the National Science Centre in Poland.
Natalia Panas:     Double-Censored Freedom? 
117
nalist (1905). She published essays and theatre reviews but also her 
own literary texts, mainly short stories, and translations of plays. Her 
first published article “Obrazovanje ženskinja u Srbiji (Education of 
women in Serbia)” (1905) is of great importance. It is telling that she 
began her journalistic path with this topic. Magazinović was keen-
ly aware in her own education she was an individual beneficiary of 
women’s emancipation but also saw its importance from a broader, 
group perspective, as an opportunity for the development of young 
women in general. She fought for the right of female students to 
take examinations on the same basis as male students, initiated the 
establishment of the Women Students’ Club (Klub Studentkinja) 
and led its activities. The members of the Club became known pri-
marily for their fluency in foreign languages, so they translated peda-
gogical, socialist and feminist texts. The club also initiated the idea of 
breaking the Faculty of Law’s exclusion of female students. Thanks 
to her persuasion and academic competence Magazinović became 
the first female law student in Serbia. She did not, however, gradu-
ate. Graduation was not the goal, but she set a precedent and paved 
the educational path for future female candidates to study law at the 
University of Belgrade.
At that time, not long after graduating from the University, she 
started to work as a teacher (1906) and was simultaneously involved 
in the Abrašević theatre group, where she both acted and sang. For 
several years she repeatedly applied for a scholarship to study abroad 
but was consistently declined in favor of candidates from better con-
nected families. She saved for several years in order to afford travel to 
Munich in 1909, where she immersed herself in life among artists and 
political debate about socialism, before moving on to Berlin to study 
German philology. Inspired by the performance of the Canadian 
dancer Maud Allan, which she had seen in Belgrade in 1907, and 
the Munich art scene, she decided to study dramaturgy under Max 
Reinhardt in Berlin (1909–1910). There she was taught both ballet 
and modern dance by Isadora Duncan’s sister Elizabeth. While at 
university she met her future husband Gerhard Gesemann (1888–
1948), with whom she travelled extensively throughout northern 
Europe during her stays in Germany and before their marriage—in 
their premarital relationship, Maga only spent time with Gerhard 
when she came to Germany. In Moj život, she confesses to her many 
doubts about how she might reconcile a long-distance relationship 
with planned motherhood and her passion for her work, as well as 
the age difference between her and her future husband, Gesemann 
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118
being several years her junior. In 1910, Maga Magazinović opened 
her own performing arts school, School of Rhythmic and Fine Arts 
(Škola za Ritmiku i Plastiku) in Belgrade. At the same time, dur-
ing the school vacations she would travel to Germany, particularly 
Munich, to advance in her artistic and pedagogic ambitions with, 
among others, Emile Jacques Delacroze. Not long after, Gerhard 
came to Belgrade to meet Maga’s family just before the First Balkan 
War (1912) and they got married on the eve of the Great War (May 
1914). She writes about the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 and the 
First World War (1914–1918) from the perspective of everyday life, 
describing life under Austro-Hungarian occupation, an account of 
her war migrations in Serbia, the deaths of her mother and brother, 
her marriage to Gerhard, the trauma of motherhood and the death of 
her first child, the world left behind after the evacuation of Serbian 
troops in 1915, the so-called Albanian Golgotha, and the departure 
of her husband Gerhard with them. After his betrayal, of which she 
found out when she had come to visit him in Switzerland, and her 
separation from him, she describes the birth of their daughter Rajna, 
later co-editor of an autobiographical study of her mother’s writings. 
The last pages of Moj život are backstage stories and programs of 
plays, concerts and choreography, relationships with audiences and 
critics. She makes no mention of the Second World War: her autobi-
ography comes to an end in 1927.
All this Magazinović included openly in the ego-document she 
began writing on her seventieth birthday, 14 October 1951. She opens 
her story with astonishment at her own persistence and professional 
activity, despite the political turbulence and war. She depicts her 
birthday with a bitter description of her loneliness but also describing 
her feeling of calm in the face of her imminent death. This introduc-
tion to the description of her life is simultaneously an element lead-
ing to what Philippe Lejeune called the conclusion of a clear “auto-
biographical pact […] with the reader, that is, the recognition of the 
identity occurring between the author, narrator and protagonist of an 
autobiography” (Rodak, “Autobiografia” 44). It is complemented by 
a referential pact, i.e. a kind of promise by the author to the reader to 
bear witness to the truth:
It came to mind to me today to describe my life. […] I know that I am not 
an important figure of any kind, with neither talent nor intellect, nor even 
love for dance or the performing arts in general. Perhaps, however, it will be 
no exaggeration to portray the course of one such life and, on its example, 
education: the upbringing and teaching of girls at the end of last century and 
Natalia Panas:     Double-Censored Freedom? 
119
the beginning of this century, as well as the struggle and effort of my genera-
tion for every inch of both academic and artistic knowledge, and especially 
for the attainment of an academic success, today so easily accessible to all, to 
girls and boys, to the poor as well as the wealthiest. One thing, however, I fear 
in this endeavor: will my memory be sufficiently accurate and clear, and will 
I be able to lay out the paths of this memory with the necessary honesty, and 
as humanly impartial to myself and others as possible? (Magazinović 42–43)2
It is precisely this understanding of autobiography, based on the pact 
of truth-telling, that may have proved decisive regarding the cultural 
censorship of Maga Magazinović’s herstory.
The autobiographical triangle: Magazinović’s relationship 
with the reader
Małgorzata Czermińska’s theory of the autobiographical triangle is an 
extension to the description of the author-reader relationship. The tri-
angle is a visualization of the relation of three autobiographical stances, 
which “are not related to any specific genre, but to the position of the 
speaking I in relation to the object [world-I-you] of the statement” 
(Czermińska 26). The first stance, “witness [world], appears most often 
in memoirs devoted to events of historical importance and to people 
whom the author met in his or her lifetime and considered sufficiently 
significant to convey an image of them to future generations” (26). 
It is like an epic picture of the world. The second stance, confession, 
is closer to the notion of the lyric, as the subject of autobiographi-
cal reflections here is the author’s intimate world (I). Challenge is the 
third autobiographical stance, distinguished by Czermińska, which re-
sembles a dialogue in a play: “It shifts the weight of attention from 
the artefact to the artist’s contact with the audience, and opens up the 
space for play, provocation.” (48) In such an autobiographical account, 
the author “overtly renders the viewer the essential frame of reference 
against which [the ego-document] exists.” The “strategy of constant 
changes of tension,” moving the reader [you] to constant vigilance, is 
also significant (48–51).
Czermińska points out that “in the case of a particular text we 
can only speak of the domination of one dimension over the others, 
but never of the exclusion of any of them” (Czermińska 31). In the 
case of Moj život the dimensions of confession and testimony balance 
2 All translations from the works of Magazinović are by the author.
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120
each other, intimate writing being intertwined with an account of the 
world around. We can see this in the way Magazinović writes about the 
sphere of inner transformation and her own motivations for seeking to 
influence the world:
The Faculty of Law had so far been the unquestionably male domain of stud-
ies. In our club [of female students] we arranged to conquer this domain. I 
decided to enroll in the Faculty of Law. There was a deal of wrangling around 
this […] but I enrolled despite the opponents of this “female invasion” [of 
the university] […] After two months, D. Rokić enrolled, and it was she who 
first graduated from this faculty. Since I had graduated from the Faculty of 
Philosophy in 1904, I ceased to attend the Faculty of Law. The goal of my 
enrolment was achieved: the Faculty of Law had opened its doors to female 
students. (Magazinović 176)
About relationships:
For me it was mainly age that made the difference. We were also from different 
countries. The difference in the way he and we lived. And finally, perhaps the 
biggest obstacle: how I would manage to reconcile art and motherhood […] I 
came home Hamlet-like: “a tear in one eye, a smile in the other!” My mother 
was old, kind and loving, but I was no longer the same person who had set out 
into the world, full of beautiful dreams. I had seen a great deal, heard a great 
deal, visited a great many places, met a great many people, experienced a great 
deal of beauty. (Magazinović 282)
About the non-normative in art:
During the break I was with Nadezhda in her dressing room [Maud Allan]. The 
dancer wore small flesh-colored panties. She said that it was “polizeilich verbo-
ten aufzutreten” [forbidden by the police to appear] without panties under her 
outfit. Her English body was flushed and seemed, in its slenderness, completely 
unblemished and “over-gendered,” and she also referred to it as such. Quite 
like a naked child. Only in Saloma’s costume, in gestures that were consciously 
sensual, could she give the impression of being feminine. (Magazinović 216)
Or about courageous choices:
[after being declined twice to study abroad due to other female candidates’ 
better family connections and in spite of Magazinović’s superior qualifica-
tions:] I, dear Professor,3 will nevertheless go to study in Germany at my own 
3 This is about Bogdan Popović (1864–1944), a highly respected Serbian literary 
historian. He was a professor at the University of Belgrade and editor of the most 
important literary journal, Srpski književni glasnik (1901–1940). In his publications 
Natalia Panas:     Double-Censored Freedom? 
121
expense, without your competitions; and thus I ended this uncomfortable 
state of affairs with yet another explanation. (Magazinović 204)
From the stance of confession, we read at once a desire for honesty with 
herself and with the audience. At times the author makes self-referen-
tial comments: about recollection, uncertainty about her own memory 
(“She married, if my memory is not wrong, some officer whose name 
I do not remember,” 81); she also follows memory in her story (“Since 
I’m on the subject of clothes, I’ll describe the fashion of the time,” 82); 
and she explains the reason she is writing about something (“I don’t 
remember exactly the dates of these visits. I bring them up to give an 
insight into the mood and understanding of gender relations in society 
at the time and the struggle of women in the early twentieth century for 
equal rights with men,” 175). We also find in these quotations features 
of testimony, through which we learn about the world at the turn of 
the twentieth century from the perspective of a Serbian artist, among 
other herstories of the socialist movement, in which the author con-
sciously addressed gender equality:
We then translated Clara Zetkin’s treatise Students and Socialism. From Lily 
Braun The Women’s Movement. We also studied and discussed John Stuart 
Mill’s The Subjection of Women. At that time the most prominent German 
feminist of the time Käthe Schirmacher, the Danish literary figure and advo-
cate for women’s rights Karin Michaëlis and even the English suffragette Lady 
Aberdeen came to Belgrade to campaign. (Magazinović 175)
And at the same time the features of a confession. Magazinović reveals 
herself to the reader through the honesty of her motivations. By intro-
ducing the reader to the sphere of intimacy writing a closer author-read-
er relationship is established. The stance of confession, focused on con-
tinuous development, the emancipation of thought and self-discovery 
through new experiences, becomes at the same time the stance of chal-
lenge, although in a different sense from that defined by Czermińska, 
thus not in the sense of a linguistic or textual play. The stance of chal-
lenge is created by what is recorded on the carrier of memory (the 
manuscript of the autobiography), i.e. Magazinović’s herstory itself and 
the fact of telling this herstory. As autobiography is “‘both a linguistic 
creation and a social act: by announcing that it will tell the truth, and 
by telling the truth about reality, it engages in interpersonal relations.’ 
Its individual subject ‘is not an illusion, but a fragile reality’” (Rodak, 
on literature, he refused to include the works of women.
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122
“Review” 250). As the following discussion will show, autobiography, 
through relating the author’s life, becomes a challenge to the politics of 
cultural memory. We will therefore come to a point where the text, as 
a carrier of cultural memory in a specific socio-political situation, may 
be subject to censorship.
Cultural memory, its formation and the censorship of memory
Paweł Rodak observes that “in autobiography, there is an indelible ten-
sion between the experienced, the remembered and the described and, 
by analogy, between three times: the time of living, the time of remem-
bering and the time of writing” (Rodak, “Autobiografia” 44). This rela-
tionship brings us to the issue of cultural memory. According to Aleida 
Assmann’s memory theory, communicative memory is the basic unit of 
cultural memory. Communicative memory is characterized by the lack 
of a unified form of memory, which it acquires post factum, i.e. after 
being embedded in a story that stabilizes these memories, the carrier 
of memory. It is also limited in time and it begins as a vivid memory 
that “blurs always with the expiry of the third generation” (Assmann 
87). This kind of memory in the case of Moj život is fundamental. It is 
thanks to this communicative memory that Magazinović’s testimony 
and confessions were published at all and thus saved from the ultimate 
censorship of oblivion. I refer here to the group of women who stored 
the manuscript, compiled and published it and, as her former students, 
continued her artistic work.
Cultural memory, on the other hand, enjoys great longevity in the 
collective memory and “only takes shape through subjective percep-
tions, evaluations and assimilations, supported by the media, cultural 
institutions and the educational system” (Assmann 88). It has a crucial 
impact on the construction of individual and collective identities. In 
Magazinović’s case such circumstances conducive to the emergence of 
cultural memory are only just beginning to emerge by dint of the pub-
lication of the autobiography thirty-two years after the author’s death 
and in the wake of promotional cultural endeavor associated with it. 
Her memoirs still need to go through “social processes of selection 
and canonization based on educational institutions” (Assmann 57). 
In doing so, attention should be paid to the notion of power, which 
influences cultural memory by creating a content-centered canon that 
constitutes “the ideas shared by the members of a social group about 
its past” and at the same time implies “the cultural creations formed 
Natalia Panas:     Double-Censored Freedom? 
123
within the group for remembering” (Wawrzyniak 539). Ewa Bińczyk 
also notes that “there is no power not intrinsically associated with the 
field of knowledge. Power is also the distribution of ignorance, of what 
is silenced” (Bińczyk 68), and therefore subject to censorship. Starting 
from such a theoretical framing of the notion of power as a tool of his-
torical politics, through which the elite pursues “such representations 
of the past from which the legitimacy of the power relations prevailing 
within that group would be derived” (Wawrzyniak 544), we arrive at 
a socio-political-cultural situation in which Maga Magazinović’s auto-
biographical herstory could not exist.
Context for censorship
Magazinović’s autobiography is focused on the years dominated by the 
narrative of the state, i.e. socialist Yugoslavia, which emerged after the 
Second World War and lived the legend of a heroic struggle with the old 
order. The story of the new historical policy therefore had no place for 
a voice from the bourgeois past (Moj život), which also addressed femi-
nism and presented a different vision of socialism. This brings us to the 
vectors of forces of autobiographical tension “between the experienced, 
the remembered and the described and […] the time of living, the time 
of remembering and the time of writing” (Rodak, “Autobiografia” 44). 
As the domain of interest here is censorship by oblivion, i.e. censor-
ship established by the power of the fear of losing control, reduced to 
ignoring and seemingly assigning women only emancipated roles in 
the socialist state, it may be noted that the resultant moment of “auto-
biographical tension” falls during the non-publication of Moj život, a 
period of almost half a century, from the 1950s to 2000.
Magazinović’s intention to publish her ego-document is indicated 
by two memoir texts which appeared in the periodical Letopis Matice 
srpske (The Chronicle of Matica Srpska, January, February 1965) and 
form part of Moj život: Sećanja. Detinjstvo u Užicu (Memories. Childhood 
in Užice) and Sećanja. Školovanje u Beogradu (Memories. Education in 
Belgrade). A survey of the bibliography of Moj život made it possible 
to put together a table based that shows the number of Magazinović’s 
texts published up to 2000 (i.e. when the book was published) in peri-
odicals (excluding her regular column in the daily Politika) and in 
edited collections, books and concert programs, and literature in which 
she was mentioned:
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124
Published articles 
and text Books Lectures Concerts
Literature about 
Magazinović:
14 – 1902-1936 2 – 1932 2 – 1912 72 – 1911-1943 136 – 1905-1940
1 – 1959 1 – 1951 5 – 1920-1924 0 – 1941-1973
2 – 1965 1 – 1937 6 – 1974-1973
1 – 1996 1 – 1938 16 – 1992-2000
1 – 1997
Table 1: Number of texts published by year of publication
What is clear from this overview is the way Magazinović’s works ceased 
to appear in published form or to be seen at the theatre after the Second 
World War, even though the author was professionally active until her 
death (1968). We will probably never know the reason for this, but we 
can examine the context in which Moj život was created and published, 
and some indications may emerge regarding the herstorical content of 
the autobiography.
Firstly, attention should be drawn to the gender bias resulting 
from the patriarchal nature of Serbian/Yugoslav society. We find 
Magazinović’s intimacy writing in texts interspersed with descriptions 
of stage plays and the body in motion, which testifies to the artist’s 
emancipated and unconventional life. Vera Obradović, an expert on 
Serbian choreodrama, assessed dance of Magazinović’s time as provoca-
tive and subversive not only in the field of art but also from the perspec-
tive of patriarchal society:
How “indecent” modern dance was viewed in Belgrade at the time is recor-
ded by Zora Prica-Krstić on the occasion of Maud Allan’s visit: “When the 
American Maud Allan, a dancer in the style of Genevieve Stebbins and Isadora 
Duncan, first presented classical dance in Belgrade (1908), it gave rise to a 
huge outcry. She first had to dance in front of an areopagus of ‘the chosen 
few,’ artists and journalists, and only then did she receive permission from 
the police to dance before the public barefoot!” (Obradović Ljubinković 16)
This performance by the Canadian dancer was a turning point in 
Magazinović’s professional career. She decided to take up dance profes-
sionally, and she learned from another controversial dancers, Duncan 
sisters. What was important in this style was the way the dance was per-
formed: freely, barefoot, in lightweight clothes that sometimes revealed 
a good deal of flesh, as can be seen from the numerous photographs 
Natalia Panas:     Double-Censored Freedom? 
125
included in Moj život, defying the pillars of the culture of songs about 
male heroes, and this culture was deeply rooted in Serbian society. In 
her choreodramas, Magazinović brought female characters from the 
background into the foreground, into leading roles, in order to reflect 
on their fates. These included the choreodramas Jelisavka (1926), Smrt 
Majke Jugovića (Death of Jugović’s Mother, 1927), and Kosovka devojka 
(Kosovian Girl, 1935). It may have been problematic that Magazinović’s 
works predated the era of classical ballet, which was unknown in Serbia 
at the time. The audience was immediately confronted with modern 
dance, which was also controversial in those parts of the world where 
stage dance and ballet had long been known. Magazinović would have 
been aware of prevalent disparaging associations related to the active 
role of women in the arts:
At my school, they did not look too favorably on my involvement in the 
workers’ amateur theatre group and choir, or in the workers’ movement itself. 
My former teacher Anđelija Aćimović […] used to tell my mother how they 
spoke ill of me because of the time spent in the evenings from 8 to 10 “in the 
kafana,” teaching German to the workers, and also because of my acting and 
singing in “Abrašević.” And even before that, I was castigated for founding the 
“Students’ Club” and translating Ellen Key’s progressive work The Century of 
the Child. (Magazinović 200)
On the issue of carnality, it is worth noting that in Moj život Magazinović 
writes with relative openness about the body and sex education:
No one informed us directly about sex, and love was separated out as if in 
addition. Dada [Maga’s sister] began her periods as early as at the end of sec-
ond grade and cried in the room and covered her head with her fists, shouting 
“I don’t want this!” […] I thought she was “impure” in a way. (Magazionvić 99)
She also detailed Gerhard’s infidelities and her conceiving her daugh-
ter, which she decided to go ahead with despite knowing that she and 
her husband were on the verge of separating. These are some of the 
most intimate parts of the autobiography:
A great number of photos were sent to him by Kristel: countless nudes, oth-
ers in swimsuits, and only some with clothes on. For me, it was all too much, 
especially the disgust at such “sisterly relationships” and at stealing men from 
each other. […] I don’t comprehend, and cannot find justification for such 
“impure” relationships! I do not understand how a man or a woman can have 
more than one human being with him or her at the same time, with whom 
they share sensual love. (Magazinović 356)
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126
We went to the “Leman” hotel. And then there was my daughter […]. She 
arose out of suffering, without faith in him (Gerhard), maybe even without 
the spark of love? And that was my great sin against Rajna. After all this, I 
should not have any more children with this man, who was no longer mine in 
soul. (Magazinović 355)
This is the first contextual pathway to show the breaking of social ta-
boos and the transgression of cultural boundaries in the circumstances 
in which society marked a woman’s choices and her body with shame. 
In contrast, an emancipating woman emerges from Moj život. The sec-
ond contextual pathway that may have influenced the phenomenon of 
censorship by oblivion relates to the involvement in the development 
of socio-political thought. In order to analyze the gaps in the cultural 
memory of Magazinović, I want to highlight some clues that indicate 
this involvement. First of all, I think it may be linked to her work for 
the newspaper Politika,4 where Magazinović held a specific, emancipa-
tory position:
I have stocked the “Women’s World” column with news from the West Euro-
pean women’s movement, which at the beginning of the century was extremely 
vociferous and perceptibly strong, particularly in England and Germany. They 
fought for equality in academic and professional teaching and the acquisition 
of ever new positions; the more extremist suffragettes advocated the achieve-
ment of political rights, above all suffrage. (Magazinović 184)
Magazinović proudly wrote that it was at Politika that she began work-
ing as the first female Serbian journalist. The newspaper represented the 
idea of the unity of all southern Slavs, so essential to the socialist vision 
of Yugoslav society, but in the Greater Serbian form.5 Insofar as the new 
post-war order was socialist and supranational, as exemplified by the 
4 “As bases for Serbia’s liberal progressive development Jovanovic advocated uni-
versal suffrage, complete freedom of press, speech, and assembly, full local self-gov-
ernment, a reduction in bureaucracy, and the creation of a democratic people’s army. 
Among his proposed social and economic reforms were progressive taxation, extension 
of agricultural co-operatives, improvement of public health, and elimination of state 
monopolies.” (Mackenzie 41) Is that not basically all that Tito denied?
5 At first Jovanović, Jovan Cvijić, and other independent Serbian intellectuals from 
“Slovenski Jug” supported Macedonia’s autonomy rather than its annexation to any of 
the Balkan states. Macedonians led by Gligor Hadži Tašković advocated an autonomous 
Macedonia as a self-governing unit in a future Balkan confederation. After conferring 
with political leaders and journalists, including Jovanović, they issued a short-lived 
newspaper in Belgrade, Autonomna Makedonija (Autonomous Macedonia). Denouncing 
it, Greater Serbian newspapers such as Politika and Pravda asserted that Macedonia was 
Serbian and, in the future, must belong to the Serbian state (Mackenzie 43).
Natalia Panas:     Double-Censored Freedom? 
127
slogan of Brotherhood and Unity, and women theoretically had equal 
rights to men it represented what Magazinović had long been advocat-
ing, the new elite needed to be “replaced” with figures unassociated with 
the old order, which, after all, had been challenged during the Second 
World War. It is therefore unsurprising that after the advent of the new 
Yugoslavia, from 1945 onwards, Magazinović was erased from the ar-
chives of the editors of Politika, although the source of this information 
gives no details (see Pančić and Zupanec). In Moj život Magazinović does 
not directly describe her political involvement, but it is difficult not to 
notice her links with the intellectual, bourgeois milieu. In particular it 
is worth noting the herstorical network:6 her close friendship with Delfa 
Ivanić may have been of particular importance for her being silenced 
in cultural memory. Frequently in Moj život, Magazinović mentions a 
friendly relationship, teaching Delfa’s daughter for years, or collaborat-
ing during the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 in the Kolo srpskih sestara 
(Circle of Serbian Sisters7), founded by Ivanić, which was primarily in-
volved in the education of girls, and thus, similarly to Magazinović, in-
volved in breaking down barriers in higher education for other women. 
This friendship is of importance because Uspomene by Ivanić (Memoirs, 
written in the 1960s and published in 2015), as detailed by the editor 
Jasmina Milanović, was explicitly censored by dint of self-censorship 
motivated precisely by the political situation:8
Fearing that certain statements and assertions might be misinterpreted, single 
words, parts of sentences, and even whole paragraphs, have been deliberately 
omitted. This is particularly the case with the time that Delfa Ivanić spent in 
a communist prison in 1944. All deleted passages have been restored to their 
original places in square brackets […]. For the same reasons, the events of 
Delfa Ivanić’s life after 1945 are not included in the manuscript […] because 
for her, with the arrival of the new communist regime, life ended and she did 
not want or could not write about this period. (Milanović 23–24)
6 This includes Stanka Glišić, Nadežda Petrović, Delfa Ivanić, Louise Paget, Anka 
Anđelkovićka (“nekadašnja naša prva socijalistkinja,” Magazinović 219), Zora Prica, 
Ksenija Atanasijević, Isidora Sekulić, Mir-Jam/Milica Jakovljević.
7 Kolo srpskih sestara, a humanitarian organisation, founded in 1903 by Nadežda 
Petrović and Delfa Ivanić, which until the end of the Second World War focused on 
the education and professional activation of Serbian women and, in times of armed 
conflict, on supplying food and clothing to prisoners of war, setting up hospitals for 
wounded soldiers and training nurses. The educational scope of activities was also 
patriotic in nature.
8 In the categories of memory, censorship and self-censorship are often referred to 
as active forgetting.
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
128
Similar glimpses of self-censorship may be seen when reading Moj život 
makes no mention of her connection to the royal court of Serbia, but 
in the supplement which includes others’ recollections of her, Mirijana 
Popović describes the time Magazinović worked directly for Queen 
Marija Karađorđević, giving lessons to her children. In her memoirs 
Ivanić tells that she was related through adoption to the royal family. 
She also recalls a visit by Magazinović, thanks to whom she met Ljuba 
Jovanović-Čupa, a controversial political figure in the days of the first 
Yugoslavia.9 This cast suspicion on Magazinović regarding her Greater 
Serbian or even nationalist leanings.10 After the war Delfa Ivanić’s hu-
manitarian work was officially banned and Kolo srpskih sestara’s prop-
erty was seized by the authorities of socialist Yugoslavia. The carriers of 
the memory of her activities were therefore effectively erased for a long 
time and replaced by symbols of the new state.11 In Uspomene, Ivanić 
ends her herstory during the Second World War, Moj život includes no 
memories of the Second World War or the time after the war. Popović 
tentatively suggests that lack of time may have been the reason. During 
this time Magazinović no longer works for Politika and publishes al-
most nothing.
Based on a comparison of the fates of these two women, parallels 
may be drawn between Ivanić’s and Magazinović’s ego-documents in 
the context of censorship of cultural memory. Censorship takes place 
firstly because of class identification, linked to bourgeois culture in 
Serbia and its strong position among the elite, which often resonated 
with the Greater Serbian narrative; and secondly, gender identification, 
at the level of the threat to power by women’s independent and eman-
cipatory work.
9 Ljuba Jovanović-Čupa was involved with the secret organisation Black Hand 
(Crna ruka), which worked for the reunification of all Serbs outside the borders of 
the Serbian state. Its character is often assessed as nationalist and terrorist. On the 
other hand, “Jovanovic sided with the pan-Yugoslav element in a debate between 
proponents of Greater Serbia and Yugoslavia (with or without the Bulgars), which 
divided the Serbian national movement even after 1918. Jovanovic stands as a sincere, 
dedicated Serbian apostle of Yugoslav unity, brotherhood and the equality of all South 
Slavs” (Mackenzie 54).
10 It remains an open question for a separate study whether such nationalistic ten-
dencies in Magazinović’s activities actually existed.
11 This element excellently represents the potential for Ivanić’s legacy to function 
actively in cultural memory. The ban on the activities of the Kolo srpskih sestara issued 
by the Nazi authorities, after all, was enforced well before the written memoirs, and 
then, after ‘liberation’, the seizure of the KSS House by the communist authorities and 
its renaming as the Ivo Lola Ribar (a Yugoslav partisan hero) Cultural Centre.
Natalia Panas:     Double-Censored Freedom? 
129
It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that mentions of Magazinović 
tentatively began to appear in dance literature, but compared to edi-
tions of men’s autobiographies from a similar period and area of cre-
ative activity, this interest was negligible (see Table 1). Svetlana Tomić, 
a researcher into women’s literature in the Serbian canon, notes:
This is worth emphasizing because no matter what type of history textbooks 
on nineteenth-century Serbia you open, whether on the history of society or 
literature, you can hardly find any evidence that women existed in the past at 
all. (Tomić 126)
The series of memoirs, autobiographies and diaries published in the 
collection by the Belgrade publishing house Nolit in 1989 repre-
sents the apogee of ignorance. The collection consists of twenty-four 
volumes, of which twenty-one are by male authors, and the remain-
ing three (Memoarska proza 18. and 19. Veka I, II, Ratna memoarska 
i dnevnička proza) are collections of excerpts from fourty-three male 
and three female authors: Jelena Lozanić-Frothingham (1885–1972), 
Mina Karadžić-Vukomanović (1828–1894) and Milica Stojadinović 
Srpkinja (1828–1878). Clearly, therefore, the male voice predomi-
nates.12 It was not until the 1990s that work began to recover cultural 
memory in individual initiatives. This brings us to the year 2000 when 
Magazinović’s memoirs were reliably compiled and published.
Conclusions
Maga Magazinović’s autobiographical narrative in the stances of wit-
ness and confession clearly clashed with the image of a patriarchal and 
socialist society portrayed by the authorities and their politics of cultural 
memory. Through intimacy writing, the stances of witness and confes-
sion created in reading the stance of the challenge to the taboo topics 
and the politics of cultural memory: issue of literature canon, gender 
canon, and above all the challenge to the position of women in society. 
What emerges from the autobiography is the figure of a woman eman-
cipating herself and other women, independent, guided by her desires, 
courageous in her choices and successful in achieving her goals, despite 
12 I would identify here the influence of the emerging nationalist sentiments in 
the republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the period before the 
break-up in the 1990s, and thus the rediscovery of national identity. Perhaps this is 
the reason no place was found in the publishing canon for a socialist, feminist, cos-
mopolitan dancer.
PKn, letnik 46, št. 1, Ljubljana, maj 2023
130
the discrimination she faced. Magazinović was socially, culturally and 
philosophically engaged. The perspective of a woman’s body that frees 
itself from the limitations of censorship and its unconventional expres-
sion of intimate emotions through her work and writing is a perspective 
that has been subjected to the double censorship of moral and ideo-
logical perceptions that censored literature, such as women’s confessions 
and testimonies of feminist art, that failed to meet the conditions of the 
official narrative. Importantly, “feminist art [is] about changing percep-
tions, raising awareness, and pushing for change” (Tumbas 71), which 
will always encounter resistance from power. Systemic censorship, i.e. 
that derived from power-knowledge relations, coupled with the posi-
tion of women in patriarchy, took place through oblivion, and the re-
storative work of memory was initiated by Magazinović’s direct heirs. 
The autobiographical carrier of memory that testifies to Magazinović’s 
contribution to the cultural heritage of Serbian society, i.e. Moj život, 
was ignored and lost in the stored memory of the archives, and only 
after changes in the system of power, the distributor of knowledge, and 
the transformation of society, emerging from a patriarchal regime that 
regulates canons, can the content of the carrier be reworked in cultural 
memory and be restored once more to its rightful place.
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Dvojno cenzurirana svoboda? Cenzura intimnega 
pisanja s strani kulturnega spomina v knjigi Moj 
život Mage Magazinović
Ključne besede: srbska književnost / avtobiografija / intimnost / kulturni spomin / 
cenzura / Magazinović, Maga / emancipacijski diskurz
Maga Magazinović (1882–1968) je bila srbska plesna umetnica in pedagogi-
nja. Analiziram njen malo znani ego-dokument Moj život (2000) in ga obrav-
navam kot primer prvoosebne pripovedi zaradi njenih strategij predstavljanja 
intimnosti v literaturi z žanri, kot sta dnevnik in izpoved. S pomočjo kultur-
nega spomina raziskujem prispevek Mage Magazinović h kulturnemu življenju 
Srbije (objekt spomina), kaj je prenesla v svoj intimni opis (medij spomina) in 
kaj je nato cenzura namenoma izključila iz kolektivnega spomina kot neskla-
dno s kanonom srbskega kulturnega spomina. Magazinović je s svojim inti-
mnim pisanjem kršila vse kulturne tabuje, opisovala bližnje odnose, svobodno 
razmišljala in odkrito zagovarjala feminizem. Pri tem je izpostavljala žensko 
zasebno sfero, ki je bila dotlej zapostavljena – tako v dobi kraljevine, v času 
patriarhalnega zagovarjanja krepostnosti, kot tudi v novi socialistični stvarno-
sti. Zato v članku prikazujem emancipacijsko perspektivo ženskega telesa, ki se 
osvobaja cenzurnih omejitev, in njeno nekonvencionalno izražanje intimnih 
občutkov s pomočjo modernega plesa in pisanja. Poleg tega poudarjam, da sta 
to perspektivo v kulturnem spominu urejala dva cenzurna sistema: moralni/
erotični v Kraljevini Jugoslaviji in ideološki/politični v socialistični Jugoslaviji.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.163.41.09Magazinović M.:305-055.2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v46.i1.07