Original article (in Serbian) was published on 15/03/2023
The reader drew our attention to the fact that for many years the domestic media and social networks have been talking about the book “The Bud of Evil” by Jonathan Lee Vice. Some sources claim the author is British, some write about her in a masculine gender, and a quote that is not hers is attributed to her. However, Vice is the pseudonym of the author Jelena Vasic, and this information is available in the Cobiss+ database, which Jelena’s son confirmed for FN Tragac.
The reported post originates from Twitter and has over 75,000 views and more than 1,200 likes. The author’s unusual pseudonym was convenient to show “how a British woman describes Serbs in her book” in a series of posts. This is not the only record where Vice is described as a “British woman” or a “British writer/author”: the mistake was also made by the media, such as the web portals Politika, Vidovdan, Odbrana, Republika and its section Srecna.
Determining the identity of the author
Looking at one of the copies of the book, we noticed that, under the dedication, the writer’s name was handwritten, but we could not figure out the first letter of the surname. It featured the following: “author under the pseudonym J. ?asic”. At the end of the book, it is stated that Jelena Vasic is responsible for agency rights and distribution, and her phone number is also printed. We unsuccessfully tried to make contact through that number, although the chances of such a thing at the start were small since the book was printed in 2001.
We also searched the book in the Cobiss+ system, where it is possible to learn more about the published works. In the “detailed information” section, it is stated that the real name of the author of the novel “The Bud of Evil” is Jelena Vasic. At the same time, this was the only information about the author that we found: there is no information about other works, no biographical information on the Internet (and therefore no connection to Britain), nor were we able to reach anyone who participated in creating and publishing a book.
By searching for posts about “The Bud of Evil” on Facebook, we indirectly, through reading the comments, reached Ilija Vasic, the author’s son. We spoke with Ilija and received confirmation that the assumptions are correct, that his mother is Jonathan Lee Vice, or Jelena Lela Vasic, and that she is deceased.
In an interview for Tragac, Ilija Vasic said that the book, due to the time it was published, was never commercially distributed, but that it was printed in a small circulation, mostly for family and friends. The novel “Without Mercy”, which was announced at the end of “The Bud of Evil”, was never published, and according to him, it was “lost”. He also said that it bothers him that the novel is being pirated on the Internet without the family’s consent, but he also emphasized that identical excerpts from the novel are constantly being quoted in the media and on social networks, which shows that the work is not viewed as a whole.
Non-existent quote
At the end of 2020, the web portal Istinomer wrote about a “prophetic quote” that is linked to the book “Letters from a senior to a junior devil” which was allegedly written in 1941 by C. S. Lewis. This web portal, as well as several foreign fact-finding media, managed to prove that the questionable quote was not written by Lewis.
On the platform “Livejournal”, at the end of the same year, an almost identical passage is written as coming from the book “Advice to a Young Man”, written by Jonathan Lee Vice in 1941. Jelena Vasic did not write the mentioned book, nor is this quote found in “The Bud of Evil”, which is her only published novel.