Celia Hawkesworth-Ivo AndriÄ - Bridge Between East and West-Continuum International Publishing Group (1984) PDF

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West
Ivo Andric photograph by Radoslav Grujic

Ivo Andric: Bridge
between East and West
Celia Hawkesworth
THE ATHLONE PRESS

London and Dover N. H.
First published 1984 by The Athlone Press Ltd
44 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4LY
and 51 Washington Street Dover, N. H. 03820, USA
Celia Hawkesworth 1984
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Hawkesworth, Celia
Ivo Andric.
1. Andric, Ivo - Criticism and interpretation
I. Title
891.8'235 PG1418.A6Z/
ISBN 0-485-11255-8
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hawkesworth, Celia, 1942-
Ivo Andric: bridge between East and West
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Andric, Ivo, 1892-1975Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title.
PG1418.A6Z69 1984 891.8'235 84-9186
ISBN 0-485-11255-8
Published with the help of The Ivo Andric Foundation
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing
from the publisher.
Printed in Yugoslavia
Foreword
The works of Ivo Andric may be read in numerous languages, from

Italian and Finnish to Japanese. In Europe the first translations
appeared in Czech and French in 1919. Since then Andric has
become best known in Poland and Germany, where virtually all his
works have been published.
The first work to be translated into English was Bosnian Story
which appeared in 1958, translated by Kenneth Johnstone. After the
award of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1961 several more works
appeared in English, both in Britain and the United States, and they
have continued to be published intermittently ever since. Neverthe-
less, Andric has remained relatively neglected in the English-
speaking world, known for the most part only to those involved in
Slavonic studies. Several scholarly articles have appeared in English,
but these are accessible only to the narrow readership familiar with
Andric's writing in the original.
The present work is an attempt to introduce Andric to the more
general reader. It assumes no knowledge of the writer and
endeavours to offer a comprehensive survey of his work. To this
end, Andric has been left as far as possible to "speak for himself". It
is to be hoped that new editions of Andric's works in English may
lead to a revival of interest in this important European writer. The
way would then be open for the publication of more narrowly based
critical studies.
All the passages quoted in this volume have been translated by the
author in order to ensure consistency of tone. A list of existing
translations into English is given in the Select Bibliography. The
titles of published translations have been retained, in the text, for
ease of identification.
For Nada Prodanovic-Curcija and
in memory of Mira Rotter,
with whom it all began.
Contents
Foreword v
Acknowledgements viii
Note on the Pronunciation of Serbo-Croatian Names ix
1 Introduction 1
2 Verse 51
3 Short Stories 68
4 The Novels 123
5 Devil's Yard 189
6 Essays and Reflective Prose 206
7 Conclusion 234
Notes 250
Select Bibliography 261
Index 269
Acknowledgements
This work could not have been written without the invaluable advice
of many friends and colleagues both in Yugoslavia and Britain who
have found the time and the patience to read the manuscript in
whole or in part. I am particularly grateful to Professor Svetozar
Koljevic of the University of Sarajevo, Dr Vladeta Jankovic of the
University of Belgrade, Dr Predrag Palavestra of the Serbian
Academy of Sciences and Arts, Dr E. D. Goy of the University of
Cambridge, Mr Dusan Puvacic of the University of Lancaster and
Dr Robert Pynsent of the School of Slavonic and East European
Studies, University of London. My thanks are also due to Dr
Michael Branch, Director of SSEES, for his personal encourage-
ment, and to the School's Publications Committee for their support.
I am grateful also to SSEES for granting me a period of study leave
in the early stages of the work, and to the British Academy for
enabling me to spend some time in Yugoslavia. Above all, I am
indebted to the Andric Foundation in Belgrade, whose staff have
been an unfailing source of encouragement, support and concrete
assistance. I am particularly grateful to Mr Miodrag Perisic for all his
willing and energetic help and to Vera Stojic, who worked closely
with Andric for many years, for her advice. A generous grant from
the Foundation has made it possible for the work to be printed in
Yugoslavia. I am grateful to Radovan Popovic and Miroslav Kar-
aulac for permission to use material from their works in the
biographical section of my introduction. Finally, the work could not
have been completed without the patient help of Mrs Jeanne Clissold
in typing sections of the manuscript and of my family in simply
being there.
Note on the Pronunciation of
Serbo-Croatian Names
With the exception of some Turkish words and names (e.g. Cem, the
younger son of Sultan Bayazid II, whose story is told in Devil's
Yard), Serbo-Croatian spellings have been retained. The language
may be written in either the Cyrillic or the Latin alphabet. The Latin
alphabet includes a number of unfamiliar letters listed below.
Serbo-Croat is strictly phonetic, with one letter designating one
sound. The stress normally falls on the first syllable, never on the
last.
c - ts, as in cars
c - ch, as in church
c - tj, close to c, but softer i.e. t in future
dz-j,as in just
dz - j, as injustd- dj, close to dz, but softer i.e. d in verdure
j - y, as in yellow (Jugoslavija)
s - sh, as in ship
z - zh, as s in treasure
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1
Introduction
Andric and Bosnia: the source and the spirit of a life work
The work of Ivo Andric is deeply rooted in his native culture: by
concentrating on what is most characteristic, most significant and
creative in his own immediate surroundings, Andric seeks to identify
what is most universal. To the outsider this setting may seem
obscure, remote and exotic, and it has often proved difficult to
penetrate beyond this initial impression. Because of its unfamiliar-
ity, the aroma of the East that fills so many of Andric's pages has
tended to dominate our reading. Andric's work arises out of a
collision of cultures particular to his birthplace, the rugged Balkan
region of Bosnia. Bosnia is probably chiefly known abroad for its
capital city, Sarajevo, and the assassination there in 1914 of the
Austrian Crown Prince Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, which was the
immediate cause of the outbreak of the First World War. Born in
1892, Andric was a product of the atmosphere prevailing in Central
Europe at the turn of the century; his work is rooted in Bosnia, in
this otherwise obscure corner of Europe, meeting-place of East and
West, where for so long the Ottoman Empire confronted the
Habsburg Monarchy. For West Europeans, whose attitude to "The
Turk" was for centuries hostile, Andric represents one of the
brightest aspects of this meeting in his positive fusion of features of
each culture. His experience led directly to the emergence of one of
the most important symbols of his work: the bridge. The phrase
"meeting-place of East and West" may be felt to have become a
cliche with regard to the Balkans, but the concept applies uniquely
to Bosnia for particular historical reasons. And it is only out of this
exceptional coincidence of cultures that Andric's blend of European
and Oriental attitudes could have grown.
What makes the territory of Bosnia unique in the whole of
2 Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West
erstwhile Turkey-in-Europe is the size of its Moslem population.
There are well over a million Moslems in Yugoslavia, and most of
them are in Bosnia and the neighbouring region of Hercegovina.
Despite the fact that they used to call themselves "Turks" - and this is
consistently reflected in the work of Andric - they were so only in
religious allegiance. The only actual Turks in Bosnia throughout its
history were the handful of administrators appointed from Istanbul.
And even then, the nature of the Ottoman Empire meant that these
"Turks" could well have belonged to any of the subject races, many of
whose members were taken at an early age from their homelands and
brought up in the Ottoman capital, bound to no ethnic group but to
the Sultan alone. The large Bosnian Moslem population is Slav and
speaks the same Serbo-Croatian language as its Christian brethren.
Most of the lands of Ottoman Europe consisted of an indigenous
rural Christian subject people, administered by Turkish officials and
soldiers living in towns. In Bosnia, however, there was a native
Moslem ruling class - the Beys - and a large rural population of
converts. The Beys were landowners, either representatives of the
old feudal nobility or adherents of the Bogomil heresy who had
preserved their lands and property and their old way of life by
exchanging one religion and one sovereign for another. The Vizier,
appointed from Istanbul, with his residence at various times in either
Banja Luka or Travnik, represented the Emperor, but his influence
over the powerful Beys was limited - to the extent that he was barely
allowed into the town of Sarajevo. It was always the policy of the
Ottoman conquerors that those of the subject people who were
willing to accept Islam should be permitted to retain their property,
but the exceptionally widespread and profound conversion that took
place in Bosnia was the result of the particular circumstances
prevailing there before the conquest. It is generally accepted that the
main factor was the widely established Bogomil heresy, which
spread from Bulgaria through Macedonia, persecuted by the early
Christian churches there, but welcomed when it reached Bosnia. It
was a form of dualism, influenced by the Massalian and Paulician
heresies of Asia Minor and closely related to the Albigensian heresy.
When it began to gain a hold in Bosnia, in the late twelfth century, it
had been modified so that it appealed to the ruling class and the
peasantry alike. It soon acquired its own hierarchical organization
Introduction 3
and became known as the "Bosnian Church". Naturally enough it
was fiercely persecuted by the Catholic Church, and by the time the
Turkish conquest was complete, in 1463, many of its adherents were
inclined to favour conversion to Islam rather than Catholicism. So it
happened that under Ottoman rule there were in Bosnia a land-
owning class of native Moslem Beys and a population of Catholic,
Orthodox and Moslem peasants and small-town dwellers. To these
were added, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a significant
number of Sephardic Jews. The last element in this exceptionally
varied cultural landscape were the gypsies who were widespread
throughout the Balkans.
This confusion of cultures was, until the relatively recent Euro-
peanization of all aspects of life, immediately visible in the villages
and towns. It was described by a Scottish traveller, R. Munro, on a
journey through Bosnia in 1894 - two years after Andric was born:
But whatever be the race or creed of the modern Bosniac - Slav,
Semite or Turk: Christian, Jew or Moslem - he still lives, moves
and has his being in the traditional work of his forefathers. Hence,
as might be expected, the costumes seen in Sarajevo are somewhat
bewildering. Of the men, some wear the fez or turban, along with
a tight jacket, loose knickerbockers, stockings and pointed slip-
pers. Others have costumes which appear to have borrowed their
individual elements from mixed sources. Almost every man wears
round his waist a sash or leathern girdle, in the folds of which he
carries such necessary objects as tobacco, knife, etc. The Mayor of
Sarajevo wears European dress and a fez. Women also adhere to
their traditional costumes. Veiled or unveiled, they strut along on
wooden slippers and the divided skirt a la Turque. Mussulman
women seldom appear on the streets; but a Catholic or Jewish girl
may be seen wearing a fez, or a small round cap ornamented with
coins, by way of setting off her coquettish face.1
Bosnia, then, at the time of Andric's birth, was more than merely
the frontier between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires - it was an
area where East and West met and intermingled to a far greater
extent than in the rest of the Balkan peninsula. To describe it as the
"meeting-place of East and West" is to describe not only its histori-
cal and geographical role, but the daily experience of its inhabitants.
It is an ostensibly Christian country where minarets dominate the
urban skyline, where aspects of Islamic observance have crept into the
Christian rite, where the air is filled with the aroma of freshly ground
Turkish coffee and leisurely narghiles, with the regular call of the
muezzin and traditional Slavonic song. Orthodox and Catholic
festivals alternate with each other and with the holy days of Islam, and
richly ornamented oriental wares and foodstuffs fill the markets
alongside stalls selling Croatian and Serbian national dress.
Eastern features dominated the life of the towns until the Austrian
annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1878, when rapid changes
were introduced. Nevertheless, despite Central European adminis-
trative buildings dating from that period and the extensive industrial
and residential expansion since the Second World War, the main
impression of the centre of Sarajevo is not very different today from
this description by Arthur Evans in 1876:
But a turn in the road reveals to us the Damascus of the North - for
such is the majestic title by which the Bosniac Turks, who consider
it, after Stamboul, the finest city in Turkey-in-Europe, delight to
style Sarajevo. Seen, indeed, from above, in an atmosphere which
the Bosniac historian has not inaptly compared to that of Misr and
Sham (Egypt and Syria), it might well call up the pearl and emerald
settings of Oriental imagery. The city is a vast garden, from amidst
whose foliage swell the domes and cupolas of mosques and baths;
loftier still, rises the new Serbian Cathedral; and lancing upwards,
as to tourney with the sky, near a hundred minarets. The airy
height to the East, sceptred with these slender spires of Islam and
turret-crowned with the Turkish fortress (raised originally by the
first vizier of Bosnia on the site of the older "Grad" of Bosnian
princes), commands the rest of the city, and marks the domination
of the infidel. Around it clusters the upper-town, populated
exclusively by the ruling caste; but the bulk of the city occupies a
narrow flat amidst the hills, cut in twain by the little river Miljaska,
and united by three stone and four wooden bridges. Around this
arena, tier above tier - at first wooded hills, then rugged limestone
precipices - rises a splendid amphitheatre of mountains . . .2
It was into this atmosphere and landscape that Ivo Andric was born,
and his early experience was coloured by three of the most striking
Introduction 5
aspects of Bosnian life: its mountains gazing impassively down on
the passing generations; its variety of cultures; its narrow valleys
where a bridge becomes not merely a means of crossing from one
isolated community to another, but a symbol of the links between
men regardless of their cultural differences. This experience is at the
heart of Andric's work. Throughout his life he was fascinated by the
detailed history of his homeland, and one of the most characteristic
aspects of his work is its concern with the transmutation of historical
events into legend and anecdote, into art.
While he wrote a number of articles about the works of other
writers, Andric never stated what his own intention was in writing a
particular work, saying that it was impossible to speak about what
one was going to do before one began and that afterwards the writer
had said all he had to say and was exhausted, "not so much by what
he had written, as by what he did not succeed in saying".3 What was
said in the work, if it was good, could not be said differently, or it
would become something different itself, and the writer was quite
unimportant compared with the work.
Nevertheless, Andric has made a number of general statements
about the nature of art and the function of literature. Two of the
most developed can be seen as characteristic of his outlook. One
comes in an essay on the nature of art: "Conversation with Goya",
published in 1935. Andric was particularly drawn to Spain and, like
many writers of his generation, he felt a special affinity with the
work of Goya. Here he puts into the painter's mouth words which
explain the particular power of his painting, words which Goya
himself would never have spoken - for his statement is implicit in his
work - but which explain the close bond, the "bridge", between
Goya the painter and Andric the observer. The words can be read as
Andric's own personal statement:
I have seen the stupidity of ignorant men of power, so-called "men

of action", as well as the ineptitude, weakness and bewilderment
of the world of learning. I have seen principles and systems which
appeared more solid than granite disperse like mist before the
indifferent or hostile eyes of the world, and what was until a
moment before truly a mist solidify in front of those same eyes and
form into unshakeable, holy principles, more solid than any
granite. And I asked myself what the meaning of these changes
was, what plan was it all following, and what aim was it all
pursuing? And however much I looked, listened, and wondered, I
found neither meaning, nor plan, nor aim in any of it. But I came
to one negative conclusion: that our individual ideas, for all their
intensity, do not mean much and cannot achieve anything; and to
one positive one: that we must listen closely to legends, those
annals of collective human endeavour through the centuries, and
try to make out of them, as far as possible, the meaning of our
destiny.
There are a few points of human activity around which legends
have been gradually built up in thin layers over the years. For a
long time I stood, bewildered by what was happening around me,
and in the second half of my life, I came to the conclusion that it
was useless and mistaken to look for sense in the meaningless but
apparently so important events taking place around us, but that
we should look for it in those layers which the centuries have built
up around the few main legends of humanity. Those layers
continue, if ever less faithfully, to reproduce the shape of that
grain of truth around which they collect, and so carry it through
the centuries. The true history of mankind is contained in fairy-
stories; they make it possible to guess, if not to discover, its
meaning. There are a few fundamental legends of humanity which
indicate or at least cast some light on the path we have travelled, if
not on the aim we are pursuing. The legend of The Fall, the
legend of the Flood, the legend of the Son of Man crucified to save
the world, the legend of Prometheus and the stolen fire . . .4
The other general statement forms part of Andric's speech of
acceptance of the Nobel Prize, in 1961:
My homeland is truly "a small country between worlds" as one of
our writers has put it, and it is a country which is trying in all
fields, including culture, at the price of great sacrifices and
exceptional energy to compensate rapidly for all that its unusually
stormy and difficult past has denied i t . . . Your recognition of one
writer from that country undoubtedly means encouragement for
that endeavour. We are therefore bound to be grateful, and I am
happy that at this moment and in this place I can express this
Introduction 7
gratitude simply but sincerely not only in my own name, but in
the name of the literature to which I belong.
The other part of my task is somewhat more difficult and
complicated: to say a few words in connection with the narrative
work whose author you have honoured with this prize.
But where a writer and his work are concerned, does it not seem
a little unjust that the author of a work of art, in addition to giving
us his creation, a part of himself in other words, should be
expected also to say something about himself and that work? Some
of us are more inclined to look on the creators of works of art
either as dumb, absent contemporaries, or as celebrated ancestors,
and we believe that the word of a work of art is purer and clearer if
it is not confused by the living voice of its creator. Such a view is
not unique or new. Montesquieu held that "writers are not good
judges of their works". And I once read with wonder and
understanding Goethe's rule: "The artist's task is to create, not to
talk." And much later I was excited to come upon the same
thought, clearly expressed in the work of the late lamented Albert
Camus.
For this reason I would like to lay the emphasis of this brief
discussion on some observations on stories and story-telling in
general.
In a thousand different languages, in the most varied conditions
of life, from century to century, from the ancient patriarchal tales
told in peasant huts by the fireside to the works of modern story-
tellers emerging at this moment from publishing houses in all the
great centres of the world, the tale of human destiny unfolds, told
endlessly and uninterruptedly by man to man. The method and
form of this narration vary with time and circumstances, but the
need for stories and story-telling remains; the story flows on and
there is no end to the telling.
Sometimes it appears that over the centuries, from his first
spark of consciousness, man has been talking about himself,
telling always the same story, in a million different variants, in
tune with the breathing of his lungs and the rhythm of his pulse.
And that story seems, like the tales of the legendary Scheherazade,
to seek to deceive the hangman, to delay the inevitability of the
tragic blow that threatens us and to prolong the illusion of life. Or
perhaps the story-teller should try, through his work, to help man
to find himself and his way in the world? Perhaps his vocation is to
speak in the name of all those who were unable to express
themselves, or prevented from doing so because they were struck
down before their time, by life, the executioner? Or is it that the
story-teller tells himself his tale, as a child sings in the dark, to
delude his fear? Or is the aim of the story to illuminate, at least a
little, the obscure paths on to which life often casts us, and to tell
us something more than we, in our weakness, can discover and
comprehend about the life which we live but which we do not see
and do not always understand. So that frequently we learn what
we have done and what we have left undone, what to do and what
not to do, from the words of a good story-teller. Perhaps it is in
those tales, both oral and written, that the true history of mankind
is contained, and perhaps it is possible, if not to know, then at
least to glimpse in them the meaning of that history.5
The basic idea of each of these passages is expressed in virtually

the same words: "Perhaps it is in those tales, oral and written, that
the true history of mankind is contained and perhaps it is possible, if
not to know, then at least to glimpse in them that history." And:
"The true history of mankind is contained in fairy-stories, they make
it possible to guess, if not to discover, its meaning."
The distinction Andric makes here between "knowing" and
"glimpsing", "guessing" and "discovering" the meaning of man's
history is crucial. The word used in Serbo-Croat ("slutiti") means
"to sense", "to have an inkling", and it implies intuition as opposed
to logical, reasoned knowledge. For Andric, truths about human life
cannot be known, they can only be experienced, and they are
crystallized in works of art, in the paintings of Goya, in stories and
legends.
It is to these legends, to the layers accumulating around the few
main legends of humanity, in the particular form in which they were
built up in the historical circumstances of his native Bosnia, that
Andric was to return so fruitfully in his works of fiction. In this he
was to draw heavily, although often indirectly, on the rich oral
literature of the South Slav lands.
There were two other important influences on Andric's childhood
Introduction 9
and youth which are also reflected in his work and which seem to
contribute to the same general conception of the way in which art
can convey truth. The first was his Catholic upbringing, which
inclined Andric to see human experience in terms of certain abstract
categories, such as evil, sin, fear, lust - and to recognize the strength
of the parable as a medium.
The second influence is more difficult to trace and identify, as it
was the result of no specific training or individual experience. It is
the "Oriental" flavour of life, which Andric absorbed from his early
experience of living in Bosnia. At one or two points in his work we
are given a glimpse of something of the way in which this experience
was communicated to him, but it remains impossible to be specific.
It seems to have something to do with that "silence" of Bosnia,
which he describes in Bosnian Story - a non-Western, non-intellec-
tual acceptance of life in its totality, without analysis, without
explanation; an Eastern stoical respect for life whatever it brings and
a tendency to revere its silent physical manifestations rather than
abstractions. This outlook is perhaps best seen in the short story
"The Bridge on the Zepa". The story emphasizes the mystery
involved in the building of the bridge: the builder lives outside town
like an ascetic, in a world of silent meditation over his plans and
calculations, working with religious dedication until finally his idea
is embodied in stone. The whole task seems to have a significance
greater than anyone can explain. The vizier who commissioned the
bridge wants his motto engraved on it: "In silence lies security".6
This silence is the most important aspect of the bridge: it is the
silence of a complete statement which cannot be further described or
explained, but which embodies a truth. The motto arises out of the
vizier's fear of the fact that words can engender evil, treachery,
deceit. The stone bridge represents a silent link between man's
incomprehension in the face of life and his apprehension of a
harmony which could give his life meaning. The strivings of the
human spirit are here given form in the skilfully carved stone which
represents the beauty and permanence men crave. The idea of the
bridge grew out of the vizier's experience of evil, unhappiness,
arbitrary persecution and imprisonment, and out of his awareness of
the transience of life. In the end he decides not even to have the
motto engraved - leaving the bridge to stand alone, embodying both
10 Ivo A ndric: Bridge between East and West
the vizier's idea and the creative principle, which is represented by
the builder: it needs no further comment. The story of the building
of the bridge ends with the words:
There, in Bosnia, it gleamed in the sun and shone in the
moonlight and carried people and animals across the river. Little
by little, the circle of freshly-dug earth and discarded objects that
surround any new building disappeared completely. People took
away and the water carried off the broken stakes and pieces of
scaffolding and unwanted wood, and the rains washed away the
traces of the stonemasons' work. But the countryside could not
merge with the bridge, nor the bridge with the landscape. Seen
from the side, the bold white sweep of its arch looked always
separate and alone, and took the traveller by surprise, like an
unusual idea which had gone astray and been trapped among the
wild limestone mountains.7
Ideas thus "trapped" form the substance of Andric's work, and
the purpose of the present study will be to examine something of the
process of "pursuing" and capturing them in works which are the
products of a mind educated in the Western tradition, but formed
also, at least in part, by those same wild limestone mountains of
Bosnia.
Andric the man - a biographical outline

It is of course in trying to capture something of the nature of Ivo
Andric the man that one is most conscious of the reluctance with
which the writer allowed himself to be a public figure. The strength
of his sense of the responsibility imposed on him by his vocation is
clear when one considers the extent to which he did involve himself
in public life, and his acceptance of his responsibilities is the more to
be admired.
Andric's friend, the cartoonist Zuko Dzumhur, has said that
Andric frequently bemoaned the fact that he had not written under a
pseudonym: "I would have been far freer, and I would, perhaps,
have been a better writer. This wretched name has made many
demands on me and limited me in many ways."8
Whatever can be discovered about Andric the man from his own
Introduction 11
writings, and the statements and recollections of those who knew
him, can be only a fragment of the truth. For Andric had a carefully
developed sense of the limits of his public personality, and would
reveal only what he was prepared to reveal. He has been described
by a close friend as an "iceberg" of which nine tenths were
perpetually in darkness.9
"What do I remember?" wrote Andric's friend Sreten Marie,
when asked to contribute to a book of recollections. "Ivo's very
individual tournure d'esprit, a certain melancholic irony that was
peculiar to him. Yes, and that unforgettable, slightly nasal, warm
voice coming down from his wide mouth. With his gaze usually
turned inwards, but suddenly directed straight into my eyes, as
though he were taking me into himself as well."10
Andric was quite consistent in his desire for anonymity and his
conviction that knowledge of a writer's life was simply irrelevant to
an understanding of his work. There is an air of well-guarded
secrecy about even some of the simplest facts of his life. The story is
told, for instance, that when asked directly whether the house in
Travnik which is now a museum was really the house in which he
was born, Andric replied ambiguously: "A man has to be born
somewhere."11 What follows is, consequently, the barest outline of
his life.
Andric was born in Travnik, the old centre of the Ottoman
administration in Bosnia, on 9 October 1892, the only child of
Catholic parents, Ivan and Katarina Andric. His father was working
as a caretaker in Sarajevo, where Ivo was taken as a baby. When his
father died, two years later, Katarina took her small son to her
husband's sister Ana in Visegrad. Ana, and her husband Ivan
Matkovic, a sergeant in the Austrian police service, took the child
into their home and brought him up as their own.
Andric has described the impact of his early experience in
Visegrad in a short sketch, "Paths", written in 1940:
At the beginning of all the paths and roads I know, at the root of
the very thought of them, stands sharply and indelibly drawn the
path along which I took my first steady steps.
This was in Visegrad, on its hard, uneven, well-trodden roads,
where everything is dry and miserable, without beauty, without
joy, without the hope of joy, without the right to hope, where a
bitter mouthful you have never eaten chokes you with every step,
where heat and wind and snow and rain devour the earth and the
seed in the earth, and everything which nevertheless germinates
and grows is scorched and bent and bowed as though the elements
were trying to return it to the formlessness and darkness out of
which it had escaped.
These are the countless paths that decorate the hills and slopes
around the town like strings and ribbons, merging with the white
main road or vanishing beside the river and among the green
willows. The instinct of men and animals sketched these paths and
need trod them down. It is hard to set off along them, to tread
along them and to return by them. By their side people sit on
stones or shelter under trees, on a dry spot or in the meagre shade,
to rest, to pray, or to count over the proceeds of a trip to market.
It was on these paths, which the wind sweeps and the rain washes,
which the sun infects and disinfects, where you meet only
exhausted livestock and silent people with hard faces, it was on
these paths that I founded my dream about the riches and beauty
of the world. It was here that, uneducated, weak and empty-
handed, I was happy with an intoxicating happiness, happy
because of all that was not here, which could not be and never
would be.
And on all the roads and highways I passed along in later life, I
lived only from that meagre happiness, from my Visegrad
thoughts about the riches and beauty of the created world. For,
beneath all the roads of the world, there always ran, visible and
sensible only to me, the sharp Visegrad path, from the day I left it
until today. It was on it that I measured my step and adapted my
stride. It never left me, all my life.
At those times when I was wearied and poisoned by the world in
which I found myself by some mischance, and where by some
miracle I had stayed alive, whenever the horizon darkened and my
purpose faltered, I would unfold before me, like a believer his
prayer mat, the hard, poor, high Visegrad path which heals all
pain and wipes away all suffering for it contains them all in itself,
and surpasses them all. And so, many times in a day, exploiting
Introduction 13
every moment of quiet in the life around me, every pause in
conversation, I would tread part of the road I never should have
left. And so, by the end of my life, unseen and in secret, I shall
nevertheless have trodden the appointed length of the Visegrad
path. And then, with the thread of life, it too will come to an end.
And it will be lost where all paths end, where all roads vanish,
where there is no longer any walking or effort, where all the
highways of the earth become entangled in a senseless ball and
burn, like the spark of salvation, in our eyes which themselves
grow dim, for they have led us to our aim and to the truth.12
In Visegrad Andric made his first friends, playing with them by

the river and on the bridge. He describes some of the traditional
children's games and the legends that coloured and shaped them in
The Bridge on the Drina. From the age of six he attended primary
school, and the four years he spent there were the happiest of his
formal education, thanks particularly to one teacher, Ljubomir
Popovic, of whom he always retained vivid and warm memories.
In the autumn of 1902 Andric was registered at the High School in
Sarajevo, the oldest secondary school in Bosnia. He lived there with
his mother, who had remained in Sarajevo working after her
husband's death.
During Andric's secondary school days Bosnia had a population of
some two million, of whom 87 per cent were illiterate. In 1905
statistics record nearly nine thousand civil servants, of whom six and
a half thousand were foreigners from all parts of the Habsburg Mon-
archy, so that the streets and cafes of Sarajevo were full of a mixture
of Slav languages, with a strong German element.
The teaching staff of the school was a similar mixture of nationali-
ties. In the first twenty years of its work, of a total of eighty-three
teachers, apart from teachers of religion, only three were of local
origin. The teaching programme was devoted to producing dedi-
cated supporters of the Monarchy, and Andric describes this phase
of his education as a sad contrast to his elementary school experi-
ence: "All that came later, at secondary school and university, was
rough, crude, automatic, without concern, faith, humanity, warmth
or love."13
This view of his formal education is necessarily coloured by the
growing resentment felt by Andric and his contemporaries towards
the dominant culture. Later, Andric the writer was able to look on the
fate of foreigners serving in the wilds of Bosnia with sympathy. At this
stage in his life, however, Andric's lack of success at school can be at
least partly explained by a sense of alienation from the majority of his
teachers. There was one notable exception, Tugomir Alaupovic, who
became Andric's great support and mainstay in years to come.
It seems that, for the most part, Andric pursued his own interests
while at secondary school, showing very early the passion for reading
which he has described as dominating his schooldays. He read Don
Quixote - in German - when he was twelve or thirteen, and among
many other works, he had read the whole of Strindberg (without
understanding all of it, as he said later) by the time he left school. And,
if his school career had been far from brilliant, at least he left able to
read major works of European literature in Latin, Greek, German,
French and Slovene.
It was at secondary school also that Andric began to write. He was
always convinced that his was what he wanted to do, although he
received no encouragement from home. When Andric showed his
mother one of his first pieces, she responded: "Did you write this?
What did you want to do that for?"14
In 1912 Andric registered at the university of Zagreb, with a
scholarship from an educational foundation in Sarajevo. In 1913 he
transferred to the university of Vienna. It was here that he first
became acquainted with the work of Kierkegaard, whose Either . . .
Or ... became his constant companion for the next few years. He
became seriously ill, showing the first signs of the tuberculosis that
had haunted his family, killing his father and his three uncles by the
time they were thirty-two years old. It was on medical grounds that
Andric asked to be allowed to leave Vienna and continue his studies, if
possible, in Russia. It is likely, however, that he was motivated also by
a political protest planned by fellow-Slav students in Vienna, to
boycott German-speaking centres and transfer to Slav universities.
Early in 1914 Andric transferred to Cracow.
During the first months of 1914 Andric was particularly active,
contributing reviews, poems and notices of art exhibitions to several
Zagreb periodicals. His letters to friends from this period are
cheerful:
Introduction 15
I can't say that my life here is dull, we have come by chance into
very excellent company, where there are all kinds of things which
are otherwise rare: good people, witty women and fresh sand-
wiches - and, were I well, all would be well. . .
I have given up tobacco, but I can't do without my night walks
- I think that in May I shall either recover or die . . ,15
Early in June an anthology of New Croatian Lyric Verse appeared
in Zagreb, containing six poems by Andric. He was described in the
notes on contributors:
The most extraordinary Sarajevan: without a trace of Turkish
atavism: delicate, pale, with a fragile, fragrant soul like those
white flowers of his that light up the sweet sorrow of his soft,
yearning dreams. Too lacking in energy to write long articles.
Brief, like a transitory love affair. A prince without a court, pages
or a princess. In the winter he breathes his fill of cafe air, and in
the spring he heals himself with breaths of air from the luxuriant
meadows. Unhappy as all artists are. Ambitious. Sensitive. In a
word: he has a future.16
On 28 June a friend in Cracow told Andric the news of the
assassination in Sarajevo. Leaving his few belongings with his
landlady, Andric went straight to the station and took a train to
Zagreb. In the middle of July he set off with his friend, the poet
Vladimir Cerina, to spend the summer vacation at Cerina's home in
Split. The young men were becoming increasingly uneasy about the
political situation, and when they reached Rijeka Cerina suddenly
left Andric, saying that he had to go urgently to Italy. He did not
offer any explanation to Andric, but a few days later police came to
search for him at the offices of the paper where he had worked in
Zagreb.
Andric arrived in Split exhausted and ill. The police took an
obvious interest in his movements and by the time war was declared
Andric was fully expecting to be arrested: most of his friends were
already in prison. It was on 29 July that he was finally arrested and
imprisoned.
Andric's experience of prison was varied. From Split he was taken
to Sibenik, further up the Adriatic coast, and from there, with some
350 others, to Rijeka. Many of the prisoners were then taken on to
Pest, while another group, including Andric, arrived on 19 August
in Maribor (Marburg) prison, in what is now Slovenia.
In Maribor, the prisoners were eight to ten to a room and Andric
and his fellows quickly organized their time in reading, discussion
and learning foreign languages. "We've founded a proper little uni-
versity", Andric wrote to his friend Evgenija Gojmerac in January
1915.17
Nevertheless, despite the artificially cheerful tones of his letters of
this time, Andric's health was rapidly deteriorating, and other
notes are sounded:
I'm a bit weak, but I'm protecting the little health I have and I
hope that I shall be able to hold out. I want to hold out in order to
save my mother's only child. [November 1914]18 I can't tell you
how much effort it takes to survive just one afternoon, sometimes
just one hour. [January 1915]19 Sometimes I become impatient,
but I force myself to be calm and sit down, God knows how often,
at the table: all neuter nouns, etc. . . . Believe me, grammars are
the only books I can read calmly, for everything else reminds me
of the past or the present, and I don't want that. [March 1915]20
The case against Andric was eventually dropped through lack of
evidence, and he left prison on 20 March 1915. He spent the
following two years, until the Amnesty of 1917, interned in the small
Bosnian village of Ovcarevo, near Travnik, and later in the neigh-
bouring town of Zenica. "Mother is very happy. It has been three
whole years since she saw me. And she can't grasp all that has
happened to me in that time, nor the whole of my crazy, cursed
existence. She cries, kisses me and laughs in turn. Like a mother."21
After the comradeship of the prison in Maribor, Andric's letters
from Bosnia in this period express a deep sense of isolation and
despondency. His experience of exile in the wild mountains in the
heart of Bosnia certainly coloured the atmosphere of the novel
Bosnian Story, set in Travnik and describing the exile and isolation of
the small diplomatic community there in the early nineteenth
century.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Andric's internment in Bos-
nia was the fact that he came into close contact with the Franciscan
Introduction 17
parish priest of Ovcarevo, and with the friars of the monastery of
Guca gora. Andric spent much of his time reading the monastery
chronicles and listening to the friars' stories, learning from them
about the history of the Franciscans in Bosnia. It was a world which
was rapidly disappearing but to which Andric was to return often on
his visits to Bosnia throughout his life.
Towards the end of 1917 - following the Amnesty, and after a
short holiday in Visegrad and a spell in hospital in Sarajevo - Andric
went to Zagreb, where many young men of his generation were
converging, released like him from prison and internment and
anxious to avoid conscription in the greater anonymity of the city.
Andric was by now seriously ill and was taken into the Hospital of
the Sisters of Mercy, which had become a new meeting-place for
many who had been together in prison.
In the company of several like-minded young men and writers,
including the renowned playwright Ivo Vojnovic from Dubrovnik,
Andric entered fully into the intellectual life of the time. At the end
of 1917, with three others, he launched a new literary periodical, The
Literary South, the first literary magazine of an expressly Yugoslav
orientation. Its first number appeared on 1 January 1918. In this
journal and others, Andric began to publish regularly: reviews of
books and plays, verse, translations (of Walt Whitman and Strind-
berg), and the first fragment of a story, '4)erzelez at the Inn".22
In these first months of 1918, Andric's health was deteriorating
steadily. He was described by several contemporaries as being
exceptionally thin and pale, with all the signs of approaching death.
The first weeks after the end of the War were intoxicating for the
peoples of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes. In the words of Vojnovic: "We look at one another, pale
with happiness, and ask 'Is this true? - Is this really happening to
us?'".23
Nevertheless, it did not take long for Andric and Vojnovic to
realize that the organization of the new state had simply replaced the
old one, more or less unchanged. They were deeply disappointed,
but resolved to carry out their duty to their fellow-countrymen as
conscientiously and seriously as they could.
In November 1918 Andric published an article in the Zagreb
paper The News, entitled "Let the intruders remain silent":
The idea of national unity is the legacy of our finest generations
and the fruit of heavy sacrifice. This unity, the dream of our life,
and the meaning of our struggles and suffering, must not, now
that it is largely realized, be allowed to fall into the hands of
intruders, to be tainted by the marks of their unclean fingers and
treated with their toothless sophisms . . . And all of us who bore
this idea of unity unsullied through fratricidal battles, and did not
deny it before the slanderous Austrian judges, we shall be able to
defend it also from unscrupulous journalists and sullen self-styled
politicians.24
This is the tone of a young man with a sense of strong moral
obligation to his country and his countrymen, and a clear, deter-
mined allegiance to the idea of national unity. His temperament
could not long sustain easy enthusiasm for superficial victory, and it
is possible also that the state of his health contributed to his bleak
perception of the political reality of the "victory."
Towards the end of the summer Andric's first book, Ex Ponto,
was published. In December, Ivo Vojnovic wrote to his brother:
I'm sending you Ex Ponto which has created a great sensation.
The writer is a young Catholic, a perfect young man. A Serb from
Bosnia, where he contracted tuberculosis. He is here now,
running The Literary South, my constant companion, one of the
best and most refined souls I have ever met. This work of his will
become "Das Gemeingut" of all peoples when it is translated.
C'est un grand poete, et une dme exquise.25
In January 1919, Andric was back in hospital. Vojnovic was now
seriously anxious for his life, and wrote to Andric's friend and
former teacher Tugomir Alaupovic, who was now Minister of
Religious Affairs in Belgrade, asking him to use his influence with
the government to finance treatment abroad. In the end Andric
decided to go to Split, and he remained there and on the nearby
island of Brae until mid-September, when he returned to Zagreb
saying that he had been cured by the "air, sun and figs of Brae".
While he was on the island, Andric had completed work on a
second volume of prose poems, Anxieties, which was published the
following year.
Introduction 19
With these two volumes of prose poems and the first part of the
story, "The Journey of Alija -Derzelez", in print, Andric was
launched on his literary career. "Andric est arrive", wrote the Serbian
writer Milos Crnjanski at the end of his review of Ex Ponto.26 He
was, however, dissatisfied with the circumstances of his life. On the
one hand the activists had begun to leave Zagreb. Andric wrote to
Alaupovic in March 1919: "We have all dispersed, and I feel lonelier
than ever in my life."27 On his return from the coast the town
seemed even more deserted: Vojnovic was his one real friend left and
he was frequently ill. At the same time, Andric had begun to be
anxious about his family responsibilities. He had written to Alaupo-
vic before he left for the coast, asking him to look out for a suitable
post for him. His uncle was growing old and responsibility for caring
for his mother and aunt would soon fall on him:
This is what will not permit me to go on living this impoverished,

but free and fine style of life . . . I have no one whom I could
consult about this matter (except Vojnovic who has persuaded me
to write), so I am asking you whether you could bear my situation
in mind . . , 28
Something of a more general dissatisfaction with his surroundings

can be seen in another letter to Alaupovic, written in July: "I shall be
glad to get to grips with some concrete work which has nothing to do
with journalistic literary cliques."29 Alaupovic wrote in September
1919, offering Andric the post of secretary in his Ministry. Towards
the end of October, Andric left for Belgrade.
The first formative phase of Andric's life was over, coloured by

poverty, illness, imprisonment and exile against a background of
international tension and war. Andric set out, in generally better
health, into a job about which he knew nothing but which offered a
previously unknown stability. He was setting out into a town he had
never seen. But he was going as an established writer, with his first
book sold out after enthusiastic reviews. He entered immediately
into the literary life of Belgrade, focused on the "Moscow" cafe,
where he was warmly welcomed and accepted.
Andric was one of the best-known and most popular young writers
in Belgrade and he seems to have been spared the barbs of the press
of his day. Nevertheless, the role of a public figure did not really
appeal to him. Those who knew him then describe how he withdrew
increasingly into himself and gradually took less and less part in the
discussions so beloved of Belgrade literary circles.
In February 1920 Andric entered the Diplomatic Service. This
choice of career was ideally suited to Andric's temperament. Indeed,
it has been described by a friend of his as "not only a career, but a
vocation". It can be seen almost as an image of Andric's involvement
in the outside world: it was not Andric as an individual who
appeared in public, but Andric the writer with a profound sense of
obligation to this country and its culture, as the representative of
that culture - just as he was his country's representative abroad.
There were drawbacks: Andric complained that the consulates and
embassies were understaffed, that he had to work long hours and did
not have enough time for his writing. He also hated all the pomp and
ceremony, enduring it, however, with dignified good grace, as he
was later to accept the international attention and acclaim lavished
on him as Nobel Prizewinner.
Andric's career as a diplomat was outwardly uneventful. He made
rapid progress through a series of postings, and was appointed
Minister to Berlin on 1 April 1939, at the age of 47. This appoint-
ment shows clearly that Andric was highly regarded and trusted in
government circles.
If Andric's career was particularly well suited to his abilities and
temperament, it no doubt also suited him well to be right outside
literary circles in Belgrade. Although he maintained many close
friendships among his fellow-writers, he was far removed from the
intensely self-absorbed, sometimes violently polemical tradition of
literary life in his homeland.
Throughout this period, despite the obvious success of his
diplomatic career, Andric was concerned above all with his writing,
taking advantage of any free time he had and avoiding more than the
essential social contacts. At the same time, he steeped himself in the
atmosphere of the cities where he worked. His experiences of so
many European centres were full and very fruitful, at least indi-
rectly. Immediate impressions of his travels form an important
component of Signs by the Roadside:
Introduction 21
There are paths that I have not seen and which I shall never tread
- and there are many of them! - but that is because I did not find
the energy or the time or the possibility of doing so. But there is
not a single path or road that I have not at least stepped on to if it
were possible. In doing so I did not know fear, fatigue or
hesitation. And this mad and uncontrollable curiosity of mine was
the cause of many of my wanderings, mistakes, senseless or
misguided acts. It devoured the greater part of my strength, but it
could also be called my heroism and my main justification; it could
also be the real basis of my pride, if I wished to pride myself on
anything and if my curiosity needed it.30
The majority of the pieces refer to specific journeys and places.
The following passage is typical:
In all the cafes in Madrid there are swarms of people cleaning
shoes, roaming with their equipment from table to table, going
close up to each customer and asking in a rough voice and with an
insolent expression:
"Limpiam?" ("Shall we clean them?")
and as they do so they point impertinently at your shoes sugges-
ting to the customers that their shoes are not as clean as they might
be, and forcing their services on them. And they often succeed.
These are for the most part young people of filthy, repulsive
appearance. They are often police spies or agents, involved in
secret, disreputable affairs, or both. They usually live with and
from prostitutes, and on Sunday afternoons they dress in the latest
fashion.31
Andric's first posting was to Rome, and the city impressed him
deeply. He wrote to Alaupovic in June 1920:
Even the best historians, philosophers and archaeologists can only
glimpse the greatness of Antiquity and the desperate effort of the
Renaissance, for their conclusions can be based only on frag-
ments. It is as though someone would try to reconstruct from a
broken skeleton the beauty of that person in his life or her
lifetime. I know only one thing: that each little piece of stone
exudes such beauty, such peace and strength, that I am often
happy and proud that the human consciousness was able to
contain such beauty and that human hands had the strength to
give it form . . . How often have I wanted to show you . . . the
most beautiful places and to share my pleasure and joy with you,
my closest, dearest friend.32
An interesting reflection of Andric's preoccupations at this time
can be seen in a remark in another letter, written to Alaupovic from
Visegrad in July:
If everything here is not as I would like it to be, I am of course
glad that the Bosnia which I carry with me in my thoughts
through Rome is one thing, but this tough, real one is something
else . . . I have already told you that I am enjoying Rome. But I
cannot write about how that city enriches the soul, for it seems to
me that even Goethe's words about it are superfluous. It happens
in an almost mystical way. After the difficulties and effort and the
problems of settling in, suddenly, unexpectedly, there begins to
grow in one a deeper sense of all these centuries-long layers of
religion, ideas, states and institutions. All these human
endeavours, so contradictory among themselves, teach you the
same thing: that the meaning of human activity on earth is: law,
measure, order and denial. And everything great and beautiful
that has been created has been created in blood and sweat, and in
Silence . . ,33
In October 1921 Andric was posted to Bucharest. His letters from
there deal mostly with literature, but in March 1922 he wrote to
Alaupovic expressing his concern at the news reaching him of the
political and economic situation in Yugoslavia. He was troubled
particularly by the threat from all sides to the Yugoslav unity in
which he so passionately believed. This letter expresses an acute
sense of isolation in a foreign land and an anxiety that he was losing
touch with his fellow-countrymen, growing by the end of the letter
into a determination to leave his career and return to either Belgrade
or Zagreb. His health was bad again, and this may have contributed
to his mood, for in June he wrote again to Alaupovic in better spirits:
Of course there are difficult times when one is abroad, such as I
knew only during the war . . . I live quietly, observe the people
and this interesting country, and I am acquiring, with the tenacity
Introduction 23
of a miser, the most various experience. And while everything
around me seethes with delight in politics, money, petrol and
scandal, I am writing - whenever I can - a Bosnian story, which I
hope will perhaps give you some pleasure when you read it. I hope
so anyway . . ,34
In November Andric was transferred to Trieste, but the damp

climate did not suit him and, on his doctor's advice, he was moved to
Graz the following January, as Vice-Consul. In Graz he took up his
interrupted university studies again, following lecture courses in
history, philology and philosophy, and beginning work on a doctoral
dissertation.
There was an unexpected setback to his career at this point. A new
law was passed stipulating that civil servants must be university
graduates. As Andric had not completed his degree, his employment
was terminated at the end of December 1923. The Consul General in
Graz made an eloquent plea on Andric's behalf:
His bearing at work and outside is exemplary. With industrious

application he has acquired a wide-ranging knowledge of the
diplomatic consular profession, he^cnows the organization of state
administration very well; he has been employed with great success
in various tasks of an administrative, judicial and consular-
commercial nature. With his rare intelligence, many-sided educa-
tion, distinguished manner, his kindly dealings with the public,
his serious and honest character; his knowledge of the Serbian,
French, German and Italian languages, his firm will to work with
the qualifications he has acquired so far, Mr Andric offers the best
guarantee that he will with time become an excellent civil servant,
who can only be a credit to the diplomatic profession, and benefit
to the state and our people . . ,35
In June 1924 Andric was duly granted his doctorate, with a thesis
entitled "Die Entwicklung des geistlichen Lebens in Bosnien unter
der Einwirkung der tiirkischen Herrschaft" (The development of
intellectual life in Bosnia under Turkish administration), having
been absolved from completion of his first degree on the recommen-
dation of two of his professors. In September Andric returned to the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belgrade, where he remained until
late October 1926, when he was sent to Marseilles as Vice-Consul.
In the meantime, his literary work was going well. His first
collection of stories was published in 1924 and awarded a prize by
the Serbian Royal Academy, and in February 1926 he was elected to
the Academy.
Andric's time in Marseilles began sadly. His uncle Ivan Matkovic
had died in 1924, his mother the following year, and now he received
the news that his aunt had died as well. He wrote to Alaupovic in
February 1927:
1927 did not start particularly cheerfully for me. I had 'flu and
angina and had just begun to recover when I heard that my aunt
had died in Visegrad. I could not even go to her funeral. And she
was the last member of our family. Or rather, I am the last. I have
no family left now. Nowhere and no one to go to. I am completely
alone here. Apart from official contacts, which are neither interes-
ting nor pleasant, I have no company whatever. During the day I
am in the office, and in the evening I read whatever comes my way
36
At the end of the year Andric was sent temporarily to Paris, where he
spent much of his spare time reading the three volumes of corres-
pondence of Pierre David, the French consul in Travnik at the
beginning of the nineteenth century who was to become the main
character in the novel Bosnian Story.
In 1928 Andric was posted to Madrid as Vice-Consul. Spain made
a particularly strong impression on him, as can be seen from several
pieces in Signs by the Roadside, and from his essay "Goya", which
appeared in 1929.
From 1 January 1930 Andric worked as secretary to the Perma-
nent Delegation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the League of
Nations in Geneva, becoming deputy delegate the following year.
His second volume of short stories was published, and it too was
awarded a prize. In 1933 he returned to the Ministry in Belgrade. In
the same year he was awarded the Legion of Honour, which was
followed by several distinctions, including the Order of the Red
Cross in 1936. He was made Director of the Political Section of the
Ministry in 1935, and with the growing tension in Europe found less
Introduction 25
and less time for regular literary work. In November 1937 he was
named Assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and in April of
the following year he was sent to Berlin.
There is evidence that Andric did what he could to exert what
small and insignificant influence he had to help Polish prisoners after
the Nazi occupation of Poland. But his efforts could not of course
succeed. Some insight into his state of mind can be gained from an
entry in his notebook in September 1939:
In the worst moments of my life I have found unusual and
unexpected consolation in imagining another life, the same as
mine in dates, names and events, but true, bright, pure; painful of
course as every life on earth must be, but without anything dark or
ugly in that pain; a life which begins with a blessing and is lost in
the heights and extinguished in light. And, standing thoughtfully
over the figure of that double of mine, as a tree stands over its
image in still water, seeking salvation, I have forgotten for a
moment my real life, while it trembled with my pain.37
As though trying to preserve this other imaginary world, a volume
of Andric's stories appeared in German in 1939: the book and the
translator were warmly praised. Abruptly, however, the stillness of
the water was shattered and Andric was obliged to confront the
reality of the political situation.
Andric's comments on his experiences in Berlin in the early years
of the War in Europe have not yet been published. In the outline of
his biography printed by the Andric Trust in 1980, the following
entry in his diary is all that is recorded for 1940:
On 7 April he wrote:
Whoever has glimpsed, even if only partially and for a moment,
the true fate of mankind, can no longer experience untroubled joy;
he can no longer look without deep sorrow on a human being
stepping into the arena of the sun, on to a winding path with a
known end. Composed only of priceless elements from unknown
worlds, a man is born in order soon to become a handful of
nameless soot, and as such, to vanish. And we do not know for
whose glory he is born, nor for whose amusement he is destroyed.
He glints for an instant in the clash of contradictions of which he is
made, passes alongside other people, but not even with their eyes
can they tell one another all the grief of their destinies. So some
disappear, and so, in cruel ignorance, others are born, and so the
incomprehensible history of man runs on.38
The mood is one of hopelessness and frustration, and it is typical

enough of Andric that he should take such a wide view of human
history at this time. For all their drama, it was still the sheer
pointlessness of the events around him that seems to have most
grieved Andric in this passage.
Andric's position as his country's representative in Germany at
this time was, naturally, difficult. The former king, Alexander
Karad"jord"jevic, who was assassinated in Marseilles in 1934, had
tried to secure Yugoslavia's future through the Little Entente with
Rumania and Czechoslovakia under the auspices of France. His son,
Peter, was a boy of ten when his father was murdered. A Regency
Council was established under Peter's uncle, Prince Paul. He
reversed Alexander's policies and linked Yugoslavia's economy with
that of Germany, which had become Yugoslavia's largest trading
partner by 1939. Yugoslavia also had favourable trading agreements
with Italy and Hungary. Meanwhile, the occupation of Czech
Sudetenland and Austria confirmed the view of the Yugoslav
government that the only realistic policy for Yugoslavia was to ally
herself to Germany politically as well.
In March 1941 Prime Minister Cvetkovic and the Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Cincar-Markovic, went to Vienna at Hitler's
request and signed the Tripartite Pact, pledging Yugoslavia's sup-
port of Italy and Germany. Extracts from Andric's letters to Cincar-
Markovic in 1941 suggest that he was critical of the Yugoslav
government's handling of the crisis, and in a letter of 17 March he
asked to be relieved of his duties.
Events, however, moved too rapidly. Ten days later a coup d'etat
deposed Prince Paul, and his seventeen-year-old nephew was pro-
claimed king. Yugoslavia was promptly invaded by the German
army. On 17 April the High Command of the Royal Yugoslav Army
formally capitulated and the four long years of bitter resistance had
begun.
Andric was taken with the rest of the Embassy personnel to the
Introduction 27
Swiss border, where they met up with officers of the Paris Embassy
and officials from other German centres and occupied lands. In June
they were all sent out of German territory in a special train.
Andric went straight to Belgrade. He was officially retired from
the Diplomatic Service, but refused to take the pension due to him.
He lived in complete isolation, refusing to co-operate in any way
with the quisling government.
In these circumstances of isolation and virtual immobility, Andric
settled down to work on the three novels which were published in
1945. He refused to publish anything as long as the occupation
lasted.
In the course of the bombing of Belgrade in 1944, he wrote in his
notebook:
In exceptional and fateful events such as these air-raids, as in
times of harsh political oppression, the behaviour of most people
is similar. The cowardly and the selfish believe that everything
that happens - every single incident - is directed against them
personally. The dull-witted, and those who are by nature reckless
and careless, do not think about these events at all, until they
experience them directly. Only the sensible man will observe
coolly and interpret correctly, and try to identify and evaluate
their general significance, and only after that does he examine the
extent to which these events can affect him personally, and then
he tries to remove himself from danger and defend himself - in so
far as that is possible and morally permissible.39
Andric's own behaviour during the air-raids has been recorded.
He once told Zuko Dzumhur that he had been very frightened by
the sudden scream of the warning sirens the first day, and had run
out of the house and set off with the endless column of people fleeing
out of the city. As he went he looked around him and noticed that
these people were all taking their families with them, their children,
their infirm parents and relatives. "I looked myself up and down,"
said Andric, "and saw that I was saving only myself and my overcoat
. . ."40 He was ashamed and after that he never left his house, even
during the fiercest bombing.
On 20 October 1944 the Partisans and the Red Army entered
Belgrade, and Tito was installed as the head of a Communist-
controlled government. In cultural life the years immediately follow-
ing the War were marked by bustling activity and enthusiasm but,
until the break with Stalin in 1948, also by the dominance of a
Soviet-style Socialist Realist aesthetic.
In March 1945 the newly founded Serbian State publishing house,
Prosveta, brought out its first title: The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo
Andric. The Bridge on the Drina aroused great public interest. Its first
edition of five thousand copies was sold out within the year (there
were to be five editions by 1949). Andric sent a copy to Alaupovic
with this dedication:
You are partly to blame for my thick books. You encouraged me
as a boy to follow this path. But I console myself: since you loved
and understood me as a sickly, ignorant child in the Sarajevo
gymnasium, you will, I am sure, understand me also today, as a
mature man, who has seen many countries and cities and who has
still today, as once in his childhood, only one real, basic ambition:
to grasp as much as possible of the spirit of the life around him and
to give it on paper a form which could, more or less, be worthy of
the name of art.41
In August Bosnian Story appeared, and in November The Woman
from Sarajevo, as well as a collection of short stories.
Andric was now set on a course of steady activity and involvement
in the intellectual and cultural life of his country. Shrinking always
from exposure as a private individual, he was nevertheless willing to
take on the public duties of a man conscious of his responsibilities to
his fellow-countrymen. He was elected Vice-President of the Society
for the Cultural Co-operation of Yugoslavia with the Soviet Union in
November 1946, for example, and in the same month he was made
President of the Yugoslav Writers' Union. He was elected Delegate
to the National Assembly of Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1947, where
he concerned himself particularly with cultural and educational
questions. In April 1950 he was elected delegate to the Chamber of
Nationalities of the National Assembly of the Federal National
Republic of Yugoslavia. He was decorated for his services to the
people by the Praesidium of the National Assembly in 1952, and in
December 1954 he was accepted for membership of the Communist
Party. This action was no doubt prompted by a desire to serve his
Introduction 29
country as fully as possible, rather than commitment to any political
party as such. Many of Andric's contemporaries have remarked on
his exceptional abilities in his work on committees. In view of his
well-known reticence and preference for privacy, this public activity
must be seen as his own realization of the contribution he could
make to the new, young society in the country to which he was
deeply committed.
On 27 September 1958, at the age of 66, Andric married Milica
Babic, costume-designer at the National Theatre in Belgrade.
Andric had been devoted to her for many years, but it was only now
that her first husband died and they were free to marry. They had
ten happy years of married life together before Milica died, aged
fifty-nine.
Andric is recorded on several occasions before this as having been
asked by younger writers whether he thought a writer ought to
marry. He always replied that it was probably better not to, although
this would mean considerable self-denial. His close friend Maja
Nizetic-Culic, however, interprets his reluctance to marry earlier
differently: "He was perpetually persecuted by a kind of fear; it
seemed as though he had been born afraid, and that is why he
married so late. He simply did not dare enter that area of life . . .
And so he lived: on the one hand fear, and on the other solitude . . .
And he did not know how to shake them off."42
Meanwhile, Andric's works were being translated into numerous
languages and he continued to play an active part in the cultural life
of Yugoslavia, participating in delegations to many countries includ-
ing China in 1956 and London in 1959, when The Bridge on theDrina
was published there. On this occasion he also visited Edinburgh.
On 26 October 1961, Andric was awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature. His reaction was reported in the Yugoslav press:
All the questions I am being asked today can be reduced to three

main groups: What do I feel? What do I think? and What am I
going to do?
The first question I can answer immediately and precisely. The
main emotion that fills me at this moment is a sense of gratitude. I
am grateful first of all to the Swedish Academy of Sciences; and
then to the institutions and individuals in my country who
proposed me for this award, to the institutions and individuals
abroad who supported this proposal. I thank all those who ever
helped me in my life and work, while I often did not manage to
thank them even verbally.
What do I think? I think that my country, through its
literature, has received international recognition.
What am I going to do? I shall answer this honestly too. I am
going to wait patiently until all this excitement around me, which
I am not accustomed to, and all this holiday atmosphere is over, to
get back once again to my ordinary, monotonous working day.
And a working day is always a celebration for me . . ,43
The following year was filled with public recognition for Andric's
work in various countries. In March he set out on a journey
to Greece and Egypt, but he was taken ill in Cairo and returned
to Belgrade for an operation. He was obliged by his health to
refuse invitations to visit the United States, France and Poland,
among other countries. The public recognition continued,
however, and numerous translations of his works appeared all over
Europe, in America, Mexico, South America, Iran, Japan and the
Lebanon.
It is clear from remarks in his letters at this time that this public
attention was a burden to Andric. He endured it graciously, but
became increasingly anxious to preserve his privacy. He wrote to
Maja Nizetic-Culic in 1967: "I am reasonably well, although the life
I am obliged to live is not at all healthy or agreeable . . ,"44 It was
particularly hard that these years, when so much international and
national attention was focused on Andric, were the years of his
marriage. His wife undoubtedly helped him endure the attention,
but they were granted all too little peaceful time together. Milica
died on 24 March 1968.
Andric was now seventy-six. He had never been strong, but now
his deteriorating health obliged him to refuse all invitations to travel
abroad, and he had frequently also to restrict his movements within
Yugoslavia. He continued to work until 1974, when he became
seriously ill. In December he went into hospital, where he died, after
a long struggle, on 13 March 1975. His funeral was attended by some
ten thousand citizens of Belgrade.
Introduction 31
The following general comment on Andric the man was made by a
Belgrade critic and philosopher, Dragan Jeremic:
Finally, a few words about the general impression Andric made on

me. Andric behaved towards everyone, regardless of who he was
or what work he did, with the same kindness, patience and
concern. He was kind and pleasant precisely up to the point that it
never became familiarity. In his presence only those who tried to
cross the barrier he put up for the sake of his peace, his work and
his essential concentration, could feel uncomfortable. He did not
easily abandon his plans and aims. That is why only those who
wanted to get too close to him out of pure curiosity or self-interest
might meet with resistance. He prized, above all, qualities of the
intellect, but he loved everything in life, as his work shows - open
to virtually all manifestations of life. He knew how to listen as no
one else, and from everything that anyone said or did he would
draw out at least one thread for his rich and complex work. And
only a truly wise man can do that. While ordinary people find
many things boring, empty and useless, a wise man knows how to
find benefit for his spirit and his work in everything. Andric knew
how to do that better than anyone else I have ever known.45
The literary and historical context

The last words of the preceding section can serve as a useful starting
point for an attempt to place Andric the writer in the whole context
of European literature: "From everything that anyone did or said he
would draw at least one thread for his rich and complex work."
Tracing possible influences on any writer with a truly individual
voice is a difficult task which can lead to only qualified statements.
On several occasions, in short articles written for various publica-
tions, Andric has described his early thirst for books and their
inaccessibility to him. There were no books at all in the poor homes
of Bosnia, except possibly one or two reference works or Church
calendars. Even secondary school offered little or nothing, and
during his school years in Sarajevo there were only three or four
shops selling school and office material which also stocked a few
books. The biggest and best of these displayed several Serbo-
Croatian and quite a number of German works generally published
in Vienna or Munich, light reading intended for the Austrian civil
servants and officers, and some German translations of the Russian
and Scandinavian works fashionable at the time. "They were all the
same to me", remarks Andric, "since I knew nothing whatever about
any of them."46 He describes how he used to spend hours as a
schoolboy in the front of this shop window - for him the only
window into the world - and at night he would go home and dream
about it: "Then it was no longer an ordinary shop window, with
books in it, but the light of the universe, a part of some constellation
towards which I was drawn with intense longing, but also with the
painful realization that it was inaccessible to me."47 He would go to
this enchanting window every day, and stare into it until he knew all
the names of the writers and titles by heart, wondering what was
hidden behind them and making up his own meanings for them.
One enterprising boy at the school used to acquire catalogues from
various publishers and bookshops in the larger towns and these
would sometimes contain the first instalment of an adventure story,
as an advertisement. The entrepreneur would then hire out the
precious pages to his eager colleagues for a small sum. In these
catalogues the boys read for the first time the names of Cervantes,
Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne . . . as well as the titles of
novels by Slav writers. Sometimes there would be a short synopsis of
the works, but more often the boys made up their own:
And when we raised our eyes from the pages of our catalogues, we
would gaze into the distance and read in it novels which we were
unable then to reach, and some which we would never reach, for
they did not exist in any publisher's list. On the summer sky and
the green slopes of the mountains, above the tops of the minarets
and towers, we read, in lightning quick versions, our own dream
of books as the most beautiful of all the beautiful things in the rich
and beautiful world which was just opening up before us.48
Andric describes this experience as the beginning of his writing -
not with his hand and not on paper, but in his mind, his thoughts,
his imagination.
Eventually Andric and some school-fellows discovered that one of
the stationers had a small lending department of some three or four
Introduction 33
hundred volumes in Serbo-Croat and German, mostly from the
famous Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek, which Andric describes in
The Bridge on the Drina as "those cheap little booklets with yellow
covers and unusually small print, which were the main spiritual food
accessible to schoolboys in Sarajevo at the time".49 And Andric set
about reading, avidly and quite indiscriminately, all the works of
Slav, German and world literature that he could lay his hands on.
While his tastes always remained wide, he gradually identified a few
writers as particularly congenial, referring to them as his "best
friends". The most important of these were Thomas Mann, Marcus
Aurelius, whose works he had by him constantly in his later years,
and Goethe, without whom he refused to leave for the hospital
during his last grave illness.
Another example of the importance of books to the young Andric
has often been quoted. When he was first imprisoned in Split he had
one book to share the dark hours of his solitary confinement. Much
has been made of his apparent choice of "soulmate", but Andric
himself has given a more matter-of-fact account. He was told that he
could send for some warmer clothes, a blanket and books from
home. Rejoicing at this news, Andric asked for all the books that
were on his table. In his excitement, he forgot that he had just tidied
them all away. There was just one single volume on his table,
brought by the postman since his arrest: Kierkegaard's Either . . .
Or . . . . This work can scarcely have contributed any real joy to
Andric's situation, but, on the other hand, it would be wrong to
attribute attitudes expressed in his early writings to this circum-
stance. The volume had greater symbolic value than direct influ-
ence: "That one single book was on my table, and that one single
work was the only one to reach me! But it was a book. I had a book in
my hand and I felt immediately that all that inexpressible fear had
vanished somewhere, that it was no longer anywhere in me; I felt
that I was continuing to live . . ."50
Because of his initial deprivation, books were always vitally
important to Andric. Later in his life, when he visited schools or
private houses, he could never resist examining the books on the
shelves. In every small town he visited he would call in at the library.
When he became a successful writer, he gave generously to schools
and libraries all over Yugoslavia to ensure that children should not
suffer the starvation of his own early years. His entire Nobel Prize
was dedicated to this cause.
In terms of his position in Yugoslav literature, Andric began to
write with its coming of age. The Serbo-Croat language had been
used in a standardized form as a written literary language only since
the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This is not to say that
it had not been used as a means of literary expression. On the
contrary, centuries of occupation by foreign powers and widespread
illiteracy had fostered the growth of a rich oral literature. Without
this heritage, the phenomenon of Andric would be inexplicable: the
particular strength and resonance of his work springs directly from
these roots, firmly planted in his native soil.
From these roots a literary tradition in Serbo-Croat grew up in the
course of the nineteenth century. With a few exceptions, the writers
of this period can be seen on the whole as serving a rapid
apprenticeship to the craft of literature, steadily increasing its range
in terms of material and technique. By the beginning of the
twentieth century, under pressure of various political events and
circumstances, the cultural life of the Serbs and Croats had been
propelled into Europe and writers had gained sufficient maturity to
be able fruitfully to absorb influences from the mainstream of
European literature. The European context of literary activity in the
Yugoslav lands was no longer questioned. Since the end of the
nineteenth century, young people from all parts of the future
Kingdom of Yugoslavia had been travelling widely in Europe and
studying at various universities in the Habsburg Monarchy or in
Paris. It was at this time that Andric entered wholeheartedly into the
cultural life of his country, eager to know and share in the whole
European literary tradition.
This he did with great energy and thoroughness, acquiring, as we
have seen, a knowledge of several European languages as well as
Latin and Greek by the time he left school. In this he was by no
means exceptional among his fellow-writers and critics. The early
years of his literary activity were spent very much as part of a group,
working on the one hand within the world of books and on the other
for the improvement of cultural and social conditions. It was not
until he was living in Belgrade in the 1920s that he began to separate
himself increasingly from the various literary circles there. Andric's
Introduction 35
work was well-known and widely acclaimed in Yugoslavia between
the wars, but it was after the Second World War that his stature in
Yugoslav literature was assured, and particularly, of course, after the
international recognition of the Nobel Prize. He is now generally
regarded as the outstanding Yugoslav writer of the first half of the
twentieth century.
The external events which affected Andric's life were of course the
common experience of his generation throughout the Western world
- the two World Wars, the rise of Fascism and the growth of
Communism as a political force. The direct involvement of the
Yugoslav lands in these events meant that their experience could no
longer be regarded as in any sense peripheral: Andric himself lived
through the exceptional violence of the first half of the twentieth
century which had such a profound effect on his whole generation.
The bonds with his contemporaries throughout Europe were conse-
quently deep, and his central experience of the tragic and violent
divisions between men was one with which his whole generation had
to come to terms.
In view of the highly individual flavour of Andric's imaginative
world and his strength as a writer, it is more appropriate to talk in
terms of experience shared with his fellow-writers, of literary and
imaginative sympathies rather than influences as such. Andric's
writing is of course shaped by his reading, on several different levels,
of which many cannot ever be isolated. Meanwhile, various studies
have been written on the influences on his work which can be most
readily identified, for example: Ivo Andric and Classical Literature;
Andric and German Literature; Andric and Scandinavian Literature;
Andric and the French; Andric, Strindberg and Kierkegaard; Andric and
Italian Literature.51
The Classical influence has been seen chiefly in his lucid economi-
cal style and in his stoical outlook. Points of contact have been noted
with such writers as Pascal and Montaigne, with poets such as
Heine, Rilke and Maeterlinck. Andric himself has spoken of his
particularly deep affection for Goethe. Naturally enough, however,
affinities with various twentieth-century European writers are the
most clearly seen.
Andric's most consistent contact was with German literature, and
one of the first possible influences to be remarked on was that of
Kafka. Andric himself has, however, put this relationship in per-
spective: "We were both subjects of the same Empire, we lived in
the same city, perhaps in the same street, perhaps we attended
lectures by the same professors, we breathed the same air, grew up
in the same atmosphere, why should we not - here and there - have
thought or said the same things?"52
Points of contact have also been identified with Nietzsche,
mentioned by Andric in The Bridge on the Drina as one of the writers
whom the university students read avidly on the eve of the First
World War: the idea of immutability personified by the bridge itself;
the idea of perpetual repetition; Nietzsche's concept of "Ewige
Wiederkunft"; the notion of the dynamism of the struggle between
good and evil; the theme of illusion. Ideas of this kind are
undoubtedly present in Andric's work, although it would probably
again be inappropriate to speak of a direct influence. A more
immediate sympathy can be seen in Andric's attitude to the work of
Thomas Mann, a writer whom he knew particularly well, but again
this affinity should not be exaggerated. Points of contact between the
two writers include a concern with the legends of humanity, with
history, with universals; an interest in the irrational stimuli of
human behaviour.
The influence of Scandinavian writers on Andric's generation has
been considerable; their discovery in the first years of the twentieth
century was a revelation to intellectuals in Yugoslavia. Andric's
immoderate reading of Strindberg at an early age established a
certain bond which can be seen most clearly in the intense irrational
psychological currents beneath the surface of Andric's calm prose,
particularly in the stories written between the wars concerning
individual psyches thrown off balance for one reason or another. In
his mature years Andric retained a great respect for Scandinavian
writers of his own generation, and read them with more sympathy as
he grew beyond his early infatuation with Strindberg.
It is the name of Kierkegaard, however, which is most frequently
linked with the early years of Andric's writing, and there is no doubt
that Andric was drawn to the philosophical and spiritual world he
formulated. It was the expression of a world view with which Kafka
also had much in common, describing himself as "on the same side
of life" as Kierkegaard. And of course it underlies the whole
Introduction 37
Existentialist approach, which affected so much European writing in
the first half of the twentieth century. Obvious affinities with
Kierkegaard include a fundamental anxiety, unease, as the central
experience of life; a conviction that thought cannot be divorced from
the immediacy of life; that understanding can be achieved only
through the experience itself; the notion that conditions of life are
fundamentally the same for all men at all times; the dominant tone of
melancholy, arising from a strong imagination able always to see
clearly the disparity between the real and the possible, and its
creative potential; and, related to this, the vital role of paradox and
the passion it generates; the crucial importance of isolation in the
process of discovering truths about human existence.
At the heart of Andric's writing there is a certain rigour, springing
on the one hand from the kind of self-denial proposed by Kierke-
gaard, a concentration that depends on solitude and silence, and on
the other from a determination to hold all the paradoxical elements
of the experience of life together, to deny none in favour of a
comfortable half-truth. It is this rigorous determination to confront
the central paradoxes of the human condition that brings Andric's
writing close to that of the Existentialist writer he most admired,
Camus. One could say of Andric's positive acceptance of transience
and a world dominated by arbitrary forces, as of Camus, that the
mere fact of facing the absurd clear-sightedly is in itself a partial
release.
The presence of the German and Scandinavian literary traditions
in Andric's writing is perhaps most readily traced. This connection
is a result partly of his early education in the German-speaking
world, and partly of the strong presence in early twentieth-century
European writing as a whole of such thinkers as Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard. Another important, if unstated, influence on Andric's
generation is that of nineteenth-century French literature, and
particularly Flaubert.
Aspects of Andric's work, notably his concern with the perennial
truths of legend in a modern form, are close to Mann, Anouilh and
Camus. At the same time, his writing has been likened to the work of
Conrad and Henry James. There have been studies of the "inter-
national" theme in Andric's work, the confrontation of cultures, in
relation to James and Conrad. In addition to the material these
writers have in common, there are distinct similarities in the tone of
their works: in the distance each stands from his material and the
resulting irony and humour. For the rigour at the core of Andric's
work involves also his complete control of his material, with its
complex but apparently impassive texture.
Andric has also drawn on his own Serbo-Croat tradition, and he
has written on several occasions of those writers to whom he felt
particularly close. These include a number of prose writers from the
late nineteenth century, and the Montenegrin poet Njegos. Above
all, however, it is to the collector of Yugoslav oral literature, Vuk
Stefanovic Karadzic, that Andric most readily returns; to Karadzic's
extraordinary determination against great odds, his persistence, his
wholehearted devotion to the life of the people, their customs and all
aspects of the manifestation of their culture, his perspicacity and
literary acumen which enabled him to select at once what was most
specific and most universal in that culture; and his own lucid,
objective but vivid style.
Andric began his literary activity writing poetry and criticism
within a wholly European frame of reference. It was not long,
however, before he turned definitively to his own local culture, to his
roots, to the "heritage of his forefathers", the oral traditional
literature. The presence of this culture is not always immediately
obvious in Andric's works, but where it is it accounts for their
particular density and resonance.
A number of studies have been written concerned with various
aspects of the reflection of Yugoslav oral culture in Andric's work.
Some deal with explicit references to songs and stories, giving
examples of direct quotations, particularly of proverbs. Some treat
the question of the influence of oral literature on Andric's style and
narrative procedure. Others are concerned with the particular nature
of the legends which can be traced in his work and their origin in the
oral tradition.
Perhaps the most vital aspect of this relationship is that in his
references to the oral literature of his countrymen, Andric is above
all simply acknowledging a response to the human condition univer-
sally manifested in the creation of legends, heroes, ballads and lyric
songs. When Andric speaks of "the truth that is contained in
legend", he is as interested in the "truth" itself as he is in the
Introduction 39
conditions in which its expression arose, as interested in the legend as
in the circumstances that gave rise to it. Here, seeking with Vuk
Karadzic the most universal statements which meet a profound
human need, Andric vividly illustrates the fact that, for all its local
colour, an individual culture can cross all national barriers. The other
crucial aspect of this relationship springs from Andric's concern with
history. One of the most important dimensions of the oral culture is its
function as the expression of the people's interpretation of their
history, their view of themselves, their values and their particular
experience. In this narrower aspect of a national culture it is precisely
the differences between nations which are emphasized, and here that
the barriers are built. In The Bridge on the Drina a perennial human
need is manifested in the Visegrad children's references to the heroes
of the ballads with which they grow up. The children of both
Christian and Moslem families are equally entranced by the ballads,
and the heroes are equally real to them: dents in the road beside the
bridge are known to have been made by the hoofprints of their hero's
horse. For the Christian children, however, the horse is that of the
Serbian prince Marko, while for the Moslems it is that of Alija
-Derzelez. Thus Andric identifies the fact that an individual culture
can both reinforce divisions between men and, at the same time, in its
basic intention, can bridge them. The divisions are in the foreground
and cannot be resolved, but they are rendered insignificant by a
broader perspective.
These roots of Andric's work bring us back to the idea that thought
cannot be divorced from the immediacy of life. Understanding can be
achieved only through the individual's own personal experience of a
particular reality. At the same time this is only one aspect of Andric's
experience, a particularly vital and creative one certainly, but one
which cannot be separated from all the many other disparate
influences which conditioned his work.
Critics and literary historians continue to try to identify the decisive
influences in Andric's work, just as potential biographers endeavour
to trace the shaping forces in his personal life. The last word should be
left to Andric himself:
I don't believe at all in decisive influences. A man grows, develops,

reads, paints, writes, composes, some things attract him more,
some less, he is receptive to some things and resists others,
consciously or unconsciously . . . It has sometimes happened that
I have gained immeasurably more at some concert than from a
meeting with a writer I once greatly admired. And vice versa: I
have sometimes gone to a concert happy to think I was going to
hear a work which meant a great deal to me at one time, and
returned from the concert empty, dull. It was not that the work
was different, I was different, my mood was different, on one
occasion I was quite tranquil and open, ready to respond, on the
other I was like a closed book, inaccessible. And perhaps it was in
fact that other concert, for me apparently unsuccessful, that was
the more significant for what I did that day, than the other which
remained as a treasured memory . . .
And when you ask me who has influenced me decisively, how
can I answer? That shop window with the books whose titles I did
not understand? Perhaps precisely that! Or that one single book
which was on my desk? Perhaps just that! . . . But, you see: it
could equally well have been Jules Verne and not Kierkegaard
that was on my table, and now you are imprisoned with that one
single book which chance has thrust into your hands for a year,
two years, you read it ten, twenty times. Can that writer and his
book influence you? They must, but it is not the same if the
influence is Kierkegaard's or Verne's . . . No, I really think that
there cannot be a precise answer: when you embark on this
adventure of writing, then everything influences you. When I was
young, for instance, I particularly liked Leopardi. His poetry
enchanted me. When I was starting to write I used to say to
myself: what is the use of writing when no one can say what
Leopardi said . . . And the way he said it. That love for Leopardi
was my secret . . . I studied in Cracow and I could say a great,
great deal about how much I owe Polish literature; both Polish
poets and Polish novelists, that is my great, personal debt of
gratitude. Or, there is in me an exceptionally strong line of
connection with Scandinavian writers: Strindberg, Hamsun,
Selma Lagerlof, Ibsen . . . Or, how much I could say about what
it meant to me to get to know the work of some French or
Russian, German, English, Spanish writers. As a student I read
old Chinese poets in French and German translation. They moved
Introduction 41
me, both by their thoughtfulness and their warmth. They
sounded better to me in German. I don't know why of course: did
it have to do with the spirit of the two languages; or perhaps it was
a question of which translator was better; or was it perhaps that I
was more "at home" with German then - in any case those
German translations gave me enormous pleasure. They made me
want to see China and I did not miss the opportunity when it arose
. . . But then, you see, when I was in Stockholm years later I
spoke in French . . .
All of that - the little shop window with the books, the book in
prison, Leopardi, Chinese verses, Scandinavians and Poles,
French, German and Russian writers - it is all just one possible
aspect of the story of influences. How could it be possible to
extract from all of that, and far more that has not been men-
tioned, something that should be called - a decisive influence? I
simply do not know and am not sure that I would even know how
to say it. The reason is very mundane: when you read good writers
extraordinary things sometimes happen to you - you suddenly feel
that the writer you are reading is talking about something that has
been smouldering buried somewhere within you and that you
realize in an astonishing way that you are not alone, that someone
else has been troubled by what is disturbing you; that you have
not been abandoned, that someone else has been hurt and
tormented by what is hurting you now and over which you are
tormenting yourself. That is at the same time support, hope, and
solace.53
First literary allegiances

This is the broad context in which Andric's work should be viewed.
As he grew as a man and developed as a writer, he tended to work in
increasing isolation, with the many various influences on him acting
beneath the surface. He took no part in the literary groupings in
Yugoslavia between the wars: Expressionist, Surrealist, or the
various shades of left-oriented writing. There was only one period in
his life when he was wholly involved with a group of writers and that
was as a very young man, when he was a prominent member of the
Young Bosnia movement. But the experience of these formative
years was of particular importance in his emotional and intellectual
development and should therefore be considered in some detail.
Every generation of men has its own illusion about civilization;
some believe they are helping to stir it up to a blaze, and others
that they are witnessing its extinction. In fact, it is constantly
flaring up and smouldering and being extinguished, depending on
the position and angle from which we observe it. This generation,
which was now discussing philosophical, social and political
questions on the bridge, under the stars, above the water, was
merely richer in illusions; otherwise it was similar in every way to
others. It too had the feeling that it was both lighting the first fires
of a new civilization and extinguishing the last flames of another
which was burning itself out. The only thing that could be said
about these young people in particular was that for a long time
there had not been a generation which had dreamed and talked
more about life, pleasure and freedom, and which had less of life,
suffered more, was imprisoned and perished in greater numbers
than this generation was about to suffer, be imprisoned and
perish. But in those summer days of 1913 there were only bold but
vague intimations. It all seemed like an exciting new game on the
ancient bridge which glowed white in the moonlight of those July
nights, clean, young and unchanging, but perfectly beautiful and
strong, stronger than everything time could bring and people
invent or do.54
In these words from The Bridge on the Drina Andric describes his
own generation on the eve of the First World War. This was the
generation that formed the "Young Bosnia" movement. It is more
appropriate to talk in terms of a generation, for the movement itself
was amorphous and fragmented, although spontaneous, active and
widespread, involving young people from every kind of background
and reflecting all shades of opinion from the vaguely liberal to the
radical revolutionary. It is difficult not to view the participants in the
Young Bosnia movement with hindsight, to see all their actions as
leading systematically to the First World War. That has indeed been
the position of much of the voluminous literature examining the
causes of the War and identifying the responsibility for it. But while
many of the young men concerned were increasingly impatient with
Introduction 43
words and favoured action, no one could have foreseen the repercus-
sions of the pistol shot fired by one of the youngest members of the
movement. An article written by one of the Young Bosnian leaders,
Vladimir Gacinovic, in 1915, expresses their typical response.
Speaking of Gavrilo Princip, he writes: "It never occurred to my
young friend that his heroic bullet would provoke the present world
war. And, believe me, when I read the various reports of it, my head
reels with the appalling thought: did we, really, start all this?"55
In order to try to understand how Ivo Andric came to be actively
involved in the Young Bosnia movement, it is necessary to consider
the circumstances in which it came into being.
The lands which make up present-day Yugoslavia had been
divided for centuries under several foreign powers; the Turks in the
east, the Venetians on the coast and the Habsburg Monarchy in the
west. The Venetians had begun to settle on the coast in the eleventh
century, the Turks had arrived in the Balkan peninsula in the
fourteenth century, and the Habsburgs, with their acceptance of the
Croatian crown, in 1527. In addition the Croatian Lands had
formed part of the medieval kingdom of Hungary from 1102 to 1526,
when the Turks overran Hungary. If one considers the crucial
cultural divisions between the various regions - the Orthodox
Christian areas in the east, now dominated by Islam, the strongly
Moslem central region of Bosnia and the Catholic west - then the
scale of the obstacles to unification of the South Slav lands can be
clearly seen as immense. For the Serbs and Croats - divided between
the eastern and western areas, and spread fairly equally through
Bosnia - formed, despite all these barriers, one single linguistic
community. The nineteenth century brought many changes, setting
in motion processes that were eventually to lead to the formation of
the new Europe after 1918. Ottoman power had been steadily
waning, the Venetian Republic had ceased to exist and the Habsburg
Monarchy was seriously weakened by both external and internal
pressures. In 1804 and 1813 there were rebellions in Serbia which
led to the foundation of a virtually independent principality in 1830.
Conditions in Bosnia towards the end of the nineteenth century
were wretched, and only aggravated by the Austrian occupation of
1878. In The Bridge on the Drina Andric describes the rapid changes
which followed the arrival of the Austrians, and their apparently
frenzied activity which was quite incomprehensible to the local
population, accustomed to the relatively uneventful years of Turkish
rule. The material changes brought about by rapid industrialization
not only meant a still heavier burden of taxation, but gradually also
had a profound effect on the mentality of the people of Bosnia. Their
poverty obliged thousands to seek work abroad, notably in Germany
and America. It was said that some Bosnian villages sent half their
male population to work abroad, while the other half served in the
Austrian army. Many previously prosperous villages were virtually
deserted. These migrant workers returned from abroad more criti-
cal, less passive, and they offered a ready response to the leadership
of the young people educated in the few Bosnian schools and the
universities of Zagreb, Vienna, Prague and Graz. Together, the new
generation of Bosnians, both peasants and educated young people,
organized groups in the villages: agricultural and commercial
co-operatives, gymnastics societies and temperance groups. The
students were anxious to share their learning, they organized courses
in medicine, geography and political economics, opened reading
rooms and ran newspapers.
Andric describes the effect of these developments on the small
town of Visegrad:
Parallel with the rise in prices and that incomprehensible but

obtrusive game of rising and falling bonds, dividends and the
value of money, people began increasingly to talk about politics.
Until then the people of the town had been concerned exclu-
sively with what was close and familiar to them, with their
earnings, their amusements, generally only with questions relating
to their family and their parish, town or religious community, but
always directly and narrowly, not looking far either ahead or back.
Now, however, in the course of conversation, increasingly often
questions arose which lay somewhere further off, beyond this
circle. Religious and national parties - Serbian and Moslem - were
founded in Sarajevo, and immediately afterwards sub-committees
were set up. Reading rooms and choral societies were founded,
first Serbian, then Moslem and, finally, Jewish. Boys from the
secondary schools and students from university in Vienna and
Prague began to arrive home for the vacations, bringing new
Introduction 45
books and pamphlets and a new way of expressing themselves. By
their example they showed the young townspeople that they need
not always silently conceal their true thoughts as the older people
had always believed and maintained. New religious and national
organizations sprang up on a broader base, with bolder amis; then
workers' organizations also appeared. It was then that the word
"strike" was heard for the first time in the town. The young
apprentices grew serious. In the evenings, on the bridge, they held
discussions among themselves which would have been incompre-
hensible to others and exchanged little paper-bound pamphlets,
with titles like "What Is Socialism?", "Eight Hours of Work,
Eight of Rest and Eight of Education", "The Aims and Direction
of the World Proletariat".
There were many townspeople who remained cautiously silent
or repressed such innovations and daring thoughts and words. But
there were still more, particularly among the younger, poorer
people with time on their hands, who welcomed them all as joyful
indications which corresponded to their inner needs, suppressed
and kept silent until then, and which brought into their lives that
grand and exciting element which had so far been lacking. As they
read the speeches and articles, protests and memoranda of the
religious and party organizations, each of them had the feeling
that something was being disentangled within him, that his
horizons were being broadened, his ideas liberated and his
energies linked with other people and energies far away, about
which he had never thought until now. Now people began to look
at each other from a new angle. It seemed to them that life was
becoming more expansive, richer, that the limits of what was
inadmissible and impossible were being moved back and that new
vistas and possibilities were being opened up.
In fact, they did not have anything new even now, nor could
they see anything better, but they were able to look beyond their
immediate small-town present to have an exciting illusion of
breadth and strength. Their habits did not change, their way of
life and the forms of their dealings with each other remained the
same; it was only that arguments, bold words and a new way of
conversing entered into the ancient ritual of sitting idly over
coffee, tobacco and brandy. People began to separate and gather
together, reject and attract each other according to new standards
and on a new basis, with the force of old passions and ancient
impulses.56
It was this atmosphere of profound general change in the mental-

ity of the people as a whole that gave the young people directly
involved in the Young Bosnia movement such a heady sense of the
effectiveness of their activities. These activities, while enthusiastic,
were sporadic and not sufficiently well organized to be sustained.
Nevertheless, at one time or another each region had its own
periodical publication, designed to cater for the needs and interests
of the people, which contributed to an increasingly widespread
sense of community and national responsibility. And the single-
minded dedication of the leaders of the movement was certainly
impressive.
Apart from their endeavours to broaden the horizons of the
people, the movement's activities chiefly consisted of meeting in
small groups. There were at this period large numbers of young
people throughout the Habsburg Monarchy who belonged to secret
societies representing various shades of opinion. They gathered
mainly to read, to compile their pamphlets and newspapers, to
exchange ideas. Literature played a vital role in shaping the ideas
and organization of the movement. Almost all the Young Bosnians
tried their hand at some literary activity, in the belief that a
revolution in the spiritual and intellectual life of individuals must
precede all radical social and political change. These young people
set to work energetically to translate all the most popular contem-
porary writers, notably Scandinavian, particularly Strindberg, but
also many German, Belgian, Russian, French, English and Italian
works. They were remarkably effective in circulating books, con-
sidering the generally low level of culture in Bosnia.
Sarajevo was a natural focal point in the atmosphere following
the annexation of 1908. This atmosphere of resentment was height-
ened by events in Croatia, where in 1910 the Governor, Cuvaj,
appointed by Budapest, had initiated a period of unconstitutional
rule. There was an attempt on Cuvaj's life in 1912. A comment
made at the time by Ivo Andric in his diary epitomizes the growing
impatience of the movement's adherents:
Introduction 47
Today Lukic tried to assassinate Cuvaj. How splendid it is that the
secret threads of action and rebellion are being drawn together.
How joyfully I foresee days of great deeds . . . My life is passing
without the blessing of goodness and sacrifice. But I love the good.
Long live those who die on the pavements, unconscious with
anger and gunpowder, smarting from our common shame! Long
live those who, withdrawn and silent in their dark rooms, prepare
the rebellion and constantly think up new actions!57
Serbian and Croatian students in Vienna decided that they should

form joint societies to respond effectively to the situation. In 1911 a
group of radical schoolboys and students in Sarajevo founded the
"Croato-Serb or Serbo-Croat or Yugoslav Progressive Youth Organi-
zation", with the nineteen-year-old Ivo Andric as its first president.
Gavrilo Princip was among the first to join this new society.
Andric's involvement in the progressive groups of his time was
inevitable. However temperamentally unsuited he was to violent
revolutionary action, it was impossible that a young man of his
seriousness, with his strong moral and patriotic sense, could have
avoided being caught up in the ideals and activities of his contem-
poraries. Above all, a common passion for books brought'the young
men together, and this passion dominated Andric's life as a school-
boy. Their ideals were based to a considerable extent on the writings
of the Russian Positivists, just as their programme of education for
the people reflected similar activities in the Russian and other Slav
lands towards the end of the nineteenth century. Some of these ideas
were also reinforced by a selective reading of philosophers both
Classical and contemporary - whose views were promoted in the
pages of the movement's various journals.
Andric's intellectual education, in the specific, drastic circum-
stances of his youth, was intense and rapid. His reading, writing,
and the discussions he had with his contemporaries were given a
special urgency by the extremity of his situation: on the one hand
there was the unsatisfactory social and political situation of Bosnia
in the early twentieth century, and on the other the appalling scale of
the cataclysm which appeared to the young men of Andric's
generation to be, at least in part, a consequence of their efforts to
remedy the circumstances around them.
We shall probably never know the extent to which Andric's
feeling of responsibility for the events of the First World War
contributed to the guilt which he describes frequently in his writings
as one of the essential experiences of his life. It is likely that this
feeling of guilt was far deeper, an irrational reaction, a temperamen-
tal disquiet, aggravated by his experience of Catholic dogma.
Nevertheless, it was probably reinforced by the consequences of his
one venture into direct political activity.
Similarly, Andric's sense of isolation in the world was absolute,
almost mystical. We may also assume that it was intensified by his
experience of imprisonment. Andric was twenty-two when he was
arrested. Never particularly strong, he became ill with tuberculosis
during his imprisonment and spent part of the War in a hospital for
non-combatants. These circumstances all combined to reinforce the
sense of isolation, the fear, disquiet and guilt which colour so many
of Andric's writings.
How early Andric began to suspect that he was not temperamen-
tally suited to the life of an active revolutionary is also a matter for
speculation. He has left an eloquent account of his realization,
however, which is included in the collection of prose poems,
Anxieties. "Story from Japan" is written in the form of a parable.
After the successful coup by a group of 350 conspirators against the
Empress Au-Ung (Austria-Hungary?), which included the poet
Mori Ipo, when the group met for their first ceremonial assembly,
Mori Ipo was not among them. A slave was sent with a sedan chair to
bring him; instead the slave returned with a letter:
Mori Ipo sends greetings to his comrades, the conspirators, on

their parting!
I thank you, comrades, for our common suffering and faith and
our victory, and I ask you to forgive me that I am unable also to
share with you in the victory as I shared in the struggle. But poets
- unlike other beings - are loyal only in misfortune; they abandon
those who are doing well. We poets are born for struggle, we are
passionate hunters, but we do not partake of the booty. The
barrier that divides me from you is narrow and invisible, but is not
the blade of a sword also thin and yet it is deadly? I could not cross
it to join you without detriment to my soul, for we can stand
Introduction 49
everything except power. That is why I am leaving you, comrade
conspirators, and I am going to see whether there is anywhere an
idea which has not been put into practice or an aspiration which
has not been realized. And may you govern with reason and good
fortune! But should any misfortune or trial ever beset our Empire
of the Seven Islands and should there be a need for struggle and
for solace in the struggle, then please call on me.
Here the president of the council, who was a little deaf, stopped
reading and with the impatience of an old man, said with some
displeasure:
"What misfortune could possibly befall the Empire under the just
and enlightened rule of the 350?"
All the members of the council nodded; the older ones smiled
disdainfully and pityingly: What possible misfortune! The reading
was not continued; they began to debate the law on import and
excise duties.
Only the head of the nation's scholars read the poet's message to
the end, but to himself, and then he folded it up and deposited it
in the archive of the former Empress.58
The sense of responsibility to his countrymen ascribed here to the
Japanese poet remained with Andric all his life. It dictated his choice
of profession and drove him, however reluctantly, to involve himself
in certain limited ways in public life after the Second World War.
"It is quite pointless to describe a writer, it distracts the reader's attention

from the real things."59
The preceding endeavour to place Andric in his context, geographi-
cal, cultural and historical, can do no more than present a number of
external facts. For Andric the "real" things were the life of his mind,
his creative work. Consequently the experience of his diplomatic and
public life is only indirectly reflected in his work. His search is for
the patterns and perennial truths underlying the surface forms of
human existence, for the metaphysical dimensions of experience.
Nor are his characters neutral actors whose lives are confined to
their public role. Andric's response to the world is essentially
emotional, for all the restraint and apparent objectivity of his prose.
It is this strong lyrical element, combined with the broad perspective
of his works, that gives Andric's portrayal of people in history, and
his evocation of the myths and legends by which man orders his
experience, that immediacy which is his hallmark.
One of Andric's favoured literary forms is lyrical reflective prose.
There are several essays and numerous shorter pieces which are
often virtually prose poems. These fall into two very broad categor-
ies. The majority are statements which formulate a general conclu-
sion about the nature of human behaviour and existence. The others
are observations of the surface detail of human experience. At their
best, they have the aphoristic quality of statements which promise to
reveal essential truths. This comes on the one hand from their roots
in the accumulated wisdom of the people as it is expressed in folk
literature, and on the other from an affinity with the European
tradition of reflective prose, in particular the work of such writers as
Marcus Aurelius, Pascal and Montaigne. Passages of this kind occur
also in Andric's fiction and contribute to its quality of a generalized
statement.
A clue to this tendency of Andric's work can be found in one of
the longer pieces of reflective prose. These tend to focus on
important symbols in his writing - "Bridges", "Faces", "Sun". One
is devoted to "Wine", and includes the words: "Everything which I
praise in these words has once passed through my senses and my
consciousness, pleased me and strengthened me and left me the idea
of myself as the only reality."60 This is, then, the starting point of all
Andric's writing, as it is the point at which the circle of his thinking
is closed. "Ever since I can remember", Andric once wrote, "I feel
that I have been working on and preparing always the same work.
Parts of this work are published and acquire the name of 'story',
'poem', 'essay'."61
The divisions between the various genres in Andric's work are
often very slight. He is concerned with the essential features of the
human condition, which he approaches from a variety of different
angles and perspectives. To borrow the image on which the form of
the novella Devil's Yard is based, his works construct more or less
elaborate circles around a nucleus which is the individual confront-
ing his own identity in the flux of human destiny.
2
Verse
First poems, Ex Ponto, Anxieties
Andric's first published works were poems and he continued to write
verse intermittently all his life, although much of it was not
published until after his death.
His first poems appeared in the context of the Young Bosnia
movement. The writing of its members is in marked contrast to their
robust active personalities. For, while they were committed to
violent revolutionary action and their essays reflect their belief in its
effectiveness, their imaginative works are coloured by the prevailing
tone of European literature. In their critical writings they called, as
their contemporaries throughout Europe were doing, for revolution-
ary modern modes in all areas of life, from love to poetry. They
found that this modernity was hard to achieve in practice, however,
and surrendered to the fashionable literary mode, a Neo-Romantic
melancholy which was well enough suited to their dispiriting
environment.
The poems Andric published before the First World War are
virtually indistinguishable in tone from much of what his contem-
poraries were writing. Nevertheless, it is probably true to say that in
his case the role of the political activist, however sincerely he played
it at the time, was fundamentally unsuited to him. By contrast,
however, the prevailing melancholy seemed to match his own
temperamental response to the world.
These early poems point in no particular direction, beyond
establishing the free verse form of virtually all Andric's poetry and a
tendency to a mournful self-pity which sometimes threatens his
personal statements.
The prose poems written during the War, however, represent a
personal confession and cannot be considered merely the reflection
of a literary vogue. Ex Ponto (the title refers to Ovid's account of his
exile on the Black Sea) was published in 1918, Anxieties in 1920,
when Ex Ponto was also reprinted. Thereafter Andric refused to
allow them to be included in any of the collections of his works
published before his death. He rejected them because they seemed to
him too raw and too intimate, unprocessed reactions to the circum-
stances of his life in the War years and of no artistic value.
Nevertheless, they are important since they contain ideas and
themes which recur in his later works.
The strong emotional colouring, particularly of Ex Ponto, was
toned down in Andric's later prose poems and verse but their form, a
combination of aphoristic statements and longer reflective passages,
continued to appeal to him.
Ex Ponto and Anxieties record Andric's emotional reaction to the
circumstances of his early life and the development of a number of
themes around the central paradox of his personality and his work.
One of the last passages in Ex Ponto expresses this paradox
succinctly: "Wherever I look there is poetry, whatever I touch
brings pain."1
These few words could stand as an epigraph to all of Andric's
work. Its abundance of stories, characters, observations, comments,
is its first striking aspect, coloured by a clear-sighted acceptance of
the essentially tragic nature of the human condition. In Ex Ponto
despair predominates, but the work also traces the growth of
remarkable strength.
Andric was twenty-two when he was arrested and imprisoned.
This fact alone might be enough to account for much of the tone of
the volume. Andric has said that at that time, in Sarajevo, it was
known exactly who could and who could not be arrested. Only
criminals went to prison.
To be in prison seemed to me then - the end of everything. The

end of life: you wait only for the moment when they will come to
take you off to the execution yard; you expected nothing else . . .
We had no experience. When I found myself in my cell, I thought
only of death. I remember cell No. 115 and my inexpressible fear
. . . The door opens, squeaking slightly, slams, you hear the key,
and you are left alone. Alone, and with you your fear. Immense.
Verse 53
Whatever you start thinking about, every thought ends with - fear
. . . I found myself constantly thinking about the sun. Where was
it? Did it exist?2
Andric already felt isolated from his fellow-students, not quite
sharing their revolutionary zeal. The little he has said about his
relationship with the Catholic God of his childhood suggests that he
felt equally cut off from Him. Here, then, was a young man whose
experience of the world had already been intense and had forced a
burden of responsibility on to his immature shoulders. In prison he
was left in solitary confinement for several weeks.
Some years after his experience Andric was able to give it
expression in several sketches describing a young man's imprison-
ment and his obsession with the sunlight falling through his barred
window.
In the introduction to Ex Ponto written by Andric's friend Niko
Bartulovic we are given a glimpse of the young writer's personality as
seen from the outside, which confirms the impression conveyed by
the text:
As he says himself, Ivo Andric was already a little tired when he
came into the world. He attributes this to atavism. The last male
descendant of an old Sarajevo family, physically delicate and frail,
with the thoughtful eyes of a dreamer, he seemed really to feel in
his own person the weariness of many generations. Apart from
that, you can see no trace of his Bosnian surroundings in him in
any form, and he maintains for precisely that reason that his whole
heritage has been condensed into the traditional Bosnian inclina-
tion to melancholy. The songs of the area he comes from, with all
their soft minor-key intonation, are nothing but one great sorrow
and unspecified longing . . .3
Melancholy, then, is the keynote of Andric's temperament. It
suggests immediately isolation, introspection and, in these early
poems, a Neo-Romantic exaltation of the insights granted by such a
temperament:
The sickly thoughts and dark forebodings of the melancholy have
a terrible accuracy, however absurd and misguided they appear to
the healthy.
The melancholy are like the aspen, which trembles when other
trees do not even feel the breeze. Like an actor who casts a shadow
on to the stage while he is still standing in the wings; thus events
appear in the dreams and forebodings of the melancholy.
The centre of a healthy man's thoughts is life and the questions
it raises, but in the melancholy it is death and its secrets . . ,4
This response to the world, although later expressed in less
hackneyed terms, was probably conditioned by a combination of
physical attributes, childhood experiences - including the mournful
songs of his native land - and the extreme circumstances of his
experience of the War and of imprisonment. He continued to see the
true reality underlying all appearances in these dark colours. In
many of his later works, Andric describes characters who are for
various reasons more able than their fellow-men to apprehend what
he regards as the true nature of reality, because they are somehow
outside surface forms and distractions. A recurring theme is the
insight granted by a sudden change of perspective. Given its
importance in Andric's work as a whole, it is legitimate to assume
that, while his reaction to his imprisonment was conditioned by
latent tendencies, the experience itself was decisive. Not only did
this experience set in motion a number of emotional reactions to the
world, but it also determined a symbolic vision of the world itself as
a prison, a vision hinted at in various works and whose full value is
expressed in Devil's Yard. This stock Romantic metaphor thus
acquires substance in Andric's work.
The notion of a change in perspective is described in the opening
passage of Ex Ponto:
Has it ever happened to you that, thrown off the rails, you bid
farewell to the everyday and are swept off, borne by a terrible
whirlwind, appalled, as one under whose feet the ground is
slipping away?
Has it happened to you that everything is taken from you - and
what cannot be taken away from a man? - that a heavy, hideous
hand is placed on your soul, taking from you the joy and serenity
of a free spirit; and that your very courage, which remains as the
last desperate gift of destiny, is taken from you and you are left a
dumb, callow slave?5
Verse 55
The High Romantic tone of this passage reflects at once Andric's
youth and the exalted spirit in which he and his Young Bosnia
contemporaries steeped themselves in literature.
The experience conveyed in these dark colours to the young man
in his solitary cell tended to crystallize into several specific emotions,
and those remained the central categories of human experience in
many of Andric's works. The dominant psychological states are
isolation - from men and God - fear, guilt, sin, suffering. These
states are experienced within an all-encompassing absolute silence.
In the midst of this despair, there are sudden moments of clarity
and "light". Nowhere in this work, or in any of Andric's later works,
is there any attempt to explain or identify the precise nature of this
"light". It is a recognition of the spontaneous irrational energy of the
human spirit, the will to survive and to overcome all odds.
The fact that these moments of light were granted to Andric does
not mean that from then on he was able steadily to work his way out
of his despair. Ex Ponto is above all a record of the fluctuations of
human mood, the passing strengths and weaknesses of the spirit.
Andric denies himself any positive system, which would remain
constant despite the vagaries of transient mood. On the contrary, it
is precisely in recognizing and accepting these fluctuations that
Andric finds a source of hope. At the beginning of the volume the
natural world is included in the cold hostility that surrounds the
young man, but as the work proceeds, Nature is increasingly a
source of solace. Partly for specific manifestations, sun in particular,
and snow; but more because the fluctuations of the human spirit are
seen as in harmony with the changes in the natural world. Andric is
acutely affected by light and dark, for example, and acknowledges
that his reactions to the world are quite different in the daylight and
at night.
Increasingly, Andric's apprehension of harmony is expressed in
the notion of a constant ebb and flow:
There are moments when my soul swells like a wave and breaks in
me and my twenty-three years raise their voice and my wild desire
beats its brow against the narrow circle of fate like a bird against
glass.
There are moments when, in the calm which comes automati-
cally from misfortune, I glimpse the need for denial and suffering,
when grateful for all the joys of life that once were - I see that it
was necessary for them too to have an end, and that it should have
been an end like this.
There are moments when I burn calmly like a sacrificial torch
which has just been brought into the temple.6
There is, then, no steady development in Ex Ponto. Despair
alternates with moments of peace and light, lamentation on the
writer's solitude fluctuates with frustration following unsatisfactory
attempts at communication with his fellow-men. Out of this
kaleidoscopic collection of statements a pattern does nevertheless
begin to emerge.
The outside world is hostile: "Remorselessly rigid and motionless,
the mountains look down from the cloudy heights. The sky is high,
inflexible. The earth hard, merciless . . ."7 There is a sense of
unreality and falsehood about the writer's dealings with the world
and his fellow-men:
I have returned. I went again among people. With all the passion
of a soul welling over, I celebrated my return among living people.
And now look: how numb and tired I am. Loud pleasure is a
violent intoxicant, a poison which starts to act in solitude. The
abandoned room is reproachfully silent and lonely thoughts
appear, like offended friends who pretend not to know me. I have
returned, but it would have been better if I had not gone.8
Words, the common currency of human communication, can be
misleading and dangerous: "We ought to be far more careful with
the words we speak . . . If words were only as short-lived as the
sound that expresses them! But often they live for years, like
shameful wounds they hurt and sting and poison a man's life."9
"The longer you spend alone and keep silent about yourself, the
more shallow and foolish your neighbour's talk becomes."10
What emerges above all from Ex Ponto is the fact that Andric had
the spiritual and emotional resources not only to withstand isolation,
but actually to grow and be strengthened by it: "Do not regret your
solitude and the silence that is around you. Perhaps fate is on your
side, perhaps it is someone's ancient prayer that envelops you with
Verse 57
quietness as a protection, perhaps in your silence words lie buried
that would have brought disquiet and unhappiness."11 "The last
expression of all and the simplest form of all endeavours is - silence.
I have fallen in love with it for my whole lifetime, and when my life
passes, silence, my good mother, will place her pale hands on my
eyes and this whole piteous story will sink into the darkness, as a
brief incomprehensible sound dies in silence."12
The silence and isolation of Andric the writer are, however, far
from blank and empty. They are peopled with ideas and memories
which seem to retain their purity in the quiet concentration of
solitude.
For two days now they have not taken me out even for that one
hour of exercise, because it has been raining incessantly. It seems
to me that the damp is seeping endlessly into my cell and falling
over my face and hands like a sticky sediment. My bed-cover is
sharp and icy-cold, my food tastes of tin plates, and my cell has
that indescribable smell of a confined space where a man breathes
and lives, without change or air. But here, behind my eyelids - if I
only shut my eyes - lives all the greatness of life and all the beauty
of the world. Whatever has once just touched my eyes, lips and
hands is all alive in my mind and bright against the dark
background of this suffering. The luxury and beauty of life live
indestructibly within me . . ,13
It is not only with his own thoughts and memories that the writer's
head is filled. In his isolation he also has intimations of an ultimate
harmony in which his life has a place. For Andric, life is always far
broader than the immediate present; it is a perpetual process in
which individual human lives play an infinitesimal part. It is in
immediate human contact, so often warped by hatred and malice,
that real fear lies. Andric's growing preference for solitude and his
readiness to confront the meaninglessness of individual existence
become a source of comfort and strength. His isolation from his
fellow-men is in any case only superficial. He withdraws from the
imperfect communication of daily discourse in order to be closer to
the timeless currents of human existence.
One passage in Ex Ponto suggests the level of human communica-
tion that was to be Andric's particular concern:
And look, as always in moments of the greatest trials, I see that in
the depths of my soul, under the hard crust and grey sediment of
empty words and distorted concepts which so soon betray, there
lives the eternal, unconscious and blessed heritage of my fore-
fathers, who laid their bodies in ancient scattered graveyards, and
their simple and robust virtues in the foundations of our souls.14
Ex Ponto describes the growth of a resolute human spirit,
tempered by its exposure to despair. Each statement of despair, out
of which life, nevertheless, emerges and endures, is proof of his
ability to withstand it. His strength comes from an identification of
the individual personality with the changing and yet constant natural
world, and through a merging of individual suffering, with the
timeless human condition. It demands a patient, clear-eyed, broad
view of existence, which can never be completely obscured by
immediate pain. The conclusion of Ex Ponto expresses this view in
typical form:
Epilogue.
You are much alone and often silent, my son, you are beset by
dreams, exhausted by journeys of the spirit. Your body is bent
and your face pale, your eyelids lowered and your voice like the
rasp of a prison door. Go out into the summer day, my son!
"What did you see in the summer day, my son?"
I saw that the earth is strong and the sky eternal, but man is
weak and short-lived.
"What did you see, my son, in the summer day?"
I saw that love is brief, and hunger eternal.
"What did you see, my son, in the summer day?"
I saw that this life is a painful affair which consists in an unequal
exchange of sin and unhappiness, that to live means to pile illusion
on illusion.
"Do you wish to sleep, my son?"
No, father, I am going out to live.15
While much of Anxieties is similar to Ex Ponto, there is a certain
development; in part in form and in part in atmosphere. It would be
misleading to say that this slim volume represents a cut-and-dried
statement of Andric's thinking, but it does provide indications of its
Verse 59
general direction. The greater length of the pieces - compared to
those of Ex Ponto - suggests in itself a tranquillity, an impression of
thoughts gradually formed.
Passages from Anxieties were first published in 1919 and the full
version appeared in 1920. The complete work seems to suggest a
degree of adjustment to the world; the prevalent tone of despair of
Ex Ponto has gone. By 1920 Andric was fully involved in the literary
life of Zagreb in the newly-formed Yugoslav state. These were
circumstances far removed from imprisonment in a country devas-
tated by war.
The first seven pieces, which form a separate section of the work,
are an account of Andric's confrontation with the God of his
childhood. Andric's early experience was intimately linked with the
Catholic Church. We can assume that the simple homes in which he
lived would have reflected the typical devout humble Christianity
Andric portrays in many of his accounts of village and town life
among the Christian community of Bosnia. We can only speculate
about the particular religious atmosphere of Andric's home life. But
we do know something of his important and fruitful associations
with Franciscan monks while he was interned in Bosnia.
There are many sympathetic portraits of Catholic monks in
Andric's work, and two cycles of stories revolve around two
memorable members of the Franciscan order. From these stories we
can gain an impression of the respect Andric felt for their vocation,
and at the same time a clear idea of his awareness that the personality
of the individual monk and his effectiveness were only in part
enhanced by his commitment, and not conditioned by it. On the
whole the impression given is that, with rare exceptions, religious
zeal of any denomination acts as a barrier between the individual and
the true nature of the world, blinding him to the truth and shielding
him from harsh reality.
Andric's philosophy is communicated increasingly in the form of a
kind of Pantheism, as illustrated by the the third passage of this first
section of Anxieties, ostensibly centred on the idea of God:
Everything that exists here is condemned to a battle without end.

The sea and the rocks, the seed in the earth and the wind and
animals as well as men.
Light and dark follow each other and winds alternate with
silences, but the battle does not cease to be fought. In the shadow
of a vast secret and the troubled dream that every being dreams
and spreads out over himself, you can hear constantly in the heart
of the earth the rhythm of life hammering between pain and joy.
And, in the midst of that din, its silence is dreadful.
The wind rocks the pine bough. All things shiver and freeze in
the prison of laws.
God is the night in which our destiny lies like something quiet
and small.
From the place where human thought drowns and is extin-
guished, the solitude of all living things spreads out in a circle in
appalling waves.16
Andric's God, or, at least, his conception of eternity, comes to be
seen as inherent in the natural world, in its constant changeability,
the rhythm of these changes, and in its endurance, despite and
beyond all apparent transience.
The words which express this apprehension will recur as a basic
formula at various points in Andric's works: "Around me are forests,
which know only one commandment: that they should grow, and
only one requirement: that they should die . . ,"17 The lesson
Andric appears to be driving himself to learn in this section of
Anxieties is the patience to wait until the moods of despair have
passed, the storm is quiet and he can once again be receptive to the
positive forces of life, the forces of light and growth - the flow,
rather than the ebb. Whereas in Ex Ponto his youthful reaction was a
cry of despair, in this volume the despair is often dominated by a
quiet realization that it will pass. And whereas the stern and
demanding God of his childhood was unable to bring him comfort,
he turns now outside himself to aspects of the natural world that
seem to him to embody his developing apprehension of eternity.
An indication of this progression is provided by the first passage of
the third section, entitled "Mountains". It is an act of devotion to the
writer's new God. It is worth quoting in full as an explicit statement
of faith.
Mountains in the distance, crowned with snow, who take Com-
munion with the sun, for you alone is there a song left within me.
Verse 61
You are the effort of the earth - the only worthwhile effort -
towards the sky and height.
When I think of the rosy glow of the heights, I am filled with
peace.
I know, fiery lilies and silence bloom there. Or the cautious
track of a wild animal melts in the snow. And should a pain
appear, it is carried off by changes as a fallen tree is by a river.
There death is: scattered feathers, clean, whitened bones and
black, fertile soil.
From those mountains these mornings come.
This is a morning when I, who have no gods, fall and bow down
to you, high mountains, where the silence of death and life is
warm and fertile like the silence of two pairs of lips in a kiss.
Freed from troubled evening thoughts of stars and distances,
and having trodden all the paths which smart in the memory, I fall
down before you, peaks of the earth where reigns the distant and
incomprehensible harmony of the elements.
A white silence to which God has not descended, nor man
reached.
Deep snow, with the shadow of dark spruce and the full
measure of time and its soundless laws! Winged snow, with the
form of a star and a human eye, traveller who does not hurry and
who has faith in time and forms and the possibilities that await
him, you are this morning for me in the bright distance like a deity
one invokes. And the peaks of this earth where I suffer are none
the less dearer to me than some unknown distant sky which
caused me to be born weary.
High mountains, your image in my eyes which mourn transi-
ence is more faithful and enduring than everything that has come
to me in the world, because everything that has passed through
my hands vanishes in the disquiet to which all things and all men
are condemned. I stretch out my empty hands to you; and, see,
the shadow of the day which lies on them is shortened and
deluded.18
Mountains, then, embody an idea of permanence which is an

image of the patience a man must nurture in himself to triumph over
the disquiet which is the fundamental quality of human life.
As in Ex Ponto, the writer ends with an expression of this
harmony through communication with his fellow-men. The impulse
is described in typically humble terms:
When I saw how bright the mists were in the distance and when I
heard what the woods were saying with their face which is forever
changing and the mountain peaks which had lost their greenness
and beauty but stood still, bare and eternally the same. When I
saw the relentless but dignified march of light and shadow over the
valley below me and caught the sound of their voice in my own
blood, I was afraid in the face of the mystery and astonished at the
power of discovery given to man. -1 realized at once that I would
be a poor speaker and an unreliable witness. - I stopped for a
moment and was small and alone with the inexpressible sadness of
bright, short days, which only man knows. God and the world
were silent.19
While these two youthful works are of little artistic worth
compared to Andric's mature writing, they are nevertheless a human
document of value. They present a personal struggle, in very
demanding circumstances, out of which the writer emerges trium-
phant. The strength so acquired enabled him to turn beyond
himself, to enter into and conjure up innumerable human lives, both
past and contemporary, portraying them with singular sympathy
and vigour.
I waged my battle with the winds and the cold alone. I found a
confidential word with the sap in blades of grass. I suffered greatly
while I got to know all the strengths and demands of my body and
the warm self-awareness of all the lives around me. I ordered
exactly my relationship with the movements, phenomena and
changes of everything around me, I battled until everything had
come to love me as a fearless stranger, who did not think of
himself. Clouds, woods, springs, animals and rocks filled my
consciousness, but I never forgot the human face, the wonderful
human face, lit up by the glow of reason and the sadness only
humans know because of all that they can see.
Behind all my bitter words is always hidden the human face
with its desire for happiness.20
Verse 63
Verse, 1918-73
From time to time, in his constant exposure and response to the
world, Andric would come upon a subject or an experience which he
felt he could express only in the form of a poem. This happened less
and less frequently; only one or two poems survive from any one
year after 1920. Some of them were published in periodicals, but
most were preserved in a file found among the writer's papers after
his death and labelled All my verse and prose poems. These, together
with all the published poems, were subsequently collected and
published under the title of one of them: What I Dream and What
Happens To Me. On the whole these poems show the weakest aspect
of Andric's writing. They tend to be self-conscious, often prosaic,
and occasionally they contain a hint of the self-pity which can
threaten a writer of Andric's introspective melancholy disposition.
The verse shows no abrupt changes of direction or experimenta-
tion. The first poems published in 1911 established its form: prose
sketches and short poems in free verse. Although his verse always
had a strong Neo-Romantic confessional character, influence of
Expressionist and Futuristic verse can be traced, as can that of
individual poets, such as Walt Whitman and Verhaeren. Andric the
poet was not concerned with striking poetic effect or elaborate
images, but rather, as in his fiction, with the greatest possible
precision in conveying a scene or mood. That is usually achieved
through ostensibly simple language and expression, tending towards
understatement and making its impact through concentration. This
dominance of the "idea" of the poem has determined its free verse
form, in which the relationship between highly charged prose and
verse is very close.
The subject matter of the verse falls into two broad categories:
themes which recur as preoccupations in the prose writings - The
First World War, prison, isolation, the powerful attraction of
women, a tenuous vision of joy in the form of an imaginary woman -
and more transient, immediate reactions to experiences. Some of
these latter take the form of mood-pictures, reminiscent of passages
from Ex Ponto. There is a note of personal bitterness in some of the
earlier poems, but this gives way gradually to more universal
comments on human experience.
The essential quality of the poems is their combination of
thoughtfulness and emotion. As might be expected, some of the
more youthful pieces are dominated by an immature sentiment - of
Romantic suffering, Patriotism, the cult of sacrifice. In the poems
written since 1930, however, the responsive, reflective figure of the
mature writer emerges.
A poem written in 1922, "Thought", suggests the direction from
which some consolation may come. The expression is over-explicit
and somewhat prosaic, but in the last lines the essential idea is
conveyed in terms which could stand almost as an account of the
nature of Andric's poetry. It suggests that fleeting moments may
suddenly offer a vision of salvation and that solace for all earthly
affliction may be found in the world of ideas.
Another early poem offers a more personal and complex reaction
to the world, one which is characteristic of Andric. It evokes the
fundamental unease of the human condition. The form of the poem
is interesting, as it parallels that of Andric's last poem in its initial
denial and following explanation.
Vera salutrix
No salvation, nor, any more, dream of salvation!
Since I deeply, and secretly,

Took my leave of all in the world,
I adore now only speed and movement,
For they slake desire and lessen distance,
And carry each life and every thing
To its end and fulfilment.
A horror haunts me since the day

I first caught sight of myself,
Treading the hard paths of the earth,
Like a pious traveller of God,
Seeking and praising only
Death
Which is
Peace, Faith, Bridge and River-mouth
Of every dream of salvation.21
Verse 65
The tone is youthful and contains perhaps an echo of Futurism. It
demonstrates Andric's tendency to take a more extreme position in
his verse, which captures a sudden mood not tempered by the
process of more gradual reasoned thought. There are two character-
istic ideas in this poem. First the idea of withdrawal from the world,
a withdrawal which was Andric's solace and main source of strength,
but at the same time a cause of anxiety and guilt. Then the idea of
self-observation, accompanied by "horror". The "movement"
praised here can perhaps be seen as a feature of Andric's verse in
general. At its best it captures fleeting moments with great simplic-
ity. In a way it provides a contrast to the whole effort of the prose
work, which is essentially to counteract transience. The poems tend
to reflect the awareness of the brevity and fragility of life which
drives men to create works of art, and to build bridges. It is as
though the writer relaxes in his verse, temporarily abandoning the
will to resist, and accepting instead the ease of submission to
inevitable fate.
The nine pieces gathered under the title What I Dream and What
Happens To Me, published between 1922 and 1931, give a clear idea
of the kind of themes that presented themselves to Andric as needing
to be expressed in the succinct, concentrated form of his verse. They
are for the most part mood-pictures, with more or less emphasis on
the mood, a Neo-Romantic identification of emotion and landscape.
Andric's thoughts are not abstract and cerebral, but spring from an
emotional response to the world around him. The cliched image of
the aspen sensitive to every breeze, developed in Ex Ponto, describes
suggestively enough the responsive nature of Andric the poet. He is
more susceptible in certain situations, notably when travelling or
staying somewhere abroad, and his melancholy nature inclines him
towards autumnal landscapes, although several poems express the
joy of life in the sun, usually by the sea. Two of these pieces are not
mood-pictures; one is an anecdote which impressed itself on the
writer's imagination as an almost fully-formed embryonic story,
while the other reflects on the nature of a cry heard in the night,
evoking fleeting images of its possible causes, which could again be
developed at greater length, but the poet rejects the intrusion, for he
wants only to sleep.
The most memorable of these poems, however, are concentrated
statements of fundamental aspects of Andric's attitude to the world,
such as his praise of silence in the ninth poem of this group:
An inexpressible strength to the spirit and body
is brought by silence, pride never spoken.
I know the warm scent of the silk
of love, and I know the fixed stare of farewell,
and pleasure, and the desire for death
which follows after it like a shadow.
But I have never known greater pleasure than the thought:
that the sky, which shines above us like a promise,
is merely a graveyard;
and the only dignity
and the one true prayer:
are lowered eyes and unspeaking lips.
My thought leads me like a mysterious glow

as I walk alone through the night and mist.22
One poem is particularly characteristic of Andric's whole inten-
tion in his work. Its starting point is a sense of unease and guilt
typical of his personality, but out of this grows a positive statement
of belief in the extent to which the universal is contained in the
particular:
Yes, old painting,
Yes, that is how it should have been,
One should have kept to the first word,
Not gone anywhere, and sought the heart's desires
Deep in oneself, and one's native land,
Instead of in distant, unattainable, fateful apparitions.
One should have been patient, waited, watched over the crops,
Cared for one's people, the poor, for Bosnia.
And today it would not be as it is:
Empty hands, uneasy conscience, a lost look, a thirsting soul.
One should have known, alas, what is only now glimpsed.
There is one sun everywhere, water, rock and grass.
One and inaccessible.
All the rest is an illusion of the frenzied mind
Verse 67
About oneself, and a false perspective
Of the desert we set alight in our own hearts.23
Within the context of Andric's work as a whole these few poems
offer a rare glimpse of the writer's more private sensibilities, out of
which he wove his numerous portraits of his fellow-human beings.
Some areas were too private for Andric's verse, unless such poems
were written and later destroyed. His personal experience of love
and marriage, for example, is nowhere reflected in this verse except
in the most indirect terms. Here, as elsewhere, Andric seeks to
present only what is most profound and consequently universal, the
response to the world which underlies all the incidental experience of
an individual. Even without the rest of his work, the verse and prose
poems would stand as the record of the deeply thoughtful response
of a sensitive but robust personality.
Andric's last poem, written in 1973, two years before his death,
conveys his essential nature. It calls for direct confrontation with the
bare facts of death, without the solace and delusion of prayer and
belief in eternity. Andric's world is stark, like the barren mountains
of his childhood and his essential experience of human relations. The
writer drives himself constantly to face what he regards as this
fundamental truth of reality. He is clear-sighted and courageous in
this endeavour, which is consistent throughout his work. And yet,
the very existence of this work bears witness to a contrary impulse:
the almost involuntary, irrational will to survive against all the odds.
Underlying the stoicism of Andric's response to the world, and
warming it unexpectedly from time to time, is an indomitable
optimism, a joyous acceptance of the strength of life, "which
endures and stands firm, like the bridge over the Drina".
No gods, no prayers!
And yet it happens that I sometimes hear
Something in me like a whispered prayer.
That is my old and ever wakeful wish
Rising from somewhere in the depths
And softly asking for a little space
In one of Eden's endless gardens,
Where I might at long last find
What I sought here always in vain.24
3
Short Stories
(i) 1920^1
After the personal, confessional nature of the early prose poems, the
first impression conveyed by Andric's short stories is of their objec-
tivity. Andric as an individual, with a particular life's path and
experience, is remarkably absent from his prose fiction. But this
objectivity is only on the surface. The many characters and situa-
tions portrayed all tend to illustrate those fundamental facts of
human existence with which Andric is concerned in his verse. The
extent to which all his works are indeed part of one and the same
work becomes clear as the symbolic quality of the stories emerges.
The major part of his fiction consists of short stories, comprising
eight volumes of the collected works if one includes the novella,
Devil's Yard, as opposed to the four novels. The stories cover a range
of themes, although many of them, and the majority of those
published before the Second World War, are set in Bosnia at
different points in its history. The subsequent course of Andric's life
as a diplomat is quite removed from his central interests as a writer.
Some aspects of his public life are reflected in the stories published
in this period but these are only settings; the intricacies of diplomatic
life and the writer's own activity in it play no part.
Andric himself is also absent because of the lack of any real sense of
the narrator making an objective comment on his characters and
themes. It has been said that this non-analytical, suggestive quality of
his writing is a product of the influence of Oriental traditions, where
stories are told not in perfectly composed logical wholes by pro-
fessional artists, but by "wise men, sorcerers, witches and saints".
Andric's prose depends less on lengthy dialogue and elaborate,
detailed description than on the evocation of atmosphere, mood,
vivid pictures, the suggestion of deeply hidden secret currents, with
Short Stones 69
no attempt at comment and analysis. This is particularly true of
the stories set in Bosnia, which frequently have the density of
poetry.
The reaction to the world expressed in Ex Ponto and Anxieties was
essentially emotional and spiritual. It was suspicious of any attempt
to impose "logic" or rigid systems on to human experience -
suspicious, that is, of an exclusively intellectual ordering of that
experience. This initial response is reflected again in Andric's
fictional characters' reaction to the world, which is also essentially
emotional. In the majority of his stories Andric writes from the point
of view of his characters, so as to convey a sense of the quality of
their existence from the inside.
It is artificial to try to impose a chronological organization on to
the stories. We do so here for the sake of clarity and because there is
a very general tendency towards more contemporary themes in the
stories published after the Second World War, although historical
themes and Bosnia continue to provide material, and there is no clear
dividing line.
The stories do, however, arrange themselves into groups, and this
is how they have been printed in the collected works, with the
author's agreement. There is, for example, one volume entitled
Children, which contains tales concerning children or seen through
their eyes. There is a whole series of stories, set in the little town of
Visegrad, which are similar to the individual and more or less self-
contained chapters of the novel The Bridge on the Drina. From these
it emerges that the nature of the novel's composition - in relatively
short units - was established many years before Andric came to write
it. There are also stories connected with Sarajevo and with Travnik.
In these stories set in Bosnia there is a strong sense of history. Some
dramatic moments recur, such as the Serbian uprising of 1804 and
its effect on neighbouring Bosnia and the border town of Visegrad,
in 1878. There are also several characters who seem to have
particularly appealed to Andric's imagination and who recur in a
series or small cycle of stories: the two monks, Brother Marko and
Brother Petar, the half- gypsy Corkan and the peasant Vitomir
Tasovac, for example. The personalities of these various characters
set the tone of the stories in which they occur, and the tone of
Andric's writing is consequently varied. There are also some pieces
of fantasy which are closer to Andric's prose poetry or reflective
prose than to conventional narrative fiction.
We may, then, attempt to organize the abundant variety of
Andric's short stories by considering them in groups, both by theme
and by tone.
The initial division, however, is between those set in Bosnia,
either in the vague Turkish past or in more precise historical
circumstances, and those set in other parts of Europe or an
unspecified, contemporary context. Of the thirty-three stories prin-
ted in the collected works and published between 1920 and 1941,
twenty-five are set in Bosnia, four in specific circumstances in
Europe and one in a contemporary but unspecified setting, while the
remaining three are timeless personal, dreamlike discourses.
In other words, Bosnia clearly dominates in the stories published
between the two wars. The first striking feature of the majority of
these tales is their violence. This frequently takes the form of
brutality, the persecution of the vulnerable, and is present in a
general impression of the low cost of human life. The options open
to an individual whose experience falls outside the established social
norms, for whatever reason, are strictly limited and death is
frequently the only solution which appears to present itself. Such
individual human tragedies, however, while they may dominate a
particular story, are rarely left to speak for themselves - they are
placed in an historical setting which reduces their absolute import-
ance and suggests that they are simply part of a larger-scale process,
in which all individuals are in any case doomed to oblivion.
There is no strict pattern to the violence; some stories focus on the
characters on whom it is inflicted and some on those who inflict it.
What links them is the sense that both kinds of experience place the
individual outside society. These individuals, through their isola-
tion, are granted a special insight and their exceptional experience
reflects a truth about human relations which is normally disguised
and suppressed in social organization. Isolated from society, a
human being is seen to be either victim or pursuer, attacker or prey.
The tone of an individual story dominated by violence will then be
one either of brutality or of humiliation and fear. While the narration
is generally third-person, each story is told largely from the point of
view of the main character.
Short Stories 71
This can be seen in Andric's first short story, published in 1920 -
"The Journey of Alija -Derzelez".1 This story is also of particular
interest because it is explicitly concerned with the subject of a legend.
The protagonist is the hero of a large number of Moslem heroic
ballads. Bearing in mind the special place accorded to "legend" and
"fairy-tale" in Andric's statements about art, we should consider
exactly what form "the grain of truth contained in legend" takes in a
tale such as "The Journey of Alija -Derzelez". It should be said that we
can trace two main categories of "legend" in Andric's works: those
stories which appear to arise from a need to account for and formalize
a perennial, basic human experience - lust, jealousy, shame, delusion
- and those which bear witness to man's need to organize even his
most trivial experience into manageable units.
In the first category of story, it is not the legend itself that Andric
is concerned to illustrate but the stage before it came into being: the
circumstances which gave rise to it. The social conditions which
produced Alija, and his Serbian equivalent Marko Kraljevic, were
those prevailing in an aggressive, masculine culture. The traditional
ballads concerned with Alija deal exclusively with his prowess on the
battlefield. Andric refers to his fame in just one sentence: "He was
renowned for many battles and his fearful strength . . ."2 and
immediately takes him off his horse, setting him down in a context
where he appears awkward because he is not used to being on the
ground, or to normal social interaction. His stature is at once
diminished: "In a few days the njagic circle around -Derzelez had
quite disappeared."3 There is no clear reason why the label "hero"
should have attached itself to this particular person. He is small,
unprepossessing, ungainly as soon as he dismounts, awkward and
uninteresting in conversation. He is slow-witted and chronically
lacking in imagination. But he is also obsessive. Once he sees a
beautiful woman he can think of nothing else but possessing her. Or
he abandons himself wholeheartedly to the singing of a particularly
fine traditional singer: "Berzelez felt that the singer was tugging at
his soul and that any moment now, he would expire, from excessive
strength, or excessive weakness."4
-Derzelez can flourish only in circumstances where his simple-
minded strength and single-minded energy can be expressed in the
immediate violent ways he understands. He is quite baffled by more
intricate social relationships and by the whole deeply disturbing
question of women. Andric here exploits the comic possibilities of
exposing a renowned hero to the demands made on men by their
encounters with women, in a similar way to some of the traditional
ballads about Marko Kraljevic. Marko's reaction is, however,
generally more subtle. -Derzelez, in Andric's portrayal, is at the mercy
of his complete lack of imagination. This is probably the key to his
fabled position. Failing to understand why he should be denied
possession of any beautiful woman who catches his eye simply because
of a discrepancy in their social position,-Derzelez is prepared to ignore
all social convention and ride roughshod over taboos and boundaries
respected by others as sacred and unchallengeable. Such an awareness
may well result in apparently heroic actions; indeed many heroic
actions probably stem from just such a lack of imagination. In
Andric's story, however, because he is taken out of his usual context,
Derzelez's attitude simply makes him a figure of fun.
This is the case at least as far as the outside world is concerned.
For the reader there is a further level of response, since the story is
told in such a way as clearly to evoke the impact of -Derzelez on
others and yet to allow the reader to a large extent to enter into his
experience and to look at the world, with its arbitrary rules, through
his uncomprehending eyes:
He seethed with fury. Not to be able to reach that Serbian girl.
Ever! And not to be able to kill anyone or destroy anything! A new
wave of blood broke within him. - Or was this perhaps a trick?
Were they making fun of him? Was this another of their jokes?
But at the same time he felt clearly that these threads were too fine
for his fingers and - who knows how often he had felt this in his
life - he could not begin to understand people and their simplest
acts, and he would have to give up and retreat, and be left alone
with his absurd anger and superfluous strength.5
Derzelez is, then, the first of Andric's outsiders, the social misfit
who pursues an unattainable illusion. This illusion comes in several
forms in Andric's work. It can be beauty (as here), power, happiness
or escape. The sense of helpless constraint which overcomes er-
zelez is one to which every individual is ultimately condemned.
This story establishes the pattern for many of the later ones: an
Short Stones 73
individual experience of the world which embodies a perennial human
situation, sufficient objectivity in the third-person narrative for the
individual to be seen in his or her more general context; but the whole
story is told, at least at key moments, from the point of view of the
protagonist. It is therefore the personality, or the particular experi-
ence of the protagonist, which sets the tone.
One other dimension of this story requires brief mention. It is
composed in three self-contained sections, clearly reflecting the
organization of the traditional ballads, following one "adventure" in
each individual song, but together forming a small "cycle". This
linear development in short units was to remain the basic form of
Andric's narrative procedure. In addition to its strictly formal nature,
this cyclical pattern can be seen to reinforce the sense of the hero's
helplessness, his constraint within his nature and his times.
In a large number of stories the experience of the main character is
marked, as is that ofDerzelez, by bewilderment. This can spring from
a general incomprehension in the face of human behaviour, as with
the Moslem hero, or it can be the result of the particular circum-
stances in which the character is placed. Such bewilderment can mark
equally the "victims" and the "aggressors" in Andric's stories.
In the tales which focus on an aggressor the degree of his
responsibility is open to question; his behaviour is explained by the
combination of his own personality and his particular experience. He
is not thereby absolved from guilt, but it seems as though Andric sees
the world as containing a certain weight of evil, with particular
individuals as its necessary instruments.
One example is the case of "Mustafa the Hungarian".6 He is a
soldier who has achieved a hero's reputation because of his brave
exploits in Hungary. His return to his native Bosnia is anticipated
eagerly, like that of -Derzelez, and the people's disappointment when
confronted with the reality is similar. Mustafa is profoundly changed
by his experience. The change is manifested outwardly in the fact that
he can no longer play his flute, and in his inability to sleep. When he
does fall into a fitful sleep he is tormented by dreams of the brutality
he has been forced to witness in the course of his life as a soldier. The
life he chose and the brutality it entails take complete control of his
body and its demands now govern his behaviour absolutely.
The story illustrates the clear distinction Andric makes between the
body, whose realm is the night, and the spirit, which can flourish
only by day. The tenuous survival of Mustafa's spirit is expressed
through his flute-playing, but his experience as a soldier comes to
dominate his life entirely. It appears that such uncontrolled and
unbalanced physical violence brutalizes the whole personality and
.leads ultimately to self-destruction. The coherence of Mustafa's
personality is fractured by his experience. This fragmentation, and
the restlessness that will take him relentlessly on an increasingly
destructive course, are expressed in his outward behaviour:
He did not dare stand still. He had to keep moving, because he

was equally afraid of sleeplessness as of his dreams, if he fell asleep
. . . He could no longer endure it, but saddled his horse and left
the village, in the dark, and silently as a criminal.7
To the extent that Mustafa does not understand his actions and
cannot control them, he can be included among the "bewildered". A
mark of his incomprehension in the face of his experience is his
repetition of a formula: "The world is full of swine". Several
characters in Andric's works use a similar formula simply to register
their essential experience of the world. It enables them to formalize
this experience in a way which cannot make it more acceptable, but
at least establishes a pattern in their response which is in itself a kind
of solace. This technique can be seen as an example of that vivid
recording of experience, rather than any attempt to analyse it, which
contributes to the Oriental flavour of Andric's writing.
The majority of the other aggressors are, like Mustafa, variations
on the theme of an individual who inflicts suffering in the context of
the systematic violence of an army. Mustafa is brutalized and
deranged by the experience of war. Another possibility is that a
particular type of person will be drawn to join the army and flourish
because it gives him an opportunity to express the violence already in
his nature. That is the case with Mula Jusuf in the story "In Camp",8
a man with an obscure history of implication in uninvestigated acts
of violence. He does not dominate the story in which he appears but
remains a sinister presence in the background until the end, when he
is given the task of taking a young Turkish woman, dispossessed by
the war, back to her father. The pattern of his vicious behaviour
Short Stones 75
then reasserts itself. Alone with the woman, he forces her to strip
and eventually stabs her to death.
The idea illustrated in "Mustafa the Hungarian", of individuals
functioning as vehicles for evil, is reinforced by Andric's depiction
elsewhere of armies as organic forces that sweep across the land.
Military institutions have evolved as socially acceptable instruments
of aggression and destruction, their elaborate machinery providing a
channel for the same forces which are considered irrational in an
individual. Mula Jusuf's solitary assault on the girl is horrifying, but
similar actions by groups of soldiers are seen by the outside world as
a regrettable but inevitable aspect of war. The confusion which such
a double standard causes works to absolve Jusuf to a certain extent,
and he too appears as the victim of a world dominated by evil too
powerful for any human institution to control effectively.
The haunting story "Torso",9 with its striking central image, also
portrays a man who thrives in a violent situation. It requires closer
examination. The structure of this story is one to which Andric was
to return in Devil's Yard. There is an outer frame of omniscient
narration which describes the monk Brother Petar in his cell,
recounting a story told to him by a servant in Asia Minor, where
Petar was exiled for some years. The focal point is the figure Brother
Petar sees framed in the window of the clock tower of a huge fortified
mansion where he has been summoned to mend the clock. It is the
figure of a man who once ruled Syria as a ruthless tyrant, having
been sent there to quell a rebellion. Eventually, after years of
systematic brutality, a terrible revenge is wrought on him, and he is
left - his limbs crushed and the features burned from his face - a
grotesque torso, who is carried by his servants out into the garden to
sit in the sun. His obvious harmlessness is emphasized before Petar
realizes what he is seeing: "Something like a child, like an old
woman was sitting there . . ."10
This story is particularly concentrated, with each frame contribut-
ing a dimension to the meaning. Petar is a skilled mechanic who
loves to mend the things of the world which inevitably wear out and
break; he is particularly interested in clocks, of which he has a large
collection in his cell. He is therefore seen to be on the side of time, in
harmony with it and not trying to resist its passing. The servant who
tells the story of Celebi-Hafiz represents a pattern of survival
regardless of the fluctuations of the fortunes of his masters. By
contrast with these two passive vehicles of his story, Celebi-Hafiz
himself offers an extreme example of a pattern of rise and fall, power
and ruin, abrupt change, interpreted by the people either as Divine
Retribution or the workings of an Oriental Fate. No distinction is
made between these two possible accounts of the tyrant's downfall,
respectively "Western" and "Eastern": God is simply another name
for Fate. At one point, for instance, the people are described as
praying to God, "not because they expected any help, for God was at
that time still on the side of the Hafiz, but because there was no point
in praying to the Hafiz".11 Like all Andric's monks who play a
prominent role, at this level Petar makes no attempt to interpret the
workings of fortune in terms of his own faith. On the contrary, the
first association which springs to his mind when he sees the "torso"
nodding its head in the sun is with one of his fellow-monks nodding
as the censer is swung beside him in church. The association does
not strike him as in any way irreverent. And yet, Petar is conscious
of the differences between East and West and makes an ironical
comment when he comes to examine the clock:
As soon as I opened it I could see the situation. It was Venetian

and well-made, but it had been badly set up so that its workings
were exposed to the rain. It must have been done by a Greek or an
Armenian, and they are just not suited to this kind or work,
because you cannot cheat and lying is no use.12
There is no real attempt to explain the tyrant's fall, simply a

recognition that time and fortune inevitably bring change. Various
themes are touched on which could be enlisted as an explanation.
Petar is introduced as reflecting about the preponderance of evil in
the world; the servant introduces his account of the revenge of the
tyrant's prisoners with the words: "there is a cure for every ill, and
that is that at every moment of a man's life there is a possibility that
he will make a mistake, just one slight slip, but that is enough to
cause his death and his absolute ruin."13 In addition, the instrument
of the tyrant's downfall is a woman; the only creature for whom he
ever felt real compassion or affection. But none of these possible
human rationalizations is developed; Celebi-Hafiz simply falls from
Short Stones 77
power, just as cities and whole civilizations have flourished and
perished throughout time.
As can be seen from this brief sketch, the basic theme of the story
is obvious enough. But the image of the mutilated figure in his
garden is powerful and haunting. It conveys at once a sense that
nothing has changed. He can make no other physical movement than
raise his head, but he does this with such pride that he is clearly
unrepentant, and this gives him a curious dignity. And at the same
time the grotesque reduction of his physical being brings a sense of
resignation and peace. The enigmatic quality of this figure, which
settles in Brother Petar's imagination, is emphasized by a series of
questions about the circumstances in which he heard the story: Who
was the servant? Where did he come from? How did he know so
much about the Hafiz? And was it all true? Petar concludes
ambiguously:
It happened in Asia, in a country where everything is possible
and where everyone asks how and why things are the way they
are his whole life long, and where no one can ever answer or
explain anything, where questions are not resolved but for-
gotten.14
The existence of these aggressors implies victims. These are often,
although not exclusively, women. One whole story is devoted to
different aspects of the victimization of women. Translated into
English as "The Pasha's Concubine",15 it is the story of a young girl
who catches the eye of a Turkish army officer and is summoned to
his house. She appeals to him because of her extreme youth - she is
not quite sixteen and the reason he gives for finding this stage
attractive establishes one of the themes of the story: "This is the
right moment in her life. She was separated from her family,
frightened, alone, dependent entirely on him. From time to time she
seemed to him like a little animal, which, driven against a cliff,
stared at him wide-eyed and trembling."16 The image of a helpless
terrified animal is used also of Mula Jusuf s victim. In each case the
woman's vulnerability acts as a provocation, a magnet drawing the
stronger element by a logic of its own. Into the story of Mara the
concubine herself are woven two further tales of the victimization of
women, so that together they form a complete statement of the
plight of woman as an innocent victim. The theme of the pursuit
of a wild animal is developed in the subsidiary account of the rape
of a ten-year-old girl, lured out of town by two youths with a
promise of sugar. And in the household where Mara ends her days
one of the women has a violent husband who has beaten her
regularly since their wedding night.
The story of Mara the concubine is developed, as is that of
Mustafa the Hungarian, in such a way as to make them not only
vivid individuals in specific circumstances, but also in a way
archetypal.
Among the stories published between the wars there are several
characters who dominate the tales in which they appear and seem
similarly to stand for a whole category of human experience. An
example is the heroine of the story "Anika's Times".17 Anika is a
woman who wreaks havoc in Visegrad through the unpredictable
distribution of her favours. The impact she made is still spoken of
when the story opens, several generations later. Anika is a self-
willed creature whose defiance of convention - flouted initially out
of pique with a particular young man - predictably brings her no
happiness to the extent that she welcomes the prospect of the
inevitable retribution against her as a relief for herself and others:
"It would be an act of charity if someone would kill me"18, she
repeats several times before her death. In this way Anika herself is
not entirely in control of her destiny, but is the vehicle of an
overwhelming power over men.
The story of Anika is given an additional dimension in the form
of an explanatory introduction the exact meaning of which is
perhaps not immediately clear, but emerges from the account of
"Anika's Times", This introduction describes the growing schizo-
phrenia of the parish priest of a village outside Visegrad and his
obsessive, furtive watching of women. As long as the villagers
speak of him they tend to be reminded also of Anika. There is only
a tenuous connection between her and Father Vujadin, so that the
association of the two stories in the villagers' minds seems to
suggest a more profound link. Vujadin's madness is not directly
attributable to his experience of women; he has become cut off
from his fellow-men by a variety of factors. But as he steadily loses
touch with society, women seem to loom ever larger in his
Short Stones 79
consciousness. It is this aspect of his madness that seems to
disturb the villagers and urge them to give it form in their
recollection of the legend of Anika.
Within the framework of the story "Anika's Times", this
introduction appears as a kind of meditation on man's perennial
need to control and account for his powerful response to woman,
the need which led to the creation of the legend of Adam and Eve.
Here we can see clearly the nature of the "legends" that concern
Andric. As in the case of Alija )erzelez the writer returns to the
stage before the legend evolved, to depict the circumstances out of
which it arose. In the case of Alija he portrays a hero whom one
might describe as the ideal of an aggressive masculine culture.
From Andric's account it is clear that his attributes, as they are
glorified in the ballads about him, have more to do with the needs
of the audience and the singer than with the true nature of the man
who has been singled out almost at random.
The story "Death in Sinan's Tekke"19 can be seen as a further
elaboration of the theme of man's powerful, irrational response to
woman. It is told in a gently ironic tone and offers an example of
Andric's subtle humour. It is the tale of a wise old dervish, widely
respected and admired. As he lies dying in the monastery, people
come from miles around to hear his last words of wisdom. Finally
the time comes for him to part from the world and he stops
speaking in a moment of silent meditation. Those with him watch
reverently as the great man evidently offers up his soul to God,
and then ceases to be without a further word. What they cannot
know is that Alidede, in his final moments, is preoccupied not by a
serene prayer but by two memories, the only two incidents from
his long life that come to him at that moment of exceptional
significance. Each incident involves a disturbing experience with a
woman. The first is his discovery, as a child, of the body of a
drowned woman. He was so upset that he found himself unable
ever to speak of it. The second is his hearing, as a young monk,
the running footsteps of a young woman and her pursuer. In her
desperation the woman beat on the monastery gate - her only hope
of escape - but Alidede, who witnessed the scene from his cell
window, could not bring himself to go down and open the gate
which would have brought him into direct contact with her. His
last, unspoken words do indeed take the form of a prayer, but one
that is very different in content from what those watching
imagine:
"Almighty, Great and Only One, I am so much with You and so
firmly in Your hands that I know that nothing can befall me. This
realization, this peace which You give to those who, relinquishing
all, have given themselves entirely to You, that is, in fact,
paradise. I have lived without hardship, floating like a tiny grain
of dust that hovers in the sun's rays: without weight, as it drifts
towards the heights, it is imbued with sun, and is itself like a small
sun. I did not know that such bitterness as I feel now could fill a
man's soul. I had forgotten that woman stands, like a gate, at the
exit as at the entrance to this world. And now, this bitterness has
come into me, and it sears my heart in two, reminding me of what
I had forgotten, as I gazed into the sky: that the bread we eat is
actually stolen; that for the life we have been given we are
indebted to misfortune - sin, mischance; that you cannot cross
from this world into that better one until you are plucked off like a
ripe fruit, falling in a painful, headlong flight and thudding on to
the hard earth. You probably bear the bruise of that fall even in
paradise. This is my thought, Merciful One, and You see it,
whether I speak it or not: it is harder and more bitter than I
believed to be enslaved by the laws of Your earth."20
It may be seen that there is a certain pattern in the stories
discussed so far. Alidede's insight into the fundamental forces of life
is made possible by the single-minded devotional life he leads. His
experience is very limited and his mind uncluttered; he is able to see
the world more clearly than others who may be too involved in their
own complex affairs. The Franciscan monk Brother Petar is simi-
larly clear-sighted because of his distance from the world. For the
most part, however, individuals who are preoccupied with living
their lives in society cannot see the world for what it is. As soon as
they step outside the norms of society they are granted a similar
insight to that of Alidede. Anika's experience is the mildest of those
we have been considering. Her distance from society leads her to
realize the extent of her power over men and the fact that her life has
become a channel for these basic instincts. The priest Vujadin has to
Short Stones 81
step over the border of sanity before he can realize the strength of
these currents.
Vujadin's case suggests that in Andric's writing madness can be a
kind of "privileged" state, granting individuals an insight into the
fundamental currents of life. Mara the concubine and Mustafa are
driven similarly beyond the bounds of sanity by their experience,
and they are able to recognize the full extent of the power of evil.
The strength of evil is generally disguised in society, where
elaborate structures are built up to channel and control it. Once
these structures are destroyed, for whatever reason, the individuals
are confronted by the full force of the currents underlying human
life.
In the case of Alidede, Vujadin and Anika it is not evil that is
revealed by their experience, simply a recognition of forces which
are also normally channelled and controlled by society. The impact
of this realization is disturbing and alarming because the forces are
irrational.
Andric's depiction of children is similar. Their experience of the

world, like that of the characters we have been discussing, is
essentially of things which are upsetting or frightening because they
are not understood. As long as the children's experience is not too
extreme this phase of bewilderment will pass with their maturity,
their achieving a role and position in the world which disguise the
stark facts of existence, and they will grow into balanced adults.
We can perhaps now see that all these characters suffer from
something of the same kind of bewilderment in the face of life as
-Derzelez.
The most engaging of the characters beset by this bewilderment,
in a far more light-hearted tone, is the monk Brother Marko. He is
the protagonist of four stories, of which two in particular illustrate
his outlook.
The first of these, "In the Guest House",21 describes Marko's
position in the monastery. He is a peasant of limited intellect, given
to expressive language quite inappropriate to his calling. He is
profoundly confused by the complexities of the vocation thrust
upon him by his relatives. He does, however, find himself a niche
in the life of the monastery which suits his temperament. He is
given charge of of overseeing work on the monastery lands, of the
animals and wines, and of attending to the needs of the travellers
who stay in the monastery guest house.
Athough he is confused by the dogma of his religion, Marko finds
that he is sometimes granted moments when he feels in perfect
communion with his God. These moments occur most frequently
when he is working on the land, digging or planting out cabbages:
So, after some heavy work, he sits down on a log, wipes the sweat
from his face and breathes hard, then suddenly feels the blood
roaring in his shoulders, his neck and his head, louder and louder,
until his head spins and the noise fills him completely and carries
him away. He sits with his head in his hands, his eyes open, but it
seems as though he is flying swiftly away somewhere. And then
he, who does not know how to write nicely or to speak cleverly, is
somehow able to understand everything and to speak clearly and
freely with God Himself.22
Marko's faith is subjected to a severe test when a Turkish visitor is
brought into the guest house fatally ill. His companions leave him in
Marko's care, ostensibly to seek help, but they do not return. As he
tends the sick man, Marko is overcome by a desire to save the soul of
the dying infidel. His eagerness gives him a new eloquence and he
surprises himself with the fluency with which he half remembers
phrases from his studies and invents his own arguments. The Turk
suffers this onslaught silently, but when at last he is about to die and
incapable of speech Marko brings a crucifix for him to kiss.
Summoning his last strength, the Turk spits at it. Marko is appalled;
he seizes the cross and rushes out into the summer night, his head
throbbing with fury. Gradually, however, his anger subsides:
He began to lose himself in the quiet night, in the gaze of
innumerable stars. He slowly forgot himself. Waves from his
trembling body carried over on to everything around him and he
felt as though he were sailing swiftly over an ocean in the dark.
The sky above him rocked noticeably. There were sounds all
around. He clasped the railing tightly.
Everything was on this great moving ship of God's: the village
and the fields and the monastery and the guest house.
Short Stones 83
"I knew that You did not forget anyone, not even stuttering
Marko or that sinful Osmo Mameledzija. If someone does spit on
Your cross, it is only like a bad dream. There is still room for
everyone on Your ship . . . "
In his delirium, he did not know whether he was speaking out
loud or only thinking to himself. But he could see: there was room
on God's ship for everything and everyone, for He did not
measure with rulers or scales. Now he understood how He could
be The Terrible Lord, how He could move worlds, he understood
everything, although he had no words for it, only he could not
understand how it was that he, Brother Marko Krneta, a clumsy
and disobedient monk, was standing here holding the tiller of that
ship of the Lord's. - And then he forgot himself again. He knew
only that everything that existed was moving and travelling, and
that it was all going towards Salvation.23
This image of a Christian God willing to accept all sinners,

whatever their professed religion, is echoed in a story published after
the Second World War in which Allah is similarly described as
advising a Franciscan monk not to change his faith as "this question
of faiths isn't as important to us up here, in this world, as it is to you
there, particularly in Bosnia."24
It is characteristic that Andric should use his expressly religious
characters to convey a philosophical outlook which transcends any
specific dogma. In Bosnian Story the Franciscan monk Brother Luka
is one of the spokesmen for Andric's view of life as a perpetual ebb
and flow. Petar and Alidede are also monks. Such men are confron-
ted daily by the fundamental questions of existence, and, except on
rare occasions, the coherence of their lives is not threatened by direct
experience of evil. It is clear, however, that the outlook of the
individual monks is conditioned primarily by their personalities,
which may be enhanced by their way of life but not determined by it.
In other cases, the religious dogma of any faith is seen as excluding
the individual. Marko's failure to grasp the intricacies of Christianity
in fact leaves him free for a genuine spiritual experience. But he is
made to feel guilty and inadequate by his fellow-monks, who have
access to a kind of secret society, the rules of which he cannot
understand and which is therefore denied him. Characters in
Andric's works may evolve their own ritual to order their experi-
ence, but they will feel excluded from any organized communal
pattern of behaviour. "The Pasha's Concubine" offers an illustration
of this. Mara's experience of the world is reduced to her essential
fear, but this fear is expressed in a particular way. She feels cut off
from other human beings by seeing them at crucial moments
engaged in a ritual which excludes her. She is excluded from society
by what she has become, and when she turns to the Church she finds
that although its ritual is more familiar to her, it is still outside her,
passing judgement on her. There is always a discrepancy in Andric's
works between the appearance of religious fervour as seen from the
outside and the individual experience of it. The example of Alidede,
whose fellow-monks interpret his last prayer so differently from
what it is in reality, is typical.
Marko is granted another moment of insight in the story which
recounts his death. There is a darker tone to this experience,
however, and the implications for Andric's own outlook are of
particular importance. This story, "Beside the Brandy Still"25,
revolves around the image of a medallion - a "coin with two sides" -
showing the head of a Christian saint, which Marko once saw during
his studies in Rome. Various experiences disturb him deeply and his
experience crystallizes in one idea: "Undoubtedly, there was a great
deal of evil in the world, and it was stronger than he could guess.
Perhaps it was as strong as the power of good, perhaps even
stronger."26
Eventually, as he works by a fire in the monastery, distilling plum
brandy, Marko watches the face of a Turkish visitor, who is taunting
him and the Christian religion:
Brother Marko would raise his eyes involuntarily from his task
and glance at the Turk. That head thrown back, that pale face
with its green shadows, blazing eyes, everything reminded him of
something remote and exalted: of the head of a saint whom he had
seen on a picture in a Roman Church. However hard he resisted
this sinful comparison which disturbed him, it came back and
imposed itself irresistibly like a tempter. This was the head of the
unknown saint and martyr: the same exaltation, the same shining
eyes and expression of sublime pain . . ,27
Short Stones 85
The question of the balance of good and evil has important
implications in Andric's work and in the philosophy of life that
emerges from it. His earliest prose poems, and many of the stories
published between the wars, show a preoccupation with the weight
of evil in the world. It seems from Ex Ponto and Anxieties that only a
courageous will to survive persuades Andric sometimes to glimpse a
balance in the forces of destruction and creation. This belief is rather
the product of an intuitive faith than a conclusion based on
experience, still less on the unquestioning acceptance of any set of
religious views. In the stories published between the wars there is
only one character who seems to express a preponderance of good.
This is Corkan, the illegitimate half-gypsy, a figure right outside the
norms of society, who has many of the qualities of a typical "fool of
God". He is a character who appealed to Andric, recurring as the
central figure of one story, "Corkan and the German Girl"28, in the
story "Mila and Prelac"29 and in the novel The Bridge on the Drina.
Corkan is a general scapegoat in Visegrad, a figure of fun who
himself joins in the mockery. In the story "Corkan and the German
Girl" he is shown obsessively pursuing an obviously unattainable
ideal, in much the same way as Alija -Derzelez. The light and
humorous tone of the story reflects Corkan's personality. The object
of his obsession is physically inaccessible: a tight-rope walker in an
Austrian circus company visiting Visegrad. The chaos caused by the
circus eventually results in Corkan's receiving a beating which seems
to be a regular occurrence, having more to do with relieving the
feelings of the official inflicting the punishment than the extent of
the crime. When his wounds have healed Corkan emerges from the
hayloft where he crawled to recover, laughing at the way he climbs
down the ladder. Corkan's resilience, good humour and spontaneity
are always associated with the sun, the central symbol of positive
forces in Andric's work. Indeed, the character can be seen to have
grown out of the role played by the sun in Andric's writing.
When, in his old age, Corkan is reduced by the circumstances of
his daily existence to a worn-out scarecrow, he simply shrinks and
decays while his life steadily ebbs away. He has sight in only one eye:
"But the whole sun still fits into that one eye."30
Corkan's death is a rare example in Andric's work of a peaceful,
entirely dignified end. He sits in the sun, singing softly over and over
again the first two words of a long-forgotten song, and slowly passes
out of life: " . . .[he] was bathed in sunlight and quite filled with a
sense of a strange relationship and perfect harmony between every-
thing that is lost and all that is found, between what is and what
ceases to be."31
Corkan provides a counterpoint to the weight of evil in Andric's
work. For all its difficulties, his life is successful - gratuitously so,
because of the gift of his temperament rather than any effort of his
own. He is born a channel for good as others are the instruments of
evil.
It emerges that the components of Andric's world are constant.
The distribution of good and evil, aggression and suffering, positive
and destructive forces varies from one individual to another depend-
ing in part on innate characteristics and in part on the circumstances
of their lives.
One more story from this period should perhaps be discussed, as it
exemplifies several of the ideas touched on so far. "The Miracle at
Olovo"32 concerns a young crippled girl taken by her mother to a
holy spring believed to have miraculous healing powers. What takes
place is seen by the other women in the shrine as a miracle, and will
be recounted as such by them and through subsequent generations.
As in the case of Alidede's prayer, however, the "miracle" is another
example of the discrepancy between an individual's experience and
other people's perception of it. This experience too is one which
gives rise to legend and the legend then acquires a reality of its own.
In the case of -Derzelez, the stories of his heroism are seen to be the
norm and -Derzelez himself as falling short of it, as being in some
way less real than they are. Similarly, the crippled girl herself will be
forgotten once her experience has served its purpose of fulfilling a
human need for miracles. What happens to the girl is simply that her
exhilaration with all the circumstances of her journey to Olovo
combine with the sunlight pouring down into the water to create a
moment of exceptional elation. As in the case of Mara the concubine
and Mustafa the Hungarian, who found a formula to express their
awareness of fear and disgust respectively, the girl's experience is so
intense that it demands formal expression. Such a form exists in the
idea of a divine vision. This idea is no more rational than the
experience itself but it is familiar, sanctioned by time and institu-
Short Stories 87
tionalized by established religions. It therefore acquires the superior
"reality" that characterizes legend.
The discussion so far does not account for the whole range of
stories published between the wars, several of which have no
significance beyond themselves, but are simply "good stories".
Often throughout his work, where this is the case, Andric will pay
more attention to the manner in which the story is told than to its
content. In his continuing reflection on the nature of narrative art,
his interest extended beyond the experience which demanded to be
recorded to the circumstances which made the telling of the tale
possible and to the way in which it was told. Some individuals are
described as having a special gift which makes even the most familiar
and ordinary tales worth listening to. One character with such a gift
is the old Franciscan monk Brother Petar, to whom the younger
monks listen eagerly as he lies in his monastery bed recounting
incidents from his long life. His personality imbues his tales with a
calm reflective tone, an objectivity which is very different from the
atmosphere of the stories we have been considering, where the
central character and his experience dominate.
The other important stories published between the wars are not
written from the point of view of a particular character, indeed they
are not about people at all. One is concerned with mountains, one
with bridges, and the third relates a persistent dream.
"Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not"33 expresses a theme which
persists in Andric's work from Ex Ponto to some of the last notes
recorded in Signs by the Roadside. The woman Jelena is the symbol
of an ideal of happiness which always escapes the writer. He is aware
of her stepping silently through a snowy wood, and walking towards
his door along a dark corridor holding a flickering candle. She never
reaches the end of the corridor or the poet's door. In another mood,
however, he wakes before dawn and stands by the window as though
waiting for her:
My thoughts hide the beauty of the whole world within them.

The content of my life has become an unrealizable dream. And
so my life passes, but at the hour of my death I can point to my
longing as to the only great, true and beautiful thing in my
life.34
In the full-length story of Jelena she is described as appearing to
the writer without warning, often when he is travelling, and
generally associated with sunlight. She comes, then, to stand for the
kind of joy that comes from the (illusory) sense of freedom and
exhilaration of travelling and the triumph of the spirit associated by
Andric with the sun.
The theme of Jelena is clearly a personal one, and there is no
attempt to make it objective through a third-person narrator. The
other two stories are generalized statements, important for an
understanding of Andric's whole outlook. The themes they treat are
developed at greater length in the two historical novels, The Bridge
on the Drina and Bosnian Story.
"The Rzav Hills"35 describes the frenzied activities of the
Austrians in the years following their occupation of Bosnia, and the
way in which the hills are able to throw off all trace of them and their
ugly buildings after their departure, returning to their ancient,
enduring outlines. The story contains much of Andric's view of the
differences between Eastern and Western culture, as these were
vividly displayed in Bosnia when the European ways of Austria-
Hungary were imposed on the more-or-less Oriental atmosphere of
Ottoman Bosnia.
"The Bridge on the Zepa"36 is one of the stories richest in ideas
which recur elsewhere in Andric's work. It provides a preliminary
sketch for The Bridge on the Drina, in a concentrated form. A
Bosnian-born Grand Vizier in Constantinople whose experience is
similar to that of the great Mehmed Pasha, builder of the bridge on
the Drina - he was taken, like Mehmed, from his native village at the
age of nine - wishes to endow his native village with a building that
will be of enduring use. He is told of the regular destruction of the
wooden bridges built over the Zepa and resolves to have a stone
bridge built. The bulk of the story consists of the description of the
dedication of the master-builder, planning and building the bridge.
Having made his initial plans and despatched them to Constanti-
nople, he builds himself a cabin and settles there, buying simple
foods from the neighbouring peasants and preparing them himself,
spending the whole day investigating the river and its currents,
examining the stone he intends to use, carving and sketching. When
work begins, it is at first interrupted by a sudden storm that fills the
Short Stones 89
river and sweeps away the preliminary structure. As in The Bridge on
theDrina, the villagers interpret this as the will of the river, rejecting
all human innovation. But the building starts again, the work
stopping with the onset of winter when the master-builder remains
in his hut, scarcely emerging, poring in solitude over his plans and
calculations. Eventually, halfway through the following summer, the
building is completed and the bridge emerges at last from the
scaffolding.
The portrait given here of the master-builder suggests a devotion
to an ideal conventionally associated with religious fervour. This
gives his work a mysterious, almost supernatural quality. He works
with single-minded, self-denying dedication to create something
which will transcend the vagaries of the natural world and the
ravages of a human time-scale. The ideas and the creative genius of
the master-builder will long outlive him in his works.
In addition to the main theme - that the bridge embodies a
complete statement requiring no further comment - there is another
important idea. The Vizier's initial desire to build something
enduring in his native village is prompted by his experience of
imprisonment following a political upheaval in Constantinople. The
winter months he spent in prison brought a new thoughtfulness, a
new awareness of the narrow dividing line between life and death,
and a new gratitude for being alive and at liberty. In prison, he
remembered his native land and thought of the villagers' houses
where his glory was frequently spoken of, without any realization of
the price of that glory or the other side of success. His decision to
build the bridge was an expression of this new perspective.
The hills in "The Rzav Hills" stand for the endurance and
immutability of the natural world in contrast to the transience of
human life. The bridge has a similar quality of permanence, at least
to the human mind, but it has the additional quality of being man-
made. The bridge stands, then, for the creative principle, the
explicit striving of man to resist and conquer transience. It is a
bridge, in fact, between man's life on earth, his aspiration to
eternity, and the life of the imagination. It is a particularly fruitful
symbol in Andric's work, as can be seen in The Bridge on the Drina.
It stands also for the guiding principle of his work, which is that
ideas which can be abstracted from experience, like the Vizier's
motto, cannot communicate the truth of experience itself. The age-
old need of mankind for stories is based on this fundamental
apprehension that fairy-stories and legends say more about human
life and history than any abstraction can. Hence the whole move-
ment in Andric's work away from analysis, in favour of complete
entities, stories which communicate through their various compo-
nents - the central image, recurrent vocabulary and emotional
colouring - an experience which is more than the sum of these parts
and which cannot, ultimately, be described or paraphrased.
(ii) 1945-60
In Andric's work as a whole there is no abrupt break or change of
direction corresponding to the various upheavals of the troubled
times he lived in. There is, rather, a steady evolution and develop-
ment of themes and ideas, in which his personal experience is only
indirectly reflected. Nevertheless, a number of short stories pub-
lished after the Second World War either deal directly with it or
reflect attitudes prevailing after it in various ways.
As was to be expected, the Yugoslav Communist Party which
came to power after the Second World War was closely allied to the
Soviet Party and the presence of Soviet advisers was felt in all aspects
of public life. Cultural life was dominated by the new Communist
"establishment", whose influence restricted the range of subject
matter considered "suitable" for literature. After 1948, and Yugosla-
via's break with Stalin, the atmosphere in cultural life became more
relaxed, and from the early 1950s the scope of acceptable literary
material was steadily extended. Andric, who made a major contribu-
tion to the literary life of the new Yugoslavia with the publication of
his three novels in 1945, reflected something of the prevailing
atmosphere in a number of his short stories from this period.
Examples are "The Tale of the Peasant Siman",37 a complex story of
the relationship between a Moslem landowner and his Christian serf
as it is altered by the Austrian annexation of Bosnia, and a number of
pieces more or less directly concerned with the War. The first post-
war years cannot, however, be seen as a homogeneous phase. Andric
published some eighteen stories between 1945 and 1948, covering a
range of themes and styles; from the tales set in Bosnia under
Short Stones 91
Turkish or Austrian rule to themes from his childhood, and timeless
reflections set in a contemporary context.
Only three stories deal directly and exclusively with the War itself,
and of these one is in fact a sketch for a passage from the longest of
the three, "Zeko".38 Describing the experience that led the inade-
quate Zeko, dominated by an aggressive wife and collaborator son,
to become involved in illegal activities in the Resistance in occupied
Belgrade, it has something of the uneven quality of The Woman from
Sarajevo in that there is an imbalance between the treatment of the
different characters. In the novel the protagonist becomes almost a
caricature among characters whose treatment is realistic. In "Zeko",
the situation is reversed. The main character's credibility is under-
mined initially by the almost grotesque figures of his wife and son,
and his later development lacks conviction. Nevertheless, the story
contains some vivid passages, particularly those describing life by
the Sava River and the bombing of Belgrade.
The other two short pieces exclusively concerned with the War are
more consistent in tone. "The Titanic Bar",39 published in 1950,
portrays the agonized fear of the Jewish owner of a little bar in
Sarajevo on the one hand and the development of the brutal,
inadequate personality of a young Fascist, or "Ustasha", on the
other. The material is superficially as directly a product of the
specific circumstances of the Second World War as "Zeko", and yet
the quality is different. This difference lies in the fact that the two
main characters in "The Titanic Bar" fall into archetypal categories,
while Zeko's political "awakening" is not quite satisfactorily accoun-
ted for by either his innate qualities or his experience.
"The Titanic Bar" describes the situation in Sarajevo in the early
stages of the War before the systematic removal of the Jewish
population to work camps or extermination, when individual mem-
bers of the Ustasha movement took advantage of the times to rob and
persecute individual Jews. Some of these "Ustashe" acquired large
sums of money or jewellery through blackmail or in return for
helping some Jews and their families to leave the country. Others,
however, had to be content with small-scale activities of various
kinds. "And it was often here that the ugliest and most senseless
scenes of unimaginable misery and horror took place."40 Andric
describes the dingy, squalid little bar owned by Mento Papo, so
small that only half-a-dozen customers can stand in it at one time;
and the character of Papo himself, the black sheep of the Sephardic
community of Sarajevo, who took up with petty gamblers and
drinkers at an early age and is generally regarded as having disgraced
the Jews. The situation is thus essentially ironic: Mento Papo is
Jewish only by birth; he has none of the attributes of wealth and
success which are generally associated with his race and provide
some kind of provocation, in the form of envy or jealousy, for anti-
Semitism. The crude emotion is here exposed for what it is: senseless
hatred of what is different and easily identified as such. The portrait
of Mento Papo then becomes an illustration of the growth of fear.
The fear common to his whole people is exaggerated in Papo's case
by complete isolation. There is no possible way out of the sickening
blind alley of terror to which Papo is doomed. He is abandoned by
all his former customers and ignored by the Jews with whom he has
sometimes to do a day's hard labour. The process of his destruction
is already well under way when the long-awaited knock on the door
finally comes. The story of the young man in Ustasha uniform who
thrusts his way into the bar is then given in detail. His family is
described as having begun to decline with the Austrian occupation of
Bosnia, and his father as having had a lifelong ambition to exercise
power as a prison guard. There is also some doubt as to whether the
child is actually his, which leads to violent quarrels between husband
and wife. The child, Stjepan Kovic, is physically large, but slow-
witted and innately dishonest, always a figure of fun in his native
town. This background offers the typical combination of historical
circumstances, innate characteristics and personal experience which
determines the environment in which an individual develops.
Just as Mento Papo's fear and isolation are archetypal, so Kovic's
character is also generalized in the manner typical of Andric. He is
described as "one of those barren and slovenly people who neither
wither nor ripen, who cannot reconcile themselves to an insignificant
or average style of life, but have not the strength or ability to alter it
by hard work or perseverance. From his childhood, a difficult and
tormented man".41
The description of Kovic is developed into the portrait of an
inadequate, dissatisfied and consequently potentially dangerous
personality. He is a man who needs some outward sign of import-
Short Stories 93
ance: he has to carry something as he walks through the town "and
the more unusual the article, the better he felt and the more easily
and assuredly he stepped".42
Kovic suffers from a painful, obsessive desire to be something
other than he is, above all to be seen to be important. The
opportunity offered by membership of the Ustasha movement seems
therefore to answer his need, although he is taken no more seriously
within its ranks than he was outside it, and he soon begins to realize
that he has still not achieved the importance to which he feels
entitled. When Kovic finally acquires his "own" Jew to persecute, he
is once again maddened by the contrast between his expectations and
the pathetic, squalid reality he encounters. The account of the
"interrogation" is vivid, with Kovic's frustration and bitterness
mounting to the point where he shoots his victim, repeatedly and
frenziedly.
This story is a satisfactory coincidence of universal, generalized
themes of fear and persecution with the specific circumstances of the
Second World War in Bosnia, with both aspects of the whole
developed. As in the case of the victims in earlier stories, Papo's
vulnerability acts as a magnet, a provocation to Kovic's aggression,
which in turn functions as compensation for his own sense of uneasy
dissatisfaction.
It is at first sight perhaps surprising that Andric did not write
more directly about the War's effect on Bosnia, given the emphasis
in his work on the propensity of the mixed population of the area to
intercultural strife. But in fact, in view of the particular circum-
stances of the War in Yugoslavia, it is quite understandable that
Andric's statements should have been on the whole indirect. Apart
from the struggle with the occupying forces, the victory of the
Communist-led Partisan Army involved the defeat of elements
hostile to it, including other local Resistance forces; the War saw also
the emergence in Croatia of an "independent" Fascist state which
contributed not only to the extermination of Jews, but also to the
elimination of Serbs living in Croatian territory. The result was that
of the one-and-three-quarter million who died during the War, over
600,000 were murdered by their fellow-Yugoslavs. If these circum-
stances are not treated directly, however, much of Andric's work
since the War can be seen as an investigation of the state of mind and
the kind of breakdown of accepted norms of behaviour which can be
seen to have contributed to conflict on such an appalling scale.
A reflection on the nature of intercultural relations in Bosnia is
given in a piece published in 1946, under the title "Letter from the
Year 1920".43 Throughout his work Andric uses Bosnia, with its
potential for intercultural conflict, as an image of the human world
where the basic conditions of existence can be seen in an extreme,
raw form. His frequent reference to the widespread and deep-seated
hatred which he describes as characterizing the atmosphere of
Bosnian life should be seen in these terms. Whether or not the story
was written, or at least drafted, earlier, it is certainly no coincidence
that it was published when it was, when the strife which Andric had
witnessed in the First World War was exaggerated systematically in
the circumstances of open anti-Semitism and civil war.
This story is similar in flavour and manner to several published
after the Second World War, in which the first-person narrator
examines incidents from his own childhood and youth, usually
expanding them into more general statements. The degree to which
these sketches and stories are actually autobiographical is in many
cases uncertain, but together they add up to something approaching
an account of the development of the writer's imaginative life. In
"Letter from the Year 1920", the references to the response of the
narrator to the world of books are familiar. And it is likely that the
character of Maks Levenfeld is based on someone known to Andric
as a young man. The substance of the piece, and letter itself,
however, need have existed only in Andric's imagination, stimulated
by his understanding of Bosnia and his knowledge of the repercus-
sions there of both world wars. It is a lengthy reflection of the nature
of hatred, seen as an organic force, the "correlative" of fear. In the
context of Andric's experience of war the irrational fear characteriz-
ing human existence can be seen to have been channelled in a
particular direction. The Fascist Kovic's dissatisfaction is expressed
as aggression as soon as the opportunity presents itself. In war, the
same fundamental unease is given universal expression in the form of
legitimized hatred:
Hatred which like a cancer in an organism wastes and con-

sumes everything around it, to perish itself in the end, for such
Short Stories 95
hatred, like a flame, has no constant form of life of its own; it is
simply the instrument of the instinct for destruction and self-
destruction . . . **
The extent to which this hatred is an inescapable facet of the human
condition is seen in the fact that although Levenfeld leaves Bosnia in
order to escape from its pervasive influence, he is killed as a volunteer
in the Spanish Civil War. Typically, Andric undermines his charac-
ter's brave attempt to break out of the pattern in this briefly stated
ironic final note. As always in Andric's work, however, even such
statements as these are relative. In this story, in the context of war, the
existence of hatred - properly channelled - is seen as potentially also a
positive force.
The story raises some other, general, issues. The fear which is the
essential condition of human existence engenders the idea of the
opposite, the ideal of perfect beauty, justice and happiness. Similarly
the hatred which is the manifestation of fear also implies its opposite,
love. Acts of hatred may be carried out in its name, but the ideal
endures pure and untainted because it is entirely abstract, remote
from daily experience. It is no coincidence, Andric seems to say, that
man has chosen to place his several gods in the distant heavens.
You are, for the most part, accustomed to keep the full force of your
hatred for what is close to you. The holy objects you love are
generally beyond three hundred rivers and mountains, and the
objects of your revulsion and hatred are here beside you, in the
same town, often the other side of your courtyard wall. So your love
does not seek many deeds, but your hatred is very easily transform-
ed into action. You love your native land, love it deeply, but in three
or four different ways which exclude and mortally abhor one
another and often come into conflict . . . This impoverished,
backward land in which four different faiths live crowded together,
would need four times as much love, mutual understanding and
tolerance as other countries. And in Bosnia, on the contrary, lack of
understanding, which occasionally turns to open hatred, is virtually
the common characteristic of the population.45
Andric's comments on intercultural and interreligious conflict can
be read on the level of the absurdity of human strife throughout the
world and throughout history. A memorable passage in this story
describes the different chimes of the bells in Sarajevo ringing out
the time differently for each of the four faiths. It is clear from this
passage that the divisions are man-made, as is the arbitrary choice
of method to express the passing of time. But just as the develop-
ment of the calendar and clocks can appear to offer man control
over time, and his religion can appear to give his life meaning, so
can his hatred of alien cultures appear to absolve him from his own
fear:
Whoever spends a night in Sarajevo awake in his bed, can hear the
voices of the Sarajevo night. The clock on the Catholic cathedral
chimes heavily and assuredly: two in the morning. More than a
minute passes (75 seconds to be exact, I counted) and only then
does the clock from the Orthodox church strike with a somewhat
weaker but penetrating sound, chiming out its two in the morning.
A little later the clock tower at the Bey's Mosque sounds, with a
muffled, distant voice, and it strikes eleven o'clock, eleven ghostly
Turkish hours, according to the calculations of remote, alien ends
of the earth! The Jews do not have their own bell to chime, but
God alone knows what time it is for them, according to both
Sephardic and Ashkenazy reckoning. So, even at night, while
everything sleeps, in the chiming of the empty hours in the dead
of night, that difference keeps vigil which divides these sleeping
people who, when they are awake, rejoice and grieve, receive
guests and fast according to four different hostile calendars, and
send all their desires and prayers towards one sky in four different
liturgical languages. And this difference is always, sometimes
visibly and openly, sometimes imperceptibly and covertly, similar
to hatred, often completely identical to it.46
Despite Andric's experience of the Second World War, in the
stories published between 1945 and 1960 the extreme violence
and the brutality of the inter-war stories has generally gone; or at
least, in those stories in which violence is depicted it has gone
inward and become subtler, even if its destructive power is almost
as great.
For Andric an essential feature of human relationships remains
attack and defence, and he examines this now in his depiction of
Short Stones 97
family life, where one partner in the marriage is seen as the
aggressor. This aggression can take several forms. It reflects on the
one hand Andric's concern with the reality underlying social conven-
tion, and on the other his interest in the moments at which these
conventions break down completely and the reality is suddenly
violently disclosed, as in the extreme case of war. One situation is
developed in several stories as a symbol of such covert aggression.
"Persecution"47 is a typical instance.
In the earlier tales of violence the persecution of individuals was
generally public. Now the surface of the lives described is apparently
unremarkable, normal and quite satisfactory. "Persecution" opens
with a statement of general hostility towards Anica, the wife in one
of these ostensibly unexceptionable marriages, and criticism of her
having left her husband: "No one could understand why Anica, the
wife of Andrija Zerekovic, one day left her home and husband.
There was no obvious reason or reasonable justification for such an
action."48
This story offers an example of the balance between individual
experience and generalization that typifies Andric's technique of
characterization. The descriptions of both wife and husband consist
very largely of generalization: "One of those strong, shapely girls
who are afraid of growing and showing their beauty . . .";49 "It is
not a rare occurrence . . . for the eldest sister to stay at home . . .
Such a girl is left without any personal life . . .";50 "That is one of
those all-powerful laws in our social relations . . .";51 "It was one of
those marriages . . .".52
The generalization is deliberately intensified in this story to
heighten the contrast between the familiarity of the pattern, the
expectations of outsiders and the reality of the marriage itself.
"Everything went as God commands and as people imagine and
expect."53
The nature of the harassment to which Anica is exposed is then
described. The first hints lie in the way her husband looks on her
arrival in his household as a new acquisition, the crowning touch to a
perfectly successful life. He likes to refer to "[his] wife" as often as
possible in conversation with others, implying that he is more
concerned with the sound of the word as a boost to his public image
than with the woman herself. As he lies beside her at night he falls
sweetly asleep in the knowledge that she belongs entirely to him, is
his property just as his house is. The narrator comments, hi an
aphoristic general observation typical of Andric:
But great dangers are hidden in so complete a realization of a
desire, and the greatest lies in the new desire which appears in the
place of the old one . . . Who knows what the existence of the first
one was protecting us from, as long as it was within us, tormenting
us, alive and unrealized?54
In his new, perfect life, Andrija discovers an entirely new
dimension: for the first time he, who has always adapted himself to
the expectations of the outside world, is able to speak quite openly
with no thought or regard for his audience. A pattern of behaviour
then establishes itself between the couple, in which she listens
silently to all he has to say while he holds forth, no longer aware of
her except as a silent presence, a necessary stimulus. In this torrent
of words, then, Andrija builds up an increasingly exaggerated and
grotesque sense of his own importance. At first Anica listens,
without reacting, but gradually she comes to feel increasingly
offended by his onslaught of self-congratulatory fabrication. The
terms in which she experiences this form of persecution are similar
to those used to describe more blatant forms of degradation in some
of the earlier stories:
It seemed degrading . . . she felt insulted that he thought he could
give his imagination free rein before her, as though before a
lifeless object or mindless creature . . . She felt like someone who
was being ill-treated, and ill-treated in a heartless, underhand, but
ostensibly innocent and permissible manner. She was ashamed
because of it all ... This profound feeling of humiliation and
shame hurt and stung her insupportably, more and more with
every day . . .55
Anica's breaking point is described poignantly: "The years would
have passed; if she did not succumb, she would survive them,
silently; she would survive the years, but she could not survive the
hours and minutes."56
What is at stake here is more than the portrayal of the idiosyncra-
tic behaviour of one individual. It is a reflection of a common aspect
Short Stones 99
of human relationships in which one individual dominates another,
exploiting the other's passivity and denying his or her right to
develop a distinct personality.
This type of aggression exists everywhere, but the institution of
marriage offers a unique opportunity for its expression. Like
physical violence, psychological violence to the dignity of another
human being can be provoked equally by the weaker party's
vulnerability, a sense of inadequacy in the aggressor or by a
destructive urge with no apparent cause.
Marriage also offers a situation in which an individual's fantasies
can be played out and his need for illusion to a certain extent
satisfied. A ritualized pattern of behaviour is established which the
partner accepts, although his or her own individuality may from
time to time flare up and make its own demands. As in so many
other forms of human contact, each actor is locked in his own
solitude and "communication" is possible only within accepted,
stylized bounds, which always threaten to break down.
Marriage in these stories can be seen as a nucleus of society. The
rules governing human behaviour are no different, except in scale.
It may be seen that there is a general development from the stories
published between the wars. The central characters in them were
portrayed as having placed themselves "outside" society by what was
regarded as their "derangement". Now, the portraits are of people
who appear to be playing a "normal" part in society but who are
subject in their private lives to the same kind of aggressive or
defensive drives, the same need for illusion, the same kind of unease
and fear. The existence of a norm outside them from which they are
felt to deviate in one way or another is similarly implied. The needs
of these characters are expressed in terms of "sickness" which
humiliates and shames their partners.
Another example of socially acceptable violence is that done to an
individual personality by his having to conform to the requirements
of his public life, of having to subordinate his own interests and
desires to those of his superiors. Alternatively, a man's public
position may offer him the opportunity of malicious, covert and
socially acceptable violence to others. In these cases, any violence
inflicted on others carries with it the fear of retribution. This
increases the individual's tyranny in his moments of confidence but
is a source of constant anxiety, particularly when he is no longer
protected by his public role, when he is alone at night. Whether the
distortion of the protagonist's personality results from his capacity to
inflict misery or is compensation for his own subordination, the
effect is the same. The distortion of the personality through the
circumstances of his public life will at some point seek to regain a
balance which may well be seen by the outside world as madness.
The implication is that the organization of social life is itself a form
of madness which cannot correspond to or control the true facts of
human existence.
The striking common feature of all the stories portraying these
various kinds of violence is that its vehicle is speech. It is through
words that Andrija persecutes his wife; another character compen-
sates for the humiliation of his working life as a civil servant; a
consul exerts power over his clients. A supervisor on a state farm
tyrannizes an employee through words which alternate with unpre-
dictable periods of silence.
There are references throughout Andric's works to the power of
words for good or evil, one of the earliest examples being the "Bridge
on the Zepa". One story, published in 1954, is entitled simply
"Words".57 This time the focal point is not the power of words but
their communicative value, their capacity to establish contact
between human beings. The story gives two contrasting examples of
the use of words: the narrator describes his meeting on a train with
an old school-friend who greets him with a torrent of meaningless
words describing the surface events of his life since they last met.
The narrator soon ceases to hear the words and pursues his own
thoughts, reminded by this onslaught of a quite different approach
to speech. At one time he had lived in a small hotel in Paris, in a
room next to an old Austrian Jewish refugee couple. When the old
man eventually died, his wife told the narrator the strange tale of
how her thirty years of contented married life had been completely
silent. She did not remember her husband saying anything beyond
what was strictly necessary in their day-to-day affairs. The result was
that they both quite lost the habit of conversation. And then, on his
death-bed, the old man had suddenly called on her for comfort and
implored her to speak to him, to say anything, just to talk. But she
was by now incapable of finding a single word for him. Their life
Short Stones 101
together had been an example of real communication and understan-
ding, more profound than may be expressed in words. Yet the need
of some proof of this communication was felt at the end in order to
give it a different kind of reality, identifiable and in some way
enduring by being given form.
One important story, "The People of Osatica",58 explores a
related idea: the extent to which actions are seen to be "real" and
"true" only in so far as they are recorded in words.
Andric will often begin a work with an account of its geographical
setting, which has a symbolic dimension. In this story, the village of
Osatica is described as being situated both on a hill and in a hollow,
because of the mountains which rise up above it. Everything
depends on the point of view of the observer. The villagers also have
a long tradition of telling stories in order to bolster their sense of
their own importance. This is typified by the tale of a certain
"Hassim":
. . . that story is not only more beautiful than ugly reality, it will
last longer than Hassim would have lasted had he stayed in the
village, and it is worth far more than he was ever worth to the
villagers while he was alive.59
These ideas, of relativity and the superiority of the work of art
over ordinary experience, colour the story. It portrays a villager who
performs a daring feat when he climbs to the top of the church
tower, but his achievement is unreal as long as it is not recognized
and confirmed by others. Eventually he himself begins to doubt its
reality. A counterpoint to the relativity and anxiety which mark the
villagers' lives is provided by the craftsman who comes to install a
cross on the church tower. While the villagers need public, spoken
confirmation of their exploits, the craftsman works silently in a dark
room. His craft is its own justification, requiring no words to give it
either significance or, indeed, reality. The craftsman's occupation is
privileged, on the side of the positive forces of life. He is at one with
his task in which confusion and chance are eliminated: "Everything
around you works with you and helps you . . . [your work] is
strengthened and grows out of itself like a plant from a seed carefully
sown, for which everything has been foreseen."60 In all these cases,
the words do not themselves carry meaning. They fulfil a function,
which may be to give "reality" equally to an actual occurrence or to
an illusion or to give a form, not in itself "true" or "false", to an
underlying "grain of truth" about human experience.
Another aspect of the power of words is the subject of one of the
stories from this period examining children's insights into the adult
world. The child Lazar, in "On Bad Terms with the World",61 likes
to listen to adults talking "not because of what they said, as he did
not understand much of that, but because of their behaviour and
way of speaking".62 One word he overhears captures his imagination
particularly because of the mysterious meaning it evidently has for
the people who use it: in speaking of someone they know they
describe him as "suspect". Lazar becomes obsessed with the word
and tries in every way he can think of to discover exactly what the
concept entails. The explanation he is given fascinates him without
really explaining. He is told that a suspect person is someone who
has spoken some forbidden word. The boy is intrigued by the notion
of a person to all appearances like everyone else, but cut off, isolated
from the rest of the world. He decides to try to cross the frontier of
suspicion himself, and thereby gain access to the other, mysterious,
sinister side of life. One day, after lengthy preparation, Lazar shuts
himself in a room alone, to utter the word that will place him
irrevocably the other side of the dividing line, that will put him "on
bad terms with the world". There is something irresistibly compell-
ing about the darker forces from which everyone around the child
tries to protect him, but of which he is nevertheless aware. The child
feels excluded from the adult world by the existence of forces and
ideas he cannot understand. It emerges from this story that his sense
of exclusion would be more tolerable if there were some good reason
for it, and so the child deliberately chooses to cut himself off, thus
providing himself with a clear, logical and comprehensible pattern of
cause and effect. His situation is of course no different from that of
any adult who searches all his life for some explanation of his
confusion and sense of isolation, in the same way as he seeks rational
explanations for the vagaries of chance.
The craftsman in Osatica is able to escape from anxiety and chance
in the clarity and logic of his concrete task. This opportunity is not
available to most people. What is accessible, however, is the world of
fantasy, a world controlled by the workings of the imagination.
Short Stories 103
Where words are shown to be often an instrument of destruction, the
silent, private escape into a world of ideas is presented as salvation.
Children in particular, the major part of whose lives is devoted to
playing games, are shown to accept the illusory world of the
imagination wholeheartedly. It is not always a source of joy, often
activated as it is by an uneasy awareness of incomprehensible forces.
There are two somewhat similar stories from this period in which
children are taken out of their ordinary, everyday context on an
outing: in both cases to a ruined fortress, one of which is in Belgrade
and contains the mausoleum of a Turkish Grand Vizier. The
substance of each story is a dream involving characters associated
with the places visited. The dreams are vivid and demonstrate on the
one hand the potent associations carried by ancient buildings, and on
the other the fertility of a child's imagination.
The temperament of the children through whose eyes have been
seen all the stories mentioned so far is strikingly similar, and its
particular predilections are developed in the story called "Panor-
ama",63 which contains the least equivocal statement of the positive
power of the imagination.
This tale describes a source of great excitement in the childhood of
the first-person narrator. For about a year during the boy's school-
days in Sarajevo there was a permanent "Panorama of the world": a
series of still photographs which could be seen enlarged and
brilliantly vivid through a series of special binoculars arranged in a
circle. The photographs would be rotated at intervals so that each
spectator could look at each one in turn.
For the child the world seen through these binoculars - Rio de
Janeiro, Lisbon, Ceylon - became the only reality - "real, glorious,
bright life" - and the life of his little Bosnian town seemed "like a
bad dream". The pictures extended and incorporated all that the
boy read in books and dreamed and constructed in his imagination.
This game of joy and enthusiasm was worth gold to me, and not
merely a nickel coin. For, in fact, I gave all that was required for
the game from myself and I brought it all out of myself. For many
boys of my age anything, even less significant than this primitive
panorama, could provide the starting point for such a game, every
means, even the poorest, is welcome to them as a way of spreading
out before them all that makes them happy or uneasy, and which
fills them, completely, for it grows with them, through all the
years of their growing.64
The style of this story conveys its mood of excitement through
short sentences and exclamations. The child's reactions are evoked
by his constantly relating what he sees to his own childish experi-
ence.
The magic of the panorama - and of the world of the imagination
altogether - lies in the fact that it can be endlessly expanded. The
child comments on some of the people in one of the photographs:
People who had all they needed. I had always thought about this
kind of life, this kind of people, and as I thought about myself and
my family, always regretted that we were not like that, and I used
to wonder how we could become like them. And now, here were
people like that standing before me - a father, mother and
daughter - as though they would at any moment start to walk and
talk. The expression on their faces and their gestures captured on
the picture made it easy for me to imagine them walking and
speaking, although they were silent and motionless. And I did
imagine them! And it was better like that, for if they had really
had the ability to walk and the gift of speech, they would quickly
have said what they had to say and crossed the sunny avenue and
the whole spell would have been broken . . . As it was, they
walked when I wanted them to and said that I wanted when I
wanted. And it had no end, no bitter hint of an end!65
The child's reactions to the pictures and the leaps and bounds of
his imagination convey a great deal about a general attitude to life
and art which is Andric's own. In connection with the picture of a
fortress in Rio, for example, the child's attention is caught particu-
larly by a cannon:
A cannon! In the joy of existence which these pictures meant to
me, this was the tragic note without which, it seemed, there was
neither joy nor existence. This note suggested that every joy and
each existence could at any moment be transformed into its
opposite, and that was what made them so elusive and - so
wonderful and precious.66
Short Stones 105
The child participates to the maximum in the pictures which pass
before his eyes. He stays on in the darkened room until he is
discovered by the manager, but not until he has seen all the pictures
several times. The experience is not, however, limited to the time
spent watching the panorama itself:
That square with its flowers, water, dignified stone buildings,
with its beautiful, carefree people, provoked the greatest disquiet
in me, particularly at night, when it came to life in my dreams or
half-dreams. For you should know that the real life of these
pictures began only later, when I returned home and lay down in
my bed.67
It is, then, at home in his bed that the child's imagination brings
to life the characters and scenes he has observed with such excited
concentration. And they not only acquire a life of their own, but act
as a stimulus to thoughts about many other different aspects of life.
As far as the outside world is concerned, the child's absorption in
his imaginary world is often a source of resentment: seeing that he
does not belong completely to their world, people tend to try to drag
him back into it. And the narrator himself sees that there is another
side to his involvement in the vivid life of the pictures: "Because of
this passion for the world and life of the pictures, which dominated
me completely, I became the debtor of this real world and guilty in
the life which I had to live."68 These words are reminiscent of
statements about the life of the artist elsewhere in Andric's work.
Eventually the panorama leaves:
It went, and left me disappointed and alone, with a question
which cannot be answered and will not be put aside. - Which is
the world, the real world, with living people and their mutual
relations expressed in possessions and force and power, in money
and calculation, and which is the image of the world, with its
riches, joy and beauty? - There is no explanation or answer. The
years pass; with new experiences and new journeys the question
acquires hundreds of different aspects, but still remains without
an answer.69
The question remains unanswered, but the vivid world of the
pictures stays brilliantly alive; more durable, often, than the real
world of everyday experience: "Forgetfulness, which erased so many
living faces and places, so many real delights and upsets, had no
power over this world."70
The narrator describes how he used to imagine the progress of the
characters from the pictures, and from time to time himself, in the
towns and landscapes from the panorama. His musings have differ-
ent forms and a range of tones.
The conclusion of the story offers an apt description of Andric's
attitude to story, legend, the life of the imagination and art in
general:
So these pictures from the world of my panorama appeared and

disappeared in a flash. And they will perhaps appear again, either
these same or different ones. You should not expect anything too
confidently in these matters, but you may hope for everything.
This was the nature of the love that flared up in me once, as I
watched in that closed and half-lit room pictures of towns and
landscapes, and it was never extinguished or diminished, but grew
with me, not losing its energy or brilliance over the years. That
passion was costly and difficult, but I paid for it gladly, without
sparing myself, no longer with nickel coins, but with the best part
of myself. And yet, I am its debtor, and shall always remain so, for
the pictures of the world which I saw or glimpsed cannot ever be
adequately paid for. They carry me with them and raise me up,
and link me to life, and show me constantly that, as I wandered
through the world over the years, I did not waste my strength in
vain.71
These passages have been quoted at length as they are an explicit

account of the role of art and the imagination in Andric's life. They
have the quality of his reflective prose, essays and incidental jottings.
In general, in many of the stories published since the Second World
War, the philosophical dimension is closer to the surface. The
archetypal characters and situations of the earlier ones emphasized
the form given to human experience in legend and the fundamental
needs from which it arose. Now the emphasis has shifted to an
awareness of such stories explicitly as products of the imagination.
With the slight change of perspective, Andric seems also to have
Short Stories 107
acquired a new capacity to enjoy games, the creation of zany
characters and the elaboration of pure fantasies.
An example of this tendency is the fantasy "Summer Holiday in
the South".72 In fact it is an elaboration of a recurrent idea of
Andric's found in Anxieties and Signs by the Roadside. Sometimes by
the sea, which he loved, Andric found himself thinking of the
perfect salvation of simply dissolving into its salty, iodine evapora-
tion.
"Summer Holiday in the South" describes a staid and apparently
very ordinary Austrian teacher on holiday on the Southern Adriatic
coast. The sensation of renewal and refreshment from the sea, sun
and salt air is described in physical terms: "Refreshed by swimming,
the sun and the sea-water, he felt as though he were dressed in light,
festive, flower-white and scented clothes, and that he was himself
blossoming and growing together with them and with everything
around him."73 Increasingly, the teacher becomes susceptible to
tricks of the air, and the smoke of the cigarette that seems
intoxicating in these surroundings: he begins to feel himself part of
the heady atmosphere itself. An echo of the exhilaration of the child
in "The Miracle" can be felt here. One day the attraction of these
visions becomes irresistible and he steps into the brilliance of the
light. The process is described with Andric's favourite image of a
bridge:
The tops of the thick green trees, which were already beneath
him, carried in themselves reflections of the brilliance that linked
and equalized everything on the earth, on the sea and in the sky.
That brilliance was a marvellous, steep, swaying bridge along
which a man could climb without gravity and without limit . . ,74
And so the teacher disappears without trace, mystifying not only
his wife and the local police but the whole population of the little
town, who find the uncertainty surrounding the whole curious affair
disconcerting and uncomfortable.
This piece is similar to "Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not" and
"The Ivory Woman"75 of the inter-war period. It is the expression of
an abstract idea in concrete terms, suggesting the force with which
quite abstract notions and vague impressions can impose themselves
on the imagination, demanding to be recognized as no less real than
"reality". Increasingly, in the post-War years, Andric seems to
explore such ideas and develop them to their full potential. The
conscious self-observation of the writer at work and the increased
detachment of these stories give rise to an increasingly ironic, often
gently humorous, tone and to a tendency towards allegory.
In many stories published since the Second World War there is a
clear allegorical dimension, an obvious example being "Panorama".
It is true to say that Andric had shown a predilection for allegory
early in his writing, and a tendency to present his stories frequently
almost in the form of a parable, an enigma, with a meaning to be
deduced from the material. In the post-War period several works are
clearly allegorical. The most obvious is a little piece reminiscent of a
fable by Aesop, "Aska and the Wolf'.76 It tells the story of a lamb
with an exceptional talent for ballet, whose passionate instinctive
dance so astonishes and delights the wolf poised to pounce on her
that he watches enraptured until he is himself shot by shepherds
searching for the lamb. The tale includes several general observa-
tions:
We do not even know how much strength and how much potential
are hidden inside every living being. And we cannot guess how
much we are capable of. We exist and pass on, without ever
realizing all that we could have been and done.77
The main concern of the story, however, is with the power of art
over death and the almost superhuman strength of the artistic
impulse if the artist is prepared to risk all in his commitment.
Another plainly allegorical tale from this period is "The Tale of
the Vizier's Elephant".78 The introduction to the story makes its
figurative quality explicit in a general statement about the particular
nature of Bosnian stories:
Bosnian villages and towns are full of stories. In these tales, for the
most part imaginary, beneath the incredible events and often
invented names, the real and unrecognized history of that region,
its living people and long-dead generations, is hidden. Those are
those Oriental lies of which the Turkish proverb states that they
are "truer than any truth".79
Short Stones 109
This general statement is then illustrated by a reference to a
particularly elusive and strange breed of Bosnian trout. The reader is
now prepared to accept the strangeness of the ensuing story and to
look beneath its unreal surface for the "grain of truth" around which
it has been built.
The story is woven through with references to the telling of tales
and blatant lies, the discrepancy between an event and its later
elaboration, the need to invent what cannot be known. One of the
subsidiary variations on the main theme is quite incidental, but
carries wide implications. In the same way that Cerzelez had grown
larger in the stories of his heroism, so that the people were
disappointed when they actually saw him* so the Vizier's young
elephant in this tale seems larger than he really is because he reflects
the people's fear of the Vizier himself. Indeed, the fact that the
awesome ruler's pet is actually an elephant is an illustration of this
process. What is suggested by these various references is the familiar
truth that the words people use are not the substance of their
communication; they are not themselves the meaning, but only a
pointer to that meaning.
The main line of this story is, then, the tale of a particularly
ruthless vizier whose arrival in Travnik is preceded by terrible
accounts of his cruelty, but who is himself never seen in the town at
all. This fact simply increases the townspeople's anxiety, so that
when the Vizier acquires an elephant (the fashionable way of
demonstrating one's position in Turkey at this time is to own an
exotic wild beast), their resentment of the innocent creature is the
more intense. There are several elements of importance in the
development of the story such as the obvious innocence of the
animal, which causes havoc in the narrow streets of Travnik because
of its size and youthful exuberance, its need of play and exercise. It
has much of the quality of the various young girls in Andric's works,
from Mara the Pasha's concubine on. Fresh and innocent, on the
threshold of life, they are caught up in events over which they have
no control and which eventually destroy them. For all its size, the
elephant is invested here with a kind of primeval grace which gives
the story a humorous dimension and at the same time a special
poignancy, and eliminates the danger of sentimentality which often
accompanies allegory. What the story chiefly concentrates on is
building up the atmosphere of an occupied land, the fear and
bitterness, the hatred and helplessness of the population caught in a
complete impasse. The townspeople react in different ways to the
oppression, depending on their personal power and position. The
most powerless are the most vociferous in their resentment, the
wealthy are cautious and cunning, while the youngest are able to see
not only that the elephant is innocent, but that the Vizier himself is
vulnerable.
The central point of the story is made in a manner typical of
Andric. The narrative focuses on one character, Aljo, who sits on a
hillside above the town, and from this new perspective is able clearly
to see the nature of theimpasse in which he and his fellow-citizens
are trapped:
This was not a head accustomed to thinking sharply and clearly,
but today, here, a small ray reached even his brain, a weak and
brief ray of consciousness about the kind of town and country and
empire it was in which he, Aljo, and thousands like him, a few
more foolish and a few cleverer, some richer and many poorer,
were living; the kind of life they were living, a meagre and
unworthy life which was passionately loved and dearly paid for,
and, if you thought about it, it was not worth it, it really was not
worth it.80
As Aljo sees it, there are two possible ways a man can react to this
situation. He expresses the dilemma simply:
Whoever is brave and proud, quickly and easily loses his liveli-
hood and his freedom, his property and his life, but whoever bows
his head and succumbs to fear, he loses so much of himself, fear
consumes him to such an extent that his life is worth nothing.81
Once Aljo has clearly and definitively observed the dilemma, he
resolves it instinctively. He goes back down the hill to become once
more the old Aljo, who loves a good joke. In its limited way, with the
scope for action at its disposal, Aljo's spirit triumphs. He has shown
more courage than his fellow-citizens in his willingness to complain
to the Vizier about the elephant and, when this mission proves
impossible, after his initial reaction his old zest for life returns. In his
moment of vision, however, Aljo has identified the essential dilemma
Short Stories 111
of defeat and occupation which is expressed in the Yugoslav oral epic
tradition: tragic and noble death - epitomized by the self-sacrifice of
the hero Milos Obilic, who died killing the Turkish Sultan - or
survival, in itself ignoble but redeemed by humour, symbolized by
the figure of Prince Marko.
This story is a particularly apt illustration of its introductory
remarks. The wry humour with which it treats the surface content,
the elephant and the townspeople's inept reactions, cannot relieve
the underlying account of the price of life under occupation which is
vividly evokes.
We can perhaps, then, identify in this period an increased
tendency to allegory. There has been an allegorical dimension
present in many earlier works as well, through the principle of
stories gathering around a few essential myths or legends, and
through the generalized character of many individual incidents and
figures. Characters and situations tend to stand for something
beyond themselves. This trend is allied to the other that dominates
in this period: an increased interest, explicit and self-conscious, in
exploring the world of the imagination, a sense of the writer
watching himself at work. It is possible to see the particularly
complex texture of Devil's Yard as arising out of a combination of
these two tendencies of Andric's mature years.
(iii) The House On Its Own*2

In 1960 Andric published a short piece entitled "Faces",83 which
lent its name to the collection of stories published in the same year.
It introduces the altered perspective which seems generally to mark
the writer's attitude to short-story writing in this period. It also
provides a preliminary sketch for the collection of stories published
posthumously as The House On Its Own. "Faces" begins with an
introductory passage, which can be seen as the starting point for the
longer collection:
. . . Ever since I can remember, the human face has been for me
the most brightly lit and most attractive fragment of the world that
surrounds me. I remember landscapes and cities, and I can
conjure them up in my memory when I want and keep them
before me for as long as I want, but human faces which I have
seen, both waking and in my sleep, come to me of their own
accord and remain under my gaze for an uncomfortably long or
painfully short time; they live beside me or vanish capriciously
and completely, so that no effort of the memory can ever summon
them again . . . And while I look at towns and landscapes through
my own experiences and as a part of myself, there is no end to my
debate and coming to terms with human faces . . .
Singly, or in procession, human faces appear before me. Some
spring up silently, of their own accord or through some cause
which is unknown to me, or some come, as though in response to
an agreed signal, on hearing a word or phrase that always
accompanies them.84
This introduction is followed by four examples of the kind of faces

that appear to the writer and the kind of response they arouse in
him. In order to enter imaginatively into the experience of other
human beings, the artist must remove himself - create in himself a
nameless silent space.
The essential elements of this piece provide the basis for the more
developed reflection on the process of artistic creation which The
House On Its Own represents. The work is perhaps more interesting
in its overall significance than for its individual stories, which vary in
substance and quality. Together they offer a comprehensive account
of the way Andric selected his material, or rather, in keeping with
the image that governs this work, his material selected him. The idea
of "characters in search of an author" has, of course, interested a
number of writers from Sterne to Pirandello and Unamuno. In his
treatment of it Andric does not enter into any theoretical discussion
of "truth" and "reality" but develops the theme on a literal level; his
characters are all "remembered".
The first idea to emerge from the introduction to The House On Its
Own is that creation is possible only under certain conditions. The
first of these necessary conditions is isolation. As we know from
elsewhere in Andric's work, solitude was a state he chose and
sought. The description of the house in Sarajevo where the work is
set suggests the ideal environment in which the process of artistic
creation can take place. The house is described with Andric's typical
Short Stories 113
care for precise detail. Its character is significant in view of the
writer's long-standing rejection of the arbitrary division of the world
into East and West: it was built in 1887, when Central European
modes were being mixed with the older Turkish style of building.
The furnishings express a similar mixture of styles and periods,
suggesting that the inhabitants were people who "did not care much
about the external appearance of things, or their names, but knew
how to make use of all that these things could offer for a modest,
peaceful and comfortable life to those who cared more for life than
for what could be thought, spoken or written about it."85 Such an
environment does not intrude into the life and thoughts of those
living in it; it offers an ideally peaceful background. "Here that
peace reigns which we desire constantly, but achieve in our lives only
with difficulty, and which we equally frequently seek to escape,
without real need and to our own detriment."86
The next condition Andric postulates is the need for the artist to
create in himself a state as near as possible to the tranquil neutrality
of his physical environment, to make of himself a perfectly passive
vacuum into which ideas can flow. This neutrality is an idea that
recurs in Andric's reflections. Two passages in Signs by the Roadside
use the image of the photographic plate, and suggest that the artist
has to create in himself the negative of what he wishes to convey in
order to project it in positive form on to the imagination of his
readers. Here, the idea is developed:
An ordinary looking day is beginning for everyone, including

myself. Only, while others sit down to a regular activity, with a
more or less clear aim in front of them, I gaze absent-mindedly at
the pictures and objects around me as though they were strange
and new, and feigning awkwardness, I wait for my idea to begin in
me. With naive cunning (whom am I deceiving, and why?) I seek
the thread of my story, broken off the previous day, endeavouring
to look like a man who is not seeking anything, I listen to hear
whether the voice of the story can be heard within me, ready to
turn myself completely into the story or part of the story, into a
scene or one of its characters. And less than that: into an instant in
a scene, into one single thought or movement of that character. In
this endeavour, I circle round my target, indifferent and
apparently innocent, like a hunter who turns his head away from
the bird he is hunting but without in fact letting it out of his sight
for an instant.
I have to proceed like this; it has become second nature to me.
For the moment that a fragment of my everyday consciousness
intrudes and I acknowledge my intention and call my aim by its
true name, I know what will happen. Thinner than the least
substantial mist, all this atmosphere of nameless dream will
disperse and I shall find myself in this familiar room, just as I am
in my identity card or in the list of occupants of the flats where I
live, a man with recognized features, without any connection
whatever with the characters and scenes in the story I was
thinking about until a moment before . . . And then . . . my day
which has barely begun will suddenly turn grey and, instead of my
story and my work, there will be opened up before me the
intolerable triviality of an existence which bears my name but is
not mine, and the deadly desert of time which suddenly extin-
guishes all the joy of life, and steadily kills each one of us.87
In his receptive state, however, the artist may also be pursued by
ideas and characters which demand his attention regardless of what
he had planned to write that day:
But it can happen that my day starts differently as well, that I do
not lie in wait or anticipate my stories, but they seek me out, and
many of them at the same time. In a half-sleep, before I have
opened my eyes, like the yellow and pink stripes on the closed
blind of my window, there begin to tremble in me of their own
accord the broken threads of unfinished stories. They offer
themselves, waken me and disturb me. And later, when I am
dressed and sit down to work, characters from these stories and
fragments of their conversations, reflections and actions do not
cease to beset me, with a mass of clearly delineated detail. Now I
have to defend myself from them and hide, grasping as many
details as I can and throwing whatever I can down on to the
waiting paper.88
We have seen elsewhere in Andric's works that his introductions
serve to create a certain frame of mind in the reader, which will
Short Stories 115
determine his reading of the work to follow. This account of the
passivity of the creative artist raises the question of what kind of
character and scene particularly imposes itself on the artist's mind?
The work thus offers an explicit expression of the question running
through all Andric's writings: what kind of stories capture the
imagination and demand to be handed down through the genera-
tions, because they seem to reflect some general truth about the
condition of mankind?
For the most part the stories that follow this introduction are
portraits, while a minority place more emphasis on the situation they
describe. Because of the introduction, we are bound to read the
stories with their general significance in mind, so that on the whole
Andric's familiar techniques for conveying generalization are not so
obtrusive here as in some other works. There is a reminder at the
beginning of each piece of the central image of the work; the way in
which each character "visits" the writer is described. All possible
variations on this theme are used, so that the device does not become
overworked but is exploited with the lightness of touch and gentle
irony which pervade the whole volume, despite the tragic nature of
some of the individual tales. Such a procedure is typical of Andric's
later short-story writing in its self-conscious observation of the artist
at work.
The effect of this introduction is, then, to concentrate the
attention of the reader not solely on the anecdote or character
described, but on its function in the writer's imagination. In this
light, the eleven pieces in the collection all offer examples of a "type"
of subject matter which presents itself to the artist as suitable for
some specific reason. A further dimension is added by the fact that
some of the characters portrayed suggest their own reasons. These
are functions which have been at one time or another ascribed to
literature, but which Andric dismisses with characteristic irony and
scepticism.
Two of the portraits describe the type of ostensibly "unbalanced"
character who always particularly interested Andric. One is a
compulsive liar and the other an hereditary alcoholic with suicidal
tendencies.
The portrait of the liar, Baron Dorn, typifies the irony which
colours most of this collection. His compulsion is described in the
terms Andric uses elsewhere of more serious psychological derange-
ment. The Baron can thus stand for any of Andric's characters
regarded by society as "abnormal". He is described as a passive
vehicle for deceit, which gives him the innocence associated with
many of Andric's characters who are to an extent absolved from
responsibility even when they are the instrument of evil. The
Baron's "defect" is in any case harmless. He is resented because he
exaggerates a universal human tendency to deceit. This is unac-
ceptable because it reminds others of their own fault and their
hypocrisy in condemning the Baron, and because it undermines
their tenacious hold on what they choose to regard as the "truth".
Their condemnation of the Baron presupposes the existence of an
objective reality known to everyone except him, a supposition
which is absurd on anything but the crudest level, particularly in
the work of Andric with its recurrent theme of a lie, an illusion,
being more real than any truth. Andric conveys this absurdity by
stressing the arbitrary dividing line between "truth" and "false-
hood". The "truth" as seen by others becomes increasingly
"improbable" to the Baron. Like that of most individuals, his life is
characterized by an endless, vain search. In his case the search is
for someone who would believe him, for the alchemy which would
transform "the miserable, heavy lead of his lie ... into the pure
gold of the one real truth".89 This image ironically reverses the
conventional terms in which truth and falsehood are usually
defined. The more conventional idea is expressed earlier in the
story in a lively account of the working of the Baron's imagination,
reminiscent of Andric's description of the pure fantasy represented
by the circus: "words begin to spark and set fire to each other and
to light up vistas which he had not even imagined existed until that
moment".90 The Baron is one of the characters who suggests a
reason why the narrator should take him seriously:
Among the traces which have been left on the cobblestones of

Sarajevo, and which now often come to life and knock on my
doors and window, the story of Baron Dorn is not one of the
most significant, it is not glorious or important, nor particularly
tragic, but it is pathetic. A hopeless case. And that is precisely
why he likes to call on me, because in me, he says, he has sensed
Short Stones 117
a man who does not accept hopelessness, one who will listen to
him patiently and with understanding.91
The narrator dismisses this trust as illusory: such a character is no
more "credible" in fiction than in "reality"; the writer cannot "help"
him, beyond understanding that his "hopeless case" is universal.
The reason suggested by the alcoholic in the other portrait of this
kind is still less plausible. He maintains that the narrator ought to
encourage writers to bring a problem like his to the attention of their
reading public; in other words, that literature should be a vehicle for
social comment and reform. Andric's scepticism is clear:
We talked. The conversation lasted a long time, and went the only
way it could have gone. Roughly as though we had raised an
immense stone block for a fraction of a second into the air, and let
it go again to return to its original position. Many words and rapid
or interrupted sentences, and all in all: nothing.92
The portrait of the alcoholic is coloured by a similar kind of
innocence to that of the Baron. The central character has inherited
the family tendency just as a man inherits an illness, or indeed any
physical or mental malfunction. The individual is, then, seen as the
victim of arbitrary forces which destroy his life. The theme of
drinking as a means of escape plays a prominent part in many of
Andric's later works, as one aspect of the broader theme of illusion.
Here the theme is used to suggest three different sets of ideas: the
desire of the individual to escape from his sense of isolation and
absurdity; inherent derangement; and the more general symbolic
sense in which alcoholism can stand for all the self-imposed evils or
delusions of human life.
It is easy enough to see the ideas that underlie the portraits of
these two individuals. Two of the other pieces which are essentially
portraits describe individuals. But in their case it is their situation,
rather than their personalities, which can be seen in general terms.
One portrays a relationship of love and violence which is at once
oppressive and vital, and the other the plight of a peasant girl taken
from her devastated village by the Turks, to be sold as a slave. This
story is an extreme statement of the theme of captivity which runs all
through Andric's works:
People are born to be enslaved by the enslavement of life, and to
die as the slaves of illness and death. Everyone is a slave enslaved
to something, for he who is sold in chains in the market-place is
not the only slave; whoever sells him and whoever buys him is also
a slave.93
Another portrait in the collection is ostensibly simply that of an

individual and is described without any anecdote which might place
the character in a generalized situation. And yet it gradually emerges
that he does have a function in relation to others. His features are so
unusual that he makes an immediate impression. He lives every
aspect of his life with verve and gusto. He is unpredictable, awkward
and yet appealing, looking boldly and mockingly on ordinary
people, their orderliness and laws "as though he had been created
and existed simply in order to surprise and confuse people around
him".94 The reader's answer to the tacit question behind this whole
collection - why do some characters particularly demand attention -
would in this case have to be in terms such as Andric himself
suggests; that he is one of those people who are remembered as
larger than life and more attractive than they are in reality.
The two most developed portraits in the collection are equally
characteristic of Andric. One concerns an historical figure - the
Vizier of Mostar, Alipasha Rizvanbegovic - drawn with typical
abundance of historical detail. His story focuses on one moment of
his life: not the height of his power, but his disgrace and subsequent
death during the campaign of Omer Pasha Latas. The suggestion is
that success and power cannot tell us much about the true nature of
human destiny. When the Vizier passes by the narrator's window
with his full retinue as Lord of Hercegovina he merely waves,
without stopping, but when he comes as a defeated prisoner he stops
for a moment to exchange "a few ordinary words".
Alipasha's story, which has points of contact with the earlier
"Torso", is introduced in general terms. One of the preconditions of
human power is that it must be at the expense of others. Alipasha
achieves his ambition to be the highest authority in Hercegovina
only after playing his role in the age-old pattern of fraternal conflict,
resulting in the murder of the most determined of his brothers. In
his own eyes he is a "firm and just" ruler, but to those he rules he is
Short Stones 119
"arbitrary and cruel". The ironic tone in which the brief account of
Alipasha's life is given increases its generalized quality by reinfor-
cing the sense of an inevitable pattern.
The point of Alipasha's story is the insight granted by the altered
perspective, when "he came to understand what remains of a man
who has suddenly lost everything, and, stripped of all, stands on his
own feet, naked and alone, against all the forces of the surrounding
world, helpless and invincible".95 The change which is described as
coming over Alipasha's physical appearance following his humilia-
tion reflects the inner change. As the trappings of power fall away, so
do the man's pretensions to it. His face, when it shows any trace of
life, comes increasingly to express "the mild disorientation and
devotion of a mendicant dervish".96 Stripped like this to his human
essence, with no further pretensions to position or power, the man
gradually acquires real stature. Denied the possibility of resistance,
he is forced into himself and finds peace, so that he feels an urge to
try to comfort and encourage the anxious villagers and townspeople
as they watch him pass instead of being himself consoled by them.
From the pedestal of his suffering, as from the highest mountain, he
says that he made out and understood some truths about human
beings and human relationships more clearly than ever before in his
life. Andric leaves the image of the fallen Vizier, forced to parade
through Bosnia on a mangy mule, to speak for itself. Alipasha is
prevented from "explaining" his new understanding when he is shot
by a Turkish soldier. For Andric, a truth that could be directly told
in words would not be worth telling. Fundamental truths can be
embodied only in images.
The other story of particular density, "The Circus",97 centres on a
child's excitement on his first visit to a circus. The tone is similar to
that of "Panorama" and other stories presented as childhood memor-
ies. The circus performance and the child's breathless concentration
are described in detail. The terms in which the child expresses the
illusion of perfection conjured up for him by the circus are those
which characterize the search of every individual for a "better" life
and happiness:
They knew what they wanted, and whatever they wanted they
could do. They did not need words or explanations. They did not
hesitate, they did not make mistakes . . . They moved and lived in
confidence. They knew nothing of misunderstanding or doubt. . .
They had turned their backs on all that was called "life", but only
for the sake of a more perfect and more beautiful life. They were
happy.98
This story offers a vivid illustration of Andric's recurrent idea that

illusion is more compelling, more "real", than reality. It conveys the
intoxicating power of the fleeting belief that the object of our search is
attainable.
The inevitable disillusion when the performance comes to an end -
"Could these things have an end? Why then it was as if they did not
exist! Could beauty lie?"99 - is paralleled by the main part of the story,
which describes the fate of the circus director - a tale of illness,
misery, blackmail and violence belying the apparent glamour and
excitement of circus life. The circus manager apologizes for his
intrusion into the narrator's life, but explains that he has come to
"complete the narrator's childhood memories".100 Andric, as always,
balances one image with its opposite, because everything in life must
be illuminated from all sides.
Other stories in this collection suggest another reason for the artist's
choice of material. It may be that the secret lives of insignificant and
rejected individuals should also be illuminated through the artist's
intuition. There is a suggestion here that each individual's life is
equally worthy of attention, if only because of a sense of guilt:
"Because, if out of selfishness and for the sake of our own comfort we
avoid hearing a person out, we shall probably have to do it later,
ashamed, in an involuntary memory or a dream . . ."101
These words touch on the recurrent idea that one "must always let a
man tell his story as he wants, in his own way, for every story is true at
one time or another". This theme is developed in Devil's Yard. It
occurs twice in The House On Its Own: in connection with Alipasha
and in a piece entitled "The Story".102
This tale is of particular importance in this collection, itself a
reflection on the nature of story-telling. It deals not with the material
of art, but with narrative sjyle and technique. It describes a character
renowned for his ability as a teller of tales. He is essentially self-
effacing:
Short Stones 121
He never talks about himself, never defends or justifies himself;
he does not exaggerate or intrude. While others regularly seek to
enter into my story and sometimes try to do so inappropriately and
importunately, he would, on the contrary, like me not to mention
him at all, and if I do relate one of his jokes, he would like me not
to tell anyone where it came from.103
The ideal narrator's task is difficult. He must efface himself so

that his material can speak for itself and make its full impact directly
on the reader, but at the same time his craft can add a new dimension
to the story told. One is reminded here of the description of Brother
Petar as a story-teller, and the indefinable atmosphere associated
with the way he spoke.
The craftsman and the artist can create this atmosphere, which is
engendered because what they create is npt life itself but something
consciously apart from life; something salvaged, at least temporarily,
from the flux.
When the unobtrusive story-teller has left the room, the narrator
returns to where he had been sitting, listening to the tale:
It seemed as though he had not actually left the room, as though

something of his, invisible, but alive and real, had remained
behind him here and was continuing to talk, not in words, but
directly, through the living sense itself of what Ibrahim-Effendi
had been relating. I listen to the silence of my room speaking on,
and from time to time I acknowledge with a nod the truth of what
I hear. If anyone were to see me, they would think I had gone
mad. But I am listening to the very source, usually inaudible, of
all Ibrahim's stories.104
The narrator then recalls the tale his visitor had been telling him.
It is a story of intense emotion and drama, conveyed through vivid
visual detail without further comment.
Ibrahim has features in common with other characters from this
collection and stands for a set of ideas familiar in Andric's work. To
others, he seems like a man who does not really live, who cuts
himself off from society just as Dorn the compulsive liar and Jakov
the drunkard had done:
Instead of so-called "real" life, whose blows he had felt while still
in his mother's womb, he built himself another reality, composed
of stories. With these stories of what might have been but never
was, which is often more truthful and more beautiful than
everything that did happen, he shielded himself from what
"really" happened around him every day. So he escaped life and
cheated fate. He has been lying for nearly fifty years here in the
cemetery on Alifakovac. But he lives on here and there, from time
to time, as a story.105
These last words touch on three related reasons for the telling of
stories which we have met in Andric's work: the notion that "what
might have been" can be more "truthful" than what really occurs;
the idea of "cheating fate" - like "the legendary Scheherezade"; and
the idea of the "immortality" of characters in a work of fiction. The
range of stories in this collection, and the reflections which emerge
from its setting, make it an account of Andric's short-story telling in
miniature.
4
The Novels
The bulk of Andric's fiction consists of stories and, while some of
these are quite long, it seems that the shorter, more concentrated
form attracted him most. Nevertheless, it is for the three novels
published immediately after the Second World War that Andric is
chiefly known, certainly abroad and probably also at home. During
the War Andric declined to publish anything as long as the
occupation lasted, so that it was at least partly chance which drove
him to evolve the longer form, arranging the shorter units into more
complex wholes.
Two of the novels, The Bridge on the Drina1 and Omer Pasha
Latas2 (published after Andric's death), have the same basic
structure. They are a collection of individual unilinear entities linked
together around a central theme. They reflect Andric's characteristic
tendency to work in cycles of interlinked but independent units. The
model for his approach is clearly that of the traditional ballads. The
effect of these songs is cumulative, and their meaning lies not so
much in the individual ballads as in their embodiment of a broad set
of ideas and values. Andric's first published story, "Alija-Derzelez",
is an example on a small scale of the exploitation of his model. On
the broadest scale, the whole body of Andric's works can be seen to
work to the same end.
. . . everything that exists is one single reality, and it is only our

instincts and the irregular reactions of our senses that lead us to
see in the variety of phenomena in which this one reality is
manifested separate, distinct worlds, different in both their
characteristics and their essence. Those worlds do not exist. There
is only one reality, with its eternal ebb and flow of laws which are
known to us only in part but which are always the same.3
These words from "Conversation with Goya" may serve as a
definition of Andric's works, which all approach the same core of
fundamental issues of existence from different angles and perspec-
tives.
What this means can be seen clearly in the case of the three novels
published in 1945. For all their varied subject matter they are
concerned with the same issues, but the angle of vision is very
different in each one. The Bridge on the Drina presents a broad time-
scale and portrays the history of a town over four centuries. In
Bosnian Story4 the focus is narrowed to a small group of people over a
seven-year period, while in The Woman from Sarajevo5 Andric
concentrates on the fate of one individual. The course of the
protagonist's life in this last work is determined by a fundamental
anxiety. A similar kind of anxiety underlies each of the other novels
and colours all their various components. Their significance does
not, then, lie in the abundance of detail that forms their surface, but
in the cumulative effect of the ideas behind them and the whole
philosophical frame of reference, in which all the details are of only
provisional and partial importance.
The Bridge on the Drina

The novel was written quickly, between July 1942 and December
1943. An outline of some fifty pages has been preserved, as well as
jottings treating various aspects of the subject matter. As we have
seen, "The Rzav Hills" and "The Bridge on the Zepa" form part of
this preliminary process.
The Bridge on the Drina is the chronicle not of a family but of a
small town, and in particular of the focal point of that town: the
bridge over the River Drina. The town is Visegrad on the eastern
edge of Bosnia, near the border with Serbia. The chronicle traces its
history from the sixteenth century to the First World War, and uses
the bridge to bind the individual chapters and stories together. The
emphasis is on the evolution of a common mentality in the town,
deriving from common experience and a common heritage of legend
and anecdote. The population of the town is mixed, but Andric
chooses in this case to stress the coherence of the whole. This is
achieved partly by the time-scale, but also by Andric's basic
The Novels 125
intention in the work. This is to contrast the transience and
insignificance of individual human life with the broader perspective
of life as itself enduring, a constant ebb and flow. On this level the
bridge provides not only a structural but also a symbolic link.
Each chapter or anecdote is in some way connected with the
bridge. It is the focal point of the town, and most important events
occur on or near it. Such an apparently simple structural function
contributes also to the main direction of the work, which depicts the
growth, from a series of disparate events, of a common heritage.
The movement of the chronicle through the four centuries it
describes is not steady. The first event of major importance to the
people of Visegrad, the building of the bridge in the mid-sixteenth
century, is described in detail over three chapters; the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, when no important historical events
affected the town, pass by in a single chapter; the nineteenth century
covers ten chapters, and the years from 1900 to 1914, the remainder
of the work, a further nine chapters. Such a scheme allows the
author to describe the main events affecting the life of the town in
detail and also to suggest an awareness of history as never uniformly
well-known or related. In his account of the building of the bridge he
is able vividly to present the discrepancy between the accounts
which remain in the popular consciousness and the events themsel-
ves. The static nature of the centuries of Ottoman rule is then
highlighted by the changes which take place during the nineteenth
century and increase in speed and scope with the Austrian annexa-
tion of Bosnia and Hercegovina at the end of that century. The
impression created in this way is that in the life of a community, as in
the life of an individual, the passing of time cannot be measured
strictly chronologically. Some periods of time pass more slowly or
more rapidly than others; some appear longer because they are more
filled with important events and changes; others count as nothing,
for they contain no events by which to measure their passing. But
the clearest implication of the broad time-scale is the predictable one
in Andric's work: that, for all these events and changes, nothing of
significance alters.
The Bridge on the Drina begins with a description of the town of
Visegrad at an unspecified moment in its history, complete with all
its legends, its traditional children's games and its established
customs. This is the "personality" of the town, not radically altered
by historical changes, and inherited by the passing generations. The
geographical setting is described as the first factor to influence the
mentality of the population. Visegrad has grown up in a wide fertile
valley surrounded on three sides by gentle hills and rich farming
land. The townspeople have a reputation for being carefree, quick to
spend their money and enjoy life. The life of the town, despite the
major historical upheavals which affect it, is steady and on the whole
harmonious.
Such a description is arbitrary and offers no objective information
about the real nature of the town of Visegrad. It reflects only
Andric's intention to emphasize a harmony which is suggested to be
also a consequence of the presence of the bridge.
The bridge is taken for granted in the life of the town. But it is
taken for granted in a positive way. It links the town with its
suburbs: "In fact, when one says 'links' it is as accurate as saying:
the sun rises in the morning so that we are able to see around us and
complete our necessary business, and sets in the evening so that we
may sleep and rest from our daily toil."6 For the bridge is the only
permanent and safe crossing-point on the whole central and upper
Drina, and the vital link in the road connecting Bosnia with Serbia
and, through Serbia, with the rest of the Ottoman Empire. For the
townspeople the bridge is as vital a part of life as the sun, while it is
the raison d'etre of the town itself, which has grown up around the
bridge "as from its root". The importance of the bridge on the Drina
is further highlighted by the fact that there is another bridge in
Visegrad - over the Rzav, a small river which joins the Drina at the
edge of the town. But any mention of "the bridge" always means the
carved stone bridge over the Drina and never the simple wooden one
over the Rzav, "without beauty, without history, with no other
meaning than that it serves the locals and their livestock as a
crossing-point".7 From the beginning, therefore, we are given some
idea of the importance of the bridge on the Drina in the life of the
town, and in the course of the chronicle we gradually discover what
exactly its "meaning" is.
The role of the bridge in the townspeople's mentality, as Andric
describes it, typifies the way in which his characters in general
experience their lives. The symbols Andric uses to convey their
The Novels 127
essential experience grow out of that experience, and are not
imposed on it from outside. This can perhaps be most clearly seen in
The Bridge on the Drina where the bridge is experienced as a symbol,
even though its significance is never articulated. The townspeople
would always give a more rational account of its importance. In this
way we can say that the symbolic level of Andric's writing does not
in fact lie "under" the surface of his characters' experience. It is an
integral but unspoken part of that experience.
Every important moment in an individual life is in some way
connected with the bridge. The Christian children born on the left
bank of the river cross it in the first days of their life to be baptized;
and all children, Moslem and Christian, spend the majority of their
childhood around it. They know all the carefully carved forms of the
bridge, and all the stories and legends associated with it. These
children, for whom the legends are most alive - since they form a
part of their games - contribute most to their preservation. They
play and fish under the bridge; with adolescence they move up on to
the bridge itself, and particularly on to its central part, where stone
benches and a coffee-maker encourage the townspeople of all ages to
linger. Wedding and funeral processions pass over the bridge and
generally stop at the central point, where the wedding guests
frequently dance the traditional round dance, the "kolo", while the
coffin-bearers lower their burden where their charge spent so much
of his life, to rest for a while.
The legends with which the townspeople grow up are described as
tales in which "imagination and reality, dream and waking, are
strangely and inextricably fused and interwoven".8 The townspeople
have always known them "unconsciously, as though they had
brought them with them into the world, just as prayers are known
and no one remembers from whom he learned them nor when he
heard them for the first time".9
To convey the archetypal quality of these legends and their
timelessness, Andric uses two themes from the traditional South
Slav heroic ballads. One is simply the name of the builder reputed to
have built the bridge. "Rade Neimar" (Rade the Builder) is associ-
ated with all the fine white palaces and towns mentioned in the
ballads. He is the archetype of "the builder" in the popular
imagination. Frequently in the South Slav ballads, and in the
European tradition in general, building enterprises are beset by
difficulties created by a "spirit" which demands that a human
sacrifice be built into the foundations before the building can be
completed unhampered. In the case of the bridge on the Drina the
traditional pattern is observed. The story goes that all that was
achieved during the day was destroyed at night, and somehow the
builders came to feel that they must find newborn twins called by the
traditional names Stoja and Ostoja, and build them into the founda-
tions before the building could continue. The Visegrad legend
describes how two such children were found and built into the
central pillars of the bridge, but Rade the Builder took pity on the
despairing mother and left openings through which she could
continue to feed her babies. This traditional outcome explains the
two finely carved apertures on the bridge, now used as nesting-places
by doves, and the two thin white marks on the columns that seem
like milk trickling from the holes at certain times of year. So strong
is the legend in the town that enterprising merchants scrape the
white powder from the bridge and sell it as a remedy to nursing
mothers with insufficient milk. This legend seems to have grown out
of the notion that nature demands a price for human interference in
the name of progress, and that any human undertaking of real
beauty and significance requires a sacrifice of appropriate magni-
tude. Andric explains the "real" events which made it possible for
this idea to be expressed in this particular form.
The immediate reaction of the population to every innovation
introduced into Visegrad is to reject it. This is true also of the
bridge. The apparently senseless chaos of all the equipment required
for its building; the unjustifiable untidiness and inconvenience this
causes; above all the tyrannical methods of the Turkish foreman who
forces the whole male population to work without pay - all
contribute to the resistance of the townspeople to the idea of the
bridge and eventually drive a handful of men to sabotage. Since the
notion of human sacrifice in enterprises of this kind is widespread, it
is easy enough for the saboteurs to spread the story of a hostile spirit
and to supply proof in the form of the systematic destruction
overnight of the work carried out during the day. And by a strange
coincidence their scheme is given credence by the fact that a simple-
minded girl from a neighbouring village gives birth at about the
The Novels 129
same time to still-born twins. The babies are taken from her
immediately and buried, but for days she searches for them,
wandering around the site of the bridge and asking the workmen
whether they have seen her children. The coincidence is so strange,
and the sight of the unfortunate woman wandering distraught by the
bridge, unable to understand the straightforward explanation of the
villagers, so captures the imagination of the townspeople that
although not many actually believe the story that the children were
built into the bridge, everyone repeats it and passes it on. The story
satisfies their real need to acknowledge the significance of the
building.
Another legend associated with the bridge survives similarly
through the strength of the emotions it arouses, and particularly
among the children through its ability to give shape to some of their
irrational fears. During the construction of the bridge an Arab
workman was crushed to death by falling rock and his body could
never be completely extracted. Such an accident is an inevitable part
of much human endeavour, which may itself account for the
persistence of the notion of human sacrifice associated with building
ventures of importance, since bones actually are found in the walls
and foundations. The horror of this accident stays in the popular
consciousness and the story is carried down among the children that
"the Black Arab" lives in a large dark hole in the central part of the
bridge. Any child who sees him will die. His figure haunts their
dreams and during the day the children taunt their fears and test their
nerve by approaching the Arab's cave, for the most part disbelieving,
but unable to resist the powerful fascination of terror. The pattern of
their behaviour is timeless, corresponding to a profound human need.
Only the form of its expression alters from one culture to another.
Then there is the series of unexplained marks on each side of the
river beside the bridge, round and equally spaced, two by two, as
though they were the hoofprints of a giant horse. The children know
them to be traces of distant heroic times, when the rock was still soft
and the warriors and their horses of enormous size. For the Christian
children they are the hoofprints of the famous skewbald horse Sarac,
belonging to Prince Marko, while for the Moslem children they are
those of the winged mare of their Alija-Derzelez. The children do not
argue about their different interpretations, since each is quite
convinced of his or her own version, and no one has ever persuaded
his counterpart to change his mind. Their respective ideologies do
not prevent the children from playing happily together, keeping the
tiny fish they catch in the "hoofprint" hollows when they fill up with
rain water.
Irregularities and strange features of the local landscape are thus
given colourful explanations and woven into the sum of legend with
which the local people grow up. The last feature of the bridge to be
given such shape is the mound above the road on the left bank of the
river. This is the grave of Radisav, the man who led the opposition to
the building and was impaled by the Turkish foreman. The details of
what he actually did and the way in which he was executed have long
since been forgotten by the townspeople, but once again his grave
serves to satisfy the need of each community for heroes. The
Christians speak of him as a great hero of superhuman strength, who
defied the Turks over the building of the bridge, but who could not
be confined by any mere mortal bonds until he was betrayed and
strangled in his sleep with strands of silk, against which alone he had
no power. For the Moslems, again, it is the grave of a heroic dervish,
who defended the crossing of the river against an infidel army and
did not want the grave marked in any way because he would rise
again to defend the river should the infidel ever try to cross it once
more. Both communities believe that at certain times of the year a
strange supernatural light can be seen over the grave, and both
believe in the second coming of their ideal hero.
Through these stories, Andric conveys the perennial human need
to give scope to the imagination; to colour natural phenomena with
supernatural dimensions; to give shape to emotions of excitement,
wonder, admiration and fear. "People remember and relate what
they can grasp and what they succeed in turning into legend.
Everything else passes them by without deeper trace, with the dumb
indifference of nameless natural phenomena, not touching their
imagination or remaining in their memory."10
This whole introduction, with its emphasis on stability and
harmony, reinforced regularly throughout the novel by reference to
the special properties of the bridge, acts as a counterweight to the
tales of individual human destinies. The lives of the individuals
described are characterized often by violence, tragedy and a painful
The Novels 131
awareness of transience expressed in terms of a search for enduring
meaning beyond themselves. The contrasting broad perspective of
the novel conveys a balance in which awareness of suffering is
matched by a positive acceptance of life. This is more than a passive
instinct for survival. It is determined by the example of the silent,
enduring triumph of the human spirit embodied in the bridge.
Andric describes the building of the bridge as the direct result of
one individual tragedy. As in the story "The Bridge on the Zepa", it
was commissioned from Istanbul by an Ottoman dignatory who
originated from Bosnia. In Andric's account, which differs consider-
ably from the facts, Mehmed Pasha Sokolovic was taken as a ten-
year-old child, with other children from his neighbourhood, to serve
in the Janissary Corps as payment of the "head tax", part of the
oppressive Ottoman taxation system. When the procession reached
the banks of the Drina and crossed, by means of an unwieldy raft,
the children's mothers and other relatives, who had followed at a
distance, had finally to part from the boys. To the child who was to
become Mehmed Pasha, this crossing-place on the Drina represen-
ted defeat and impotence, a complex of emotions and ideas which he
never fully articulated, but more or less rationalized in his later life:
Like a sense of physical discomfort somewhere within him - a
black line which from time to time, for a second or two, seared his
breast in half - the child carried within him the memory of this
place. There the road is severed, the hopelessness and tedium of
poverty are concentrated on the rocky banks of the river, whose
crossing is difficult, costly and uncertain. It was a painful place in
that poor mountainous region where misfortune became public
and obvious, where a man was brought to a halt by the overpower-
ing element and, ashamed at his impotence, was obliged to
recognize and see clearly both his own and others' poverty and
backwardness.11
The "black line" of the river marked an absolute gulf between the
two parts of the boys' lives. Because it was in addition a gulf
separating the Christian West from the Moslem East, it could stand
for all the deep and apparently insurmountable divisions between
men, based on ideology and power.
With time Mehmed Pasha forgot the origin of his pain, but the
discomfort remained and drove him eventually to try to relieve it by
building a bridge across the gulf. This project was uniquely success-
ful in that the bridge became a crucial link between Europe and the
East, fulfilling a clear need. More importantly, however, it stood for
future generations as an example of the possibility of overcoming not
only physical obstacles, but also individual misfortune and transi-
ence.
In addition to the expression of the townspeople's resistance to
change and the notion of sacrifice, after the details of the building
have been long forgotten there remains also the memory of the
atmosphere surrounding the personalities involved in it. People
speakt)f the ruthless foreman, his terrified and finally demented
subordinate, and the heroic Radisav who led the resistance and was
put to a slow death for all the townspeople to see. The whole process
of building the bridge is thus felt to have been carried out in an-
atmosphere of fear. The initial reaction of the townspeople to the
arrival of the workmen with all their equipment is one of alarm and
confusion in the face of the new, the inexplicable. Such anxious
apprehension will accompany the changes described later in the
work, particularly such major developments as the introduction of
the railway, but none of them is carried out by the terrorist methods
of a man like the original foreman. The memory of the building of
the bridge also vividly illustrates the fact that fear breeds fear. The
subordinate, Plevljak, is driven mad because he could have been the
one to die slowly on the pale, had he failed to catch Radisav. The
foreman's own ruthlessness stems in part from the fact that he is
constantly aware of the possibility of losing his power because of the
spies and informers who inevitably surround figures of authority.
Such episodes are kept alive in the popular consciousness, because in
them an individual is seen to embody a significant aspect of the
human condition.
It is Andric's intention that the positive qualities of the bridge,
once it is built, should be seen completely to outweigh the suffering
entailed by its building and the individual tragedies played out on it
over the generations. In order that the full significance of the bridge
should emerge, Andric concentrates, in the body of the novel, on
these individual destinies. He describes in relentless detail the scene
of the impaling of the leader of the saboteurs. It is a passage which
The Novels 133
cannot easily be read and which Andric thought from time to time of
removing or toning down. But he left it, and it serves as a reminder
not only of the brutality of the Ottoman regime but of man's timeless
capacity for cruelty, inflicted particularly systematically as it was
during the Second World War, when the novel was written.
Radisav's fate is connected with the bridge only in so far as its
building was the initial stimulus for his action. He represents
qualities of resistance and courage, as timeless as the cruelty they
oppose.
The bridge sees its share of violence over the centuries. During
the nineteenth century in particular, and the rebellions which led to
the emergence of the independent kingdom of Serbia, the heads of
rebels impaled on the bridge became a common sight. The fate of a
young Russian soldier who inadvertently allowed a Serbian rebel to
cross the bridge, and his suicide, are recounted in detail. And the
novel ends with war. In the first days of the First World War the
bridge is mined by the Austrians and the central section blown out.
This violence to the bridge itself signifies the end of an age,
symbolized in the death of one of the leading Moslem figures in the
town, Alihodza.
The experience of violence, and the fear of it, are the factors which
compel people to find compensation in legend, in stories of noble,
beautiful and strange characters and occurrences. Two such stories
are related.
The first is the tale of a Moslem girl, such a dramatic and
exceptional tale that, as with floods and wars, the year in which it
took place is long afterwards remembered. The girl, Fata, was
exceptionally beautiful:
It has always been the case with us that one girl in each generation
becomes the subject of stories and songs through her beauty, her
diligence and nobility. For a few years she would be the object of
all desires and an unattainable model; imaginations would be fired
by her name, rousing the enthusiasm of men and the envy of
women. These are exceptional beings whom nature sets aside and
raises to dangerous heights.12
When a young Moslem announces in public that he will see her in
his home as his bride one day she categorically denies it, unaware
that her father is to promise her hand to that same young man. She
cannot make her father break his promise but neither can she go
back on her word, so she goes through the marriage ceremony; but
as the wedding procession makes its way across the bridge to her new
home, she stops her horse in the middle and leaps to her death in the
river below. "The townspeople related the event for some time
afterwards, and then began to forget. There remained only the song
about the girl whose beauty and wisdom made her shine above
everything, as though she were immortal."13 As with nursery
rhymes and many traditional songs whose originating circumstances
are forgotten but which remain, and continue to feed the imagina-
tion of later generations, Fata's story is told for its own sake, without
comment. Like so many of Andric's stories, however, it implies a
cluster of ideas: the absolute power of authority; the common need
to admire, to identify an individual as embodying exceptional
qualities; and at the same time pleasure at seeing such an individual
humiliated, the idea that such a degree of pride, admirable and pure
as it is, should inevitably bring destruction on itself; the natural
justice of uncompromising arrogance ending in such a dramatic and
definitive leap. Above all it suggests the strength of an individual
will, refusing to be broken even to the point of death.
The other story tells the tale of a mysterious gambler and the
dissipation of a man's entire fortune. On the morning after the game
a young Jewish boy finds a gold coin left on the bridge. It is the
Sabbath, but the boy defies the sacred laws of that day and picks it
up, and with it he embarks on the life of a vagabond gambler. The
townspeople predictably believe that the stranger responsible for this
destruction of two lives was none other than the Devil.
Legends, and the tales of individuals and events which fire the
popular imagination, are the common stock the people of Visegrad
carry with them through the generations. Such tales contribute to
their sense of identity and give the townspeople a coherence with
which to face the vagaries of the natural elements and the upheavals
of history.
Natural disasters are an inevitable part of a community's common
heritage. In Visegrad the most frequent elemental force to be
contended with is the River Drina. Flooding is a frequent hazard
and thus marks the passing of time:
The Novels 135
. . . at irregular intervals of twenty or thirty years, there are bad
floods which are afterwards remembered as are uprisings or wars
and are long taken as the date according to which time, the age of
the townspeople and the length of human life are measured.14
Such a disaster forms the focal point of a whole generation's life;
those who experienced it will always be ready to talk about it at
family gatherings or public festivals:
at a distance of fifteen or twenty years, in which the household was
restored and began to prosper again, "the flood" came to be seen
as something terrible and enormous, but familiar and cherished; it
was a close bond between the ever fewer survivors of that
generation, for nothing so binds people together as a shared
disaster, safely survived. And they felt themselves firmly linked
by the memory of that past misfortune.15
The parallels with the bonds formed in time of war and other
crises in any culture are clear. The young people, of course, cannot
understand what comfort and pleasure their elders can possibly find
in the memory of the worst setback of their lives. During such
natural disasters the leading men of the town gather together in one
house, and here there is no discrimination of faith: "The force of the
elements and the burden of common misfortune had brought all
these people together and bridged, at least for the evening, the abyss
which divided one faith from another, and particularly the Rayah
from the Turks."16 A unique atmosphere is created as these men sit
over coffee and brandy, waiting for the night to pass and the water to
subside. To avoid speaking of the current disaster, they turn the
conversation to other areas of their common experience: memories of
old times, stories of the town's eccentrics and notable events from
the distant past. So their common heritage helps them to feel united
in the face of a real threat, conscious of the endurance of the town
and its life, despite all upheavals. When the water subsides and they
set about repairing the damage, they gradually come to realize the
importance of the bridge, which is always untouched by the ravages
of the flood: "Everyone knew that in that life of theirs there was
something which resisted all the elements and which through the
incomprehensible harmony of its forms, and the invisible wise
strength of its foundations, emerged from every trial indestructible
and unchanged."17 In times of crisis, the people themselves are able
to express timeless qualities of humanity which the arbitrary divi-
sions of religion and culture otherwise obscure or distort. The
reaction of the townspeople to natural disasters is similar to their
behaviour in the face of the man-made conflicts of the nineteenth
century, and the Balkan Wars in the early twentieth century. There
is the major difference, however, that it is impossible for the
representatives of different faiths to mix freely while the conflict
lasts. Each community then draws together for comfort and mutual
support in the greater security of its own kind.
While the immutability of the bridge is continually stressed, the
way of life of the townspeople is altered by external events. This fact
becomes increasingly clear with the rapid changes brought by the
end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. In the static
years of Ottoman rule there were few modifications to the life of
Visegrad. The most radical was the building of the bridge itself and
the increased importance it gave the town as a vital communications
link. The next noticeable change came with the waning of Ottoman
power, during the nineteenth century. The boundary between
Bosnia and Serbia became more firmly established as Serbia acquired
increasing independence, taking on all the characteristics of a state
frontier. This fact necessarily affected trade, traffic and the general
mood and mutual relations between Moslems and Serbs, subtly
altering the long-standing relationship of occupier and occupied.
The first hint of change on such a scale that it marks the end of an
era comes with the arrival of the Austrian army in Visegrad at the
end of the nineteenth century. The extent of the change is realized
by the Moslem shopkeeper Alihodza, who serves as a symbol of the
old Ottoman order. Alihodza refuses to take part in the futile
resistance to the Austrian army, and as a punishment is nailed by the
ear to the centre of the bridge as the army approaches. He is thus
obliged to experience the moment with exceptional force. As he
reads the declaration which the Austrians stick to the wall of the
bridge, it is suddenly clear
that it was all over with him, with all his family and all that was
theirs, over at once and for ever, but in a strange way: your eyes
The Novels 137
still see, your lips speak, you go on living, but life, real life has
gone . . . He goes slowly from the bridge and feels that he will
never again cross to the other bank, that this bridge which is the
pride of the town and from the beginning closely connected with
his family, the bridge on which he has grown up and beside which
he has spent his whole life, this bridge has been suddenly broken
in the middle . . . that broad sheet of white paper inscribed with
the Austrian declaration had cut it in half, like a silent explosion.18
On this level historical events do not only affect the lives of
individuals, they virtually become their lives. It is possible for
Alihodza to feel that his life has ended simply because an epoch of
human history has ended. History demands the complete commit-
ment of the individual, and there is no limit to the way in which the
individual will be willingly manipulated by its requirements.
The immediate changes brought by the Austrian administration
are obvious enough to everyone in Visegrad. New buildings are put
up, trees are cut down for new roads to be made, drains are
constructed, street lighting introduced. These innovations are grad-
ually accepted by the majority of the population, although there are
always those who refuse. The identity of such people is then
expressed entirely in their resistance. They represent the assertion of
a human dignity which has accepted one set of standards but will not
now submit arbitrarily to new ones. The older people in general,
accustomed as they are to absolute stability in their way of life, are
unable to understand the perpetual activity of the foreigners. To
them it seems that the Austrians are merely playing with all their
weighing and measuring. Alihodza, who has accepted none of the
changes, feels that the Austrian frenzy is not only unhealthy but also
evil - here the basic conflict between a static community and a
"progressive" outsider is intensified by the conflict between Eastern
and Western cultures. Alihodza quotes religious authorities to show
that it is wrong to divert the course of running water for however
short a time, as was necessitated by the repairs to the bridge. And for
the bridge itself, he gives an account of the origin of bridges to prove
that the foreigners' meddling with it will lead only to its destruction:
My late father once heard from Sheikh Dedija and told me as a
child the story of how there came to be bridges in this world and
how the first bridge came into being. When Allah made this
world, the earth was flat and smooth as the finest engraved copper
platter. That did not suit the Devil, who envied man this divine
gift. And while the earth was still as it had emerged from the hand
of the Lord, wet and soft as unbaked dough, he crept up and
scratched the face of God's earth with his nails as hard and as
deeply as he could. That is how, so the story says, there came to be
the deep rivers and ravines which divide one area from another
and separate people from each other and prevent them from
travelling over the earth which God gave them as a garden for their
food and sustenance. Allah was sorry when he saw what the Evil
One was doing, but as he was unable to go back to the work that
the Devil had desecrated with his touch, he sent his angels to help
mankind. When the angels saw that the poor people could not
cross those gorges and depths, nor complete their work, but that
they were troubled and looked and called in vain from one side to
the other, they spread their wings over those places and people
began to cross over their wings. So people learned from God's
angels how to build bridges. And that is why, after fountains, the
greatest good is to build bridges, and the greatest sin is to meddle
with them, for every bridge, from the log over the mountain
stream to this work of Mehmed Pasha's, has its own angel which
protects and watches over it, as long as God has granted that it
should stand.19
The majority of the population, however, after their initial

reluctance, gradually accept the changes, as for them life is more
important and urgent than the forms in which it is lived. And for
some time it is only the external forms which change. Within their
homes the people continue to live as they have always done, cooking
and washing as they always did, celebrating their holy days and
preserving all their old customs: "Old beliefs and values conflicted
with new ones, merged with them or endured alongside them, as
though waiting to see which would survive."20 Eventually the new
values, new tastes and fashions do penetrate further into the way of
life of the people. Particularly in peacetime cultural differences
become less marked and the foreigners begin to take on local
characteristics, at first mainly through their children playing
The Novels 139
together but then in their own speech and habits, while the locals -
particularly the Christians and Jews - adopt aspects of the foreign-
ers' dress and behaviour. Nevertheless, from the broadest perspec-
tive these changes are perceived as insignificant.
Despite the modifications to the traditional life of the town,
despite the permanent lighting on the bridge and hitherto unknown
presence of women on it, the bridge itself is seen to be still
unchanged. As after floods and wars, it emerges from all the
upheavals, just as it always was:
One could say that all these changes on the bridge were insigni-
ficant, superficial and short-lived. The numerous and extensive
changes in the thinking and customs of the people and the external
appearance of the town seemed to have passed by the bridge
without touching it. It seemed as though the ancient white bridge,
which had lived through three centuries without trace or scar,
would remain unchanged "under the new emperor" as well, that it
would resist this flood of innovations and changes just as it had
always resisted the biggest inundations and had always arisen out
of the seething mass of turbulent water that covered it, untouched
and white, as though reborn.21
The last chapters of the chronicle describe the first years of the
twentieth century in detail, with particular attention to the optimism
of the generation who were students at the outbreak of the First
World War - the generation to which Andric himself belonged.
These chapters describe lives in progress and the characters'
hopes, plans and fears. They cannot have the completeness and
sense of perspective of the earlier passages. On the contrary, they
open the novel out towards an unknown future. Nevertheless, the
lives of these young people are intricately linked to their town and its
past, through common memories and because they are the descen-
dants of people who played out their role in the town in earlier times.
The continuity symbolized by the bridge is therefore also embodied
in them. They are at once seen to live in history as they live in time
and space, and at the same time to carry history in themselves.
The Bridge on the Drina can be seen as a portrait of history itself.
History is made as much by individual personalities as by mass
movements and the upheavals created by the rise and fall of empires.
In The Bridge on the Drina there is a constant balance between the
impact of external events, of natural vicissitudes, and the particular
flavour imparted by individual personalities who capture the imagi-
nation of the local people and determine the temper of an age.
The stories of the drowned girl, the gambler and the Russian
soldier stay in the memory of the townspeople. Other individuals
play their part, not through any particularly memorable anecdotes
like these but simply through the force of their personalities which
attract wide attention in the town: such are Alihodza, the innkeeper
Lotika and the gypsy Corkan. Such characters impose themselves on
their age and contribute to its history, to a lesser degree, but in the
same way as natural phenomena and man-made upheavals.
In the last chapters of the chronicle, where the passage of time is
slower and Andric's focal point different, he no longer identifies the
individuals or crises that determine the history of the town. They
can be selected only by future generations and their significance felt
only with the passing of time. Similarly, the "meaning" of the bridge
can be seen only in the broader time-scale where generations come
and go, facing the vagaries of fortune and carrying with them their
common heritage, their sense of identity. The Bridge on the Drina is
about the passing of time, the presence in the world of individual
human beings for a brief moment, filled for them with drama and
urgency but forgotten except in rare instances, and then only in
greatly modified form, by the generations which replace them. In the
chronicle the changes that come are neutral. It is only to individuals
that they seem either "good" or "bad". In themselves they are only
different, requiring that infinitely adaptable humanity eventually
accept them. On this broad scale the people are not allowed the
luxury of an apparent meaning to their lives through heroic action,
love or dedication to any ideal. These are attributed to them, where
they exist, only by later generations. Their lives simply pass. The
overwhelming impression left by the work is not, however, this
bleak statement but a silent acceptance of the fact that, while lives
pass, life continues. The flow of life continues, carried forward by
each generation, unchanged by natural or man-made upheavals,
unaffected by the destinies of individuals. And that is the signi-
ficance of the expressive symbol of the bridge, communicated to the
population of Visegrad without the need for more explicit statement.
The Novels 141
The bridge represents a special harmony between man and
Nature. The importance of buildings, conditioned as they are by
human need, is frequently stated in the work - the need can be
transient and the result ugly, as in the case of the military observa-
tion post erected on the bridge; or it can represent a long-term
adjustment of man to his environment. If the result is not a taming of
Nature but a meaningful response to man's surroundings, as in the
case of the bridge, it can be beautiful, a source of peace and
harmony:
The strange and exceptional beauty of the bridge can never be
better felt than on these summer days, at this hour. Sitting here, a
man feels that he is on a magic swing: he is crossing the earth,
sailing on the water, flying through space and yet firmly and
securely fixed to the town and his white house over there, with its
garden and its plum orchard round it. Here at such times, over
coffee and tobacco, many of these humble citizens, who have little
else but that house and a little shop in town, feel the full richness
of the world and the boundlessness of God's gifts. All this can be
offered to people, and offered over the centuries, by a building,
when it is fine and strong, conceived at the right moment, erected
in the right place, and successfully realized.22
The idea of a bridge is rich in association and open to wide
interpretation. Alihodza's account of its origin illustrates the
strength of the symbol on an unspoken level. To the townspeople in
their daily lives, however, it stands above all for permanence.
The permanence of the bridge in the face of change is a source of
comfort to the people who live near it, just as the stability of
mountains and the constant renewal of the seasons have always been.
It acts as an enduring counterweight to all the changes and upheavals
and the divisions between communities, so that a sense of balance
and harmony is always restored. There is an explicit statement of its
influence at the end of the chapter describing the floods:
So on the bridge, between the sky, the river and the mountains,
generation after generation learned not to regret inordinately all
that the turbulent water carried away. Here they absorbed the
unconscious philosophy to the town: that life is an incomprehensi-
ble wonder, for it spends itself and runs out perpetually, and yet it
endures and stands firm "like the bridge on the Drina".23
It is characteristic of Andric that such a statement should not be
placed at the end of the novel. The belief it describes is unconscious,
a point of reference which does not itself alter the basic facts of an
individual's life and mortality. The last words of the novel return us
from the metaphysical to man and the earth: "On the slope leading
to Mejdan lay Alihodza breathing his last short painful breaths".24
Bosnian Story
From the broad time-scale of The Bridge on the Drina Andric moves
in this novel to close consideration of a brief period of Bosnian
history, known as "the age of the consuls". Andric began work on
this, his first novel, in 1924, seeing it as a study of contacts between
East and West. In the course of his diplomatic career, he was able to
study documents concerned with the period, the reports of the
French and Austrian consuls, and the published works of the main
characters Daville (Davide) and des Fosses.25
After Napoleon's occupation of the Dalmatian coast in 1806 a
consul was sent to represent French interests in Travnik, the
administrative centre of Bosnia. The Austrian government rapidly
followed suit. Bosnian Story opens and closes with the reaction of the
local Moslems to the idea of the coming of the Western consuls, and
to their departure seven years later. The body of the work studies
these seven years in detail. They are traced mainly through the eyes
of the French consul, Daville, and his young colleague, des Fosses.
The other main characters are the two Ottoman viziers governing
Travnik during the period and the two Austrian consuls, von
Mitterer and his successor von Paulich. The work is very carefully
documented, often quoting the actual reports and journals of the two
Frenchmen.
While there is a certain progression in the response of the two
Frenchmen to their surroundings, the development of the novel is
typical of Andric's work in that it is linear. There is no action that is
dependent on interaction between the characters, and no relation-
ships develop in any depth. Instead, individual events, characters or
The Novels 143
anecdotes become the focal point of each chapter. This structure
conforms to the basic pattern of Andric's writing, but as in The Bridge
on the Drina the individual chapters are connected; underlying
themes, developed in the separate chapters, contribute to the
dominant tone of each novel.
While The Bridge on the Drina emphasizes the coherence and
harmony of the life of Visegrad, the common experience that bound
the mixed community together, in Bosnian Story what is stressed is the
hostility between the various groups living in Travnik. All the various
components of the novel reinforce ideas of mistrust, misunderstan-
ding, isolation and exile.
The novel opens with a prologue, describing the reactions of the
local Beys to the news of the coming of the French consul. The
immediate response of the man to whom the news is first given is the
bald statement that they do not want any visitors. Such an attitude is
common to both the Moslem and Christian communities in Travnik.
Each group fears any new arrivals or changes to the established way of
life. As far as the native Moslem population is concerned - and
particularly the Beys, with their status and property - even visitors
from Istanbul are unwelcome as representatives of arbitrary and often
tyrannical rule, while Westerners pose the possibility of change on a
vertiginous scale. For the Christian population the situation is bad but
familiar; they have adapted to the requirements of their meagre
existence as far as possible and they are sceptical and apprehensive of
any change. This general attitude is reflected in the state of the roads
in and around Travnik. Their poor quality is one of the aspects of
Bosnian life that Daville takes as a sign of the backwardness of the
population. For him good roads mean, simply, progress and prosper-
ity, and their neglect is another example of the innate malevolence
which he sees as characterizing all his observations of Bosnian life.
Daville's young colleague des Fosses, who is always more open-
minded and receptive in his approach to the circumstances in which
he finds himself, as usual makes an effort to understand the local
people's attitude. He realizes that the bad roads are welcomed by the
Christians, who even actively destroy them, as they put a barrier
between themselves and Turkish visitors. For the Turks every link
with Christian countries means opening the door to enemy influence,
and consequently represents a threat to Turkish power.
There is an immediate contrast with The Bridge on the Drina here.
The bridge is a symbol of contact and communication between men,
regardless of ideology, while the bad roads of Travnik suggest
defensiveness and aloofness, a narrow self-absorption and mutual
distrust. These ideas are expressed in the description of the sur-
roundings of Travnik, a description which is as arbitrary as that of
the situation of Visegrad. On the surface, "realistic" level of the
narration the implication is that human responses are often at least in
part determined by natural circumstances and forces beyond the
individual's control. More importantly, for the author it is one of a
series of devices designed to evoke a particular atmosphere. The way
Andric has chosen to describe the position of Travnik contributes to
the dominant themes of hostility and isolation. The steep hills
descending to the narrow river make it impossible for any roads
through the town to be straight, and consequently for movement to
be "easy and carefree". The inhabitants are restrained and cautious;
they never laugh aloud, they speak little, but like to gossip under
their breath.
The other aspect of this description, which offers a complete
contrast to The Bridge on the Drina, is the emphasis on transience.
The bridge in Visegrad stands for permanence, but Travnik is
described as "a fortified pass in which people have stayed to live for
good".26 The foreign visitors on whom the work is focused are
simply passing through, and this transience is reinforced at other
points in the novel.
The population of Travnik, in its uniform opposition to the idea of
visitors, is presented as a coherent entity. This is necessary in order
to emphasize the isolation of the outsiders. Little distinction is made
in this respect between the Moslem and Christian communities.
However, the reactions of the various communities to the particular
issue of the coming of the consuls differ, and the population is shown
to be far from a homogeneous group.
The Moslem population is mistrustful of anything coming from
abroad and ill-disposed to any innovation. Their mistrust of the
French consul is expressed in open hostility. Daville remains a
conspicuous outsider, a potential target should any violence erupt in
the town.
There are two instances of such spontaneous riots, and they
The Novels 145
suggest that these are not simply an expression of cultural and
religious hostility. The reaction of the Moslem community to the
French consul is not substantially different from their sentiments
towards the Vizier himself. It is largely a "mob" response to the
representatives of any authority. The way in which Andric describes
this process gives it an "organic" quality. He states that it is
impossible to perceive the logic of these blind, furious, regularly
fruitless risings, but that they do have a logic of their own just as
they have an unseen "technique", based on tradition and instinct.
The impression conveyed is of a natural phenomenon, like the
inexplicable gathering of storm clouds which suddenly clash without
apparent reason and then again disperse, leaving the sky clear for
days or weeks before accumulating again according to some hidden
logic of their own. This account of the riots as a recurrent communal
madness reduces their significance as a direct expression of hostility
to the consuls specifically; the foreigners become merely arbitrary
but conspicuous targets.
In the seven years of the consuls' stay in Travnik, they are never
accepted. The epilogue describes the Beys again, assessing the "age
of the consuls". They greet the news of their departure as a kind of
victory for, although they had to a certain extent become accustomed
to their presence, nevertheless they are pleased to see the departure
of these foreigners with their strange, different way of life and their
"brazen meddling in Bosnian affairs".27
The French consul does succeed in becoming accepted through
his family life. The whole community takes an interest in the
pregnancies of Madame Daville and in the death of one of her
children. All are favourably impressed by the Frenchwoman's
quiet industry and the example offered by the consulate of har-
monious family life. Cultural divisions cease at this basic human
level.
The population of Travnik is, then, shown on the one hand to
react spontaneously as a coherent entity in certain circumstances,
but on the other to be made up of clearly differentiated cultural and
religious groups, each with its own characteristics. In Andric's
works the inhabitants of Bosnian towns regularly have this dual
quality, with the emphasis generally falling on differentiation. Each
group has a specific role in the life of the town, with the gypsies
forming the bottom layer of the stratification - with all the most
distasteful tasks left to them.
Travnik's population is made up of different groups, but it is to
the town as a whole that the European visitors react, classing the
population all together as "Oriental".
The main spokesmen of the Western reaction are Daville himself,
who is consistently negative in his attitude to the conditions around
him, and des Fosses, who, by contrast, is ready to look further and
with greater understanding. In this way, the Western response is
seen to be relative and conditioned by the nature of the observer
himself. Daville is presented as a weak, indecisive personality who is
bound to react defensively to any situation which is difficult and
demanding. Des Fosses, on the other hand, is young, strong,
imaginative and eager to learn as much as possible from his
experience of Bosnia.
For a man of Daville's disposition, many aspects of the alien way
of life are "distasteful". His impression on leaving the Vizier's palace
is regularly a nauseating memory of the smell of mutton fat
pervading the entire place, the clothes of its inhabitants and the very
furniture and walls. He is similarly disturbed by the singing of one of
his Moslem neighbours, who returns home each evening, usually
drunk, singing the same mournful melody. The extent of Daville's
inability to enter into the spirit of this alien music, because of his
own personal dissatisfaction, is seen in a passage where he records
his reaction to the singing in writing, instead of continuing with the
epic poem on which he works in his spare time. We are driven by
these circumstances not to take his analysis seriously, but to see it as
an expression of frustration with himself and his own poetic
pretensions: "I have listened to these people singing and seen that
they bring to their songs that same barbarity and unhealthy rage that
colours all the other functions of their minds and bodies."28 Daville
discusses this music with his Austrian counterpart, who also dismis-
ses it as "ein urjammer",29 but does not feel threatened by it. Von
Mitterer is a military man who, in spite of family troubles, is self-
contained and not emotionally affected by his alien surroundings.
The reactions of the Westerners to "Oriental" phenomena are,
then, to some degree conditioned by their own personalities. There
are also vivid moments when the cultural gap between West and East
The Novels 147
is seen to be more objective. Daville succeeds in establishing a
degree of sympathetic contact with the Vizier Mehmed Pasha,
largely thanks to the latter's dignity and his personal admiration of
Napoleon. But the degree of contact possible between them is
limited. On one occasion the Vizier, who takes great interest in
Daville's account of life in France, asks him to tell him about the
French theatre, of which he has heard so much. Daville, who is
interested in literature, is delighted and decides to read some scenes
from Racine's Bajazet, on the mistaken assumption that the Turk
will enjoy the familiar subject matter. The Vizier's inevitable
reaction, however, is to dismiss the scene described as out of the
question in Turkish terms: "Why, he doesn't know what he's talking
about, since the beginning of time it simply could never happen that
a Grand Vizier should burst into the Harem and talk with the
Sultan's wives!"30 and to laugh long and heartily, making no attempt
to disguise his disappointment, despite all Daville's endeavours to
explain the art and function of tragic drama in France. The other
striking example of the cultural gulf is the scene in which both
consuls are summoned to the Vizier's palace to share his triumph in
his recent victory over the rebellion among the neighbouring Serbs.
The highlight of the audience is the moment when sacks of war
trophies are brought in and scattered on to rugs for the foreigners to
admire. Among the predictable weapons and armour, to the consuls'
consternation, are piles of noses and ears cut from the defeated
rebels, and presented triumphantly in a hideous mass of preserving
salt and dried blood. This experience of something so very far from
the criteria of Western civilization brings the two consuls closer
together, but causes Daville to doubt the whole purpose of his
sojourn in Bosnia.
The theme of cultural differentiation is further developed by
Andric himself in his function as narrator. In his account of Daville's
first ride through Travnik he suggests that "only Orientals are
capable of feeling and showing such hatred and contempt".31 He
makes several incidental comments in the course of the narrative: for
example, on the degree of sincerity to be expected in the formal
statements of Turks. As Mehmed Pasha takes his leave of Daville he
asks him to send his regards to the French general Marmont,
speaking "with that distinctive warmth, which resembles sincerity as
one drop of water another and leaves a convincing, reassuring
impression on even the most sceptical interlocutor".32 And similarly
when the second Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, leaves: "Daville well knew
that it was one of those Oriental lies or half-truths that circulate
among genuine relations and kindnesses like false coins among real
ones."33 There are also several brief asides, for example: "For an
Oriental, the Vizier was unusually lively, pleasant and open."34 All
these incidental remarks contribute to the account of the Western
reaction to the ways of the East. Most of the experience of cultural
conflict is that of the Westerners looking at the East from the
outside. Nowhere is the life of the ordinary local Moslem or
Christian population described, except in the most general terms.
Andric is concerned with the situation of people removed from their
familiar surroundings. The viziers are equally far from Istanbul as
the consuls from Paris and Vienna. On several occasions the viziers
remark on their experience of Bosnia: "The climate is harsh, the
people impossible. What can be expected of women and children,
creatures whom God has not endowed with reason, in a country
where even the men are so immoderate and uncouth?".35 "Ibrahim
Pasha could not find enough harsh words and grim images whenever
they began to talk about Bosnia and the Bosnians, and Daville
listened to him now with genuine sympathy and real understan-
ding."36
The Catholic monks also find conditions in Bosnia unusually
difficult and the population of all faiths backward in all respects. In
an interesting conversation with des Fosses, the Franciscan monk
Brother Julian puts this all down to Turkish rule, but des Fosses is
not satisfied - he feels that the Christians have also taken on certain
Oriental characteristics, such as "deceitfulness, stubbornness, dis-
trust, mental laziness, fear of anything new or of all work, or
movement".37 He explains this as being the result of need, through
centuries of unequal struggle and constant defence, which has now
become a habit and a great obstacle to all progress.
There is, then, a sufficient consensus in the novel, reinforced by
the narrator's interventions, about the difficult working conditions
in Bosnia for the reader to feel that there is some objective truth in
these statements, but the way in which the individuals choose to
react to the problems posed is of course more revealing of their own
The Novels 149
personalities than of the true nature of Bosnia. The most consistently
hostile, as we have seen, is Daville, for whom nothing he experi-
ences, from the strange sounds of Bairam when he first arrives to the
end, has any charm. Early on he coins a formula to explain all the
difficulties of his situation and the life around him, which he makes
no effort to understand: "Oriental poison". This "poison" is mani-
fested in the unfriendliness, deviousness and backwardness of the
population, as well as in their singing. It seeps into everything,
explaining des Fosses's perverse insistence on trying to understand
and thereby excuse what is for Daville simply innate "malevolence".
It affects the young Fresine, who tries to establish a commercial
network from Sarajevo and becomes disillusioned with the difficul-
ties he encounters, and finally Daville feels that he himself has
become tainted by it.
From the first day "all his work and efforts in connection with
Bosnia and the Turks had dragged him down, hampered and
weakened him. Year by year the effect of the 'Oriental poison',
which dulls the eye and undermines the will, had grown in him and
corroded him".38 Even for des Fosses, who is fascinated by all he can
see and discover of Bosnia, the experience is difficult:
Like the tightening of an invisible hoop: everything required a
greater effort and at the same time one became less capable of
making it; each step was more difficult, each decision slower and
its execution uncertain, while behind it all lurked distrust, scarcity
and trouble of all kinds. This was the East.39
The image of constraint is used of the whole historical situation of
Bosnia in the early nineteenth century:
These clashes of such opposing interests, beliefs, aims and hopes,
formed a tight knot which the long Turkish wars with Venice,
Austria and Russia entangled and tied still tighter . . . [with] the
uprising in Serbia . . . the knot tightened and became still more
intricate.4fl
The image applies to intercultural relations in Travnik, but
equally to the inner confusions of the characters themselves. For all
the foreigners, Bosnia represents a complex of problems to be
tackled. But their ability to tackle them depends on their own inner
resources. The young and energetic des Fosses cuts straight through
the tangled knot. His personality is positive and outgoing; he does not
resist the demands of the world. Another character, the Austrian
consul von Paulich, survives by treating the difficulties of his situation
as a logical, formal game.
It is Daville above all who experiences Bosnia as a defeat.
Objectively, his professional success is considerable and he is
regarded by others as decisive and effective. To himself, however, he
is inadequate and it is his perception of himself that corrodes and
undermines his actions, rather than any qualities inherent in Bosnia.
It is through the character of Daville that Andric suggests that exile -
the theme which runs through the work - is also an inner state of
being.
Bosnia, then, represents a microcosm, where the obstacles confron-
ting an individual anywhere are thrown more clearly and starkly into
relief against the bleak landscape and the extreme barriers to
communication. Against this background, and inextricably inter-
woven with it, the other main themes of the novel are developed.
The coming of the consuls is conditioned by historical events, as are
the duration of their stay and their relations with each other while they
are in Travnik. Always cool, these relations are ruptured completely
with the outbreak of war between France and Austria; re-established
with peace; only to be interrupted again. Such behaviour - in
conditions which are so difficult for both men and where they could
have so much common ground - is objectively absurd, but equally
clearly it is demanded by the conventions of international relations.
Not only is the behaviour of the consuls determined by events far
from them: because of the heterogeneous nature of the local
population, relations between the various groups that compose it are
likewise dependent on distant events. Events in Istanbul are
described as having an immediate effect on the population of Travnik
- as can be seen in their reaction to the replacement of Mehmed Pasha
following the deposition of Selim, regarded as a triumph for forces
hostile to Napoleon. With the news of Selim's murder in Istanbul, and
the subsequent killing of the man who led the revolt against him, the
mood of the population becomes so troubled that it is ready once more
to erupt in a riot, as soon as a scapegoat and immediate motive can be
found.
The Novels 151
Like the consuls, the viziers are sent to Travnik as part of a chosen
career - beyond that they have no control over their destiny, and the
length of their stay depends on the fluctuations of power groups in
the Ottoman capital. Their situation is markedly worse than that of
the European consuls in that the Ottoman system is so much more
violent. Not only are the rulers responsible for their appointment
liable to be deposed and murdered, but their own fate following such
an event is likely at best to be exile to some distant outpost of the
Empire. Since we see the viziers solely in their professional capacity
and never as family men (they leave their harems behind when they
take up their appointments), they are seen to be completely isolated.
There are three viziers in Travnik in the course of the novel and their
lives are shaped entirely by events far from them. An air of intrigue
and informing surrounds them. Their power rests entirely on an
ability to anticipate and avoid violent turns of fortune by being the
first to take violent action.
Something of this intrigue surrounds the consuls' dealings with
each other, although on quite a different scale. Their position
requires them wherever possible to make difficulties for each other -
Daville manages to delay von Mitterer's arrival, with the co-opera-
tion of local administrators in holding up his papers. Von Mitterer in
his turn works at exacerbating Daville's bad relations with the
Catholic community. Each throughout the novel continues to take
every opportunity of hampering the other's work, despite their
regular, if never warm, contact and despite the fact that, in the
difficult conditions in which they find themselves, each could offer
the other genuine sympathy and support:
Their unhappy fate and the difficulties it brought drove them
towards each other. And if ever there existed in the world two men
who could have understood, sympathized with and even helped
one another, it was these consuls who spent all their energy, their
days and often their nights putting obstacles in each other's way
and making each other's life as troublesome as possible.41
Such a situation, conditioned by the rules of power politics, stunts
the degree of communication possible between the consuls and
between the consuls and the viziers. The viziers are indeed able to
make a degree of sympathetic contact with Daville only because of
the friendly disposition of the ruling sultan to Napoleon. Their
relations with the Austrian consuls are correspondingly cold and
formal.
When the situation between France and Austria improves the two
consuls take advantage of the lull to communicate more freely and
warmly, but as tension increases once more between Napoleon and
the Habsburgs they mete out their comradeship in carefully mea-
sured doses until a complete break between their governments, or
the outbreak of war, obliges them to interrupt their own contact
completely. Andric describes their situation with a characteristic
image:
Then both tired men would start their battle again, imitating, like
two obedient puppets on long strings, the movements of the great
distant battle, whose long-term aims were unknown to them and
whose scale and intensity filled them both, in the depths of their
hearts, with similar feelings of fear and uncertainty.42
It is not only in his public relations, however, that an individual is
affected by historical events. The shape of a man's personal life and
career is similarly conditioned by the times into which he is born.
Once again, that process is most closely examined in the character of
Daville. His experience - the confusing upheavals of his formative
years, when he was caught up at one moment in emotional enthu-
siasm for Louis XVI and, ten years later, in a similar welcome for the
Revolution, only to have to readjust to the idea of Napoleon as
Emperor - provides a vivid illustration of the kind of forces which
mould a man's loyalties. Daville is shown to be particularly vulner-
able, given his weak nature which always seeks absolute answers
outside himself, but the pressures on him are certainly intense:
In short, he was one of those people who are the special victims of
major historical events, for they are not capable either of with-
standing those events, in the way exceptional and energetic
individuals do, nor of coming completely to terms with them, as
the masses of average people do.43
Historical circumstances also affect relations between individuals:

when des Fosses arrives in Travnik he is twenty-four, and Daville is
The Novels 153
approaching forty. Such a gap need not be significant, but the
discrepancy between their experiences is such as to exaggerate the
gap in their ages, indeed their generations, to the point where real
communication is all but impossible. They are in fact as foreign to
one another as any representatives of alien cultures. Des Fosses, who
provides such a contrast to his countryman, had the good fortune to
be born later, under a stable regime. By the time of Napoleon's
downfall the stability of his own robust personality is so well
established that he is able to take such a major reversal in his stride.
For Daville, however, it means a renewed questioning of the whole
of his life and its meaning:
But it was difficult not to think, to remember, to see. He had
spent twenty-five years searching for "the middle way", which
would bring solace, and give a person the dignity without which
he cannot live. For twenty-five years he had moved, seeking and
finding, losing and gaining, from one "enthusiasm" to another,
and now, exhausted, broken and worn down, he had reached the
point he had started from when he was eighteen. In other words,
all the roads had been only apparently leading somewhere; in fact
they merely went round in a circle, like the deceptive labyrinths of
Oriental tales; and so they had brought him, tired and faint-
hearted, to this place, among these crumpled papers; to the point
where the circle starts again, like any other point in its circumfer-
ence. In other words, there is no middle way; no true path leading
forward into stability, peace and dignity, but we all move in a
circle, following always the same deceptive path, and only the
people and the generations who follow it change, perpetually
deceived. In other words, this was the conclusion of the weary
man's weary and fallacious thoughts, there are no paths at a l l . . .
One only travels. The meaning and dignity of the journey exist
only in so far as we are able to find them in ourselves. Neither path
nor purpose. One only travels. Travels, spends and exhausts
oneself.44
Bosnian Story concentrates on the relations of individual men in a
specific context. Relations between the consuls and their wives
provide only incidental background information, and there are no
significant friendships or other personal relationships in the work
which are important in their own right. The work is, then, focused
on a picture of a group of men working side by side in similar
circumstances, but without any real contact. We have seen some-
thing of the way in which their relations are determined for the most
part by forces outside their control. The other aspect of their lives to
be examined in some detail is the relationship, and generally the
discrepancy, between their public and private personalities. The
necessity of presenting a public image which differs from the private
self is common, but exaggerated in a diplomatic career by the fact
that the individual has to represent a government whose interests are
at times at variance with his own. Daville and von Mitterer are
unable to indulge in the natural sympathy each feels for the other;
Daville is unable to make contact with the Catholic community; the
Austrian consul is kept at a strict distance by the viziers. The consuls
are obliged always to act according to the demands of their public
position. Daville's main anxiety at difficult moments is how a
representative of the great Napoleon should react. His indecision
always humiliates and angers him. One of the extreme tests of this
kind occurs when Daville and von Mitterer are confronted with the
Turkish war trophies. Daville is barely able to overcome his personal
revulsion but is spurred on by von Mitterer's strength of mind,
determined not to be seen to be less zealous in his congratulations
than his Austrian rival. When Daville and von Mitterer first meet,
both endeavour gallantly to pronounce as naturally as possible the
speeches they have carefully prepared in advance:
Both consuls were completely filled with the dignity of their
calling and the initial zeal of the beginner. That prevented them
from seeing the absurdity of the exalted solemnity of this meeting,
but it did not prevent them from observing and assessing each
other.45
Towards the end of the meeting neither can quite stifle his natural
sympathy for the other's predicament. That same evening, however,
they each write a report of their meeting for their superiors, in which
each describes his conclusive verbal and moral victory over the
other.
Thus the lives of these men have several dimensions: the public
encounters, their private reactions to them and their confidential
The Novels 155
accounts of them in which they go some way towards redeeming the
humiliation and indignity of the initial discrepancy. The following
passage illustrates this predicament:
During the nights, when Travnik had already sunk deep into the
darkness, one could see only one or two lighted windows in each
of the two consulates. These were the two consuls, poring over
their papers, reading information from their agents, writing
reports. And then it would often happen that either Daville or von
Mitterer, leaving his work for a moment, would go to the window
and stare out at the solitary light on the hill opposite, where his
neighbour and opponent was forging unknown traps and tricks,
determined to undermine his colleague from across the Lasva and
to spoil his plans.
The crowded little town between them had disappeared; they
were separated only by emptiness, silence and darkness. Their
windows looked at each other, glistening, like the eyes of men
fighting a duel. But, hidden behind the curtains, one or other of
the consuls, or both at the same time, would be staring into the
darkness and into the pale beam of his opponent's light and
thinking of him with emotion, profound understanding and
genuine sympathy. Then they would rouse themselves and return
to their work by their flickering candles and continue to write
their reports, in which there was no trace of their feelings of a
moment before and in which they attacked and debased each
other, from the false official height from which civil servants think
that they look down on the whole world when they are addressing
their Minister in a confidential report, knowing that it will never
be read by the people they refer to in it/6
It is when they are left alone in their studies with their papers that
each of the consuls can be most himself. Family life offers neither of
them real communication. Madame Daville is completely absorbed
in the efficient and harmonious running of her household, while
Frau von Mitterer is a capricious, hysterical woman, given to
obsessive enthusiasm and disillusion - she can only hamper her
husband, upsetting his life and to a certain extent his career. So the
two consuls are most relaxed when alone in their studies after the
rest of the household has retired. Des Fosses also writes when he is
alone in his room, but his writing of his Bosnian diary is a smooth
extension of his daily explorations, which are always rewarding,
rather than a compensation for his public frustration, as is the case
with the older men. Indeed, it is only when des Fosses is left alone
that he is really conscious of his own inevitable frustrations - those of
a vigorous young man unable to make contact with people around
him, and particularly with women. His predominant experience of
Bosnia is of silence, an overwhelming silence manifested in all
aspects of life, which he can ignore during the day, in his work, his
excursions and conversations, but which oppresses him at night.
Von Mitterer, a professional soldier who thrives on order, is
contented only when sitting at night in his study, however cold,
filling reams of paper with his orderly handwriting, describing the
surroundings of Travnik from a military point of view, with sketches
and statistics and other firm, useful facts. "By his candle, over the
pages he had already filled, surrounded by silence, he felt alone, as in
a secure fortress, sheltered and protected."47 Such a sense of security
is an illusion whereby the consul saves himself from all the absurdi-
ties and difficulties of his position.
There are, then, three dimensions to the men's solitary writing: a
sense of relief at no longer having to pretend to be what they are not
in order to satisfy the demands of their position; a deliberate salving
of their self-respect, shattered by the frustrations of the day in
writing - military reports for the one, epic verse for the other - but
also an unavoidable confrontation with their private being. Daville is
oppressed by the discrepancy between his public and private life:
During the day . . . he was a calm and resolute man, with a
definite name, profession and rank, a clear goal and precise duties
which had brought him to this God-forsaken Turkish province, as
they might have taken him to any other part of the world. But at
night he was all he had once been, was now and was to be. And
that man, lying in the darkness of the long February nights,
seemed, even to himself, strange, complex and at times com-
pletely unknown.48
The discrepancy between their public and private lives, and the
fact that the individuals act as puppets, result in a strong sense
throughout Bosnian Story that a man's public life is a kind of game,
The Novels 157
with clearly defined rules. As long as he is absorbed in playing that
game a man is prevented in some measure from realizing the extent
of his solitude in a world where most human communication is
governed and measured out according to these same rules.
That fundamental solitude is closely related to the whole idea of
exile which emerges as the dominant theme of the novel. Each of the
foreign visitors is exiled in an alien culture to which he cannot
satisfactorily relate, in which he is condemned to solitude and forced
always back on his own resources. There are, apart from the main
characters, several other exiles: the Levantines, Christians in an
Eastern environment; and the archetypal exiles, the Jews.
From the first, Daville is made to feel uneasy by his "Levantine"
interpreter, d'Avenant (known locally as Davna) - a man of mixed
Mediterranean background, who studied at Montpellier and Istan-
bul and opted for French nationality, but spent all his working life as
a doctor in Ottoman service. Daville's immediate dislike of him
springs from the sheer incongruity of his being a Westerner who has
for ever linked his life with the East. The concept "Levantine" has a
specific meaning for the narrator:
The Levantine is a man without illusions or scruples, faceless, or
rather with several masks, obliged to act condescension one
moment, courage the next, or despondency, followed by enthu-
siasm. For these are nothing but the necessary weapons of his
life's struggle, which is harder and more complicated in the
Levant than in any other part of the world. A foreigner, thrown
into this unequal struggle, becomes completely submerged in it
and loses his true identity. He spends his life in the East, but gets
to know it only imperfectly and from only one side, from the point
of view of winning and losing in the struggle to which he is
condemned. Those foreigners who, like Davna, remain in the
East, in the majority of cases take from the Turks only the baser
sides of their character, and are incapable of observing and
adopting any of their higher qualities and customs.49
There are three characters in the novel who are described as
belonging to this category, but they are isolated even from each
other. The two doctors, Davna and Cologna, are rivals: "But the
basis of their rivalry was not so much the books or the knowledge
that they had, as their Levantine need for quarrelling and competi-
tion, their professional jealousy, Travnik boredom and personal
vanity and intolerance."50
Cologna is the main spokesman for the Levantine position and, at
the same time, the focal point of a cluster of ideas about the
encounter of East and West. His ideas are of particular importance
in the novel:
"You don't need to explain anything to me; I understand the

position of the consuls, as I do that of every educated man from
the West whose destiny drives him to these parts. For such a man,
to live in Turkey means to walk on a knife-edge and to burn over a
low flame. I know this, for we are born on that knife-edge; we live
and die on it, we grow and burn ourselves out in that fire . . .
No one knows what it means to be born and to live on the edge
of two worlds, to know and understand both and not to be able to
do anything to explain them and bring them closer to each other,
to love and to hate both of them, to hesitate and stumble all one's
days, to have two homelands and none, to be everywhere at home
and to remain for ever a stranger; in short, to live stretched on the
rack, at once victim and torturer . . .
Yes, those are the torments suffered by Christians from the
Levant, which you, who belong to the Christian West, can never
completely understand, and which the Turks can understand even
less. That is the fate of the Levantine, for he is the 'poussiere
humaine', the dust of humanity, which shifts uncomfortably
between East and West, belonging to neither and beaten by both.
They are people who know many languages, but none is their
own, who know two faiths, but are steadfast in neither. They are
the victims of the fatal division of mankind into Christians and
non-Christians; eternal interpreters and go-betweens; but they
carry within themselves so much that is unclear and unspoken;
well acquainted with both East and West, their customs and
beliefs, but equally despised and suspected by both . . . They are
the people from the frontier, spiritual and physical, from the black
and bloodstained line drawn after a great and absurd misunder-
standing between people, God's creatures, between whom there
should be no frontiers. It is that border between the sea and the
The Novels 159
land, condemned to eternal movement and unrest. It is the third
world in which all the malediction of the universe settled after the
division of the world into two. It is . . ."
Des Fosses, enthralled, his eyes burning, watched the changed
old man, who kept searching in vain for words, his arms stretched
out as on a cross, and who came suddenly to an abrupt end, saying
in a broken voice:
"It is heroism without glory, martyrdom without reward. And
you at least, our fellow-believers and our kin, you people from the
West, Christians with the same blessing as ourselves, should
understand us, accept us and ease our destiny."51
This speech develops two of the main themes of the novel, the
extent of the division between East and West, and the absurdity of
this arbitrary but insurmountable division. People are cut off from
one another by accident of time and birthplace. They are isolated by
the natural sympathies and antipathies of their personalities, and
where their instincts could bring them together, they are divided by
their public position or their religious allegiance. In the midst of
other human beings, all individuals are irrevocably "exiled".
The importance of this theme is reinforced by the figure of the
Jew, Salomon Atijas, who comes to Daville at the end, knowing that
the consul's salary has not been paid for several months, to offer him
a loan to cover the costs of his journey home. On this solemn
occasion, Atijas feels an overwhelming need to explain himself and
his people to the foreigner who is about to leave Travnik for ever,
"For once to say something which would not be dictated by caution
and shrewdness, which would have nothing to do with acquiring and
saving, but would be an expression of generous pride and
sincerity."52 In the event he is unable to say all he would like, but
the narrator provides an account of what he would have said, had he
been able. He describes the history of the Sephardic Jews, how they
were swept away from their native Andalusia by a whirlwind which
scattered them over the earth:
It cast us here, into the East, and life in the East is for us neither
easy nor blessed, and the further a man goes and the closer he
moves towards the birthplace of the sun, the worse it is, for the
earth is increasingly young and raw, and man is of the earth. And
our trouble lies in the fact that were unable either completely to
come to love this land to which we owe gratitude that it accepted
us and gave us refuge, or to come to hate the one which drove us
unjustly out and persecuted us like unworthy sons. We do not
know whether it is harder to be here or not to be there . . . We left
a long time ago and we travelled with difficulty, stumbling
constantly, and we stopped in this place, and that is why we are no
longer even a shadow of what we were. Like the bloom from a
fruit that is passed from hand to hand, a man loses first what is
finest in him. That is why we are as we are.53
In this speech we have an example, unique in Bosnian Story, of a
sense of community. Elsewhere in the novel the individual has
always been contrasted to the community to which he cannot fully
belong. And it is not necessary to be a foreigner to be an outsider.
One of the several anecdotes des Fosses records about the inhabi-
tants of Travnik describes the life of the singer Musa, whose dirge so
upsets Daville - he is a social outcast, a nonconformist, and des
Fosses is made to quote from Marcus Aurelius in this connection:
"He who avoids the responsibilities of the social order is the same as
an exile." Musa, then, represents the outcast within society, while
the Jews exemplify the outcast community opposed to an alien
society and the Levantines individuals whose situation is similar to
that of the Jews but exacerbated, for they have neither community hi
their exile nor homeland, however distant.
All these varying degrees of isolation contribute to the bleak
texture of Bosnian Story, dominated as it is by the silence first
commented on by des Fosses. Silence because there is no real
communication between cultural groups, or between individuals,
and ultimately, in the case of Atijas, because of the sheer weight of
what he has to say. The silence of this sombre landscape is broken
twice, by the Catholic monk Brother Luka, and by the Levantine
Cologna. Both men are doctors, both close to the fundamental
movements of life:
Watching from day to day, from year to year, the plants, minerals,
and living creatures around him and their changes and move-
ments, Brother Luka had discovered increasingly clearly that in
the world as we see it there exist only two things, growth and
The Novels 161
decay, and that they are closely and inextricably connected,
eternally and everywhere in movement. All the phenomena
around us are only separate phases of that endless, complex and
eternal ebb and flow, only fictions, transient instants which we
arbitrarily separate, identify and name with fixed names, such as
health, sickness and dying. And none of this, of course, exists.
Only growth and decay exist in various stages and various forms.
The whole skill of the doctor lies in recognizing, capturing and
exploiting the forces moving in the direction of growth, "like a
sailor the winds", and in avoiding and removing all those which
serve decay. Where a man succeeds in capturing that force, he
recovers and sails on; where he does not succeed, he sinks simply
and irresistibly . . ,54
Brother Luka has all his life been filled with enthusiasm for his
vision of the world and the perfect harmony which can only be
guessed at, which man succeeds at times in using, but is never able
to control. Cologna, who belongs nowhere and has no public
function which could offer him illusory security and an objective
identity, balances the preoccupations of the "public men". He is at
home in conversation with Moslem, Catholic, Orthodox and Jew
and free to move among them all. His face is described as a
succession of masks; he changes language as easily as his expression
and does not even have a name which would be fixed and perma-
nent. He embodies in one being the ebb and flow described by
Brother Luka, a constant succession of shifting moods. His charac-
ter is summed up in the formula "consistent instability". It comes
as no shock, then, that this basically sceptical philosopher, for all
his occasional attacks of Catholic piety, should declare himself a
convert to Islam in order to avoid death at the hands of a mob. In
his case there is no serious dishonour: from his perspective all
beliefs are relative and, in his detachment from the world, he offers
an expression of the great that constancy and the one real hope.
Cologna's declaration of his fundamental belief, the statement of
an intellectual rather than a profoundly religious mind, comes at
the end of his description of the isolation of the Levantine, and acts
as an antidote to the emphasis on isolation which colours the whole
novel:
At the end, at the real final end, everything is good and everything
is resolved harmoniously. Although here everything really does
look discordant and hopelessly entangled. "Unjour tout sera bien,
voila noire esperance", as your philosopher put it. And one cannot
even imagine it any other way. For why should my thought, good
and true, be worth less than the same thought conceived in Rome
or Paris? Because it was born in this backwater called Travnik?
And is it possible that this thought should not be recorded in any
way and nowhere written down? No, it is not. Despite the
apparent fragmentation and disorder, everything is connected and
harmonious. No single human thought or effort of the spirit is
lost. We are all on the right path and we shall be surprised when
we meet. But we shall all meet and understand one another, no
matter where we go and however much we lose our way. It will be
a joyful vision, a glorious and redeeming surprise.55
This message represents a kind of revolt in the whole stark

landscape of the novel. Andric deliberately uses the Levantine to
express the message, for he is the character uniquely shaped by East
and West, and yet belonging to neither. It is an expression of
Andric's own philosophy, the philosophy which permeates his work
- a blend of the daily experiences of his early years, Oriental
acceptance of life in all its forms, with his experience of Christianity
and knowledge of the development of Western thought.
From his very different perspective, Daville is ultimately driven
on by a similar belief. Aware that he himself will never find the
"right path" for which he has searched all his life, he nevertheless
packs his belongings to leave Travnik soothed by the thought that
maybe his children, or their children, will reach it.
The dominant idea of transience and exile is balanced here by the
image of the "right path". The essential experience of living is thus
felt to be dissatisfaction and restlessness, governed by a constant
search for roots, for communication, for meaning.
The Woman from Sarajevo

In Bosnian Story we are given an account of the way in which several
individuals react to the essential conditions of human existence, and
The Novels 163
of the extent to which each is able to find a way of accepting these
conditions. The broader perspective of The Bridge on the Drina
places individual lives in the arbitrary flux of history, emphasizing
that "meaning" can be found only outside them, in legend and a
symbol of continuity such as the bridge.
The Woman from Sarajevo presents the portrait of an individual
who appears "mad" because she refuses to accept the basic condi-
tions of existence. We have seen that other characters in Andric's
fiction react to their own fear and insecurity with hatred and
aggression towards others. The protagonist of The Woman from
Sarajevo directs her "unnatural" behaviour above all against herself.
Rajka Radakovic refuses to be cast adrift in an uncontrollable ebb
and flow, at the mercy of arbitrary forces. She attempts to do the
impossible by making of herself a bulwark against the tide of change
and decay, by forcing her vulnerable human flesh into a structure as
inviolable as the bridge on the Drina.
This endeavour, expressed in obsessive miserliness, is difficult
material for the novelist. Andric's characters are, for the most part,
seen to react - more or less robustly or aggressively - to circum-
stances imposed on them by the nature of their existence. Rajka, on
the other hand, is herself responsible for her isolation and for all the
hardship that is the result of her obsession with money. It is a
complex passion, as it acquires all the characteristics of an irrational
force common to those of Andric's stories concerned with ungovern-
able impulses of fear, guilt, power, and so on. Yet it is based on and
developed through a series of quite rational decisions and actions.
This paradox is to an extent resolved by a study of Rajka's
psychology, but the texture of the novel is thinner than that of the
other two works published at the same time. It suggests an
"unnatural" task that the author has set himself, rather than material
evolved from his experience.
The Woman from Sarajevo begins with an introduction announcing
the death of Rajka Radakovic, as it is reported in the Belgrade
newspapers. The first chapter then focuses gradually on her dilapi-
dated house in Belgrade, her neighbours' impressions of her, her
external appearance and details of her way of life. The body of the
work is a lengthy reminiscence as Rajka looks back over her whole
life; it shifts back and forth from the past to the present and ends
with Rajka's sudden death from a heart attack as, in her anxiety
about the safety of her money and in the gloom of her unlit flat, she
comes upon the wet coat she had hung up in the hall and mistakes it
for the thief she had for so long feared.
In view of the work's concentration on the figure of Rajka, and the
fact that the novel looks largely at the world as she sees and
experiences it, the role of the narrator is not altogether clear. Rajka
dominates the narrative from beginning to end and the narrator's
own descriptive comments jar slightly, since he makes no attempt to
attribute these observations to the main character herself. These
external comments do set Rajka's story in a specific context and
endeavour to link her life with her age and environment.
Sarajevo in the first decade of the twentieth century is described as
abounding in contrasts and conflicting views and ways of life, varied
social classes and groups, religions and nationalities, bound together
in their common desire for money. The tone of the town is described
as the product of Oriental habits of idleness and a Slavonic need for
excess, combined now with Austrian formalistic concepts of society
and social obligations, basing a man's social standing on his ability to
spend:
It is hard to imagine a town with less money and poorer sources of
income but a greater thirst for wealth, with less will to work and
skill in making money, but with more appetites and desires. The
combination of Oriental customs and Central European civiliza-
tion here creates a particular form of social life in which the local
people compete with the new arrivals in creating new needs and
opportunities for spending. The former habits of restraint among
the poor and thrift among the wealthier classes had now paled
utterly. In so far as there still were people who had preserved the
town's old ways of modest and strict principles of small earnings
but great thrift, they stood to one side of all social life, like the
comic remnants of times long past.56
In this context, Rajka's financial ventures flourish.
As we have seen in the case of Travnik in Bosnian Story, the degree
of harmony between the various nationalities and faiths depends on
the stability of the whole society. A measure of hatred between
cultural groups is always latent, ready to be sparked by some upset
The Novels 165
in the established order. Such an upset in The Woman from Sarajevo
is the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand on 28 June 1914.
It is only in the aftermath of such an event that the true nature of the
population of a town like Sarajevo can be seen. As in Bosnian Story,
the impulse governing the outbreak of violence is treated as some-
thing organic, irrational. Andric is speaking here of the lower strata
of society whose dissatisfaction is always ready to be channelled in
the direction of violence, under any stimulus.
Adherents of the three main faiths, they hate each other, from
birth to death, senselessly and profoundly, carrying that hatred
even into the afterlife, which they imagine as glory and triumph
for themselves, and shame and defeat for their infidel neighbour.
They are born, grow and die in this hatred, this truly physical
revulsion for their neighbour of different faith, frequently their
whole life passes without their having an opportunity to express
their hatred in its full force and horror; but whenever the
established order of things is shaken by some important event,
and reason and the law are suspended for a few hours or days, then
this mob, or rather a section of it, finding at last an adequate
motive, overflows into the town, which is otherwise known for the
polished cordiality of its social life and its polite speech. Then all
this long-restrained hatred and hidden desire for destruction and
violence, which have governed their feelings and thoughts until
now, break out on to the surface and, like a flame which has long
sought and at last found fuel, these emotions take over the streets
and spit, bite, break until some force stronger than themselves
suppresses them or until they burn themselves out and tire of their
own fury. Then they retreat, like jackals, their tails between their
legs, into people's souls, the houses, and streets, where they
continue to exist for years, concealed, breaking out only in
malicious glances, foul language and obscene gestures.
This Sarajevo frenzy of hatred, nurtured for centuries by various
religious institutions, favoured by climatic and social circum-
stances and reinforced by historical developments, broke out now
and spilled into the streets of the modern part of the town, built
with quite different assumptions, for quite a different order and
quite a different kind of behaviour.57
The last general description of social movements is an account of
Belgrade society around 1920 - an unformed society, open to all
comers; an uneasy mixture of disparate people loosely linked by
their common interests; people from various parts of the Balkans
and Central Europe, uprooted by the War and assembled by chance,
out of the context of the traditions and customs with which they
grew up. In such an environment fraud and deception are rife, since
standards of behaviour are no longer clear-cut; a prevailing optimis-
tic enthusiasm, after the misery of the War years, makes the path of
the social climber and confidence trickster smoother than it would be
in different historical circumstances. This general picture of Bel-
grade society is used to describe the atmosphere of the gatherings
that take place at the house of Rajka's relatives, where she and her
mother stay on their arrival in Belgrade, and to explain the
phenomenon of the trickster Ratko Ratkovic, who succeeds in
persuading Rajka to lend him money, something previously quite
unthinkable for her.
These more general statements about contemporary life include
some comments on the effect of the First World War on the ordinary
people of Bosnia and the writing of young poets immediately after it
- quoting directly one of Andric's first poems. All this background
material serves to illustrate the circumstances in which Rajka's story
takes place and some of the social phenomena particularly associated
with the period.
Rajka's own story, however, is not dependent on the historical
moment except in so far as it determines the precise forms in which
her financial dealings develop. The story of her obsession is itself
timeless, but in Andric's work all aspects of life - the individual, the
moment in time, the geographical and cultural setting - are inextric-
ably linked.
Rajka is introduced at a stage when her obsession is fully
developed. Her house is dilapidated, with signs of neglect every-
where, as though it were inhabited by somebody blind or totally
indifferent to worldly things, making use of them only when
essential. She is mending, and her delight in this activity is described
in lyrical terms. She has two sources of pleasure at this time -
mending and saving. So absolutely is her world expressed in these
two verbs that she cannot bear even the concept of "spending" time
The Novels 167
on cooking and housework, since the very verb "to spend" in any
connection or form is a source of pain for her. Her obsession with
saving shows an extraordinary degree of detachment from the world,
to the extent that she is prepared to neglect her health and ruin her
eyesight, sitting in the cold and dark. Health and eyesight cost
nothing and seem to come in abundant supply, unlike the things of the
world which wear out and decay. From her perspective her own
physical being is infinite, or at least expendable in the cause of her
ideal. This ideal is described in terms of a young girl's indulgence in
thoughts of love. As she might sing love songs over her work, so Rajka
finds herself repeating the magic words "mend", "forbear" under her
breath as she darns her already well-stitched stocking. The process of
mending is then exalted in heroic terms of struggle against a powerful,
invisible enemy: "In this struggle there are dull, difficult, apparently
hopeless moments, there are defeats and moments of weakness, but
there are, and many more of them, bright moments of dedicated,
devout service and triumphant exaltation."58 The language of this
long passage and of the following one, a meditation on the notion of
"forbearance", is such as might accompany an act of religious worship
rather than the homely task of darning, but for Rajka self-denial and
suffering for the sake of her ideal of thrift are akin to the zeal of
religious devotion. These ideas emerge here from the fact that her
dedication is to the abstract notion of preservation rather than to the
physical manifestation of her ideal - money itself.
The broad outline of Rajka's career is an initial obsession with
acquiring wealth. The goal of her early life is the almost mystical
notion of "the first million", a dream which fills her waking and
sleeping life. She develops a ruthless business ability and succeeds
rapidly in making large sums of money. She continues this activity all
through the War years, exploiting every aspect of the War for her own
ends, quite unable to understand the outrage of her fellow-country-
men over this behaviour and their desire for revenge and retribution.
When the War is over she is obliged to move to Belgrade, where no
one knows her. Her activity here is more subdued, and she has lost her
ambition to acquire much more. Instead she concentrates her energies
on preserving what she has and deriving satisfaction from speculating
as to what she might have made from various transactions.
The two main events in Rajka's life - her decision to embark on a
life of money-making, and her aberration over young Ratko Ratko-
vic, which is so apparently out of keeping with her cold, solitary
character - are given a psychological explanation, which establishes
an uneasy balance between the rational and irrational aspects of her
behaviour.
It is essential to Rajka's psychology that she be capable of great
devotion. Two characters in her early life command her allegiance.
These are her father and her mother's younger brother, a man some
four years older than Rajka herself, of exceptional charm and zest for
life. In her long reminiscence she reveals nothing of her earliest
years. Her real life began when she was fourteen and the father she
admired suffered the ignominy of bankruptcy and died. Her father
had been the epitome of all that was strong and dignified, and she
regarded him almost with reverence. Consequently she takes his
dying message to heart: that her guiding principle through life
should be to save, that she should never be a victim of her own
weakness or the greed of others.
The solemnity of this moment stays with Rajka throughout her
life in Sarajevo, where she visits her father's grave each Sunday,
forbidding her mother to accompany her. Her first reaction on each
visit is a rush of tenderness unknown to her in any other circum-
stances. But after this initial lack of restraint the tenderness turns to
cold resentment of those who destroyed him, and she dedicates
herself anew to carrying out his last command as faithfully and
literally as she is able.
The grave is gradually forgotten as Rajka's vow becomes in-
creasingly her own inspiration and, once she leaves Sarajevo, she
scarcely thinks of her father. Her devotion becomes detached from
his memory. She is incapable of any warmth of feeling towards
anyone else around her at any stage in her life, with the single
exception of Uncle Vlado, her mother's younger brother. Her
response to Vlado is as unquestioning as her devotion to her father.
He is a young man of great charm and an insatiable desire to give - of
his strength, health and wealth. Rajka is drawn to him by over-
whelming tenderness of an almost maternal nature, wanting desper-
ately to save him from himself but obliged helplessly to watch his
inevitable downfall and death, penniless, of tuberculosis at the age of
twenty-two. He remains for Rajka throughout her life "her tenderest
The Novels 169
and most terrible memory, a perpetually unresolved question . . .
The man who was dearest to her in the world had in unnatural
degree that vice which was for her worse than any sin and blacker
than death. Profligacy!"59 Her readiness, after she has refused so
many, to help young Ratko Ratkovic when he comes to her in
Belgrade, appealing for assistance as he embarks on his business
career, stems from the single fact of his strong physical resemblance
to Uncle Vlado. Soothed by his gentle smile, so exactly like Vlado's,
Rajka lends him increasingly large sums over a period of some
months until she discovers that he is simply a weak-willed, self-
indulgent squanderer. The shock of this discovery reminds Rajka
forcibly of that grave in Sarajevo, and as she stumbles home through
the winter wind, she silently addresses her father:
I know and remember everything that you advised me and left me
as a pledge, but what is the use if the world is such that in it lies
and deception are more powerful than anything else? I did
everything to insure myself. But what is the good, when the attack
comes from where you least expect it? And if no one deceives us,
we deceive ourselves. Forgive me for being so lost and helpless
after so many years and so much effort, but I did not betray my
vow; the world betrayed me. You know how I worked, long and
hard. I thought that your word, together with my will and effort,
would be sufficient protection against everything. But it isn't like
that. In this world there is no protection nor adequate defence.60
After some days of illness, Rajka revives with one thought in her
mind: to save. She can never recover her loss but she can preserve
what she has through her own effort and self-denial.
There is something of a vow of penance in this decision, and in the
ruthless way in which Rajka carries it out for the remaining decade
of her life. This is in keeping with the exalted tone we have already
seen as a feature of her obsession in its fully developed form. And
this is the most interesting aspect of the novel. The psychological
explanation of Rajka's actions is not entirely satisfactory as it gives
her irrational behaviour a rational origin, and because it is under-
mined to a certain extent by the description of her habits of
economy, which verges on caricature.
The other aspect of the novel which interferes with our reading of
it as a psychological study lies in the writing. The tone is too varied
to read quite smoothly. There are the passages of objective descrip-
tion of the historical and cultural background of Rajka's activities
and the neutral narrative itself; but the texture of the writing is
richest in the passages which reproduce the movements of Rajka's
mind, such as the lyrical meditations on the joys of mending and
forbearance mentioned above. The major part of the novel is written
from Rajka's point of view. She is seen first carrying out her pledge,
then reviewing the course of her conscious life. Where the narrator
takes over there is a break in the tone of the writing, for what is
described is not seen by Rajka herself, or at least not in the same
terms. She is oblivious to everything that does not concern herself
and her narrow ambition. The discrepancy comes when the writer
allows a certain measure of irony into passages seen through the eyes
of his heroine. An example of this irony can be seen in the exalted
tone of much of Rajka's reflection and in individual passages, for
example the one in which she considers the concept of beauty:
She had never really understood why people made such a distinc-
tion between what was beautiful and what was not, and what it
was that carried them away and intoxicated them to the extent that
for the sake of what they called beauty they would waste their
health and spend their money, great, holy, powerful money,
which was superior to everything else and with which no kind of
beauty could be even closely compared.61
Or again, when she has delayed putting more coal on her meagre
fire: "She was warmed by the shovel-full of coal she had not used."62
The devout nature of Rajka's fervour in her darning becomes
explicit when she describes the true meaning of the act: "To mend
means to struggle against decay, it means to assist eternity."63 And
again, of saving:
It supports life and the existence of things around us, enriches us
constantly and makes what we have eternal, so to speak; it saves us
from spending, loss and disorder, from growing poor, from the
misery that comes at the end and which is blacker and grimmer
than death, true hell, while one is still alive and still on earth. And
when one thinks that all of this around us is perpetually fading and
The Novels 171
vanishing, breaking, wearing out and slipping away, and how
little and insignificant is all that we are capable of undertaking and
doing in the struggle against this process, then one would accept
any suffering and any renunciation, simply to resist this evil, then
one must be ashamed of every moment of rest, as a waste of time,
and every mouthful as dissipation and luxury. One must endure
everything in this hopeless struggle, with the fanatical courage of
the martyr.64
With each darned hole, Rajka is filled with a warm glow of
realization that she has added one more positive mark to the
universal account of gain and loss, "that another hidden crack in the
great galleon of the universe has been sealed".65
Decay is relentless and loss inevitable, nevertheless it is impossible
to give up the struggle and submit meekly to destruction. The
struggle is sufficient reward in itself.
Now she really could not see any more. But before she switched
on the light, she remained for a few moments, her hands crossed
on her work, with the painful but exalted feeling that the ultimate
limits of saving were after all unattainable. This only saddened
her, but it did not discourage her. However far, even unattain-
able, those limits were none the less more worthy of effort,
renunciation and sacrifice than any other aim which a man could
set himself.66
All her life Rajka strives to cut herself off from the world, its
demands and obligations, to concentrate fully on her goal. Politics,
the War, demonstrations - none of this has any reality for her; it is
intolerable for her to think that her life and affairs can be in any way
dependent on such meaningless occurrences. For Rajka the real
world is somewhere else:
For a long time there had been two worlds for her, completely
different, if not completely separate. One was this world of ours,
the one everyone calls the world, this whole noisy and immense
earth with its people and their life, their instincts, desires,
thoughts and beliefs, with their eternal need for building and
destroying, with their incomprehensible game of mutual attrac-
tion and repulsion. And the other one, the other one is the world
of money, the empire of acquisition and saving, known to only a
few, the secret and silent, boundless area of wordless struggle and
perpetual planning, in which calculation and measure reign like
two dumb deities. Unheard and invisible, this other world is no
smaller and no less varied nor less rich than the first one. It also
has its sun and constellations, its sunrises and eclipses, its rises
and falls, its blessings and barrenness; it also has the great,
obscure force of its inner meaning, of its life principle on which
everything rests and around which everything moves and which
weak mortal man can only guess at and glimpse.67
Rajka's attitude to the temporal, chaotic world in which she is

obliged to live her daily life resembles that of an ascetic, dedicated
entirely to the divine, moving among his fellow-human beings as one
enlightened among children. It is only after her mother's death in
Belgrade that Rajka is able to live her life entirely as she wishes.
While her mother's life was bleak enough, she had still managed to
retain some vestiges of those small pleasures which brighten ordin-
ary lives - a cat and some potted plants, for example. These - living
things with their own demands - Rajka summarily removes and
feels at last quite free: "In the whole house there were no longer any
of those superfluous trivialities which distract and dissipate our
attention."68 Complete freedom comes only with complete solitude,
the solitude demanded by any genuine great passion. And so Rajka is
able to live out her life entirely in terms of her deity, "saving",
through her solitary small triumphs of self-sacrifice, sitting in the
half-light by a fire that hardly exudes any warmth, darning her
often-mended stocking although she can barely see.
For all the obvious irony of Andric's selection of his material and
its treatment, there is a kind of misguided nobility in Rajka's single-
mindedness. The initial impulse for her chosen way of life was, after
all, indignation against the world's destruction of her father. Such a
refusal to allow the world and the process of decay to shape her life is
a gesture which is dignified in its very futility. We have seen Rajka
state that the struggle itself is her reward, however unavoidable the
ultimate defeat. She rebels against senseless chance which threatens
to upset her plans - the fact that this chance occurrence is the
assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince and entails universal
The Novels 173
suffering on an appalling scale reinforces the ironic tone of the work,
but her revolt is none the less noble in that it is doomed.
Rajka's harsh self-denial is, then, ultimately meaningless; but more
than this it springs from an initial fear in the face of decay and entails
daily experience of that fear. In this way Rajka becomes a distorted
symbol of the human condition. She has deliberately refused any
endeavour to understand the workings of the world, other than that
one chosen rational world of finance. Consequently, she has no means
of interpreting the chaotic events around her, or of beginning to
comprehend that her self-interest during the War years would entail
in its turn hatred and revenge. With the outbreak of war she is simply
afraid of the losses she will make, but when it ends she does not know
precisely what to be afraid of, nor from which direction to expect an
attack. The fear which then governs her life, and which is ultimately
the cause of her death, is thus similar to the fear which affects the lives
of so many of Andric's characters. In essence, her obsessive stand
against weakness and decay is not unlike the acceptable self-denial of
the dervish Alidede, whose life is in its own way as "unnatural" as
Rajka's. Nevertheless, because her portrait entails the denial of so
many basic human qualities, and because it is extended over the
greater length of a novel, such points of contact with other characters
in Andric's work become theoretical. The Woman from Sarajevo
remains an exercise, which continues to puzzle critics.
Omer Pasha Latas69

No consideration of Omer Pasha Latas can be complete, since the
novel itself is incomplete; some chapters are fully worked out, but
others remain fragments. Sections of the work were published as
separate pieces in various periodicals between 1950 and 1973, while
others remained in manuscript. They have now all been assembled in
a coherent volume which follows the years of Omer Pasha Latas's
campaign in Bosnia. The novel can now be read in what is basically the
form Andric had envisaged. The novel not only has a coherent outline
but is coloured consistently by a set of ideas which reveal some
familiar and some new aspects of Andric's thinking in his mature
years. Some of the pages of the completed sections are among the
finest of his works.
Andric wished to write a chronicle of Sarajevo, as he had done of
Visegrad and Travnik. The subject which presented itself to him was
not the indigenous population of Sarajevo but, once again, a group of
outsiders. This time the character who is the focal point of the work
represents an irony that was the common fate of many converts to
Islam, whether taken by force to make up the Janissary Corps - as in
Andric's account of the story of Mehmed Pasha, the builder of the
bridge on the Drina - or whether, like Omer Pasha, they left their
native land voluntarily. Many of these men, in one way or another,
found their way back to the place of their origin. Their situation is
potent in its associations of arbitrary exclusion from a static com-
munity, constraint on action of all kinds, isolation and exile. These
themes were all woven into Bosnian Story, and it is inevitable from
the similarity of the subject matter of the two novels that they should
share common features. Nevertheless, it is possible to see a general
progression in Andric's interests between the two novels.
It is clear from some of the fragments scattered in periodicals,
manuscript and in the pages of Signs by the Roadside that ideas for
Andric's fictional works would come to the writer sometimes in the
form of a bare sketch for a story, sometimes as a complete scene, and
sometimes as a snatch of dialogue. These ideas can be of several
kinds: often they are presented visually, in vivid, more-or-less static
scenes which mark a crucial moment in the story or life of the
character described. Sometimes, again, they follow the whole span
of a character's history. Almost all of them, however, are imbued
with strong emotional and psychological colouring. As we have seen
from the earliest pieces, Andric's writings tend to cluster round a
few essential emotional states; they do not work out a purely
intellectual ordering of experience, so that when we speak of
Andric's "ideas" we should always bear this tendency in mind.
We can see this process particularly clearly in the case of the
unfinished novel. In its published form, it consists of a number of
chapters which build up a general impression of the arrival of Omer
Pasha's army in Sarajevo and its effect on the local population; a
number of chapters which examine Omer's household, his own story
and those of some of the figures around him; and three brief
fragments centred on the reactions to his rule of the Austrian consul
in Travnik at the time. All these pieces are connected with the
The Novels 175
historical figure of Omer and they are organized chronologically
around the years of his Bosnian campaign, 1850-52. This connection
is, however, fairly loose, and the extent to which they do form a
coherent whole depends on the recurrent emotions and ideas that
give the work its particular flavour.
Andric tends to examine events from the point of view of the effect
they have on the ordinary people who witness them. Here, as in
Bosnian Story, there is a clear division between the townspeople and
their response to the presence of Omer's army, and the army itself:
the townspeople form a unit, separate from the local landowners as
well as from the agents of Ottoman authority. In this case, the
division of the local population into three faiths is not stressed; its
function is to provide a sense of stable continuity against which the
visitors will stand out as strangers in a hostile land. The familiar
theme of isolation and exile is, then, one of the main components in
the atmosphere of the novel.
The basic form of Omer Pasha Latas, as well as this dominant
theme, is similar to that of Bosnian Story. The arrival of Omer's army
in Sarajevo is preceded by gossip, anticipation and apprehension.
The pattern of arrival and departure against a static background was
most fully developed in Bosnian Story. The opening chapter of Omer
Pasha Latas is complete. It was published in 1954 under the title
"The Young Man In The Procession",70 and presents some of the
main ideas of the novel.
The scene of the arrival of a stranger in a town where he is well-
known by reputation, with all its inherent drama, has been exploited
by many writers and is also common in oral literature: it is one of the
"set-pieces" of the South Slav tradition. This echo is clearly
prominent in Andric's mind in the first chapter.
Omer's task is unique. He has not come to quell a rebellion by the
"rayah" or to defeat any external enemy, but to discipline the Beys
and bring them into line with the new ideas of the Constantinople
government for strengthening and preserving their declining
Empire. The terms in which the townspeople have been summoned
to greet the army contribute to the atmosphere of hostility, threat
and potential violence. The atmosphere of awe and apprehension is
sustained and firmly established so that it endures after the army has
moved on, and permeates the subsequent chapters. There is a
digression in this opening chapter typical of Andric's narrative
method in the way it is developed for its own sake, dominating the
chapter in which it appears for several pages.
The digression begins with an introductory paragraph:
. . . In this whole parade, despite all its glitter and solemnity and
the genuine threat and danger it represented, there was something
unnatural and mad. And a crazy incident involving a pathetic
madman almost upset it at the very outset.71
This incident, and the emotional disturbance of several of the
individuals described in the course of the novel, serve a symbolic
purpose in suggesting the decay and degeneration underlying all the
pomp of the Imperial army. Its function here is to counteract the
external impression made on the townspeople by Omer's arrival and
to suggest that public display, and indeed all public behaviour, is to
an extent a lie and an illusion.
The incident itself centres on a character who might have formed
the subject for a separate story; he is another of those "pathetic,
disturbed creatures" common in Andric's works. When Omer
arrives in Sarajevo this character, Osman, breaks through the police
cordon and upsets the leading horses in the procession. The
constable who seizes the harmless madman is instructed by one of
the officers to take him off and beat him mercilessly, reinforcing the
theme of random violence represented by the army. Osman's story is
then told, creating a quite separate episode in the chapter. It
introduces two related ideas of special importance in the novel: the
pursuit of beauty and the human propensity for illusion.
The first chapters of the novel describe the arrival of the army and
its establishment in Sarajevo, with a few examples of the behaviour
of the soldiers and the fate of their prisoners given to illustrate the
nature of the army and the atmosphere it engenders.
One of the features of this army which is dwelt on, and which
contributes to the meaning of the novel, is the existence within it of a
large number of foreigners. They are mostly Poles and Hungarians
who fled to Turkey after being involved in unsuccessful uprisings in
their native lands. Since Omer is himself a convert, bom a Catholic
in Croatia, these foreign officers dominate the novel. They form the
aspect of Omer's army which is most frequently spoken of and which
The Novels 177
gives rise to the alarm, uncertainty, fear and hatred with which the
army is viewed. They raise a series of familiar issues, such as the
power of rumour and gossip to evoke fear and hatred, as well as
people's natural tendency to fear what is unfamiliar and somewhat
outside the normal pattern they are accustomed to. These foreign
officers cannot be seen for what they really are - even how many they
actually are - because of the rumours surrounding them. These
rumours spring from the needs of the people and have no actual
connection with the officers.
In endless anecdotes and whispering everyone wove into [the
story] something of their own torment and hatred, and, condem-
ning and railing against people they did not know, they took their
revenge on life for all the evils it had brought them and all the
good it was never going to bring.72
The hostility of all sections of the local population is emphasized,
as is Omer's own contempt and distrust of the majority of them, so
that they are left entirely isolated. Omer's distrust of the "foreign-
ers" springs from his intimate understanding of their background
and of the kind of people they are, as well as from his sense of his
own superiority. He knows that he might have been like them, and
yet that he could never have been. They continue to make him
uneasy, however, because of a residual sense of identity with them
and still more because of his fear that others will identify him with
them.
The absurdity and hopelessness of the situation of these men,
including Omer, is stressed:
Victims of despotism and violence in their own land, they had
become the Sultan's weapon for quelling all unrest and disturb-
ance in Turkey, regardless of its aims, intentions or causes; and
they served and perished in campaigns which actually only
speeded up the inexorable process of decay of this condemned,
outworn Empire, for which there was no cure, for the cure and the
sickness would have been equally fatal.73
There is no escape from this impasse and none of the characters
rises above it through any belief or ideology which could counteract
it. Where characters in Andric's other works have sought escape
through many different forms of illusion, in this case the only source
of solace seems to be alcohol. The result is an increased impression
of hopelessness, despair and the impossibility of escape, umitigated
now because of the essentially transitory effects of this solace. One
whole chapter of this novel is devoted to one of the foreign officers'
drinking sessions, and takes the form of a hymn of praise to the
famous "Zilavka" wine from Hercegovina:
The wine had overthrown all the barriers within them, released all
the brakes, stirred up their imaginations, shrouded reality, and
thrown new, miraculous bridges between their imagination and
reality. All their instincts were freed, and all logic buried. And
each of them was strolling, as in his own private garden, through
the endless garden made up of all that is, that is not, that once was
and would never return, what never was and never would be. And
each of them spoke of what he could see and feel there. And in
order to say what he wanted, what he had to say, none of them any
longer needed any justification or set form. It all came from
somewhere within them. Each of them felt that the others were
asking him questions, and each knew the answer to everything.
Their conversations flowed side by side, crossed one another or
collided, they had no connection with each other or coherence in
themselves. But those who were speaking felt, on the contrary,
that all was following wonderfully logically, linked like question
and answer, and that these unusual conversations, smooth, intelli-
gent, truthful, rich in meaning and full of delight, sprang out of
everything. In them these serious, unhappy people, like children
in a game, carried out great exploits, became all they desired,
realized all they had ever dreamed. But in the midst of this
turbulent sea of wonders and fairy-tales, there appeared
momentarily, like rocky islands, sharp and clear observations
from the suspended, rejected reality of their everyday life of
exile.74
The unit of "foreigners" is the section of Omer's army which

arouses the most specific hostility. It is given prominence because of
Andric's wish to convey a strong sense of one aspect of his theme of
isolation and exile. It is echoed again in the description of prisoners
The Novels 179
being taken from Bosnia in chains, steadily losing their identity and
becoming nothing but the present moment of pain and anguish.
Another pronounced feature of the novel can be seen in the army
as a whole. It is described in terms which suggest something of an
organic nature, like a cloud of locusts or a wave of lava moving over
the land, spreading fear and a sense of danger in the face of an
uncontrollable natural force. The soldiers cease to exist as indi-
viduals; they become part of a vast body whose limits cannot be
envisaged, or movements anticipated. Like a living body, the army
has needs which it satisfies indiscriminately. Two instances of such
needs are illustrated: the need for food, which is met by requisition-
ing livestock and supplies, and the need for women. This last is
illustrated in a scene describing the rape of a feeble-minded gypsy
girl, in terms which are of general relevance to the novel as a whole.
In several of his works, and most notably in Ex Ponto, Andric has
written of the powerful attraction of women as a living force existing
in its own right, outside the individuals - male and female - whom it
affects. Like the idea of violence and threat spread by the army - but
more abstract - it is a natural force, identified here in the soldiers'
imagination with the fierce heat of the Bosnian summer:
High above them, on the glinting waves of the shimmering heat,
parallel with the tread of the troops as they marched, a vast,
indefinite female body spread and rose up, with ample forms,
uncertain limitations and innumerable curves and hollows; it lay
over the bends in the roads of the sunny hillsides and over the cool
shaded valleys; you could feel it everywhere but nowhere could
you grasp it.75
Elsewhere in the novel pain and fear are evoked in similar terms to
this account of lust: as forces from which there can be no escape
since they are everywhere and yet cannot be directly confronted.
The concomitant of such forms of pervasive oppression is the
desire to escape, already hinted at in the drinking which character-
izes the life of Omer's officers. The theme of escape also forms an
important thread in the lives of all the main characters, including
Omer himself. In this connection, the symbolic role of Bosnia as a
place of exile is explicit.
In Bosnian Story we saw that evening released a man from the
clearly defined role and obvious duties of his professional commit-
ments, and brought him face to face with the essence of his
situation. In the chapter entitled "In the Evening Hours" in Omer
Pasha Latas, we see the common preoccupations of the foreign
officers in Omer's army. Their conversation over cards and brandy
always concerns the misery of their situation and their persistent
dream of escape from it. For them Bosnia symbolizes exile and
isolation, as it did for the European consuls in Travnik.
For Omer Pasha himself the inhospitable land is similarly
oppressive, although his initial journey into Bosnia from his native
Croatia was itself an escape. He is cut off from that distant former
life, however, and his freedom of movement and action is thus felt
to be severely circumscribed. His situation is similar to that of the
two Viziers - Mehmed Pasha and Jusuf - who built the bridges
over the Drina and the Zepa, because of a similar feeling of
disquiet: a sense of the complete gulf between the two parts of their
lives.
The description of what drove the young Mico Latas to seek
exile of his own free will comes in one of the most elaborate
chapters of the novel. Omer's story is interwoven with the descrip-
tion of the work of a portrait-painter, who provides a counterpoint
to the other characters in that for him Bosnia represents a kind of
release and stimulus after the atmosphere of Central Europe and
Italy, which he had found stultifying. In Andric's account of his
life Omer was driven out of his immediate environment by his
superior intellect and lively imagination, which made the con-
straints of life in an impoverished community and his particular
childhood duty of grazing the family cow intolerable. When a
career in the Austrian navy was closed to him because of a scandal
involving his father, Mico took the one line of escape offered to
him and those in a similar situation throughout the history of
Turkish rule:
At such moments, when we feel that the ground is slipping away

from under our feet, and our hands stretch upwards in vain, we
instinctively seize what we did not previously realize we knew or
had. Before us rise up the buried experience and customs of our
forebears, which we had not guessed were living in us. At such
The Novels 181
moments, when it was necessary to escape from death and
dishonour, and there was no way out anywhere, his ancestors had
found a solution: Turkey.76
Andric points out that the solution was uneasy, traditionally both
inadmissible and yet the only one available. "It was in a way both
death and dishonour, and more bitter than either."77
His presence in Bosnia, so close to his native land, obliges Omer to
confront the bleak character of his initial choice, and increases his
restlessness. Bosnia therefore represents for him, as for the Euro-
pean soldiers in his army, the essence of their situation, from which
by definition there is no escape and yet which is fundamentally
oppressive.
The need for escape is also at the heart of the story of Omer's
Hungarian wife Saida, whom he met in Romania. Like him she had
no illusion that her flight into Turkey would bring her happiness.
Her view is similar to that of the young Mico Latas and the
European soldiers. They chose to set off into a situation of complete
uncertainty, because remaining where they were would have meant
certain disgrace, and probably death.
The situation of all these characters is, then, one of severely
circumscribed opportunity; more severe in their case than that of
individuals who have not chosen to move out of their original
context, but not different in kind. In this way, as in Bosnian Story,
Bosnia emerges as a metaphor, a symbol of the constraints imposed
on the individual by a variety of factors - social, historical, political
and temperamental.
The closing chapters of the novel in its published form are written
from the point of view of the Austrian consul at the time, Atanack-
ovic. These three short chapters are no more than sketches, which
had all been published separately as self-contained pieces. The
atmosphere that pervades them is similar to that of Bosnian Story.
The situation of the foreign consuls is essentially that of outsiders,
temporarily exiled in an alien land, among people with whom they
have to deal only officially, with no obligation for closer understand-
ing and communication, and very little possibility of such contact.
The first of these chapters is the most important from a general
point of view, as it contains a further account of Bosnia, one which
offers an example of the careful balance in Andric's work between
precise detail and generalization. It takes the form of the Austrian
consul's reflection at the end of the first year of Omer's presence in
Bosnia, and a letter he writes to Vienna describing its effect on the
local population. The underlying theme of the letter - that the town
of Travnik and the whole of Bosnia resemble a prison - is taken from
an authentic letter from the Austrian consul to Prince Schwarzen-
berg, dated 5 June 1851. The letter describes the presence through-
out Bosnia of prisoners. When there was no longer room for them in
the fortress, the captured Beys, agas and the ulema were imprisoned
in the barracks, and the army began increasingly to squeeze the local
population out of their houses, so that ordinary citizens were barely
noticeable. People were reduced to three categories of unequal size:
"prisoners, those who pursued or guarded them, and silent, helpless
onlookers". During the day the prisoners poured out into the streets,
to work on various heavy municipal projects. These working parties
are vividly described, again with details taken from documents of the
period. Many of the landowners, when they were arrested, put on
their best clothes in order to save them; and they were often the
heaviest they had because they did not know where they were to be
taken and feared a cold climate. Now, in the fierce heat of this
Bosnian summer, they were obliged to carry out these heavy tasks,
to which they were not in any case accustomed, wearing their
thickest and finest winter clothing - for if they once let the garments
out of their sight they would certainly be stolen. This pitiful sight of
the "mighty fallen" attracted many onlookers, who were moved by
what they saw; wondering, if these unimaginable things were
happening, what else might occur. Their reaction is expressed in
terms which reflect the leitmotiv of the novel: "It was a disgrace
which could not be supported and against which nothing could be
done."78
The chapter describes the exceptional nature of this first summer
of Omer's campaign, stressing the astonishment of both Atanackovic
and the local population at events around them. The details refer
specifically to Omer's activities and open threats. And yet, because
the campaign has been selected as typifying the decline of the
Ottoman Empire, it stands also for the collapse of the rule of force at
any time, anywhere. This emerges from the whole text, but
The Novels 183
explicitly in the observations of the anxious onlookers: "They think:
nobody's head can be safe when such an ancient and substantial
building collapses like this. They whisper: 'and it is always hard on
the donkey over whose back the horses are beaten',"79
Throughout Andric's work a sense of patterns repeating themsel-
ves shifts the balance of his writing, despite the abundance of precise
and specific detail, away from the particular towards the universal.
In Omer Pasha Latas this sense is a result of the all- pervading notion
of sickness and oppression, the emphasis on constraint and escape,
the theme of the pursuit of beauty, and illusion. The remaining
chapters describe the lives of Omer, his wife and several figures in
his household and they all contribute in different ways to the main
themes of the work.
There is another idea in the novel, which is not fully elaborated
but is familiar enough from some of Andric's other works. The
Croatian painter Karas, commissioned to paint Omer's portrait,
provides the technical motivation for an account of the life of both
Omer and his wife Saida, but his presence represents more than that.
In all the movement towards decay which characterizes the work,
Karas's activity is intended to fix a moment in static and enduring
form. The painter himself plays a role similar to that of the Vizier's
elephant. He is an outsider looked on with suspicion and hatred by
the people of Sarajevo as "one of Omer's many sins". His presence
gives rise to the narrator's general observation:
Whenever people are oppressed, afraid, anxious about circum-
stances and events, the idea of sin and the need for such an idea
arises in them. Sin, what is called sin, has to explain the sufferings
for which people cannot find a real explanation . . . For this
reason, naturally, no one could begin to imagine that this foreign-
er, a painter from Croatia, was himself an unhappy man, a
shipwreck victim who had come, through the complicated laws of
an artist's fate, here, to this rebellious, exhausted and devastated
land, to find an escape for himself - he did not himself know of
what kind - and salvation which did not exist.80
The brief reflection on the creative process that forms the chapter
entitled "The Picture" suggests that this contrasting theme might
have been further developed in the final version of the novel. It is a
reflection on the need for struggle in the creative process. Any idea
which comes fully formed to the artist is equally easily lost, and left
unrecorded, to exist only in his mind. To endure it must involve the
artist and require his active participation.
The painter goes on to reflect that this kind of person was
common in positions of authority in the Ottoman administration.
Centuries of fighting and governing had created them, developed in
them "simplified thinking, swift judgment, lightning-quick deci-
sions, unquestioned and irreversible".81 The painter sees all this,
and the picture is already virtually complete in his mind. The artist
finds this experience of rapid and complete identification with his
subject both exciting and alarming. The theme is not here developed
to the extreme point of the potential imbalance of the artist, which
the identification of Kamil with Gem in Devil's Yard can be seen to
illustrate. It is here presented as a more commonplace artist's
experience:
Whenever it happened to him that after looking for only a short
time, the picture of the object, figure or landscape came to him
"ready-made", apparently perfect, complete and fully expressed,
eloquent and vivid so that he felt no further need to work on it, it
meant that he had been mistaken and gone astray, and that every
attempt to transfer that painting on to canvas was doomed in
advance as futile, and that it would never be realized. On the
contrary, when a subject left in him a deep but vague impression,
incomplete and unfinished, a "dumb" picture which required a
great deal more work in order to come to life on the canvas, then
there was some hope that something would come of it and that,
perhaps, a work of art would come into being, visible and
comprehensible to others as well.82
We may perhaps detect in this passage a personal note, reflecting
Andric's own feelings about his work at this time. As he was by now
a skilled and experienced writer, certain aspects of his ideas must
have virtually written themselves; and yet the complete working out
of his whole plan for the novel demanded a struggle for which he no
longer really had the physical energy. What remains is a series of
pieces loosely strung together, informed by a group of related ideas,
The Novels 185
offering a tantalizing suggestion of what the complete novel might
have been.
Of the various themes in the novel, which occur in Andric's other
works with more or less emphasis, the idea of illusion dominates. It
is first introduced in the opening chapter of the work, in two
different ways. It is found first in the reaction of the townspeople to
the pomp and splendour of Omer's army, the effect of which is
described as "intoxicating", and from which they only gradually
sober as they walk home to their simple houses and meagre evening
meals. The other instance is the digression which forms an impor-
tant part of this chapter: the story of Osman, who is obsessed and
driven mad by an illusion. Afraid all his life of women, Osman one
day comes upon a young girl washing herself at a pump on the
outskirts of Sarajevo. The shock - for one accustomed to the
decorum with which Moslem girls traditionally veil themselves - of
suddenly seeing the uncovered face of the beautiful girl, shining with
the water, the bright sun and her joyous smile, is such that Osman
never recovers. At first he is as frightened as the girl and they both
run away from the scene. But as time goes on the vision of the
smiling girl by the pump becomes a part of Osman's life, at first in
the form of a "mild, imperceptible intoxication", but later as an
obsession which undermines his whole existence. He soon stops
working to spend his days running through the streets in the vain
hope of coming once again on the vision of perfect beauty he saw for
that brief instant. Osman's situation is an extreme form of that of
many of the characters in the novel. He never imagines that the girl
of his obsession is real; he thinks of her only as a vision, and yet he is
driven irresistibly to seek her, to spend his whole life in pursuit of an
illusion.
Another story of a similar vein pursuit lingers on in the popular
imagination in Sarajevo:
It was strange how everyone in Bosnia loved a terrible story, the

more so the less joy and amusement his real life offered. It was like
that with the story of the foreigner who, like so many others, had
wanted in any way and at any price to capture that cursed,
unattainable and incomprehensible female beauty, to fix it in one
place, to penetrate it and retain it for himself.83
The story of "Kostac" becomes the subject of a song, living in the
minds of the people "like the trace of a fossilized shell in the rocky
shore of long-vanished seas".84
The theme of illusion is developed, as we have seen, in relation to
the foreign officers in Omer's army, particularly in their search for
what is obviously temporary escape through alcohol. It colours also
the stories of several other characters, including Omer and his wife.
Omer's whole life is the projection of an illusion. He is described as
the type of person who from the first moments of his conscious life
strives towards an image of himself- "Of such an exceptional person
one could say that he does not really live, for his life and work are at
the service of that future being."85 The work of the painter is also
described as illusory:
As soon as he was alone with his model for any length of time, the
same game always began. First of all a feeling of terrible, cold
distance and loneliness which froze his fingers and clouded his
eyes. That did not last long. Then slowly and gradually the
atmosphere began to change, and he in it. Each stroke of the
brush created and reinforced an invisibly thin but strong, strange
and close bond between him and his model, and with it his illusion
grew, transported and deranged him. As though under the
influence of a drug, the firm, established relations which divided
people from one another vanished. The painter forgot everything
that existed, and began to see and feel more and more clearly what
was not and could never be as the only, intoxicating reality . . .86
The theme is connected on the one hand with the idea of
unattainable beauty and on the other with the idea of escape. This
theme of a constant search for an escape which is recognized as
impossible is one which is implicit in much of Andric's work in the
recurrent image of the prison, and developed thoroughly in Devil's
Yard. The conclusion that suggests itself, then, is that prison can be
seen as a metaphor for life in Andric's work as long as one accepts
that death is final and therefore no solution. Human beings are
condemned to a sentence from which there can be no escape and yet
human life tends to be a perpetual search for an escape, for beauty,
for permanence. It emerges, then, that illusion can be a positive
force. This idea is touched on in relation to the character of Omer's
The Novels 187
brother Nikola, who is an incurable alcoholic, corroded by tubercu-
losis. He lives constantly on the verge of suicide. From time to time
he is visited by Muhsin-Effendi, a man whose function in Omer's
household is always to approve all the commanding officer's sugges-
tions. His nickname is Evet-Effendi, from the Turkish word mean-
ing "yes". Guaranteed to see everything in the best possible light, he
always greets Nikola by remarking that he is clearly well on the way
to recovery and then builds up impossible pictures of the sick man's
future life:
Nikola listens, increasingly attentively. And wonders, could that
really be? It's true that this Evet-Effendi is a senile and cunning
fool, but must everything he says be a lie? ... Both lies and
flattery can, while remaining what they are, unwittingly cast light
on some things . . .87
Muhsin-Effendi's words give Nikola a momentary illusion of the
possibility of escape from his hopeless situation, and a reason for
living.
The final chapter concerning the consul Atanackovic, "Deceit",
is devoted to his account of his dealings with Omer, which he sees as
an exchange based entirely on lies. Omer is described as lying "with
the inevitability of natural phenomena, he lies as the wind blows, as
a dog barks, as a cock crows; he lies because he cannot do anything
else . . ."88
Atanackovic is described before his first meeting with Omer,
practising his conversation with him, and then his reaction after-
wards is given:
In amazement he wondered why he had spent a whole hour
without saying anything, listening to the seraskier weaving and
spreading out his banal half-truths and raw lies, and how he could
have allowed his lies to get the better of his own half-truth. How?
Why?89
Reflecting helplessly on his situation, the consul is overcome by
anger "like drunkenness, or temporary poisoning" - in these moods
the consul would take up his pen and write "to a friend to whom he
could say everything and who . . . did not exist".90 Atanackovic's
only means of escape from his humiliating position is, in other
words, again through the illusion of confiding in another human
being. It is a similar kind of escape and illusion to those sought and
found by the consuls in Bosnian Story, writing alone in their rooms
each evening. Atanackovic ends his bitter reflection on Omer's
deceit with the words: "But, after all, we all tell lies, and we are not
much better than he is."91
We can therefore perhaps draw the conclusion that, while he was
well aware of the potentially destructive effects of illusion, Andric
had come to believe that some degree of illusion is not only healthy,
but essential in the lives of most human beings. It is an idea that
recurs in various forms, including some of the later pages of Signs by
the Roadside.
5
Devil's Yard1
More than is the case with many of Andric's other works, the sense
of Devil's Yard depends closely on its intricate structure.
The composition is one that Andric had used earlier for another
story in the Brother Petar group: "Torso". It is a system of
concentric circles forming successive frames, focusing increasingly
on the central point of the tale. The Petar stories in any case all have
a similar outer frame, since each of them is explicitly the "story of a
story". Petar is a man with a particular gift for story-telling:
In everything he said there was something cheerful and wise at the
same time. But, besides, there hovered around each of his words a
special kind of tone, like a halo of sound, which you do not find in
the speech of others and which remained quivering in the air even
after the spoken word had faded. Because of this each of his words
conveyed more than it meant in ordinary speech.2
This description comes from the beginning of "Torso". In Devil's
Yard there is a reminder of the particular quality of Petar's speech,
although here it is much less distinct:
And now, as he looked at his grave in the snow, the young man
was actually thinking of Petar's story-telling. And he would have
liked for a third and fourth time to say how well he could tell
stories. But it cannot be said.3
In the context of Andric's work as a whole these hints and
suggestions form part of a continuing discussion on the nature of art,
and the particular quality of the statements of individual artists
which impose themselves on the minds of their readers or audience.
More particularly, they contribute to Andric's reflections on the
nature of story-telling, the varying situations in which stories are
told, the varying needs they fulfil and the varying manner in which
they are related. In Devil's Yard this theme is developed in some
detail since the story is told by four separate narrators, and is set in a
prison where the recounting of anecdotes is virtually the sole
occupation of the inmates.
In this work Andric gives quite a detailed account of the narrative
style of Petar and the other main narrator, Haim. They are different,
but Andric's point, as elsewhere in his work, is that "it is best to let a
man tell his story as he will", without interference, interruption or
question. Petar lends his tales particular emotional and psychological
colouring by virtue of his standing as a monk and his great age - his
stories are all told from his cell bed where - old, ill, but full of
wisdom and experience - he selects episodes from his long life which
acquire an added dimension of seriousness because of the context in
which they are told. The qualities Petar then brings to his tales are
balance, tranquillity, sympathy and a quiet optimism. Sensitive to
the feelings and situation of others and with no personal axe to grind,
Petar is a wholly reliable observer. But in Devil's Yard Andric also
gives an example of a quite different kind of story-teller: one who
will always invent where he does not know the facts, but whose
talents should not therefore be dismissed. In a long parenthesis,
which forms an introduction to the core of the work, Andric makes a
direct comment on the need for variety and open-mindedness in
assessing works of art:
We are always more or less inclined to condemn those who talk a

lot, particularly about things which do not concern them directly,
even to speak with contempt of them, as chatterboxes and tedious
gossips. And we tend not to remember that this human, so human
and so common, failing has its good sides as well. For what would
we know about the minds and hearts of others, about other people
and consequently about ourselves, about other places and sights,
which we have never seen and shall never have the opportunity of
seeing, if it were not for people like this who have a need to
communicate in speech or writing what they have seen and heard,
and what they felt or thought in that connection? Little, very
little. And, if their accounts are imperfect, coloured by personal
passions and needs, or even inaccurate, we are ourselves possessed
"Devil's Yard" 191
of reason and experience and we can assess them and compare
them one with another, accept or reject them, in part or wholly. In
this way, something of human truth is always left for those who
listen or read patiently.4
As in the other tales told by Brother Petar, the outer framework of
his cell is established before the story itself is told. We have seen
already that it is Andric's intention always to remove the story as far
as possible from himself, to leave it on its own to communicate its
full significance without his personal intervention. The various
devices used to this end in Andric's works serve to increase the
objectivity of his tone. They also contribute to one of the recurrent
themes of his work: that no episode or individual is of intrinsic
significance; individual stories tend to be placed in a context wider
than themselves, making their own significance relative. In Devil's
Yard this relativity is most explicitly developed. The outer frame is
used to establish just that relative insignificance of individual lives
vividly. Petar has died, and a young monk watches from the old
man's cell window as the grave is covered in snow. The snow
deprives everything of its true shape, giving it one colour and one
form:
All that could be seen was the trace of a narrow path through the
fresh snow; the path had been trodden out the day before during
Brother Petar's funeral. At the end of the path a thin line of
trodden snow widened out into a uneven circle, and the snow
around it was coloured pink with softened clay, and it all looked
like a fresh wound in the general whiteness which stretched as far
as the eye could see and merged imperceptibly with the grey
desert of the sky still full of snow.5
The snow blurs the features of individuals and events and causes
them to merge into a more or less amorphous, monochrome
generality. This is the broadest scale, the immediate process of
obliteration in the uninterrupted succession of events which buries
the past in a mass of accumulated moments as surely as the snow.
The image of the all-enveloping snow is not therefore left on its own.
The immediate reality is illustrated by the activity of the monks who
are making an inventory of all Petar has left behind him. Life goes
on, declaring that whatever we regarded as our own in the material
world was simply borrowed, as was the brief span of our life. The
consistency of Andric's message and method can be seen in the
closing paragraphs of Devil's Yard., where he returns to the outer
frame. The first paragraph of this closing page consists of a wholly
negative statement:
And this is the end. There is nothing any more. Only the grave
among the invisible graves of the other monks, lost like a
snowflake in the deep snow which spreads like an ocean and
transforms everything into a cold desert without name or sign.
There is no more story nor story-telling . . . There is nothing.
Only the snow and the simple fact that we die and go under the
earth.6
But then the finality of this statement is characteristically reduced,
because even at this stage Andric removes himself: "So it seemed to
the young man by the window . . ."7
It is reduced still further because the final words of the work
describe the gradual fading of the story the young monk has been
recalling, and the steady impingement on his consciousness of the
sounds of the monks' counting and the clattering of Petar's tools.
The second frame is formed by the young monk's recollection of

Petar's stories about his time in the Constantinople prison known as
Devil's Yard. These memories have a special quality because Petar
spoke more, and more compellingly, about these two months than
any other episode in his life. Petar then takes over the narrative
directly, to describe the prison and its inmates, and the circum-
stances in which he met the young Turk whose story forms the core
of Devil's Yard. Petar's role here is similar to that of Andric's ideal
narrator: that of an observer and listener who acts as a passive
vehicle for stories which are then seen as self-contained entities, not
as part of Petar's own experience. This is not the case in all the
stories that concern him but it is true of "Torso", whose composition
also falls into separate frames and in which, again, Petar is simply
the audience of a strange tale which he later relates to others. This
structure clarifies the outline of the central tale. In "Torso" there are
three frames: the cell, the circumstances of Petar's life in which the
"Devil's Yard" 193
episode occurred, and the focal point - Petar's observation, through
a window, of the strange figure whose story is then told him by a
third party.
This basic structure is more complex in Devil's Yard: Petar meets
the young Turk, Kamil, and hears much of his tale directly. There is
a further narrator, however, the character Haim, whose verbose
story-telling technique was described above. From the point of view
of the story itself Haim's function is to inform Petar of the details of
Kamil's past (known to him because they are both from Smyrna) and
of his last days in prison - information to which Petar could not have
access. More important, however, is his function in the structure of
the whole work: the texture is deliberately fragmented, broken up
into eight distinct chapters, an introduction and an epilogue. Each
chapter is related by a separate narrator: the first is Petar's necessary
account of the prison, which has no place in the central scheme of
seven chapters in which the fourth acquires its full force as the focal
point by virtue of its position. The six chapters surrounding this
central chapter are related alternately by the two main narrators:
Petar, Haim, Petar - Kamil - Petar, Haim, Petar. The effect of this
fragmentation is to slow down the pace of the work and ensure the
prominence of the central chapter, and also to reinforce the nature of
the work as the "story of a story".
We have seen that in many of Andric's works the setting of a
particular tale is designed to establish a state of mind in the reader,
which then determines his response to the story itself. The settings
thus tend to have a significance beyond themselves: to be more or
less allegorical. In Devil's Yard this pattern is clear and the allegori-
cal setting is involved in the central theme.
The image of the "prison" had a special resonance for Andric as a
result of his prison experience during the First World War. We have
some evidence as to how freshly this experience remained in his
mind in the fact that, of the four published sketches which describe
it, three were published only long after the War, in 1952 and I960.8
These sketches are concerned largely with an external description of
incidents affecting the young prisoner who is the protagonist, and
there is a recurrent theme of the contrast between the brilliant sun
outside and the small patch on the cell floor that alters its shape
according to the angle of the sun through the bars on the little
window. For a clearer understanding of the way in which Andric's
prison experience became internalized, we have to return to Ex
Ponto and Anxieties. From these prose poems we gain some insight
into the degree to which Andric's immediate experience of imprison-
ment affected his response to the world beyond the physical walls of
the gaol as well. Bosnian Story is also distinctly coloured by the
theme of confinement: within a determined space, a role, official and
private obligations, and a culture.
In Devil's Yard this theme is explored both as an external setting
and as a more general expression of the kinds of restrictions placed
on human lives which informs not only Bosnian Story but so many of
Andric's shorter works.
The Turkish prison in Constantinople - a detention centre in
which criminals and suspects are held before being sent to trial or
exile or before they are released - is described in terms that lend the
whole work its special flavour. The first striking feature of the
prison, which is very large - a whole town of prisoners and guards"9
- is the haphazard nature of its population. People are arrested on
the merest suspicion on the principle that it is easier to release an
innocent person than to search through Constantinople for the
guilty. We know already that Petar is there fortuitously: "All
because of a misfortune that befell Brother Petar, through no fault of
his own, by a crazy conjunction of circumstances, in that troubled
period when authority ceases to distinguish the innocent from the
guilty."10
Some of the terms in which the prison is described are familiar
from elsewhere in Andric's work. These are the terms in which
Andric describes the natural world in general: "So the Yard
ceaselessly sifts the variegated crowd of its population and, always
full, it is constantly being filled and emptied anew."11 These words
are reminiscent of the account of life itself given in The Bridge on the
Drina: "Life constantly spends itself, and yet endures . . ."
It is implicitly suggested that we should read the description of the
prison as an account of the world itself, but it is a world which has
specific qualities. In making their arrests, and thereby determining
the population of the prison, the police work according to some logic
of their own. This idea is again familiar from Andric's description of
the natural world elsewhere. The existence of some "logic" inacces-
"Devil's Yard" 195
sible to human reason is tantamount to denying the reality of such
"logic". When the wind blows "the whole of that Devil's Yard
reverberates and roars like a vast child's rattle in a giant's palm and
the people in it dance, writhe, collide with one another and knock
into the walls like grain in that rattle".12
The key figure in the prison is its governor, Latifaga, known as
"Karagoz" after the grotesque character in the Turkish shadow
theatre. Karagoz has a dual role. Most clearly he represents that
arbitrary logic that governs the natural world and human destiny.
He has evolved a system of behaviour towards the prisoners which is
entirely unpredictable. He can appear in the Yard at any moment
and start his idiosyncratic "interrogation". His manner is always
different. At one moment he will suddenly announce to one prisoner
that he is free without explanation, and at the next he will tell
another protesting his innocence that it is precisely "innocent"
prisoners whom the authorities now require, and he has therefore
just condemned himself.
At another level, however, Karagoz's role is apparently almost
reversed: he represents authority -
This strange, endless game of his was incomprehensible but it
seemed that in fact he never believed anyone; not only the accused
or witnesses, he did not even believe himself, and for this reason
he needed a confession as the only point which was at all fixed and
from which one could in this world, in which everyone was guilty
and worthy of condemnation, maintain at least the appearance of
some kind of justice and something resembling order. And he
sought this confession, hunted it, squeezed it out of a man with a
desperate effort, as though he were fighting for his own life and
disentangling his hopelessly confused accounts with vice and
crime and cunning and disorder.13
In other words, the purpose of authority is to impose a semblance
of order on chaos, and its endeavour is not seriously undermined by
its awareness of its own arbitrariness. The population of the prison
accepts the prevailing method of government: "They were all
accustomed to Karagoz; they had grown used to him in their own
way. They grumbled about him, but in the way one grumbles about
one's fate and the life one loves."14
Like the vast majority of peoples everywhere, the prison inmates
accept the particular style of government imposed on them, regard-
less of its strength or justice.
The allegorical setting of this work is thus complex: it involves
external, arbitrary restrictions on all aspects of individuals' lives,
from the most general to the most concrete; and authority, its
ultimate illogicality and the consequent blindness of its power.
The setting is established in detail in the first chapter and
referred to frequently throughout the narrative, reinforcing the
other main strands of the work, and giving Andric the chance to
make general comments of various kinds. An instance is the
statement that Petar talked "a great deal about the life of the Yard
as a whole and about the interesting, comic, pathetic, disturbed
people in it; they were closer to him and better known than the
thieves, murderers and sinister criminals whom he tried to avoid as
far as possible".15 These words provide an adequate description of
the kind of characters to which Andric is frequently attracted in his
writing.
One of these "interesting, pathetic, disturbed" people is the
young Turk Kamil, who beds down next to Petar one night. There
is a certain air of mystery about the young man: as he thinks about
him Petar is never able to remember the exact moment when he
arrived, just as he is unable to recall certain other facts about him.
The first thing Petar remembers noticing about him is a small
leather-bound book.
From his first glance at his face, Petar realizes that the young
man is in some way ill, not physically, but Petar recognizes his
eyes: "He had seen similar eyes. There are people like this who are
afraid or ashamed of something, or who wish to hide something."16
As we know from Andric's work as a whole, characters who are
more or less disturbed mentally have a privileged position in his
world. They are more susceptible than those who are fully
balanced, and adjusted to currents underlying the surface of life.
Their angle of vision is distorted, but it allows them an insight into
an aspect of the forces governing human life which are usually not
directly acknowledged. So we may suspect from the first that
Kamil's "illness", which isolates him from his fellow-human
beings, also colours his experience of the world is a particular way
"Devil's Yard" 197
to the exclusion of any others. A bond of sympathy is immediately
established between the two men, enabling Petar to enter into
Kamil's world with a special warmth.
Since the work is the "story of a story", reference is made
throughout to the process of story-telling; the initial frame in Petar's
cell sets the tone. After this, in the Yard itself, one of the prisoners'
chief occupations is the relating of anecdotes. These are generally
stories whose purpose is to illustrate the prowess or virility of the
teller rather than to entertain his audience. The prisoners do not
really listen to one another, dismissing the idle boasts of their fellows
as a temporary distraction, not worthy of their full attention. The
second main narrator, Haim, stands out from this background as a
man with a particular gift for story-telling, and a particular need to
talk. In fact, Petar considers that his talkativeness has brought him
to the prison. The undisciplined nature of his speech makes him an
unreliable witness, but his account is not coloured by any particular
passion: he is a Jew and shares the privileged position of Jews
generally in Andric's work, that of being freer than other individuals
whose allegiance is usually either Christian and Western or Moslem
and "Oriental". Petar virtually shares this non-sectarian objectivity,
since he refuses to be affected by artificial barriers between men.
Haim is described by a generalization typical of Andric:
One of those who are involved their whole life in a hopeless
quarrel lost in advance, with the people and society they spring
from. In his passion to say and explain everything, to disclose all
people's mistakes and wrong-doings, to unmask the evil and
acknowledge the righteous, he went far beyond what an ordinary
healthy person can see and discover . . . And he did not simply
describe the people he talked about, but entered into their
thoughts and desires, of which they were often not themselves
aware, and which he revealed to them . . .17
Andric's own direct comment in parenthesis suggests that we
should not dismiss such an exaggerated interest in others as unreli-
able, since we can always learn from it something about our fellow-
men and consequently about ourselves. What seems to be implied
here is that we should not refuse to pay attention to stories, and by
extension to works of art, with which we do not feel complete
sympathy: Petar becomes irritated by Haim's perpetual suspicion of
others and by his manner, and yet acknowledges that he is a vital
source of information.
What Kamil communicates to Petar, through their mutual sym-
pathy, is quite different in kind from Haim's information. Kamil's
own story is superficially unremarkable: born in Smyrna, the son of
a beautiful Greek girl and a Turkish pasha, he showed an early
predilection for books and learning. When prevented by the Greek
community from marrying the Greek girl of his choice he turned
entirely to his studies, associating only with scholars like himself.
Several issues are involved even in this brief outline: first the
familiar fact that the circumstances of an individual's birth deter-
mine the course of his life in a way which is beyond his control. The
fact that Kamil's mother, when a young and beautiful widow, had
refused many Greek suitors and chosen instead a sixty-year-old Turk
explains the hostility of the Greek community towards young Kamil
and their refusal to let the old Turk take a second Greek girl from
them now, through his son. To Kamil their behaviour is quite
incomprehensible. Through his parents, then, Kamil is caught up
not merely in a local quarrel between families, but in the whole
universal quarrel between Islam and Christianity, between East and
West. Kamil is a solitary figure, cut off from his fellow-men by ideas
he cannot accept through no choice of his own, drawn instead to the
world of scholarship. The future course of his life is determined by
this innocent predilection and the fact that it is intellectuals like
himself whom people in authority suspect and resent, because the
outlook of these people tends to be limited by their own self-interest,
and their insistence on "law and order" cuts them off completely
from the world of the imagination. We have been prepared already
by the description of Karagoz, the prison governor, for the notion
that "law and order" are ultimately an arbitrary fabrication, imposed
on the chaotic forces of life to give them an artificial semblance of
logic. The extraordinary narrow-mindedness of the mistaken
"cause" is also illustrated in the fanaticism of the father of the girl
Kamil wishes to marry: "I am a small man in reputation and
possessions, but I am not small in my faith and my fear of God. And
I prefer to lose my life and to despatch my daughter, who is my only
child, into the sea, rather than give her to an infidel."18 A similar
"Devil's Yard" 199
narrow-mindedness characterizes the attitude of all the representa-
tives of authority with whom Kamil comes into contact.
For Kamil is arrested and sent to the prison in Constantinople
because his preoccupation with books eventually arouses suspicion.
That comes about through a combination of the natural antipathy of
those in authority towards a man such as Kamil, and malicious
gossip, to which any individual whose behaviour deviates from the
accepted norm is everywhere exposed. The rumour is spread that
Kamil has become obsessed with one particular theme of his
research to the point where he believes himself actually to be the
historical figure who has become the object of his special interest: the
Turkish prince Cem, younger brother of Sultan Bayazid. To the ears
of those in authority, men of strictly limited imagination and
intelligence, the mere mention of an interest in the Ottoman throne,
albeit of a fifteenth-century monarch, is enough to condemn a man
as potentially dangerous. It so happens that the relevant official in
Smyrna is hard and zealous, "an obtuse and pathologically distrust-
ful man, who trembled even in his sleep lest any political malprac-
tice, plot or the like should escape him".19 He has the most
dangerous attribute of a man of power. He is himself insecure and
fearful, interpreting all government directives as a direct criticism of
his personal inadequacy.
Eventually Kamil is interrogated, while held in Devil's Yard. Like
their superior, Karagoz, the two officials are interested only in
eliciting a confession from their prisoner, regardless of its basis in
any facts. Their requirements and expectations are totally at variance
with Kamil's experience and understanding of the world. Any
meaningful discussion between them is a priori impossible.
"Nothing you say has any connection whatsoever with me or with
my ideas",20 Kamil states in despair, knowing that nothing he says
can alter his situation. But the situation in which the three men find
themselves has its own inexorable pattern: the interrogators goad
Kamil until he gives them what they require, a "confession" that he
is identical with Sultan Cem, "that is with a man who, more
unfortunate than any man, has entered an impasse, with no possible
escape, and who does not want, and is not able, to deny himself, not
to be what he is".
And Kamil suffers the common fate of intellectuals who arouse
the suspicion and hostility of the machinery of power in an absolutist
regime: he disappears without trace.
Kamil's story, suggestive and moving as it is, is not in itself
particularly unusual except in the degree to which he does indeed
identify himself with Gem, the Turkish prince. In the scheme of
Devil's Yard the central chapter, the fifth, is Kamil's own account of
the life of Gem. Just as Kamil's story gains clarity of outline by being
divided between the two narrators, Petar and Haim, so Gem's story
too stands out here as a separate entity, a story complete in itself, a
story which can be transmitted down the generations.
Gem's story is powerful, archetypal in the extremity of the
situation it describes. This quality is explicit in the words with which
it opens:
It is, in a new and solemn form, the ancient story of two brothers.
From time immemorial, there have always been and are constantly
reborn and renewed in the world - two rival brothers. One of
them is older, wiser, stronger, closer to the world and real life . . .
The other is his absolute opposite. A man of short life, ill fortune
and a false first step, a man whose aspirations always go far beyond
what is necessary and above what is possible . . .21
Briefly, Gem, the younger son of Mehmed the Conqueror and

favoured by the old sultan to succeed him, claims half the empire
from his brother Bayazid. After his inevitable defeat, Gem takes
refuge on the island of Rhodes under the protection of Pierre
d'Aubusson and his Knights of St John. He thus unwittingly places
himself at the centre of a complex web of international intrigue and
Great Power politics, involving the kings of France and Hungary,
the Sultan of Egypt and the Pope, in which he remains caught up
until the end of his life. He is used as a bargaining point by Bayazid
and the Western powers in their negotations with and campaigns
against one another. The restrictions placed on him are thus
absolute: his initial misfortune seems to have been conditioned in
part by the qualities of his own character, and in part by the role
imposed on him by the circumstances of his birth and the primordial
pattern of strife between brothers. As he endeavours to escape the
restrictions of this pattern he becomes entrammelled in the strife
"Devil's Yard" 201
between countries and ideologies which makes him physically a
prisoner for the rest of his life:
The whole of the known and inhabited world, divided into two
camps, Turkish and Christian, contains no refuge for him. For
here or there, he can be one thing only: a sultan. Victorious or
defeated, alive or dead. That is why he is a slave for whom there is
no longer any escape, even in his thoughts or dreams . . ,22
The scale of his ambition is echoed in the scale of his fall: "I
wanted to make an instrument of all that the world is and contains,
with which to conquer and subdue the world, but now this world has
made an instrument of me."23
Gem's story finds a ready response in Kamil not because he has
any worldly ambitions whatever, or for any superficial similarity of
their situations, but because it describes a concentrated and extreme
form of the kind of limitations to his choices and actions which
Kamil himself has experienced in his own modest way. Kamil was,
like Cem, born with certain characteristics into a world divided
according to ideologies and interests which have no meaning for
him. When faced with the absolute barrier dividing him from the
woman of his choice, Kamil suddenly sees clearly "just how much
there was that could divide a man from the woman he loved, and in
general people from each other".24
The extent to which the archetypal "legend" of Sultan Cem, with
its additional dimension of itself repeating a timeless pattern, arouses
such a strong feeling of recognition in Kamil contributes towards a
clearer understanding of the place of "legend" in Andric's works.
The implication appears to be that in our day-to-day lives we should
not expect to come upon situations which are strikingly reminiscent
of those "few main legends of mankind" to which Andric refers in
"Conversation with Goya". Indeed, if we read through all Andric's
works with this explicit intention of his in mind, we might not be
able to discover obvious examples of situations repeating themselves
with any exact correspondence. It is the central, emotional parallel to
which Andric refers.
Kamil's sense of identification with Gem's story is, however,
particularly intense by virtue of a further dimension, notably the
whole question of identity. Kamil is arrested and imprisoned simply
because of what he is: a man drawn to the world of books and
learning, in which scholars can communicate freely regardless of
their beliefs and origins. The malicious gossip which leads to
Kamil's arrest is founded not on any action of his but on the charge
that he purports actually to be a pretender, claimant to a fifteenth-
century throne. To a degree that is almost the case, since Kamil feels
such profound sympathy for the prince that it virtually amounts to
imagining himself fully in his situation. To this extent Kamil is
prepared to make the statement that his interrogators demand of
him: that he is in fact Gem. Kamil's perspective is entirely different
from that of his interrogators; to him the statement means an
expression of emotional and intellectual affinity, while to the officials
it is an admission of guilt.
Two main issues are involved here: the irrevocable, binding
nature of the spoken word and its consequent power for good or ill,
and the degree to which the identity of an individual is determined in
the eyes of others by their interpretation of his words. One of the
author's parentheses expresses this central idea of Devil's Yard'.
(I! - Weighty word, which in the eyes of those before whom it is

spoken determines our place, fatefully and unalterably, often goes
far beyond or lags far behind what we know about ourselves,
beyond our will and above our strength. A terrible word, which,
once spoken, binds and identifies us for ever with all that we have
imagined and said and with which we never thought of identifying
ourselves, but with which we have in fact long been one.)25
Kamil's whole crisis depends on this issue. In Petar's sympathetic

eyes Kamil has endangered himself, not for the same reason that the
authorities pursue him, but because he feels that the young man's
obsession with Cem is unbalanced. Petar does not remember exactly
when, but at some point in his account of the prince's life Kamil
begins to speak in the first person. To the rational outside world
Kamil's direct, unequivocal statement "I am he" seems to suggest
insanity. In fact it is the expression of a fundamental attitude which
has made the development and function of myth and legend so vital
in human culture. Andric is no doubt here making a direct reference
to Thomas Mann's "formula of myth" - "Ich bin's". The essential
"Devil's Yard" 203
feature of categorical statements such as "I am the son of God",
"This is my flesh and blood", is their mystery. Kamil is quite clearly
not Cem, and his statement is consequently disturbing. His
identification should not, however, be thought of as "real", but
mythical. It is through a masterly, understated suggestion along
these lines that Devil's Yard is transformed from a bleak indictment
of authority, and an account of the strict limitations on an indi-
vidual's freedom of action, into a sober statement of faith, albeit
ambiguous, in the power of the imagination.
Petar is fascinated by Kamil's obsession, to the point that he is
unable to act as reason dictates he should and try to deflect the young
man from the brink of "madness": "What is not, what cannot and
ought not to be was stronger than all that is, that exists, obvious and
real, as the only possibility."26
Andric is always concerned with the truth underlying apparent
reality. Kamil's obsession is expressed in terms of his having allied
himself with that underlying truth to the extent of cutting himself off
from superficial reality. Petar's sympathy for Kamil enables him to
respond to him in a way that Haim cannot, and the existence of the
two narrators now contributes to the theme of the function of the
imagination. Haim's role is to convey information, which does not
involve him emotionally, and then to pass on. Petar's is in a way, and
to a lesser degree, to parallel Kamil's obsession with Cem, and so to
give his story continuity. For Kamil settles in Petar's imagination, as
Cem has in Kamil's.
In this way the work can be seen as, among other things, a
meditation on the nature of the artistic process; on the different ways
of telling stories, the varying degrees of involvement of the artist
with his material, the various human needs to which different works
of art correspond.
One of the essential characteristics of Petar's meetings with Kamil
is their mysterious quality. Kamil arrives in the half-light, at dusk,
and Brother Petar cannot remember any details of his arrival:
When he thought about him, later, often, Brother Petar could

never remember exactly when he had come, or how he had come,
looking for a little space, nor what he had said. With people who
become close to us, we usually forget all those details of our first
contact with them; it seems as though we had always known them
and they had always been with us.27
Later, as they talk, Kamil appears vague, absent-minded: "He did
not complete a single thought, even the most trivial. He would often
stop in the middle of a sentence. His glance kept straying into the
distance."28 Kamil is portrayed as not quite of this world: he makes
no movement or sound when he arrives, he scarcely even breathes.
He barely touches his food.
As their friendship grows Kamil talks to Petar about Gem, but,
again, Petar can never remember when or how he began. Petar's last
sight of Kamil is of the young man disappearing round a corner in
the yard. Once again it is dusk.
Kamil's physical presence has been reduced to a minimum,
emphasizing the extent to which he no longer belongs to the "real"
world. His reality is his identification with Cem. The same essen-
tially mysterious quality surrounds the way in which Petar later
remembers Kamil: in the half-light of dawn, Petar seems to see
Kamil in the cloud of smoke from his cigarette. The two men talk.
Petar addresses him as he used to speak "to the young monks in the
monastery when they were overcome by taedium vitae".29 He tries
gently to persuade Kamil not to despair: it is dawn and there will be
a dawn after every darkness; Kamil will recover. Protesting that
"one cannot recover from oneself'30, Kamil is irrevocably impris-
oned in his darkness; he simply cannot see the beauties of God's
sunlit morning which Petar points out to him. The monk's last
thoughts in connection with Kamil can perhaps be seen as a
statement of his religious faith:
I repeat to myself that there is another, different world besides
this Yard, that this is not all, nor for ever. And I endeavour not to
forget this and to hold on-to this idea. But I feel that the Yard
drags a man, like a whirlpool, down towards some dark depths.31
Perhaps, however, in the context of the whole allegory of the
Yard, it would be legitimate to see this other world as being the
world of the imagination, the world of books and stories, which gives
human life continuity, despite the apparent finality of the disappear-
ance of Petar's grave under the snow.
"Devil's Yard" 205
Such a brief account of this complex work cannot do it justice. Its
intricate writing touches on a number of different issues and raises
questions which are never answered. Apparent conclusions are
always questioned or countered, so that they become as elusive and
tenuous as the whole question of an individual's identity touched on
in the central parenthesis.
6
Essays and Reflective Prose
Essays and critical writings
Andric wrote a number of essays, reviews and articles which were
scattered through various newspapers and periodicals. They were not
collected in book form until the writer's death, but now a good idea of
the range of Andric's interests in these writings, and their quality, can
be gained from the selections published. Until recently these writings
have been considered only as a kind of appendage to Andric's fiction
and verse, and the writer himself has said that he wrote them only in
the intervals between his fictional works, when he was exhausted.
Nevertheless, it would be equally appropriate to consider them before
the rest of Andric's works, since they contain many ideas and
preoccupations which are developed fully in his fiction.
These writings cover a wide variety of subject matter, reflecting
many aspects of twentieth-century cultural life, particularly of
Yugoslavia but including also essays on such figures as Goya, Heine,
Gorky and Walt Whitman. They fall into three main categories: short
reviews of individual works, analyses of specific aspects of a writer's
work, written often on the occasion of an anniversary or other
celebration, and longer essays springing from Andric's own particular
interests.
Andric began writing reviews in 1914. The published selections
show a relatively prolific output in that year and in the years
immediately following the First World War, reduced thereafter to one
or two pieces a year, with a renewed burst of activity in 1945 and 1946.
The earliest reviews, marking the beginning of Andric's literary
career and written between 1914 and 1920, are often impatiently
negative and arrogant, but after these beginnings the tone became
steadily more sober and thoughtful with Andric's growing confidence
and stature as a writer.
Essays and Reflective Prose 207
The first of his articles to receive attention was a portrait of the
Croatian writer and critic A. G. Matos, on the occasion of his death
in 1914.1 Matos had made a great impact on the cultural life of
Croatia in his day. In Zagreb he was known as "Rabbi" and was
regarded as the chief authority in all questions of art and taste. The
gently mocking tone of Andric's article offers an insight into the
personality of Matos and his influence on others. Andric's style in
this piece conveys much of the energy and rapid impressionistic
quality of Matos's own critical writings:
His restless eyes observe everything, his inquisitive mind skims
over everything and reacts to everything swiftly, abruptly, bit-
terly, delightedly, justly, unjustly, no matter, it always reacts. It is
as though all things and people and events were invisibly inter-
viewing him, and he, with a speed that amazes, gives his answers
unsparingly personally, frequently unjustly, but he always gives
them, and consequently there is little question of precision or skill
in his answers.2
As might be expected, in these critical pieces Andric tends to
consider each artist in his historical context. Here the atmosphere of
the Croatia of Matos's day is evoked in an impressionistic style
typical of the Young Bosnians. As this was the atmosphere in which
Andric began his literary activity and which he subsequently left to
take up his diplomatic career in Belgrade, it is worth quoting:
His Croatia is somnolent, dejected; apathetic to the point of tears
. . . "No one cares about us, not even we ourselves." His Croatia
is a beautiful, downtrodden land, thrown into slavery by an
historical absurdity, betrayed, exploited, half de-Croaticized. It is
painful to live in the Croatian night. . . People's eyes have grown
heavy with waiting for the sun from the West, seeking the dawn
from where it has never broken on anyone . . . The whole of
Croatia is snoring gracelessly. Only the poets and terrorists are
awake.3
This article is typical of many of Andric's essays. They do not
offer a distanced critical appraisal of the merit of a given artist's
work, but an account of the essential qualities of that work. Many of
them are in fact imaginative portraits. In a more restrained style, the
passage quoted on Mates could have formed one of the character
sketches included in Signs by the Roadside. Another illustration of
this approach is provided by the beginning of the essay on Walt
Whitman, written in his centenary year, 1919:4
This is not poetry from which one could extract one word or one
line, dissecting and measuring, it is the work of a life and the
expression of a personality . . . His life and his poetry . . . are
closely connected like the light and dark rings of growth and
development in a tree trunk.5
It can be seen, then, that there are several points of contact
between these essays and Andric's fictional portraits, particularly in
view of the fact that many of those portraits are based on historical
figures. As the longer essays - as opposed to brief reviews - tend to
be concerned with artists or historical figures to whom he was drawn
for a particular reason, his starting point in selecting historical
figures to be portrayed in his works of fiction and his essays is
similar. They represent certain abstract ideas. In the works of fiction
the details of the characters' lives may be modified to convey these
ideas as they are developed at greater length. But, however they are
treated, all these portraits contribute to Andric's exploration of the
relationship between "history" and "legend". The two are closely
connected: "history" is seen as one dimension of the lives we all lead
and "legend" as what the human imagination extracts from random
experience, the selected historical fact which survives transience.
Several essays illustrate Andric's approach is selecting historical
figures: "The Legend of St Francis of Assisi",6 "The Legend of
Laura and Petrarch",7 "Simon Bolivar Liberator".8 Each of these
figures appeals to Andric's imagination for a different reason. Simon
Bolivar, on the centenary of his death, is described as "an unusual
figure, who bears the finest of all titles a living man can attain -
Liberator".9 St Francis represents the ascetic ideal, which Andric
maintains is not understood, let alone practised, in the twentieth
century.10 Petrarch is discussed on the 600th anniversary of his first
seeing Laura. Andric is interested in the facts of this love story as
they have been handed down to illustrate his definition of tradition
as "gossip sanctioned by time".11
In his works of fiction, where Andric explores the circumstances
out of which the "legend" emerged, his characters are seen too
closely, from too many angles to appear as "heroes". Where a
character has the reputation of a "hero", like Alija -Derzelez or
Mustafa the Hungarian, Andric is concerned with the discrepancy
between his reputation, conditioned by the needs of others, and the
true nature of the character.
All these essays illustrate the method of a creative artist rather
than an objective critic, an ability to enter into the minds of his
subjects and to identify himself with their situation and their
attitudes. This human capacity for identification with others was, of
course, explored in Devil's Yard, in the extreme case of Kamil and
the more sober manner of Brother Petar. In his essays Andric
demonstrates the warm sympathy of Petar, the ideal, self-effacing
story-teller who allows his characters to speak for themselves.
Andric returns with particular sympathy to two figures of outstan-
ding importance in the Serbian cultural tradition to which he
belongs: the collector of folk literature and reformer of the Serbian
language Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic (1787-1864) and the Mon-
tenegrin poet P. P. Njegos (1813-51).
Vuk Karadzic is admired for his personal qualities and for his
instinctive literary gift. In his essays, Andric does not question the
value of Vuk's achievements in the sense of acknowledging that
there may have been a negative side to his uncompromising attitude.
As is the case with Andric's fictional characters, while Vuk is on the
stage he dominates it and Andric looks out at his opponents largely
from Vuk's point of view. The reader is himself involved and
convinced by Andric's presentation of the case.
Andric takes a quotation from one of Vuk's letters as a motto to
define his essential quality of determination against great odds: "Ne
da se. Ali ce dati!" It is impossible to render its terseness exactly but
it could be clumsily translated: "It's hard. But it will be done!"
Andric admires Vuk for his great personal courage, his clear sight
and unwavering belief in the future and in the righteousness of his
aims. He likens him to one of the great explorers, setting out into the
unknown and convincing others of the existence of new worlds.
Vuk's instinctive recognition of artistic quality has been acknow-
ledged in connection with his selection of the best examples of the
South Slav oral tradition. Despite poor health and financial hard-
ship, Vuk would travel great distances in search of the best version
of a particular ballad. He recognized the talents of individual singers
and would return to them again and again to record their songs.
Andric examines another aspect of Vuk's literary gift in his essay on
"Vuk as a writer",12 seeing in his historical writings and descriptions
of aspects of Serbian life the qualities which denote a true realist:
"observation, selection and a rare sense of the characteristic
detail".13 Andric suggests that it is on the basis of this observation
and selection that we acknowledge the writer as "witness" and accept
his account as convincing and truthful. These qualities are precisely
those which Andric pursues in his own writing. Another general
point which could equally well apply to Andric's style is what he
describes as the "calm" of Vuk's writing: "a calm which is essential
to a good writer, for the writer must excite his readers; he must not
himself fall before them in rapture".14
Perhaps the most important aspect of the achievement of Vuk
Karadzic for Andric, however, is the fact that his work is focused
entirely on the traditions and culture of the Serbian people. Vuk
derives his strength from his roots and close connection with these
people. Andric describes Vuk as better aware than anyone of his
people's backwardness under Turkish occupation, but all the more
determined to seek out and preserve their real achievements:
No one did more, first to recognize under the mud and silt of five
centuries, and then to bring to light, all that was fruitful, creative
and of value in our people, all that Vuk believed ought to be our
contribution to general culture.15
Similarly, in the essays on Njegos, Andric is drawn to the poet as
the personification of an essential principle of Serbian culture.
Where Vuk was the man of action, whose courage took the form of
readiness for constant struggle against opposition to his linguistic
reforms, Njegos was a thinker, embodying courage on a philosophi-
cal as well as a practical level. Njegos had three functions, all of
which made great demands on him: he was "Vladika" of Mon-
tenegro: "Prince-Bishop", at once head of the church and ruler of
the land, as he was a poet. These three functions conflicted with each
other and led to contradictions in all aspects of Njegos's life. He had
to face the backwardness of which Vuk was aware daily in his
political plans for his country, setting out energetically, only to be
rebuffed ungratefully, even brutally. He was forced all the time to
face the discrepancy between his surroundings and his sensitivity
and intellect. Andric describes Njegos as on the one hand isolated by
all that he was, and on the other caught up at the centre of the
struggle between East and West, a tragic struggle often involving
fratricide, described by Andric as "not only the conflict of two
faiths, nations and races, but of two elements".16 For Njegos the
Ottoman Empire was the embodiment of Evil, a Hell on earth with
which it was his duty to struggle without hesitation or conciliation
and without any hope of victory. This daily experience drove Njegos
to see conflict as the essential principle of the Universe: constant
even in Heaven, where God/Light must struggle perpetually for
victory over Evil. Out of his experience grew Njegos's particular
brand of courage, expressed in the famous line from his masterpiece
The Mountain Wreath - "Let what cannot be occur!"17
It is a line so succinct as to defy translation, but one with which all
Serbo-Croat speakers are brought up. Andric describes it as
a unique, desperate motto which seems absurd, but which is in
fact the very truth of life . . . I have not found a more terrible
motto anywhere in the poetry of the world or the destiny of
peoples. But without this suicidal absurd, without this, to put it
paradoxically, positive nihilism, without this tenacious denial of
reality and the obvious, neither action nor the very thought of
action against evil would be possible.18
The principle which Njegos embodies for Andric, and which is
expressed in this line, is the "Kosovo principle". The defeat of the
Serbian state by the Ottoman army on the field of Kosovo in 1389 is
the central fact of the oral tradition of the South Slavs. It was a defeat
out of which the people forged a desperate heroism, a readiness for
self-sacrifice and an unassailable belief in the future. Njegos
expresses this principle with particular intensity:
In this, Njegos is the expression of our fundamental and deepest
collective emotion, for it is under his motto, consciously or
unconsciously, that all our battles for freedom have been waged,
from Karad"jord"je (1805) to the present day.19
The essays concerned with Njegos evoke the essential drama of his
situation. Andric identifies himself imaginatively with his subject
and enters into his dilemma, conveying the poet's isolation, despair,
frequent bitterness, and spiritual strength. There is also the ad-
ditional dimension of Andric's personal admiration of the poet and
his acknowledgement of the extent to which Njegos remained a vivid
presence in his mind - from his youth, when most people in
Visegrad would quote lines from The Mountain Wreath in the course
of conversation, to the Second World War, when Njegos's express-
ion of the traditional faith in the "impossible" was a source of
inspiration to so many.
The essays are, then, both imaginative portraits and illustrations
of the continuing meditation explored in detail in Devil's Yard.
There are points of contact both with Andric's fictional works and
with the character sketches and reflections of Signs by the Roadside.
The work - included in the various published volumes of Andric's
essays - which most obviously spans the categories of fact and
fiction, history and legend is the "Conversation with Goya".20 Here,
the author's identification with his subject is complete. The ideas
attributed to Goya are in fact Andric's own reflections on the nature
of art, provoked by an affinity with the painter's work. Had Andric
been interrogated as Kamil was, he would have had to reply "I am
he".
The form of this piece, which has been used by other modern
writers, brings it closer to a work of art than an essay. Goya's
physical appearance is described briefly with particular attention to
his hands, the bridge between the painter's physical existence and
the world of his imagination. The "conversation", like so many of
Andric's works, is set in a frame. The frame itself has two
dimensions; the timelessness of a small French cafe, and the
reference to a circus being set up outside it. The fact that the cafe is
near Bordeaux rather than in Spain suggests the insignificance of
man-made geographical divisions. The circus carries associations of
Andric's exploitation elsewhere of the image of a different, man-
made, reality. As in other works, some of the more contentious
views expressed in the essays are attributed to a third party, a painter
friend of Goya.
The timelessness of the setting is reinforced by the fact that the
"conversation" begins with the word "Yes". It is part of a continuing
reflection without real beginning or end, only provisionally fixed
here in a form which gives it shape and permanence, while also
suggesting the fluidity of the material itself.
Within this frame the essay makes a number of statements about
the nature of the artist, and the artistic technique. The fragility of
the process of transposing human experience into art is conveyed in a
series of images:
What is this irresistible and insatiable desire to take from the
darkness of non-existence or the prison which the interconnection
of all things in life represents, to wrest from this nothingness or
from these chains piece by piece of life and the dreams of men and
to give it form, to fix it "for ever" with this brittle chalk on flimsy
paper?21
The situation of the artist is described as ambiguous and often
painful. He is resented as suspect, concealed behind a number of
masks. The artist's destiny "insincerity and contradiction, uncer-
tainty and a constant vain endeavour to bring together things which
cannot be joined".22 The image of the circus is used to develop the
theme of the artist as illusionist, obliged to play a role in public, to
conform to an identity imposed from outside. The circus is seen as
the most acceptable form of theatrical performance. The theatre
itself provokes only an intense awareness of the futility of any crude
attempt to reproduce the forms of reality, rather than its essence.
Ways of avoiding this sense of "poverty and vanity" are suggested
in a long reflection on the difficulties entailed in the painting of
portraits, the need to free the individual completely from his
surroundings and the arbitrary moment, seeing at once the begin-
ning and the end of his life. In a passage reminiscent of "The Bridge
on the Zepa" Goya is presented as having been tempted at first to
comment on his portraits, but to have realized that they must be left
to speak for themselves to different generations in different circum-
stances as flexibly and fully as possible.
A particuarly interesting passage concerns the accusation that
Goya favoured the dark sides of life, violent or ambiguous scenes, in
his paintings. Andric maintains that all human movements are either
aggressive or defensive. He recognizes that there can be rare
moments of pure frivolous joy, but these are balanced by the
millions expressing anxiety or attack. These impulses are diluted in
daily life by many tiny actions which are neutral in themselves. But
the artist must depict a concentration of such movements in their
essential tone in order that they should be expressive and convin-
cing.
The last passages of the essay move away from the narrower issues
of the artist and his craft to more general ideas seen as deriving from
the painter's experience of life. One is the passage quoted in the
introduction to this study concerning the value of legend and fairy-
tale as casting light on the true nature of human existence. Another
describes the painter's initial creative impulse as springing from
"fear of the thought of evil". Once Goya has controlled the idea of
death by painting the word "mors" in a triangular frame on the wall
of his room, it acts as a kind of amulet which protects him from
irrational fear.
As in Devil's Yard, where the three separate narrators cast light
from different angles on the central statement, so here the fact that
the ideas are conveyed through a "conversation" involving the
narrator, Goya, and his painter friend reinforces Goya's insistence at
various points in the essay that there is only one "truth" and one
"reality", but a number of different approaches to them. Goya is
depicted as a wise old man who has seen "everything", who knows
people of all kinds. For him only one aspect of existence inspires awe
- the world of ideas, the only true reality without which there would
be only nothingness. Recurrent thoughts from all Andric's works
can be seen in the final words Goya is made to speak:
Living among people, I have always wondered why everything

intellectual and spiritual in our lives is so powerless, defenceless
and disjointed, so odious to societies of all times and so alien to the
majority of people. And I came to this conclusion: this world is the
realm of material laws and animal life, without sense or purpose,
with death as the end of everything. All things spiritual and
abstract in it have occurred by some accident, like shipwrecked
travellers from the civilized world finding themselves with their
clothes, machines and weapons on a distant island with a com-
pletely different climate, inhabited by wild beasts and savages.
This is why all our ideas bear the strange and tragic character of
objects salvaged from a shipwreck. They bear on themselves also
the marks of the forgotten world from which they once sprang, the
catastrophe that has brought us here, and the constant, vain effort
to adapt to the new world. For they struggle ceaselessly with this
new world in which they find themselves, a world that is essentially
opposed to them, and at the same time they are constantly
transforming and adapting themselves to this world. Hence the fact
that every great and noble thought is a stranger and a sufferer.
Hence the inevitable sadness in art and pessimism in science.23
Typically, the essay does not end with these solemn words. It
returns to the frame of the circus, with all its associations of illusion,
ambiguity and elusiveness; to a description of the narrator searching
through the crowd for a figure of the old man he believes he
glimpsed in the distance, but this may have been merely a trick of his
imagination and the light.
'Signs by the Roadside

We have seen that even Andric's longest works are often composed
of several smaller components. It is in the fixing of detail in a precise
context that the writer excels. His natural medium seems to have
been the short, succinct statement, which could be expanded or left
complete in itself. The two volumes of prose poems written during
the First World War can be seen as marking the beginning of a
dialogue between Andric, the world around him, and the life of his
mind, which continued until the last stages of his final illness. This
dialogue takes the form of notes, reflections, observations, sketches,
snatches of overheard dialogue, impressions from travels, thoughts
on art and the nature of human existence. If the early volumes can be
seen as a storehouse of themes and ideas developed in Andric's later
prose works, then this volume offers a virtually inexhaustible well-
spring, only a fraction of whose material was worked into Andric's
creative writings.
The collection of these notes entitled Signs by the Roadside can
perhaps best be described as an intellectual diary. As may be
imagined of a man who recoiled so consistently from any exposure of
his private life and thoughts, Andric was equally consistent in his
dislike of the diary as a genre, seeing it as a misguided search for
permanence. He was sceptical also about the publication of the
private letters of the famous. In a review of Heine's letters, written
in 1914, he states: "An unpleasant sense of the degradation of
greatness, such as I had when reading the letters of Michelangelo; it
is as unsightly as behind the wings of a stage, as a workshop; in the
studio of even the most delicate painter there is a smell of oil, paint,
anxiety, etc."24 And yet it is precisely because it resembles a
workshop - a random assortment of the tools, colours, sketches,
completed fragments - which reflects the artist's creative activity,
that this volume is of particular interest. To use Andric's basic
image: Signs represents a bridge between the experience on various
levels that is the material of art, and its processing in enduring
works. It is a record of this intermediate stage; its contents have been
carefully selected. It is clear, from Andric's statements about the
irrelevance of biographical information to an assessment of a writer's
work, that the material Andric did record in his "intellectual diary"
over the years was of a particular kind, and committed to paper in
the knowledge of its public interest. Many of Andric's notes remain
unpublished, including some of his more personal statements. The
notes he was prepared to see published, then, appeared in this
approved selection of some six hundred pages.
There are three main thematic categories in the work, reflected in
its organization: general statements on the nature of existence,
human behaviour, society and history; reflections on art, and in
particular on writing; and incidental impressions and character
sketches which can frequently be seen as having inspired or been
worked into a work of fiction. There are also two shorter sections:
one entitled "Sleeplessness",25 devoted to the preoccupations and
musings of the insomnia which afflicted Andric; the other, under the
title "Eternal Calendar of the Mother Tongue",26 marks the begin-
ning of a collection of personal reactions to individual words and
phrases in the writer's native language, and conveys something of
the vital fascination of language for him.
The first section, consisting of general reflections on human life, is
preceded by a piece which can form an introduction to and
explanation of the pages that follow it:
Some traditional tales are so universal that we forget when and
where we heard or read them, and they live in us like the memory
of some experience of our own. Such a tale is the one about the
young man who, wandering through the world, seeking his
fortune, set out along a dangerous road, not knowing where it was
leading him. In order not to lose his way, the young man carved
with an axe in the trunks of the trees beside the road signs which
would later show him the way back.
That young man personifies the common, eternal destiny of
mankind: on the one hand a dangerous and uncertain road, and on
the other the great human need that a man should not get lost, but
find his way in the world and leave some trace behind him. The
signs which we leave after us will not escape the destiny of
everything human - transience and oblivion. Perhaps they will
never be noticed at all. Perhaps no one will understand them. But
still they are necessary, just as it is natural and necessary that we
should open our hearts and communicate with others.
If these small obscure signs do not save us from disorientation
and trials of all kinds, they can make them easier, and help us at
least in so far as they convince us that, in everything we do, we are
not alone, nor the first, nor unique.27
This passage offers a succinct account of Andric's intention and
method in his art: driven by an irrational human search for
permanence, he is drawn to the simplest parables and legends as
expressing, always in new terms, the unchanging human condition.
The "signs" men leave can take many forms, from a book to an
elaborately engineered bridge. The book Andric had with him in
prison consoled him simply because it was a book, a sign. When
Brother Petar awoke to find Kamil beside him in Devil's Yard, the
first thing he noticed was a book:
The first thing he saw was a small book bound in yellow leather.
An intense warm feeling of joy ran through his body; this was
something of the lost, human, real world left far beyond these
walls, beautiful but uncertain as a vision in a dream.28
The content of the book and its author are insignificant; just as the
sign on the tree is anonymous and conveys nothing other than the
fact that someone once passed that way and made it. These small
signs are too often obscured by "the insignificant but apparently
important events" taking place around us. In Bosnian Story this
essential difference in outlook divides the French Consul Daville
from his young assistant des Fosses:
"Oh", sighed Daville, "this Travnik and the country for hundreds
of miles around are nothing but a muddy desert inhabited by two
kinds of wretches: tormentors and tormented, and we unfortunate
creatures have to live among them."
"On the contrary,' said the young man, "I think there are few
areas in the world that are less barren and monotonous. You have
only to dig down a foot or two to find graves and the remains of
past ages. Every field here is a graveyard with several layers; one
necropolis on top of another, as the various inhabitants were born
and died over the centuries, one epoch after another, one genera-
tion after another. And graveyards are evidence of life, not a
desert."
"Well", as though it were an invisible fly, the consul protected
himself from the young man's way of speaking, to which he could
not accustom himself.
"Not only graveyards, not only graveyards! Today, as I was
riding towards Kalibunar, I saw in one place that the rain had
eroded the soil under the road. To a depth of some six yards you
could see, like geological layers, one on top of the other, the traces
of former roads that had passed through this same valley . . . "29
When one uses the word "truth" of Andric's work, one must
remember that it is this kind of minimal truth: the simple fact that
others have been here before, exposed to the same kind of torments.
There are no answers to the perennial questions, but the knowledge
that others have also asked them gives us a sense of continuity which
is the only solace we can expect.
The "signs" Andric speaks of are no more than that. The bridge
which dominates the life of Visegrad and gives it its shape is a link
between two worlds and two different ways of life, but that is only
the temporal, functional level of its significance. What is stressed in
The Bridge on the Drina, as we have seen, is that the bridge is also a
symbol of the continuity of life which, for all its changes, endures.
One of the obviously important features of the bridge is that it stands
over running water. The running river itself - the conventional
image of passing time - cannot convey the quality of tranquillity and
stability of the bridge and the mountains. Nevertheless the notion of
the fluctuating moods of the sea, now rough, now still - of the
perpetual "ebb and flow" of life - also recurs frequently in Andric's
work.
In the following passage, Andric expresses a moment of vision. It
is an example of the kind of circumstances out of which a legend
might grow:
On one of the ramparts of the Kalemegdan fortress, I shaded my
eyes from the sun with my hand and in the broad space above the
shadowy ditches, full of grass, I caught sight of a whole world of
bugs and flies, cobwebs and birds. The air around me was filled
with innumerable living creatures in motion. Over the stones
under my feet ran lizards and spiders, in the freshly dug soil
beside me larvae and worms writhed struggling with the air and
light. Then I felt how innacurate our egocentric notion is that we
walk on the earth and stand in the air as though separated by
something, as though something separate; I felt that the truth was
that we, with everything around us, form one sea of living beings,
now storm-tossed, now calm. We do not live, we are life.
Individual existence, like individual death, is only a transient
illusion, two minute waves in the ocean of movement around us.
And it seems to me that I have glimpsed the root of our idea of
eternal life and resurrection. Eternal life lies in the realization that
all our limitations, all states and changes, are only imaginary,
inherited delusions, and resurrection lies in the discovery that we
never did live, but that, with life, we have always existed.30
Much of this collection consists of reflections on the way in which
this experience of life is transformed into art; and the demands of the
artist's commitment:
An enormous effort of the imagination is required in order for a
work of art to be created. And this effort should not be estimated
only on the basis of what is successfully realized, but also by what
did not succeed and was rejected in the course of the work and
which will remain for ever unknown to us, readers and audience.
When you think of all this, you wonder how a writer can endure
such a vocation. How is it that the tool he uses does not explode in
his hands and kill him, instead of creating according to his will?
But it seems that those who are engaged in such dangerous work
are protected precisely by the fact that they live inside the events,
at the very heart of the danger.31
Sometimes it is possible to trace the workings of the writer's
imagination, from a brief sketch recorded in the notebooks to a
complete story. We have seen, for example, the way in which the
theme of excitement and disillusion was developed in the story about
the circus in The House On Its Own, and that a similar theme formed
the basis for the story "Panorama". In Signs by the Roadside one
passage records the experience which was the origin of this persistent
theme. It also describes how such memories may be brought to the
surface, and demonstrates the simple stylistic devices which trans-
form a personal memory into a general statement:
Above Belgrade the sun shines as though it will never set. But
when it does start to go down, on these autumn days it is
extinguished like a live coal in water. It seems as though it were
not only the sun that is going down, but the whole earth with it.
The blue ridge of hills in the distance sinks with the sun, and then
the great plain of Srem starts to disappear, rolled up like a painted
canvas.
They are rolling up the carpet. The performance is over.
A momentary illusion which passes without leaving a trace, like
an incomprehensible shiver down the spine.
One of the greatest and most splendid sensations of my
childhood was the first circus performance I was taken to. Only
here too there was a moment of alarm and tears.
When they began to roll up the carpet after the first act, of
acrobats and clowns, and to prepare for the next, the child burst
into tears. He implored his elders not to allow them to roll up the
beautiful big carpet that seemed to him as spacious and brightly
coloured as the Elysian fields, and not to let the wonderful game of
the acrobats and clowns come to an end. In vain they tried to
console him, saying that this was only the first act, that the
performance would continue and that there were still many
wonderful things to come. The child wept bitterly and loudly, and
calmed down only when horses and white mules appeared with
bells and blue ribbons plaited into their manes. And as, in
wonder, he laughed again, the tears dried on his face.
The sun has long since set. The momentary illusion has
vanished. The familiar, motionless shapes reappear. The plain
grows dark and becomes rigid, with a sharply etched line on the
horizon. Belgrade lights up as far as the eye can see and looks like
a giant's toy.32
Another example may have been the starting point for the story
"Summer Holiday in the South", in which an Austrian teacher is
absorbed into the sea air:
A strong south-east wind, and still stronger huge waves, splash the
low, pebbled shore. I stand, bare-headed, on a high place. The
waves break with a great roar in white foam around my feet,
sometimes sprinkling even the top of my head. The powerful
clamour of the pebbles blends with the sound of the waves as the
tide constantly shifts and sorts them, coming and going, moving
them now forwards, now backwards.
The air is saturated with sea spray, which I breathe in joyfully
as deeply as I can. In this way, perhaps, a man could be
transformed into sea water, or iodine, or something stronger and
more refined, a few degrees above iodine in the scale of develop-
ment and perfection.
And so on and up, to complete non-existence.33
Those two passages are examples of the kind of mood or emotion
that might colour the presentation of a story or an individual
character. Such stories or characters can then be seen as projections
of Andric's own moods. His prose always has a strong emotional and
psychological dimension. This is illustrated by the following pas-
sage, giving a brief outline of situations for potential stories. It shows
also the writer's self-conscious observation of his work, his aware-
ness of its artificiality. Like a skilful conjuror he is interested in
trying out increasingly difficult tricks:
A writer who shows a certain skill and conviction in describing
people, their actions and states of mind, begins with time to set
himself new, ever more difficult and complex tasks. As he does so,
he can see what hard, almost hopeless work it is, and how few
human thoughts and feelings can be grasped and captured,
expressed and presented. What do people feel and think at
exceptional, fateful moments? How do they behave, how do they
defend or console themselves?
For instance: a young man, who had set off with the girl he
loves into the mountains, wanted to pick a flower and give it to her
(and demonstrate his agility, strength and devotion); he set off
down the cliff and is now falling headlong, straight into a deep
chasm.
Or: a conspirator who, according to a well-thought-out plan,
comes to the place where he is supposed to meet the companions
with whom he is supposed to carry out the coup d'etat and depose
the hated tyrant, but instead of his fellow-conspirators he finds the
tyrant's agents, and now they are tying him up, with curses and
blows, while in the corner of the large room he sees his compan-
ions, who have already been bound.
Or: a man with thirty passengers in an aeroplane which has
caught fire and is falling with its own weight, from a height of ten
thousand feet.
That's what you ought to be describing!34
Sometimes a scene which is complete in itself will impress itself on
the writer's imagination, to be recorded for its own sake:
They were reading together from a large book. The text was about
love and conflict, strife and defeat some two thousand years ago,
about parting without tears or words, with no hope of being
reunited. The woman was silent, and kept turning her face to one
side. He immediately regretted that he had opened the book at
this particular page. By a sudden movement of her neck and head,
he realized that she was going to cry. Then she quickly turned her
head away, but still a large tear fell on to the page of the open
book. She lowered her head more and more and turned still
further away. He said nothing, but sat in great confusion and
embarrassment and stared uncomfortably, with a dull sense of
surprise, at the large, clear tear shot through with light on the
printed paper. The tear slowly slipped down the tilted page and
the letters under it could be seen enlarged, as under a magnifying
glass.
For a film-script.35
Most frequently, these initial ideas are recorded in the form of

character sketches:
He was so clever and cunning that he was able, when he needed,
to divide the simplest human word, "yes", into two syllables and
so make two words which contradicted and refuted each other.
But he could not do the same thing with "no". (His skill did not
extend quite so far!) Consequently, he always answered all
questions with "yes", and then, if he changed his mind, he would
set his skill into operation and begin to break the word in two,
until he had made of it the "no" he needed.36
A sketch such as this one is probably based on observation of an

individual who caught the writer's attention. In a similar way he will
record snatches of conversation overheard, or incidents observed
around him. Other sketches are generalizations which may be used
verbatim at suitable moments in the writer's work, or expanded into
a full description of a character or situation. This kind of passage is
often used to illustrate a point in a longer piece, and is introduced by
a phrase such as "he was one of those people who . . .":
With people who are completely and irretrievably committed to a
passion, to alcohol, cocaine or eroticism, you can observe a
particular kind of absentmindedness. They look at you and
appear, more or less, to be listening to what you are saying to
them, but you see that they are lost in their own thoughts, and
their faces have an expression as though they were carefully and
anxiously listening to something in themselves, something about
which they care a great deal and which only they can hear. This is
why your questions disturb them, anger them, and this is why
they answer them briefly and vaguely. All of this means that they
are resentful, although they do not show it, and you are uncom-
fortable, although you try to hide it.37
Some of these general observations are expressed in a form which
can readily be incorporated into a work of fiction, like the observa-
tion of the peasant's behaviour below. Others are abstractions
which are complete in themselves and for which a series of jottings
such as Signs by the Roadside is the only suitable vehicle:
When a peasant has some great family care or serious damage has
occurred to his property, you can see how he thinks, "racks his
brains" or grieves, as though he were performing some difficult
physical task. He sits, a little bent, sweat breaks out in beads on
his brow, he looks straight ahead and from time to time speaks
semi-audible words. All this with a heavy and dignified serious-
ness which townspeople and the educated do not know. It is
apparent that he gives himself completely to every anxiety that
comes upon him, and that he spends himself and toils without
respite until he solves it or recovers from it. But, on the other
hand, both before and afterwards, his soul is genuinely at rest
and does not know our unhealthy unease, our conceit and the
way we taunt our imagination, spoiling our days and nights and
weakening ourselves for the important efforts of life.38
As I have lived among intellectuals, I have been able to see that

every individual really does represent a "world in himself, or at
least a state. That means roughly that everyone has his own inner
laws which take little, or as little as possible, account of the other
laws of the world. Everyone has his own conception of the world
and life, his art or science (or religion). And not only that.
Everyone has his own internal and foreign policy, his army and
armaments and his economy, and his own seas and deserts, his
judges and murderers, his theatres and pubs and brothels.
They create and elaborate all of this in themselves, at the
expense of considerable effort, until they cut themselves off from
the rest of the world, in complete autocracy and isolation. The
first part of their lives is spent in this activity, while in the
second they try to find a way back to the world of other ordinary
people from whom they have so successfully separated them-
selves.39
These general observations may also be extended from individuals
to whole people and cultures. We have noticed a number concerning
the people of Bosnia and the kind of men who characterized the
Ottoman administration there, the particular characteristics of the
Levantines and Jews. Such observations are sometimes coloured by
the outlook of the character to whom they are attributed, but more
frequently they take the form of direct interventions by the narrator
himself. Several of the observations recorded in Signs by the Roadside
concern the Balkan peoples in general. The following example
reflects something of Andric's personal experience of the two world
wars and the bitter conflict between national groups in Yugoslavia,
openly expressed between the wars and enduring under the surface
today:
This nation has suffered too much from disorder, violence and
injustice, and is too used to bearing them with a muffled grumble,
or else rebelling against them, according to the times and circum-
stances. Our people's lives pass, bitter and empty, among mali-
cious, vengeful thoughts and periodic revolts. To anything else,
they are insensitive and inaccessible. One sometimes wonders
whether the spirit of the majority of the Balkan peoples has not
been for ever poisoned and that perhaps they will never again be
able to do anything other than . . . suffer violence, or inflict it.40
Related observations were prompted by the writer's travels; a
considerable number, for example, describe his impressions of
Spain, a country which particularly appealed to him, as well as of
Scandinavia, Turkey and China. Some of the most pertinent to his
work are observations of the differences between East and West;
they convey something of Andric's ambivalent attitude to both
cultures, attracted and repelled as he is by individual manifestations
of each:
It is hard to find in the East a building which is altogether fine,
pure, in which nothing could be criticized. But, on the other
hand, there is not in the East a building, however dilapidated or
neglected, which has not at least a foot of green garden, or a
fountain of running water, or just one single flower-pot with
carefully tended fuchsias or Chinese roses.
That place is the soul of the ruined house. Buildings in the West
have nothing like it.41
In the East the earth is still raw, alive; none of its juices has dried
up; it has all its energy and all its poisons.42
People in the East.

They live indirectly. They progress in a roundabout way
through life, and as they go it seems that the actual progress itself
is not as important as the way of walking, what is said as they
walk, or the name that is given to the places through which they
pass.43
This last passage succinctly illustrates the complete mutual
incomprehension of the local Bosnian population and the Austrians,
so "purposefully" involved in building roads and railways, described
in The Bridge on the Drina.
All these passages concern the material of art, "wrested", as
Andric puts it, "from life - mine and yours". In the section of the
volume entitled "For the Writer", Andric comments also on the
method of art and the process of artistic creation, as well as on his
own personal view of the writer's position:
I do not think I shall ever succeed, even remotely, in expressing
the beauty of the ordinary actions, trivial events, and small joys of
everyday life, as they are seen through some great anxiety or
sorrow which momentarily obscures the world from us.
Through our boundless cares and efforts, the joys of life look
perfectly and enchantingly beautiful. And if later, when the cares
pass and the efforts cease, we could see these joys with the same
eyes, we would be rewarded for everything.
But we cannot.44
In books there have always been, and there are today, plenty of
untruths, half-truths, and, above all, blank spaces; that is, places
which are neither truths nor half-truths but hollow, conceited
narration which says nothing, but confuses the reader and, like
weeds, smothers whatever is significant and valid in the text.
Because when we have nothing to say, but nevertheless talk or
write, we do so always, directly or indirectly, at the expense of
truth. Every truth, in order to be revealed and communicated to
others, demands a great deal of time and space, strength and
patience; it matures slowly and is not easily recognized, and there
are often difficulties and obstacles in its way; we should not then
ourselves add to the burden.
Perhaps it would be better to shorten this brief note of mine, and
cut it off right here.45
Style? We have always talked a great deal about it, but today I
wonder what it is. The art of clothing one's thought, communicat-
ing it to others in the best and most convincing way? If I think about
it, I feel that it could be a great deal more besides. I sometimes feel
that style, that is the actual sound of the words, the sentence and the
composition of the whole, is also the main test of the truth
contained in a sentence.
If a wine-barrel which we tap with our index-finger crooked tells
us by the sound it makes whether it is full or empty, why should the
music of our sentence not be able to tell us something about the
presence or absence of intellectual or emotional content?
We do not discover truths but merely recall them, in moments of
clarity, and give them "stylistic expression".46
The aphoristic expression of the last sentence of this passage is

characteristic of Andric's whole way of thinking. It is the chosen
medium of many reflective writers of his kind, from Marcus Aurelius
and Pascal on; it is also of course a favoured form in oral culture.
A great many of the comments on the writer's craft express the
dedication which Andric has described in various works in connection
with the "builder". The individual writer should be as anonymous as
the traditional builder. His task is not to discover truths but to set up
in himself, through concentration and in solitude, the conditions in
which he can become the vehicle for their expression in as precise a
form as possible.
No matter how serious the craftsman's approach, however, he will
not always be understood. The fact that artists and their audience are
fallible and often misguided human beings is one with which the
writer must also come to terms: "To be a productive, well-known
writer means to put between yourself and others a little hill of
printed paper and a whole mountain of inexactitude and misunder-
standing."47
This brief statement, perhaps, suggests another reason why
Andric should have returned so readily to the image of the builder.
An architect's intentions may sometimes be misunderstood, but
stone is plainly a medium with qualities quite different from those of
language. Several of Andric's reflections in this section concern the
nature of his material:
There was a time when I believed in words (in the value of words
as such), swore with them, encouraged and consoled myself and
others with them, wrote them down and remembered them,
accepted them with blind faith and sincere enthusiasm, and
offered them to others as gifts. And then, gradually, with time, I
began to realize the truth about words, to see increasingly clearly
where they came from, how they came into being and disappeared
and how they changed their form and meaning, to understand
both their temporary price and their real worth and durability.
Until, finally, I realized clearly what they were: smoke and
nothingness, the fruit of chance and disorder, like everything else
around me, mere illusions, the offspring of illusions and the
mothers of new illusions.48
Apart from observations more or less directly related to art, its
nature, method and material, Signs by the Roadside is made up of
reflections on Andric's own life and on the human condition. Many
of these fragments are similar in tone to the early prose poems and to
Andric's verse: they express the strong lyrical current of all his
writing.
It is incredible how little we know about ourselves, the world
around us and the life we live. Only great and unexpected joys or
heavy blows and great losses can show us that human life is far
richer and more complex than we imagine, that everything in it
has two sides or several sides, two meanings or many meanings,
everything, from pleasure and joy to pain and disaster, from the
slightest trifle to existence itself. Everything changes and repeats
itself: a man is born several times, he grows and falls in turn,
recovers and falls ill; he dies several times, and is reborn; and
everything that happens to him is almost always unpredictable and
therefore apparently full of contradictions, hard to comprehend
and inexplicable, and his end is lost in mist, silence and
oblivion.49
Every conversation about death sobers me, disturbs me, stops me

in my tracks, and I can never accept the fact that I talk about it in
passing, lightly and irresponsibly. I always think that a person
ought to take off his shoes when he steps into this area, to lift up
his thoughts and lower his voice, and to choose his words
carefully, if he cannot actually remain silent.
This respect for our departure from the world has nothing to do
with the bogeyman death represents for us, but springs, on the
contrary, from life itself and my great love for it.50
Freedom, true freedom is a dream, a dream which, more often

than not, is not destined to come true, but anyone who has not
once dreamed it is pitiable.51
Many of the later fragments concern Andric's reflections on the
process of ageing and the distinctive features of youth and age:
Many of the great and fateful passions of our youth are founded on
a simple misunderstanding. We are like an awkward, clumsy
person who goes into a shop, points to something in the window
and says in the tone of one who is ready for anything: "I'll take
that and pay whatever you ask."
And afterwards, afterwards when it is all too late, you see that
you went into the wrong shop and asked for something you did
not need and which you never actually wanted.52
Once not only every word, but every sound was accompanied for
me by a whole procession of emotional and intellectual associa-
tions. Now that no longer happens. Sounds are isolated, and
words weak, so that people have to repeat them; and that does not
help at all.
And it would all be bearable if I were not tormented by the
thought, clear and exact in itself, that all these associations still
exist and live around me, but I do not feel or hear them. And all
this beauty, inaudible to me, is heard by others, gathered and
carried home, like armfuls of flowers.53
It is only to be expected that this volume should include references
to the most characteristic aspects of Andric's response to the world -
silence and solitude:
At the worst moments, when the din around me is at its peak,
when the last traces of reason and kindness are obscured and when
every word and grimace expresses only evil and misdirected
impulses, then, with a desperate movement of my mind, like
lightning, I demolish the whole world, erase and consign to
oblivion everything down to the last trace of existence. Over all
that men have done and said, inexpressibly terrible things, now
vanished and buried for ever, silence reigns, not the dead, faceless
silence of human habitations, but a great silence from outer space,
a new world, built entirely of silence, a wondrous Jerusalem, a
holy city, magnificent and enduring. Blocks of silence, arches and
corners of silence, shadows and patches of light on the buildings
and, as far as the eye can see, a new world for those who have been
defeated in this one, a paradise which remains after the material
world has burnt itself out in the form which we see and touch
every day and which poisons and crushes us each instant.54
Whoever succeeds in penetrating silence and calling it by its true

name, has achieved the most that a mortal being can achieve. It is
then no longer cold nor dumb, nor empty nor terrible, but it
serves him and comes to his aid in every adversity, as in the
traditional song where the hero caught a fairy by her hair and
made her his blood sister and bound her to him for ever. Whoever
succeeds in warming solitude and bringing it to life, has con-
quered the world.55
To make an adequate selection from this varied material in a short
space is difficult, and to make any relevant comment on Andric's
own succinct statements is still more so. As Andric himself has put
it:
Words seem so "eloquent" while they stand alone, innocent and

unused; if one or another of them fails, the third will speak for
both of them and say much more than that. They are linked in a
magic ring dance through which the rhythm of the whole runs; if
one of them is lame, clumsy or weary, the others drag it along with
them, so that its faltering is not noticed, and the dance goes
faultlessly on.
It is more difficult when you have to use words to say something
about words themselves and the way they are used in story-telling.
Then they are suddenly dumb, cold, and they lie like dead stones,
as though they had never spoken, danced or sung. When they deal
with words, words are silent, while they can always say some-
thing, sometimes more, sometimes less, about everything else
connected with man. Even about silence.56
In this volume, as in all Andric's works, everything is provisional.
The enduring impression it leaves is that it offers glimpses of
"truths" which are immediately questioned or denied in a subse-
quent piece. Typically, Andric warns himself and his readers against
the simplistic truths apparently offered by the attractive aphoristic
form which so appealed to him:
The aphorism as a form represents an imperceptible danger for all

of us. At first sight the aphorism appears to be a neat and pleasing
form which enables us best and with the least effort to present our
life experience, which we always feel is hard and important, and to
demonstrate our intelligence, of which we usually have the highest
opinion. But we are generally badly mistaken. An aphorism is thin
ice on to which we are led by our desire to show cheaply and
quickly what we know and what we can do. It is a mirror in which
we catch the people and the world around us, without noticing
that at the same time we are ourselves caught and reflected in it,
with all our motives and intentions.57
Fluctuation of mood is, then, the one constant aspect of Andric's
thinking. But, for all his awareness of fear and suffering as the
essential features of the human condition, a positive acceptance of
life at this price is nevertheless the dominant tone of his writing. The
following piece may serve as a commentary on his work as a whole,
but the irony of its mock-heroic tone should warn us against taking
even it too seriously:
Let me, for a moment or two, appear only and solely as a poet of
transience, let me be its herald, the one who escorts it and sees it
on its way.
You who love life - and who does not really love it at heart? - do
not recoil from this poem of mine; it is not the enemy of life, but
its friend, its whisper and its music which accompanies the flow of
life's sap like the murmuring of water.
The music of transience, that is the voice of what once was,
what is and what will be again somewhere and for someone, it is
what endures amidst eternal disappearance. Only people who love
life can hear and record the soft melody of transience. Do not
interrupt or deny it, and do not try to outshout it. Listen
carefully! It is nothing but the hymn of life of which we know
neither the beginning nor the end, into which no one invited us,
which no one gave us, and which we must sooner or later leave,
although we do not know when, why or where we go.
Do not recoil from this song!
Transience, that is the only aspect of permanence accessible to
us, for whatever does not pass is dead or unborn. Transience is life
itself, our most potent experience of life. It is in fact - ourselves.58
In his work Andric always avoided a sense of things being neatly
completed, an impression that with one individual's death, or the
end of one historical era, a part of life was ended. There is always a
sense of life continuing. This perspective also characterizes several of
the writer's last reflections, inspired by his approaching death:
If costly life and many stormy years have taught us nothing else,
they have taught us one thing: to part. Without words, without
trembling, without blinking, with dry eyes, steady hands. If I am
true to myself, the last thing I can do in your honour is to part
from you too like that, light, dear name, for in you is all good and
all beauty, and you deserve every effort and sacrifice. Anyone who
does not know how to endure the pain of parting has not truly
loved the light of the world!
Farewell! I say, or rather, I think, for I have no one to say it to,
nor is there anyone to hear me, and the light goes on like a river
which has dried up at its source but still the water goes on flowing.
Farewell! And the light drains away in silence, for sound too has
died out, the companion which so often goes with you. It is
disappearing. It remains only in my eyes. Farewell! There will be
light. There will be other eyes.59
7
Conclusion
Andric is a complex writer, and his works have generated a mass of

critical writing both in Yugoslavia and internationally. Some of his
allegiances to other twentieth-century European writers have been
touched on here, and the main concern of this account of his works
has been to stress the universal nature of their subject matter and
treatment, despite the remote, "exotic" setting of many of them.
Nevertheless, in attempting to identify some of the major features of
Andric's fiction it seems appropriate to start from what was one of
the most fruitful areas of his own cultural heritage, notably the oral
tradition.
Ivo Andric was born into a milieu in which the oral epic tradition
was still a vital force. He was therefore from the outset aware firstly
of the function of this kind of artistic expression, and secondly of the
discrepancy between the worlds of epic and daily life. These two
aspects of the process of human creativity remained a source of
inspiration throughout Andric's work.
The South Slav epic tradition offers a clear example of the raw
function of the artistic process. Many of the heroic songs, and among
them some of the finest, are above all a means of coming to terms
with history. They look back over the period of Turkish rule, to the
great battle of Kosovo which marked its beginning, and to the
independence lost in 1389. From the scant facts known about the
medieval states, from defeat and the centuries of compromise and
survival which followed it, the songs have created a pattern which
not only provides a sense of order, but gives it meaning. The years
before Kosovo are seen as containing seeds of downfall in the greed
and self-interest of medieval rulers, so that the defeat is not
altogether imposed from outside but becomes also a lesson in
Conclusion 235
humility and patriarchal values. The account of the battle itself is
transformed into a story of heroism and self-sacrifice based on a
conscious choice of death for the sake of the eternal values of the
"kingdom of Heaven" which continues to have resonance today, and
which has been an unquestioned source of inspiration in times of
war. In the process of transforming historical events into a story with
form and meaning several kinds of stylization are employed. One of
these is the liberty of the singer to move freely in time and space, to
take historical figures from different centuries and put them together
regardless of the facts of history. Another is the use of stock phrases,
formulae and whole set pieces which can grant the songs the formal
dignity of ritual. An extension of these is the archetype. We have
seen that in the various songs concerned with building projects, for
example, the master-builder is always called "Rade". It is as though
there were only one immortal embodiment of the principle of
dedicated craftsmanship, capable of being summoned freely through
time and space in the manner of the pagan gods with their specific
functions. This is a feature of the heroic age, of the people's refusal
to be dependent on many benefactors. More than this, however, the
universal craftsman - the builder, the painter, the writer - becomes
one of the central characters in his fiction. This figure is just one of
many ideas which the writer absorbed from his heritage, and which
affected his whole understanding of the function of art and several
important aspects of his procedure.
Andric's early stories tend to focus on single characters who
function as archetypes because of either their personality or the
situation they are in. These are characters about whom it would be
possible for a group of tales or songs to grow up because they are
felt to embody some fundamental aspect of the human condition.
Examples would be Mustafa the Hungarian, representing a man
brutalized by his experience of war, or Mara the concubine, whose
story gives an account of the stoic acceptance by women of the fact
that they will be used and abused by men. Several of Andric's
characters do indeed recur in a small cycle of stories, bringing a
particular flavour to the tales in which they appear. One could
perhaps even see Andric's tendency to formulate general ob-
servations: "He was one of those people who . . .", "It was one of
those marriages which . . .", as being related to the epic poetry's
concern with widespread patterns of behaviour and recurrent
insights.
In addition, the technique of oral composition has affected
Andric's narrative procedure. Such devices as the use of repetition
and symbol are among the major features of his craft.
As well as the heroic songs, the South Slav oral tradition contains
folk stories notable for their humour and their unselfconscious
introduction of supernatural elements into mundane situations. All
this affected the anecdotes and stories which were so marked a
feature of the Bosnian life of Andric's youth. In "The Tale of the
Vizier's Elephant" Andric describes the "most unbelievable" of
these stories as being the ones "which tell you most about the place
and the people". In other words, Andric grew up with the idea that
to be successful, indeed to be "true" in the sense of containing
meaning, a story need not necessarily be "believable" in any
accepted sense. In the same passage, Andric describes the tales of
Bosnia as "Oriental lies which the Turkish proverb maintains are
'truer than any truth'". The notion of "truthfulness" in art is, then,
one which engaged Andric's attention from the first. It is involved in
considerations both of content and of the nature of the artistic
process. For any human experience, whether factual or purely
imaginative, once it has been given form, acquires a "reality" apart
from material existence and "superior" to it in so far as it continues
to have relevance in many different circumstances. From one
perspective, experience becomes "real" only when it is given shape
and significance by being recorded in some form.
This idea is implicit in much of Andric's work. One form it takes
is the need for characters to give the experience they cannot
otherwise control a formula which will not explain it, but will at least
give it shape, some reality outside themselves. The story "The
People of Osatica" is based on the need for public recognition of an
act before it may be seen as real. Because of general denial, the main
character comes to doubt whether his one moment of courage, the
most intense experience of his life, ever actually occurred. The
setting of the story reinforces its atmosphere of ambiguity.
"Facts", "truth", "reality" are then highly questionable but
powerful imaginative concepts in the work of Andric. A passage in
Signs by the Roadside expresses his attitude clearly:
Conclusion 237
A fact. What is that? The furthest point we can see, the limit of
our human understanding. And nothing more. What we call a fact
is merely an imaginary point on the edge of our field of vision,
with which we seek to affirm and confine reality and our exist-
ence.1
Facts and surface reality may be misleading or simply devoid of

meaning. Andric's work is dedicated to a search, not for any truth
which could be expressed in ordinary speech, but for an understand-
ing of the ways in which perceptions may be seen as "true" or the
circumstances in which a "meaning" may be felt to be revealed.
We may then perhaps identify four related areas inherited from

Andric's cultural background. The first would be a fascination with
the discrepancy between material existence and the life of the mind,
the imagination. The oral tradition, and particularly the heroic
songs, are clearly not concerned with the facts of day-to-day life, but
with the human need for order and meaning. In The Bridge on the
Drina the hero Alija -Derzelez is worshiped by the Moslem boys in
Visegrad and is a source of wonder and inspiration for the adults who
believe in his return to earth in time of need. This belief, expressing
a deeply-rooted need for heroes and leadership, can take on a literal
reality, as can be seen in an incident in the First World War in which
Serbian soldiers defied their officer's order not to attack a town and
justified their action by maintaining that they had been led on by the
great folk hero Prince Marko on his piebald horse. There is of course
little connection between the historical figure of Marko and his
resonance in the popular mind. In Andric's story of Alija -Derzelez,
this discrepancy is brought vividly alive. He himself is incapable of
inspiring the legends about him; they have become attached to him,
more or less arbitrarily, from outside. Similarly, in The Bridge on the
Drina the character of Radisav, who sabotages the building of the
bridge, becomes a complex study of a man engaged in blind but
sublime subversive activities. He is entirely dedicated and prepared
to sacrifice his life for his cause. His protest is misguided in that
nothing can prevent the building of the bridge, which will bring
prosperity and many benefits to his native town. The exact nature of
Radisav's cause is forgotten by later generations, but he is remem-
bered and revered as a hero because of his defiance. His example
will be recalled whenever the community requires exceptional
courage, and his memory contributes to the townspeople's own sense
of self-respect. In both these cases, then, there is an obvious
discrepancy between what these men were in their historical cir-
cumstances and the way they survive in the minds of the people.
The second area is closely related to this, and concerns Andric's
interest in points of contact between historical events and the way
they are received and interpreted. For example, the French and
Austrian consuls and the Turkish Vizier in Travnik are seen in
Bosnian Story to react in different ways to the same events. More
particularly, the consuls are seen actively "processing" these events
in their conversations with others, their official reports and private
writings. It is clear that Andric himself lived through a period of
comprehensive official mythologization of recent history, and his age
abounds in examples of the "processing" of history on both a public
and an individual level.
This is perhaps why many instances of the exploitation of myth
and legend in history are of such significance in Andric's work. One
of the clearest is the way Radisav in The Bridge on the Drina is able to
make use of the existence of a theme from South Slav traditional oral
poetry to account for his sabotage of the building of the bridge. The
usefulness of such a legend to a man engaged in subversion can be
clearly seen from the fact that his explanation is readily accepted by
the townspeople, who need not believe it to be literally true. A
similar level of irrational belief must have been responsible for the
Serbian soldiers' vision of Prince Marko and their defiance of orders
in his name. The existence of this kind of belief is impossible for the
authorities to counteract, as it cannot be argued or explained away.
By the same token, of course, the "reality" of generally accepted
myths may be exploited by those in authority, just as new "myths"
may be invented.
The third area of interest is the stylization of the world of art,
which marks it off clearly from the material world. In his essay on
art, "Conversation with Goya", Andric writes:
We create forms, like a second order of nature, we arrest youth,

we retain a glance which in "nature" would have changed or
Conclusion 239
vanished a moment later, we seize and separate lightning move-
ments which no one would ever have seen and we leave them with
their mysterious meaning to the eyes of future generations. Not
only that - we reinforce each of these movements and glances by a
line or a tone. This is not exaggerated or deceitful and it does not
alter fundamentally what we show, but lives alongside it like an
imperceptible but constant proof that this object has been re-
created to a more enduring, more significant life, and that this
miracle has occurred within us, ourselves.2
The world of art is, then, a separate order of reality, and any
discussion of the "truth" of art must first clearly acknowledge its
artificiality. Andric pursues this idea in the story "Panorama". The
image of the world of art used here, a crude mechanical device,
contains no mystery. There is no question of illusion, the photo-
graphs do not evoke mysterious worlds of make-believe; on the
contrary: they are real places. And yet, seated in front of them, the
child lives fully in the world of his imagination. When he emerges,
the real streets of Sarajevo seem to him like a "bad dream". Nor does
the child people these pictures with wild and impossible adventures;
he relates them closely to his own experience, so that his delight is
firmly rooted in his own control of the stories he creates and his
involvement in them. The nature of the image used for this
reflection on the world of the imagination is suggestive. Although
the events and experiences the narrator describes as occurring to the
characters in his mind are not radically different from those of
people in life, on the one hand they are contained within the
framework of the photograph and thereby lent a formal completion,
and on the other the artificiality is never lost from view; there is
never any confusion between the two worlds. The framework of the
photographs and the Panorama, then, maintains the observer's
awareness that this is a world not radically different from the one we
live in, not superior or inferior, but separate, distinguishable by the
fact that it exists in the mind. It is, in other words an image which
suggests awareness of its own artificiality, which does in fact give it a
kind of mystery, inviting one to think not only of the story's content,
but also of the reason for a man's wishing to tell it.
Closely connected with this idea is the sense of excitement a work
of art may arouse. Andric has described his own excitement as a
child at the mere sight of a book, regardless of what its content might
be. This emotion occurs again in Devil's Yard, when Brother Petar
awakes to see a book beside him: "A strong, warm feeling of joy ran
through his whole body." This excitement stems partly from the fact
that the work of art is outside time, fixed in an enduring frame, and
partly from the idea that a work of art may contain some of the
meaning men seek in vain in their daily lives. To return to the heroic
songs, which have influenced Andric both directly and uncon-
sciously: they contain a sense of their endurance through time, their
many separate performances, the layers of meaning they have
acquired. This gives them a density which communicates, apart
from the sense of the individual song, a suggestion of the importance
they have for the singers and audience alike. There is a sense of
magic about the ritual performance of the heroic songs. If they have
survived their reception by numerous different audiences, this must
be because in all their various transformations, they retain a hint of
that "truth", found in legend and fairy-tale, which communciates
most about the nature of human existence. The ritualized form of
the performance, like the physical presence of the book, creates a
sense of anticipation that the song may contain a message of
importance within its clear confines and stylized form.
These are features of Andric's work inherited from his cultural

background, and they are reflected in his enduring interest in the
points of contact and divergence between the material world and that
of the imagination. We can look at some of these ideas in their
collective manifestation in myth and legend, and in individual
obsessions and illusions.
Andric does not make a clear distinction between the concepts of
"legend" and "myth". In "Conversation with Goya" he refers to the
"few fundamental legends of humanity". In Devil's Yard he speaks
of the ancient "story" of the rivalry of two brothers. It is at the level
of irrational recognition of a familiar and valid pattern, and the
capacity of the individual to experience the truth they contain as part
of himself, that these stories acquire the value of myth. This can
perhaps be seen as the remotest stage, when the communicative
validity of the story has been assured by time. Andric is concerned
Conclusion 241
with the starting point of the legend, its point of contact with
day-to-day reality.
While legends are in the main attached to individuals from the
outside, as we have seen, the character of Omer Pasha Latas offers
an example of a man who deliberately sets out to create a legend
about himself. Omer is described as someone who never "really"
lived, because his life and behaviour were all in the service of an
image of himself. The child Mico Latas, like many other children, is
acutely aware of the discrepancy between the mundane demands of
his everyday life and the great life of adventure which he feels it
"ought" to be. For him the life he is forced to live is unreal,
meaningless; he feels compelled to escape from it, in search of that
other "true" life elsewhere. As a young child, he is already prepared
to deny his surroundings in favour of a fiction. By simply giving his
cows different, grander names, he makes them into something more
than they are. His dream of heroic action is embodied in a song
whose outcome depends on treason. Unlike most other children
Mico Latas is able, at least apparently, to realize his dream. He
changes his destined way of life absolutely, changing his nationality
and his religion and taking a name which has no connection with his
former life, but which comes to spread fear throughout the Ottoman
world. From one point of view, Omer Pasha's life can be seen as
being lived in terms of an illusion of a superior "reality" which he
pursues to the exclusion of all contact with actuality. He requires
constant confirmation of the impression he makes on others, for he
has lost touch with any sense of himself apart from that impression.
He adapts his facial expression and tone of voice to the needs of each
situation as he perceives them, making himself quite unpredictable
and untrustworthy, and at the same time insecure if the reaction he
provokes in others is not what he expects or intends. The elusiveness
of the "real" Omer Pasha is, however, of consequence only in
encounters between him and another individual. The power he
wields over others publicly is real enough. This power is in the
nature of things transient, and his endeavour to have it immortalized
in a painting which would continue to inspire future generations
with awe is seen even by Omer himself to be illusory. The "reality"
of his power is further undermined in the scene in which he is
described as entering Sarajevo with his magnficent retinue. The awe
the townspeople experience soon wears off in the manner of the
image which dominates this novel, that of alcoholic intoxication.
Nevertheless, within these limits and with the connivance of the
people, Omer's power has "reality" and he is able to build a legend
about himself in his lifetime. There is a crucial distinction in
Andric's work, however, between this "negative" legend, which
inspires fear, and a "positive" legend such as the stories told about
the naive, blustering Alija, which may inspire real heroism on many
levels.
There are numerous examples in Andric's work of individuals
who are subject to obsessions and illusions of various kinds. Omer
Pasha's invention of an identity for himself and projection of it on to
others is an extreme example, but his endeavour is echoed in milder
form in many other characters. In fact, virtually all Andric's
characters who are given to introspection are beset by a sense of the
elusive quality of their own identity and the discrepancy between
their idea of themselves and the world around them, or the way they
are perceived by others. The only characters who avoid this sense of
insecurity and unease are those who are wholeheartedly involved in
activities outside themselves. These may be characters with a clearly
defined role which seems fully to express their personality, such as
Madame Daville in Bosnian Story, absorbed in domestic life, or the
Franciscan doctor Brother Luka, similarly absorbed in identifying
and tapping the positive forces of health and recovery. The existence
of these fully "positive" characters, in fact, distinguishes Andric's
fiction from much twentieth-century writing.
In the early stories, an obsession which dominates a character's
life is seen to be the result of circumstances, of experiences too
shocking or painful to be assimilated. In many stories Andric
explores the impact of such experience on children, showing them to
be particularly vulnerable to the strong irrational currents of human
existence. The child has not matured emotionally to the point where
he can make sense of these currents by accepting patterns laid down
by adults. The balanced adult will simply ignore information which
does not fit into the patterns he expects, while the child is susceptible
to all the conflicting aspects of reality, and cannot reconcile them. As
long as the child's experiences are not too extreme, he will grow into
such a balanced adult. However, if an adult is subjected to experi-
Conclusion 243
ences too extreme to be assimilated, the balance of his or her mind
will be upset, dominated by one aspect of reality which blocks out all
else. It is typical of the ambiguity of Andric's artistic world that
these characters - such as Mustafa the Hungarian, Mara the
concubine, the Priest Vujadin, Anika, and others - should represent
at once a distorted view of reality and at the same time a "privileged"
clarity of vision which allows them insight into some fundamental
"truth".
Andric is particularly interested in the arbitrary but rigid line
drawn by society between "sanity" and "madness". One character's
behaviour may be inexplicable to the outside world because of a
failure to acknowledge the reality of psychological pressures which
cannot be externally observed but which can be more devastating in
their effect than any material circumstances. This is the theme of
several of Andric's later stories. One of the main impulses behind his
investigation of this theme must have been his experience of the
sudden eruption of irrational behaviour through the "civilized"
exterior of social life in both the world wars. For such behaviour to
be possible, it must be assumed that the rational basis of social life is
highly questionable. The one developed image of social organization
in Andric's work is the world of the prison in Devil's Yard, ordered
by the arbitrary rule of the governor, Karagoz. There is no
identifiable pattern to his behaviour, and yet it is dictated by his own
desperate search for some kind of order.
Andric, then, explores the tenuous hold of individuals on notions
of rationality and sanity in order to account for private experience of
the human condition and, by extension, to explore the irrational
basis of all forms of social organization.
The writer emphasizes the elusive and arbitrary nature of the
dividing line people feel they must place between notions of "fact"
and "fantasy", "reality" and "illusion" by refusing to make such
distinctions. The world of the mind, fluctuations of mood, are as
"real" as any other aspect of human experience. Thus in "Summer
Holiday in the South" the "evaporation" of the main character is
described in matter-of-fact terms. A more elaborate symbol is to be
found in the story "Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not". Jelena
stands for a complex of ideas of beauty, joy, companionship,
tenderness and perfect peace of mind. She appears to the narrator
only on sun-filled days and is often associated with the anticipation,
excitement and sense of altered perspective of travel:
Above all the vision is connected with the sun and its progress. (I
call it a "vision" because of you to whom I am relating this, for
myself it would be both comic and insulting to call what is my
greatest reality by that name, which, in fact, means nothing.)3
Jelena's appearances in the story that bears her name in no way
interrupt the narrative; they are as "real" as the suitcases in the
narrator's hotel room or the shop filled with people in which he sees
her paying the cashier.
She is, then, more real than reality, a symbol of the state of elation
- "zanos" - which is a marked feature of many of Andric's
characters. This "zanos" is a complex concept. It may be either
positive, as in "Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not", or negative, as
in the amoral illusory world of Omer Pasha Latas. In its negative
form, this "elation" or "state of being carried away" is often a
collective emotion. It is seen, for instance, to overwhelm the people
of Travnik like an irresistible organic force. This is the kind of
collective madness manifested in riot and war. In Omer Pasha Latas
the state is described in terms of "intoxication". Negative "zanos"
is narcissistic, barren, destructive, while its positive manifestation
is creative. The concept conveys at the same time an absolutely
unattainable illusion - such as the capacity to become a part of
the sea air, or a vision of perfect beauty - and an instant of vivid
perception. It is the moment when a character may perceive with
absolute clarity the nature of his relationship with the Almighty,
or the "true" nature of human existence. But what is crucial and
characteristic of the ambiguous quality of Andric's work is that this
moment of perception, which plays such a central role in his writing,
should be seen as either essentially illusory or fundamentally
true according to the perspective of the observer. The conclusion
must be that it is both., simultaneously. That is, any perception of
"truth" is illusory, and at the same time it is "true" if it contains
meaning.
It is just such provisional truth, an irrational recognition of
meaning, which may be conveyed by art.
The notion of a coincidence of ideas in the moment of elation is
Conclusion 245
crucial. At such a moment there is no attempt at analysis or
understanding. The moment is one of intuition, harmony and the
reconciliation of opposites. These are the elements involved also in
moments of artistic truth. For a work of art to communicate, as in
the case of myth, there must be an act of recognition, a leap of the
imagination which involves both the identification of the artist with
his material and that of the audience with both. A vivid image of this
temporary identity of creator, material and audience in the moment
of creation is provided, of course, by the performance of traditional
oral literature with which Andric was so familiar.
The absolute involvement of the artist in his material is an idea
which runs through several of Andric's works. The House On Its
Own is an illustration of the activity of story-telling in a reflective
framework in which the narrator describes the necessity of creating
in himself a vacuum into which characters and situations will come
unbidden. The terms in which the right state of mind are described
are reminiscent of the passive concentration which characterizes the
practice of meditation. The problem of the relationship between
"fact" and "fantasy" is unequivocally solved in this introduction in
the artist's acknowledgement of the superiority of the world of the
imagination.
Devil's Yard can similarly be read as a reflection on the artistic
process, exploring the extent to which "I" can and should be
"another", and particularly the circumstances in which artist and
audience become identical with "another" in mythic recognition and
in art.
The identification of the audience with the material must, ulti-
mately, remain an act of faith, but Andric has written at length not
about his own work, but about the process of writing in general. He
makes much of the ultimate mystery of the process, the idea that one
can never really know what makes a sentence or a detail ring true and
affect all the writing around it, lifting it out of the everyday and into
a different order of conviction. He employs similar language in his
description of the craftsman, who carries, as we have seen, associa-
tions with Rade, the Master-Builder of the heroic songs. The
craftsman is not subject to any doubt about the definition of "truth"
and "illusion", "fact" and "fantasy". He is completely involved in
his activity as he works.
The craftsman and the artist are, however, rarely privileged
beings. Their sense of harmonious involvement in their work, and
their consequent creative elation, are a gift. The positive form of
elation is bestowed on those committed to creative action outside
themselves. As Andric's work progresses, his characters are seen as
not content to be the passive subjects of sudden visitations of elation.
Increasingly, they are driven to seek such moments consciously.
Inevitably, since this search springs from a self-centred, narcissistic
need, it is doomed. The House On Its Own is peopled with characters
whose lives are framed more or less entirely in illusion. The illusion
these characters pursue in one way or another - and frequently, as in
Omer Pasha Latas, through recourse to alcohol - is perceived as
escape. By definition it implies a sense of constraint which drives
them to seek a "way out":
The first sips of alcohol and the first notes of music tell them that
these hills around the city are not so insurmountable or so
impenetrable as they appear even on the most beautiful sunny
day, and particularly in the evening when the shadows lengthen
and the mists descend. You are surprised that you never noticed it
before. You see clearly: flower-lined roads lead out of Sarajevo in
all directions, and every step on them is a new source of joy
because it is all leading you out of this land and this town. Where
to? Anywhere, only somewhere into a land of order and light,
intelligible actions and open, human words. And where is that?
Where is there such a land? If you think for a moment and stop to
remember, you realize that there is no such land, there cannot be.
And yet, it exists. It is created by this life among these mountains,
under these conditions. It is that land which - is not this one.4
The striving expressed in this passage is self-centred and essen-
tially short-lived. It is barren, leading nowhere other than to
individual disappointment and resentment when the moment passes.
Yet it is superficially similar to its mirror-image of positive release.
What is crucial is the motivation behind the striving, whether it is
selfish or contains the idea of the insignificance of the individual, his
absorption into something beyond himself.
One of the images which has been particularly fruitful in Andric's
work is that of the prison. This is the image, of course, which shapes
Conclusion 247
his most concentrated work, Devil's Yard. It is a simplification to
suggest that Andric sees the world as a prison from which the
individual must yearn to escape. Such Neo-Romantic notions were
indeed present in his earliest works. The idea of captivity and
constraint elaborated in Devil's Yard and elsewhere is more complex.
At its centre, it implies the notion of escape which is embodied in
Andric's opposing image of the bridge.
A passage from the "essay" entitled "Bridges" expresses the idea
with characteristic force:
Finally, everything which expresses this life of ours - thoughts,
endeavours, glances, smiles, words, sighs - all of it is striving
towards another shore, to which it is directed as to its aim. All of it
has something to overcome and to bridge: disorder, death or
meaninglessness. For, everything is a transition, a bridge, the
ends of which are lost in nothingness, beside which all earthly
bridges are merely children's toys, pale symbols. And all our hope
lies on the other side.5
This "other side" should not be thought of as another "world",
but simply as "what is not this". That is to say, what is not fear,
pain, anxiety, guilt, unanswered and unanswerable questions, a
sense of incompleteness which seeks constantly to be resolved.
Art may temporarily convey the satisfaction of a sense of com-
pleteness, and offer existence a "meaning" which cannot otherwise
be found in human experience. Such an apparent resolution is of
course illusory. But it can communicate a sense of excitement and
hope, and can appear to hold a mysterious power. In his work
Andric never loses sight of this sense of excitement and he strives to
evoke a similar kind of excitement in his reader, not by any external
comment but by containing the mystery within the material of the
work itself, and by reminding the reader always of the artificiality of
the medium.
Apart from the central image of the bridge, the passage quoted
above contains the idea that all the various manifestations of life
embody and express something more comprehensive than them-
selves. Andric's works are precisely documented, detailed and
concrete. He avoids analysis and abstraction at all costs. He makes
full use of his native Bosnia and the details of its history to convey a
wealth of ideas which derive their strength from the complexity of
their context. Thus, for example, Andric writes most extensively of
the period of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. This enables him
to convey ideas about the vanity of earthly power, arbitrary rule and
oppression, without having to make any direct statement. The clash
of cultures at the centre of his work is similarly fruitful of ideas
without external comment. The psychological and emotional states
of Andric's characters are described in terms of their experience of
the material world. Their fears are not abstract, they spring from the
situations in which they find themselves and become an integral part
of their perception of the behaviour of others. Similarly, in all
Andric's accounts of confrontation of various kinds, the power and
vulnerability of the respective characters are conveyed in terms of
their physical attributes, their movements and gestures.
Andric's narrative procedure suggests that the universal implica-
tions of a scene or a portrait are "trapped", "imprisoned" within the
concrete details of the material world, but that they may be released
through art. The theme of the exile or imprisonment of ideas recurs
in Andric's work, and is most explicitly treated in "Conversation
with Goya" and "The Bridge on the Zepa".
No one can escape the immutable laws of the world in which we
are irrevocably confined, and yet this world itself creates the idea of
its opposite, to which we strive constantly, seeking to bridge the gulf
between them. It is clear from the passage quoted above that the idea
of freedom is conditioned by the constraints imposed by human
existence and produced by the imagination. This provides an
adequate image of the creative freedom of the artist whose ideas are
bound within the material world and conditioned by it.
Devil's Yard is an embodiment of this idea: creative story-telling in
a prison. The form builds up an impression of taut, controlled
response to deliberate pressure which finds its release at its physical
centre, a release which is highly ambiguous. The central character in
this work "becomes" the historical figure of Gem, the younger son of
Sultan Bayazid, whose life he has been studying. He begins to tell
Gem's story in the first person. This identification illustrates the vital
and mysterious "leap of the imagination" involved in the creation of
works of art and the response of their audience.
It is that recognition of a familiar or meaningful pattern that
Conclusion 249
characterizes legend, and it offers an illustration of "mythic
identification". The central idea is not in fact a statement but a
question in the form of an exclamation about the nature of the
concept "I". Kamil is asked by his interrogators to account for his
use of the word "I" in speaking of the suspect character of the
sixteenth-century pretender. But identity is essentially elusive,
depending to a great extent on other people's interpretation of an
individual's words. No man can give a full and entirely truthful
account of himself. He lives in a world of formlessness, flux and
illusion. The only way he may begin to understand his own situation
and haltingly express it to others is by recognizing similarities with
the situation of other human beings through time and space.
Throughout his work, Andric undermines anything that appears
to be an unequivocal statement by emphasizing the relativity of all
things, the vital importance of perspective. The same town may be
seen to be both on a hill and in a hollow. Facts are an illusion, and
the illusions by which men live their lives are no less "real" than so-
called "facts". Devil's Yard makes its central observation in
parenthesis at the core of an intricately structured work. This may
and does appear to give it strength. But Andric is careful to avoid
giving the work any appearance of being an absolute statement. In
many of his works he will have the story told through a second
narrator, reducing the emphasis on the tale itself by focusing also on
its teller. Or he will end a story not with the death of the protagonist
but with the new individual who comes to take his or her place in the
community. In Devil's Yard the central story of the pretender Gem is
placed in a series of interlocking frames, each representing a
different narrator.
The outermost frame is the clearly defined, formal one of the
window of a monastery cell through which a young monk is looking at
the grave of Brother Petar, who told such wonderful tales of his
imprisonment in Devil's Yard in Istanbul. Snow is falling steadily and
covering the freshly-dug earth and the path made by the funeral party.
In the endless white and shapeless emptiness which represents the
passing of time in this outer frame, all that has survived is the story
of a story in the mind of a man. In its categorical statement - "And
this is the end. There is nothing else" - the epilogue conveys to us
the importance, as well as the fragility, of that survival.
Notes
Chapter 1 Introduction
1 Robert Munro, Rambles and Studies in Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Dalmatia (Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1895), p. 14.
2 Arthur Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot
(Longman, London, 1876), pp. 240-1.
3 Quoted by Vasko Ivanovic, Pitanja nece biti (Politika
14.iii.1975).
4 Razgovor sa Gojom (Sabrana dela, Belgrade 1981, vol. 12;
Istorija i legenda, pp. 24-5). All references are to this edition of
the collected works.
5 "O prici i pricanju" (vol.12; Istorija i legenda, pp. 68-70).
6 "U cutanju je sigurnost".
7 "Most na Zepi" (vol.6; Zdf, pp. 192-3).
8 Kazivanja o Andricu, ed. Radovan Popovic (Sloboda, Belgrade,
1976), p. 171.
9 "Ledenjak, kojem su devet desetina stalno u mraku."
10 Kazivanja o Andricu, p. 76.
11 Quoted by Stevan Stanic, Borba, 7.x. 1972.
12 Staze, volume 10 of collected works, pp. 17-19.
13 Quoted by Radovan Popovic, "Zivotopis", Delatnost i dokumenti
(Zaduzbina Ive Andrica u Beogradu, 1980), pp. 67-8.
14 "To si ti napisao? Sta ti to treba?". Quoted by Gvozden Jovanic,
Kazivanja o Andricu, p. 61.
15 Popovic, op. cit., p. 71.
16 Hrvatska mlada lirika (ed. Ljubo Wiesner, Zagreb, 1914),
p. 147.
17 Quoted by Miroslav Karaulac, Rani Andric (Prosveta & Svjet-
lost, Belgrade and Sarajevo, 1980), p. 72.
18 Karaulac, op. cit., p. 75.
Notes 251
19 Ibid., p. 75.
20 Ibid., p. 75.
21 Popovic, op. tit., p. 73.
22 -Derzelez u hanu (Knjizevni jug, Zagreb, no.3, 1918, pp. 83-7).
24 Popovic, op. a'f., p. 74.
25 Ibid., p. 74.
26 Knjizevni jug, no. 8, 1919, p. 367.
27 Karaulac, op. cit., pp. 98-9.; Popovic, op. cit., p. 76.
30 Znakovi pored puta, p. 103.
31 Ibid., p. 547.
33 Ibid.
34 7hW., p. 83.
35 Ibid., p. 85.
35 Ibid., p. 85.
36 Ibid., p. 87.
37 Ibid., p.94.
39 Popovic, o/>. cir., pp. 97-8.
40 "Pogledao sam se od glave do pete i video da spasavam samo
sebe i svoj 'iberziger' . . . "
41 Popovic, op. cit., pp. 98-9.
44 Ibid., p. 118.
46 "Kako sam ulazio u svet knjige i knjizevnosti", vol. 10, p. 36.
47 Ibid., p. 37.
48 Ibid., pp. 42-3.
49 Na Drini cuprija (vol. 1), p. 284.
50 Quoted by Adamovic, Kazivanja o Andricu, p. 15.
51 Milan Budmir, Ivo Andric i antika, Ivo Andric, special publica-
tions vol. 1 (Institut za teoriju knjizevnosti i umetnosti, Bel-
grade, 1962), pp. 235-41; Branimir Zivojinovic: Ivo Andric i
nemacka knjizevnost, (ibid.), pp. 243-65; Olga Moskovljevic:
Andric i skandinavske knjizevnosti (ibid.}, pp. 301-5; Radoslav
Josimovic: Andric i Francuska (ibid.}, pp. 307-16; Eros Sekvi:
Andric, Italija i Italijani (ibid.}, pp. 287-300.
52 Quoted by D. Adamovic, "Nenapravljeni intervju sa
Andricem", NIN, 29.X.1961, p. 3.
53 Quoted by D. Adamovic, Kazivanja o Andricu, pp. 12-16.
54 Na Drini cuprija, pp. 290-1.
55 Pijemont, 1915, in Predrag Palavestra, Knjizevnost mlade Bosne
(Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1965), vol. II, p. 249.
56 Na Drini cuprija, pp. 266-8.
58 'TricaizJapana",Afcm*n(vol.ll), pp. 104-6.
59 Quoted by Vasko Ivanovic, op. cit.
60 "Vino", Staze, lica, predeli (vol. 10), p. 20.
61 "Pesnik Ivo Andric govori nasim citaocima", Ideje, 17.xi. 1934,
p. 2.
Chapter 2 Verse
1 Ex Ponto (vol. 11), p. 78.
2 Adamovic, op. cit.
3 Ex Ponto, published by Knjizevni jug (Zagreb, 1918), p. 9.
4 Ex Ponto (vol. 11), p. 32.
5 Ibid., p. 9.
6 Ibid., p. 18.
7 Ibid., p. 9.
8 Ibid., p. 43.
9 Ibid., p. 43.
10 Ibid., p. 68.
11 Ibid., p. 47.
12 Ibid., p. 28.
13 Ibid., pp. 13-14.
14 Ibid., p. 20.
15 Ibid., p. 79.
16 Nemiri(vol 11), p. 88.
17 Ibid., p.U2.
18 Ibid., pp. 109-10.
19 Ibid., p. 111.
Notes 253
20 Ibid., p. 137.
21 Ibid., p. 215.
22 Ibid., p. 221.
23 Ibid., p. 241.
24 /iw/., p. 257.
ChapterS Short Stories

1 "Put AlijeDerzeleza", Znakovi (vol. 8), pp. 9-34. The first part
of the trilogy, "Derzelez u harm" (Derzelez at the Inn) appeared
first in Knjizevnijug, Zagreb, no. 3, 1918, pp. 83-7; "Derzelez
na putu" (Derzelez on the Road) the following year. The
compete story was first published in Belgrade, in 1920.
2 "Put AlijeDerzeleza", p. 10.
3 Ibid., p. 11.
4 Ibid., pp. 10-11.
5 Ibid., p.W.
5 Ibid., p. 30.
6 "Mustafa Madzar" (first published 1923), Nemirna godina
(vol.5), pp. 23-40.
7 Ibid., pp. 28-9.
8 "Za logoravanja" (1922). Nemirna godina, pp. 9-22.
9 "Trup" (1937), Zed (vol. 6), pp. 105-17.
10 Ibid., p. 108.
11 /&/., p. 111.
12 Ibid., p. 107.
13 Ibid., p. 112.
14 7ta*.,p. 116.
15 "Mara milosnica" (1926), Jelena, zena -koje nema (vol. 7),
pp. 91-176.
16 Ibid., p. 97.
17 "Anikina vremena" (1931), Jelena, zena koje nema, pp. 9-90.
18 Ibid., p. 73.
19 "Smrt u Sinanovoj tekiji" (1924), Zed (vol. 6), pp. 199-211.
20 Ibid., p. 206.
21 "U musafirhani" (1923), ZeS, pp. 9-20.
22 Ibid., p. 11.
23 Ibid., p. 19.
24 "Proba" (1954), 2e&, pp. 73-104; p. 93.
25 "Rod kazana" (1930), ZeS, pp. 53-94.
26 Ibid., p. 54.
27 Ibid., p. 58.v
28 "Corkan i Svabica" (1921), Jelena, zena koje nema (vol. 7),
pp. 185-201.
29 "Mila i Prelac" (1924), Deca (vol. 9), pp. 25-119.
30 Ibid., p. 30.
31 Ibid., p. 32.
32 "Cudo u Olovu" (1926). Zed~ (vol. 6), pp. 165-73).
33 "Jelena, zena koje nema" (1934) (vol. 7), pp. 245-79.
34 Ex Ponto (vol. 11), p. 63.
35 "Rzavski bregovi" (1924), Zet (vol. 6), pp. 153-66.
36 "Most na Zepi" (1925), Zed, pp. 185-94.
37 "Prica o kmetu Simanu" (1948), Znakovi (vol. 8), pp. 143-70.
38 "Zeko" (1948), Nemirna godina (vol. 5), pp. 225-344.
39 "Bife Titanik"' (1950), Nemirna godina, pp. 189-224.
40 Ibid., p. 189.
41 Ibid., p. 205.
42 Ibid., p. 205.
43 "Pismo iz 1920. godine" (1946), Deca (vol. 9), pp. 171-86.
44 Ibid., p. 181.
45 Ibid., pp. 182-3.
46 Ibid., pp. 184-5.
47 "Zlostavljanje" (1946), Znakovi (vol. 8), pp. 111-42.
48 Ibid., p. 111.
49 Ibid., p. 112.
50 Ibid., p. 113.
51 Ibid., p. 114.
52 Ibid., p. 114.
53 Ibid., pp. 115-16.
54 Ibid., p. 119.
55 Ibid., p. 130.
56 Ibid., p. 140.
57 "Red" (1954), Znakovi (vol. 8), pp. 81-8.
58 "Osaticani" (1958), Znakovi, pp. 289-328.
59 Ibid., pp. 290-1.
60 Ibid., p. 298
Notes 255
61 "U zavadi sa svetom" (1958), Deca (vol. 9), pp. 17-24.
62 Ibid., p. 17.
63 "Panorama" (1958), Deca, pp. 119-49.
64 7foW.,p. 122.
65 /ftu/. p. 123.
66 Ibid., p. 125.
67 Ibid., p. 126.
68 Ibid., p. 133.
69 /too1., p. 137.
70 Ibid., p. 138.
71 Ibid., p. 149.
72 "Letovanje na jugu" (1959) Zed" (vol. 6), pp. 247-256.
73 Ibid., p. 248.
74 Ibid., p. 253.
75 "Zena od slonove kosti" (1922), Jelena, zena koje nema (vol. 7),
pp. 233-8.
76 "Aska i vuk" (1953), Deca (vol. 9), pp. 187-96.
77 Ibid., p. 193.
78 "Prica o vezirovom slonu" (1947), Nemirna godina (vol. 5),
pp. 41-90.
79 Ibid., p. 41.
80 Ibid., p. 72.
82 Kuca na osami (1976), (vol. 14).
83 "Lica" (1960), Kuca na osami, pp. 226-33.
84 Ibid., p. 226.
85 Kuca na osami, p. 10.
86 Ibid., p. 10.
87 Ibid., pp. 10-11.
88 Ibid., pp. 11-12.
89 "Baron", /Cwca na osami, p. 39.
90 Ibid., p. 38.
91 7foW., p. 43.
92 Kuca na osami, p. 80.
93 "Robinja", Kuca na osami, p. 92.
94 "Bonvalpasa", Kuca na osami, p. 17.
95 "Alipasa", Kuca na osami, p. 23.
96 Ibid., p. 32.
97 "Cirkus", Kuca na osami, p. 23.
96 Ibid., p. 32.
97 "Cirkus", Kuca na osami, pp. 55-76.
98 Ibid., p. 59.
99 Ibid., p. 61.
100 Ibid., p. 69.
101 "Geometar i Julka", Kuca na osami, p. 47.
102 "Prica", Kuca na osami, pp. 81-90.
103 Ibid., p. 81.
104 Ibid., p. 82.
105 Ibid., p. 86.
Chapter 4 The Novels

1 Na Drini cuprija (Belgrade, 1945). Collected works, vol. 1.
2 Omerpasa Latas (Belgrade, 1976). Vol. 15.
3 "Razgovor sa Gojom", Istorija i legenda (vol. 12), p. 17.
4 Travnicka hronika (Belgrade, 1945). Vol. 2.
5 Gospofaca (Belgrade, 1945). Vol. 3.
6 Na Drini cuprija, p. 10.
7 Ibid., p. 11.
8 Ibid., p. 12.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 27.
11 Ibid., p. 25.
12 Ibid., p. 123.
13 Ibid., p. 133.
14 Ibid., p. 86.
15 Ibid., p. 86.
16 /taf.,p. 89.
17 Ibid., p. 94.
18 Ibid., pp. 146-7.
19 7hW., pp. 257-8.
20 Ibid., p. 165.
21 Ibid., p. 173.
22 Ibid., pp. 113-14.
23 /fcu/., p. 94.
24 Ibid., p. 396.
25 For details of the documents used see Ante Kadic, "The French
Notes 257
in 'The Chronicle of Travnik' ('Bosnian Story')" in From
Croatian Renaissance to Yugoslav Socialism (Mouton, The
Hague, 1969), pp. 154-91.
26 Travnicka hronika, p. 13.
27 Ibid., p. 516.
28 Ibid., p. 152.
29 "An ancient primeval lament".
30 Ibid., p. 173.
31 Ibid., p. 31.
32 Ibid., p. 169.
33 Ibid., p. 446.
34 Ibid., p. 37.
35 Ibid., p. 37.
36 Ibid., pp. 225-6.
37 Ibid., p. 285.
38 Ibid., p. 512.
39 Ibid., p. 96.
40 Ibid., p. 17.
41 7foW.,p. 113.
42 Ibid., p. 114.
43 7Wd., p. 78.
44 Ibid., p. 496.
45 Ibid., p. 109.
46 Ibid., pp. 114-15.
47 7te/.,p. 159.
48 Ibid., p. 26.
49 Ibid., pp. 43-4.
50 7WJ., pp. 279-80.
51 Ibid., pp. 314-17.
52 Ibid., p. 503.
53 Ibid., p. 505.
54 Ibid., pp. 261-2.
55 Ibid., pp. 317-18.
56 Gospoitica, p. 62.
57 Ibid., pp. 99-100.
58 7hW.,p. 17.
59 7hW., p. 33.
60 7fcu/., p. 229.
61 Ibid., p. 18.
62 Ibid., p. 20.
63 Ibid., p. 18.
64 7ta?.,p. 19.
65 Ibid., p. 20.
66 Ibid., p. 35.
67 7fod.,pp. 79-80.
68 Ibid., p. 241.
69 Omerpasa Latas, vol. 15 (Belgrade, 1977).
70 "Mladic u povorci" (Zivot, Sarajevo, no. 17, 1954).
71 Omerpasa Latas, p. 16.
72 Ibid., p. 40.
73 Ibid., p. 45.
74 Ibid., p. 78.
75 Ibid., pp. 50-1.
76 Ibid., pp. 152-3.
77 Ibid., p. 153.
78 7Zm*.,p. 278.
79 Ibid., p. 279.
80 7fcuf.,p. 103.
81 Ibid., p. 164.
82 Ibid., pp. 164-5.
83 Ibid., p. 253.
84 76u/., p. 253.
85 Ibid., p. 141.
86 Ibid., p. 170.
87 7Wd.,p. 273.
88 Ibid., p. 290.
89 76u/.,p. 289.
90 Ibid., p. 290.
91 Ibid., p. 296.
Chapter 5 Devil's Yard

1 Prokleta avlija (Novi Sad, 1954). Collected works, vol. 4.
2 "Trup", Zetf (vol. 6), p. 105.
3 Prokleta avlija, p. 11.
4 Ibid., p. 54.
Notes 259
5 Ibid., p. 9.
6 Ibid., p. 121.
7 /*trf.
8 "Sunce" (1952); "U celiji broj 115" (1960).
10 7taf.,p. 12.
11 Ibid., p. 15.
12 Ibid., p. 24.
13 /tod., p. 35.
14 Ibid., p. 36.
15 Ibid., p. 41.
16 Ibid., p. 46.
17 /tod., p. 53.
18 Ibid., pp. 58-9.
19 Ibid., p. 62.
20 /tod., p. 100.
21 Ibid., p. 77.
22 Ibid., pp. 95-6.
23 Ibid., p. 95.
24 Ibid., p. 59.
25 Ibid., p. 92.
26 /tod., p. 93.
27 Ibid., pp. 44-5.
28 Ibid., p. 47.
29 Ibid., p. 115.
30 Ibid.
31 /tod., p. 116.
Chapter 6 Essays and Reflective Prose
1 "A. G. Matos" (Wfor, Zagreb, no.5, 1914). Collected works,

vol. 13, Umetnik i njegovo delo, pp. 196-200.
2 Umetnik i njegovo delo, p. 199.
3 Ibid., p. 200.
4 "Walt Whitman (1819-1919)" Knjizevni jug, Zagreb, no. 2-3,
1914). Collected works, vol. 12, Istorija i legenda, pp. 75-83.
5 Istorija i legenda, p. 75.
6 "Legenda o Sv. Francisku iz Asizija" (Srpski knjizevni glasnik,
no. 4, 1926). Istorija i legenda, pp. 84-93.
7 "Legenda o Lauri i Petrarki" (Srpski knjizevni glasnik, no. 5,
1927). Istorija i legenda, pp. 96-105.
8 "Simon Bolivar Oslobodilac" (Srpski knjizevni glasnik, nos. 1 &
2, 1930). Istorija i legenda, pp. 118-43.
11 Ibid., p. 97.
12 "O Vuku kao piscu" (Nasa knjizevnos.t, Belgrade, no. 2, 1946).
Umetnik i njegovo delo, pp. 78-91.
14 Ibid., p. 88.
15 "Vukov primer" (Politika, Belgrade, 14.ix.1947). Umetnik i
njegovo delo, p. 108.
16 "Njegos kao tragicni junak kosovske misli" (Kolarcev narodni
univerzitet, Belgrade, 1935, 22pp). Umetnik i njegovo delo,
p. 16.
17 "Neka bude sto biti ne moze!", Gorski vijenac.
19 Ibid., p. 16.
20 "Razgovor sa Gojom" (Srpski knjizevni glasnik, no. 1, 1935).
Istorija i legenda, pp. 11-30.
22 Ibid., p. 14.
23 Ibid., pp. 28-9.
24 "Heine u pismima" (Hrvatska rijec, 25.vi. 1914). Istorija i
legenda, pp. 159-64. See p. 159.
25 "Nesanica" (Znakovi pored puta, pp. 581-592).
26 "Veciti kalendar maternjeg jezika" (Znakovi pored puta,
pp. 599-602).
29 Travnicka hronika, pp. 141-2.
30 Znakovi pored puta,, p. 199.
31 Ibid., p. 224.
32 Ibid., pp. 342-3.
33 Ibid., p. 509.
Notes 261
34 Ibid., pp. 286-7.
35 Ibid., p. 383.
36 Ibid., p. 578.
37 76u/., p. 388.
38 Ibid., p. 354.
39 7fctt/.,p. 290.
40 /Wrf., p. 200.
41 Ibid., p. 351.
42 Ibid., p. 353.
43 Ibid., p. 494.
44 7&tW., p. 226.
45 Ibid., pp. 292-3.
46 Ibid., p. 293.
47 7Wtf., p. 247.
48 Ibid., p. 294.
49 Ibid., pp. 174-5.
50 Ibid., pp. 161-2.
51 7Wtf., p. 72.
52 Ibid., p. 64.
53 Ibid., p. 282.
54 Ibid., p. 21.
55 7Wtf.,p. 41.
56 Ibid., p. 288.
57 7Wtf., p. 296.
58 Ibid., p. 183.
59 Ibid., p. 217.
Chapter? Conclusion
2 "Razgovor sa Gojom", Istorija i legenda, pp. 15-16.
3 "Jelena, zena koje nema" (vol. 7), p. 246.
4 Omerpasa Latas, pp. 63-4.
5 "Mostovi", Staze, lica, predeli (vol. 10), pp. 15-16.
Select Bibliography
Collected works
There have been several editions since the first in ten volumes in 1963,
all largely following the pattern agreed with Andric himself. All
references in this study are to the 1981 edition, and the contents of
each of its sixteen volumes are listed here. There was a further edition
published in 1982 by Svjetlost, Sarajevo and Mladost, Zagreb, edited,
like the 1981 edition, by Vera Stojic, Petar Dzadzic, Muharem Pervic
and Radovan Vuckovic. This edition includes some new material and
an additional volume (17): Sveske (Notebooks), consisting of selec-
tions from Andric's notebooks and Radovan Popovic's Biography of
Andric. At the time of publication of the present study, a new Critical
Edition of Andric's works was in preparation by the Serbian Academy
of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade.
Vol. 1:
Na Drini cuprija (The Bridge on the Drina)
Vol. 2:
Travnicka hronika (Bosnian Story)
Vol. 3:
Gospoltica (The Woman from Sarajevo)
Vol. 4:
Prokkta avlija (Devil's Yard)
Vol. 5:
Nemirna godina (Uneasy Year) (stories)
(Za logoravanja, Mustafa Madzar, Prica o verzirovom
slonu, Nemirna godina, San Bega Karcica, Veletovci,
Cilim, Svadba, Strajk u tkaonici cilima, Razaranja, Bife
"Titanik", Zeko)
Vol. 6: Zef (Thirst) (Stories)
(U musafirhani, U zindanu, Ispovijed, Kod kazana, Napast,
Proba, U vodenici, Sala u Samsarinom hanu, Casa, Trup,
Rzavski bregovi, Cudo u Olovu, Zed", Most na Zepi, Smrt u
Sinanovoj tekiji, Olujaci, Na drugi dan Bozica, Na sta-
dionu, Na drzavnom imanju, Letovanje na jugu)
Vol. 7: Jelena, zena koje nema (Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not)
(stories) (Anikina vremena, Mara milosnica, Ljubav u
kasabi, Corkan i Svabica, Zena na kamenu, Igra, Zena od
slonove kosti, Bajron u Sintri, Jelena, zena koje nema)
Vol. 8 Znakovi (Signs) (stories)
(Put Alije -Derzeleza, Dan u Rimu, Znakovi, Svecanost,
Dorde -Dortfevic, Reci, Autobiografija, Na ladl, Zlostavl-
janja, Prica o kmetu Simanu, Snopici, San i Java pod
Grabicem, Prica o soli, Kosa, Noc u Alhambri, Lov na
tetreba, Razgovori, Susedi, Setnja, Zatvorena vrata, Por-
odicna slika, Osaticani, Praznicno jutro)
Vol. 9: Deca (Children) (stories)
(Kula, U zavadi sa svetom, Mila i Prelac, Panorama, Deca,
Prozor, Knjiga, Na obali, Zmija, Izlet, Ekskurzija, Pismo
iz 1920. godine, Aska i vuk)
Vol. 10 Staze, lica, predeli (Paths, Faces, Lancscapes) (sketches)
(Staze, Pisma iz Krakova, Zanos i stradanja Tome Galusa,
Prvi dan u splitskoj tamnici, Isukusenje u celiji broj 38, U
celiji 115, Sunce, Na suncanoj strani, San o gradu, Vino,
Moj prvi susret sa delom Maksima Gorkog, Kako sam
ulazio u svet knjige i knjizevnosti, Jedan pogled na Sar-
ajevo, Na jevrejskom groblju u Sarajevu, Biblioteka nasa
nasusna, Na vest da je Brusa pogorela, U ulici Danila Ilica,
Ucitelj Ljubomir, Likovi, U Sopenovoj rodnoj kuci, Lica,
Susret u Kini, Kroz Austriju, Prvi dan u radosnom gradu,
Portugal, zelena zemlja, Leteci nad morem, Mostovi,
Spanska stvarnost i prvi koraci u njoj, Na Nevskom pros-
pektu, Utisci iz Staljingrada, Predeli, Na kamenu, u
Pocitelju, Kraj svetlog ohridskog jezera, Napomena)
Vol. 11: Ex Ponto, Nemiri, Lirika (Verse)
Vol. 12: Istorija i legenda (History and Legend) (essays)
Vol. 13: Umetnik i njegovo delo (The Artist and his Work) (essays)
Vol. 14: Znakovi pored puta (Signs by the Roadside)
Vol. 15: Kuca na osami (The House On Its Own)
Vol. 16: Omerpasa Latas (Omer Pasha Latas)
Selected critical works
Bandic, Milos, Ivo Andric: zagonetka vedrihe (Matica srpska, Novi
Sad, 1963).
Dzadzic, Petar, Ivo Andric (Nolit, Belgrade, 1957).
O Prokletoj avliji (Prosveta, Belgrade, 1975).
Karaulac, Miroslav, Rani Andric (Prosveta, Belgrade, Svjetlost,
Sarajevo, 1980).
Korac, Stanko, Andricevi romani Hi svijet bez boga (Prosvjeta,
Zagreb, 1970).
Leovac, Slavko, Pripovedac Ivo Andric (Matica srpska, Novi Sad,
1979).
Milosevic, Nikola, Andric i Krleza kao antipodi (Slovo ljubve,
Belgrade, 1975).
Palavestra, Predrag, Skriveni pesnik (Slovo ljubve, Belgrade, 1981).
Stanojcic, Zivojin, Jezik i stil Iva Andrica (Filoloski fakultet beog-
radskog univerziteta, Belgrade, 1967).
Tartalja, Ivo, Pripovedaceva estetika (Nolit, Belgrade, 1979).
Vuckovic, Radovan, Velika sinteza o Ivi Andricu (Svjetlost, Sarajevo,
1974).
OTHER LANGUAGES
Marabini, Claudio, "La Narrativa di Ivo Andric" (Nuova antologia di
lettere, arti e scienze, vol. 499, 1967, pp. 474-90).
Minde, Regina, Ivo Andric. Studien uber seine Erzdhlkunst (Verlag
Otto Sagner, Munich, 1962).
Petrovic Njegos, M., Ivo Andric, L'homme et I'oeuvre (Les Editions
Lemeac Inc., Ottawa, 1969).
Collections of critical articles

Delo Ive Andrica u kontekstu evropske knjizevnosti i kulture (Zaduzbina
Ive Andrica, Belgrade, 1981).
Ivo Andric, ed. Vojislav -Duric (Institut za teoriju knjizevnosti i
umetnosti, Belgrade, 1962).
Ivo Andric u svjetlu kritike, ed. Branko Milanovic (Svjetlost, Sar-
ajevo, 1977).
Kriticari o Andricu, ed. Petar Dzadzic (Nolit, Belgrade, 1962).
Svecani skup u cast Akademika Ive Andrica (Srpska akademija nauka i
umjetnosti Belgrade, 1962).
Zbornik radova o Ivi Andricu, ed. Antonije Isakovic (SANU, Bel-
grade.
English-language works
TRANSLATIONS
The Bridge on the Drina, translated by Lovett Edwards (George Allen
and Unwin, London, 2nd edn 1961) (New American Library,
NY, 1960).
Bosnian Story, translated by Kenneth Johnstone (Lincolns Prager,
London, 2nd edn, 1961).
Devil's Yard, translated by Kenneth Johnstone (John Calder,
London, 1964) (Grove Press, New York, 1962).
Bosnian Chronicle, translated by Joseph Hitrec (Alfred Knopf, New
York, 1963).
The Woman from Sarajevo, translated by Joseph Hitrec (Calder and
Boyars, London, 1965). (Knopf, NY, 1965).
"The Zepa Bridge", translated by L. Vidakovic (Slavonic Review, 5,
14, 1926, pp. 398-405).
"Gjerzelez at the Inn", translated by N. P. Jopson, (Slavonic and
East European Review, London, XVIII, 40, 1935, pp. 13-19).
"Gjerzelez at the Gypsy Fair", translated by N. P. Jopson (SEER,
XIV, 42, 1936, pp. 556-63).
"Thirst" (Kenyan Review, Gambier, 28, 1966).
The Vizier's Elephant. Three Novellas. (The Vizier's Elephant,
Anika's Times, Zeko), translated by Drenka Willen (Harcourt
Brace and World, Inc., New York, 1962).
"Death of a Simple Giant" and other Modern Yugoslav Stories
(Includes The Story of a Bridge (Most na Zepi), Miracle at Olovo,
Neighbors, translated by Michael Scammell) (The Vanguard
Press, Inc., New York, 1965).
Yugoslav Short Stories, translated by Svetozar Koljevic (Includes The
Climbers (Osaticani) and The Bridge on the Zepa) (OUP, The
World's Classics, London, New York, Toronto, 1966).
The Pasha's Concubine and other tales, translated by Joseph Hitrec
(Alfred Knopf, NY, 1968). (The Bridge on the Zepa, The Journey
of All -Derzelez, Confession, By the brandy still, Mustapha
Magyar, In the camp, The pasha's concubine, Thirst, The snake,
The scythe, Woman on the rock, Bar Titanic, A summer hi the
south).
CRITICAL ARTICLES
Eekman, Thomas, "The later stories of Ivo Andric" (The Slavonic
and East European Review, vol. XLVIII, 112, pp. 341-56).
Goy, E.D., "The work of Ivo Andric" (The Slavonic and East
European Review, London, 1963, vol. XLI, 97, pp. 301-26).
Hawkesworth, E.G., "Ivo Andric's unobtrusive narrative technique
with special reference to 'Kuca na osami'" (Annali Istitutio
Orientale di Napoli, 1979, 20-1, pp. 131-53).
Kadic, Ante, "The French in 'The Chronicle of Travnik'" (Califor-
nia Slavic Studies, University of California Press, vol. 1, 1960,
pp. 134-69).
Lord, Albert, "Ivo Andric in English Translation" (American Slavic
and East European Review, Philadelphia, 1964, vol. 23, 3,
pp. 563-73).
Mihailovich, Vasa, "The Basic World View in the Short Stories of
Ivo Andric" (The Slavic and East European Journal., 1966, X,
pp. 173-7).
"The reception of the works of Andric in the English-speaking
world" (Southeastern Europe, 9, pp. 19-25).
Pribic, Nikola, "Ivo Andric and his Historical Novel The Bridge on
the Drina'" (The Florida State University Papers, 1969, vol. 3,
pp. 77-80).
Taranovski-Johnson, V., "Bosnia demythologized. Character and
motivation in Ivo Andric's stories 'Mara milosnica' and 'O starim i
mladim Pamukovicima'" (Die Welt der Slaven, 1981, 25,
pp. 98-108); "Ivo Andric's 'Kuca na osami': Memories and
Ghosts of the writer's past" (Fiction and Drama in Eastern
Europe, Slavica, Columbus, Ohio 1980, pp. 239-50).
Bibliography
Ivo Andric. Bibliografija dela, prevoda i literature, 1911-1970 (Srpska
Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti, Belgrade, 1974).
Coote, M.P., "Narrative and narrative structure in Ivo Andric's
'Devil's Yard'" (Slavic and East European Journal, Madison, 21,
1977).
Djilas, M., "Remembering Ivo Andric" (Encounter 50, February
1978, pp. 48-51).
Drazic, M., "Ivo Andric, the bard of Bosnia" (Books Abroad, 36,
1962).
Fazia, A., "Nobel Prize, 1962, and The Bridge on the Drina'
revisited" (Books Abroad, 37, 1963).
Ferguson, A., "Public and private worlds in Travnik chronicle'"
(Modern Language Review, Cambridge, 70, 1975).
Gaster, B., "Nobel prizeman: Ivo Andric" (Contemporary Review,
London 1962).
Juricic, Z.B., "Andric's vision of women in 'Ex Ponto'" (Slavic and
East European Journal, Madison, 23, 1979).
Kragalott, J., "Turkish loanwords as an element of Ivo Andric's
literary style in 'Na Drini cuprija'" (Balkanistica, Cambridge,
Mass., 2, 1975).
Loud, J., "Between two worlds: Andric the storyteller" (Review of
National Literatures, New York, 5, 1, 1974).
This page intentionally left blank
Index
Alaupovic, Tugomir, 14,18,19,21, 'Death in Sinan's Tekke', 79-80
22,28 Devil's Yard, 50, 54, 111, 120,184,
'Anika's Times', 79-91 189-205,217,240,243,245,
Anxieties, 18, 52, 58-62, 85,194; 247-9
'Story from Japan', 48-9 Diplomatic Service, 20ff., 27
'Aska and the Wolf, 108 doctoral thesis, 23
Babic, Milica, 29, 30 East/West, 1, 3-4, 76, 82-3,88,

'Beside the Brandy Still', 84 113,131,136-7,197-8,211,
Bosnia, 1-10,13,16, 31,44, 59,69, 225-6; in Bosnian Story, 142ff.,
70,94-6,108-9,145-6,156,164, 164,176-9
173,180-2,225; as microcosm, ExPonto, 18, 51-8,194
148-50
Bosnian Story, 9,24,28, 83,124, 'Faces', 111
142-62,174-5,188,194,218-19, First World War, prison, 15ff.,
238,242 52-3, 54,63,193-4; internment
The Bridge on theDrina, 13,28, 36, in Ovcarevo, 16-17; and 'Young
39,42,43-6, 85, 88, 89,123, Bosnia', 42ff.; Sarajevo, 1914,
124-42,143,144,194,226, 237, 165,166
238 Franciscans in Bosnia, 17, 59,148;
'The Bridge on the Zepa', 9-10, Brother Julian, 148; Brother
88-90,100,213,248 Luka, 160-1,242; Brother
bridges, as symbol, 1,9-10, 50,64, Marko, 69, 81-4; Brother Petar,
89,125,126-7,132,139-42, 75-7,80,87,121,189ff., 240
218-19; origin of, 137-8
Goethe, 7, 33
Camus, Albert, 7, 37 Goya, 8,24; 'Conversation with
Conrad, Joseph, 37 Goya', 5-6, 212-15,238,240,248
'Corkan and the German Girl',
85-6 The House On Its Own, 111-22,220,
Crnjanski, Milos,19 245,246; 'Alipasha', 118-19;
270 Index
'Baron Dorn', 115-17; The Nobel Prize, 20,29-30, 34; speech,
Circus', 119-20; The Slave Girl', 6-8
117-18; The Story', 120-2
Omer Pasha Latas, 173-88,241-2,
'In the Guest House', 81-4 244,246
oral traditional literature, 8, 34, 38,
James, Henry, 37 39,111,127-30,234-8
'Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not',
87-8 107 243-4 'Panorama, 103-6,108,239
The Journey of AlijaBerzelez', 17, 'Paths'> 1 !-13
19 70-3 237 The People of Osauca, 101-2,236
'Persecution', 97-9
Kafka, 36
The Rzav Hills', 88
Karadzic, Vuk, 38,209-10
Kierkegaard, 14,33,36-7,40
Second World War, 25-8,90-4,96
Signs by the Roadside, 20-1,24,174,
legend, 8,13, 36, 37, 38-9,71,79, 188,215-33,236-7
90,106,208-9,240-1; mDevil's strindberg, 14, 36,46
Yard, 201-3; in The Bridge on the <Summer Holiday in the South',
Drina, 125-30 107,221,243
'Letter from the Year 1920', 94-6
Literary South, 17 The Tale of the Peasant Siman', 90
lyricism, verse, 63-7; in prose The Tale of the Vizier's Elephant',
works, 68-9,106,107,108, 108-11,236
207-8,243-4; in Signs by the The Titanic Bar', 91-3,94
Roadside, 215-33 Torso', 75-7,189
Mann, Thomas, 33, 36, 37 Vojnovic, Ivo, 17,18,19

'Mara the Concubine', 77-8, 81,235
Marcus Aurelius, 33, 50 The Woman from Sarajevo, 28,124,
MatoS, Antun Gustav, 207-8 162-73
'Miracle at Olovo', 86-7 'Words', 100-1
'Mustafa the Hungarian', 73-5,81,
209,235 Young Bosnia movement, 41ff.;
literary activity, 46, 51,207;
New Croatian Lyric Verse, 15 Gavrilo Princip, 43,47
Nietzsche, 36,37
Njegos, 38,209-12 'Zeko', 91

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Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

Ivo Andric photograph by Radoslav Grujic

THE ATHLONE PRESS

Celia Hawkesworth 1984

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Published with the help of The Ivo Andric Foundation

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

The works of Ivo Andric may be read in numerous languages, from

I have seen the stupidity of ignorant men of power, so-called "men

The basic idea of each of these passages is expressed in virtually

Andric the man - a biographical outline

In Visegrad Andric made his first friends, playing with them by

This is what will not permit me to go on living this impoverished,

Something of a more general dissatisfaction with his surroundings

The first formative phase of Andric's life was over, coloured by

In November Andric was transferred to Trieste, but the damp

His bearing at work and outside is exemplary. With industrious

The mood is one of hopelessness and frustration, and it is typical

All the questions I am being asked today can be reduced to three

Finally, a few words about the general impression Andric made on

The literary and historical context

I don't believe at all in decisive influences. A man grows, develops,

First literary allegiances

Parallel with the rise in prices and that incomprehensible but

It was this atmosphere of profound general change in the mental-

Serbian and Croatian students in Vienna decided that they should

Mori Ipo sends greetings to his comrades, the conspirators, on

"It is quite pointless to describe a writer, it distracts the reader's attention

To be in prison seemed to me then - the end of everything. The

Everything that exists here is condemned to a battle without end.

Mountains, then, embody an idea of permanence which is an

Since I deeply, and secretly,

A horror haunts me since the day

My thought leads me like a mysterious glow

He did not dare stand still. He had to keep moving, because he

As soon as I opened it I could see the situation. It was Venetian

There is no real attempt to explain the tyrant's fall, simply a

Andric's depiction of children is similar. Their experience of the

This image of a Christian God willing to accept all sinners,

My thoughts hide the beauty of the whole world within them.

Hatred which like a cancer in an organism wastes and con-

So these pictures from the world of my panorama appeared and

These passages have been quoted at length as they are an explicit

(iii) The House On Its Own*2

This introduction is followed by four examples of the kind of faces

An ordinary looking day is beginning for everyone, including

Among the traces which have been left on the cobblestones of

Another portrait in the collection is ostensibly simply that of an

This story offers a vivid illustration of Andric's recurrent idea that

The ideal narrator's task is difficult. He must efface himself so

It seemed as though he had not actually left the room, as though

. . . everything that exists is one single reality, and it is only our

The Bridge on the Drina

The majority of the population, however, after their initial

Historical circumstances also affect relations between individuals:

"You don't need to explain anything to me; I understand the

This message represents a kind of revolt in the whole stark

The Woman from Sarajevo

Rajka's attitude to the temporal, chaotic world in which she is

Omer Pasha Latas69

The unit of "foreigners" is the section of Omer's army which

At such moments, when we feel that the ground is slipping away