Ivo Andric

From Legacyview Dictionary of Biography

(1892-1975)

Writer of Serbo-Croatian novels and shortstories who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. Ivo Andric's literary career spanned some 60 years. Before World War II, he was known primarily for short stories set in his native Bosnia. Andric made his reputation as a novelist with the Bosnian trilogy (The Bridge on the Drina, Bosnian Chronicle, and The Woman from Sarajevo), which appeared practically simultaneously in 1945. Andric's writings are dominated by a sense of Kierkegaardian pessimism and personal isolation.

"Here, where the Drina flows with the whole force of its green and foaming waters from the apparently closed mass of the dark steep mountains, stands a great clean-cut stone bridge with eleven wide sweeping arches. From this bridge spreads fanlike the whole rolling valley with the little oriental towns of Višegrad and all its surroundings, with hamlets nestling in the folds of the hills, covered with meadows, pastures and plum-orchards, and criss-crossed with walls and fences and dotted with shaws and occasional clumps of evergreens. Looked at from a distance through the broad arches of the white bridge it seems as if one can see not only the green Drina, but all that fertile and cultivated countryside and the southern sky above." (from The Bridge on the Drina, 1945, trans. by Lovett F. Edwards)

Ivo Andric was born in the village of Trávnik in Bosnia (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), into a middle-class family. Andric was three years old when his father, an artisan, died of tuberculosis. The family moved then to Višegrad, where he was raised by his mother, a strict Roman Catholic, and his aunt. A Croat by birth, he became a Serbian by choice. He was educated at schools in Višegrad and Sarajevo in 1898-1912. At the age of nineteen, Andric published his first poem, entitled 'U sumrak', in Bosanska vila.

In his youth Andric joined the revolutionary nationalist student organization Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnias), which was involved between 1912 and 1914 in a dozen terrorist plots of sabotage. However, another passion of the Young Bosnians was literature. When Gavrilo Princip, a member of the group, assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria in 1914, Andric was arrested as a conspirator and imprisoned and interned in various places until 1917. His time Andric devoted to reading the works of Fedor Dostoyevsky and Søren Kierkegaard.

In 1918 Andric co-founded the journal Knjizveni jug, which published several of his poems. Other early literary efforts included also translations of Walt Whitman and of August Strindberg. His prose poems Andric collected in EX PONTO (1918) and NEMIRI (1920). Beginning with the short story 'Put Alije Djerzeleza' (1920, The Journey of Alija Djerzelez), Andric turned his attention to prose and in the late 1920s he had given up poetry for fiction, focusing on short stories, which was the most appropriate form of expression for him. Much of the material for his stories, which could be called chronicles, came from the cultural heritage and centuries long struggle among the Yugoslavian peoples, Orthodoxs, Caltholics, Jews, and Muslims; Catholic characters were portrayed more often than Orthodox.

After World War I Andric completed his studies in the field of Slavic languages and literatures at the Universities of Zagreb, Vienna, Kraków, and Graz, receiving a doctorate in 1924 with a thesis on the cultural history of Bosnia. From 1920 to 1940 he was at the Yugoslavian diplomatic service first representing the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovens, which became Yugoslavia in 1929. His posts included the Vatican, Geneva, Madrid, Bucharest, Trieste, Graz, Belgrade, Marseilles, Paris, Brussels, and Berlin, as ambassador to Germany.

In the 1920s and 1930s Andric published only a few collections of stories, each titled PRIPOVETKE (Stories). After the war appeared NOVE PRIPOVETKE (1948) and PROKLETA AVLIJA (The Devil's Yard). Many of his stories of the Bosnian people were built around prominent characters, such as the monks Fra Petar and Fra Marko, the peasant Vitomir Tasovac, the brave Muslim Alija, and the Višegradian jack-of-all-trades Corcan. The protagonist are depicted in the different periods of their life. The Devil's Yard was structured as a complex series of frame stories many of which were told by inmates of a natorious Turkish prison.

After the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, he returned home and spent the war years writing in the occupied Belgrade under German house arrest. In seclusion, Andric produced his major works, NA DRINI CUPRIJA (The Bridge on the Drina), the story of the famous bridge at Višegrad in eastern Bosnia, TRAVNICKA CHRONIKA (Bosnian Chronicle), set in the town of Trávnik during the period 1806-13, and GOSPODJICA (The Woman From Sarajevo), a psychological novel about a well-to-do old maid and her fate. The Bridge on the Drina is Andric's most famous work, which offer a novelistic overview of Bosnian history between 1516 and 1914. The beautiful 16th-century stone bridge and the river have symbolic significance. They connect or separate generations of townsfolk, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, who are engaged in a ceaseless struggle against forces of nature and human restrictiveness. Through the metaphor of the bridge, the embodiment of human toil, Andric urged his readers to try to overcome their differences and live in harmony.

Andric structured the novel as a series of vignettes, each one presenting some aspect of life in the town from the time of the bridge's construction to its partial destruction at the outbreak of World War I. The author's personal history also is closely associated with the bridge connecting East and West. It is mirrored in the story of Mehmed Pasha Sokolli, who was taken from his Serbian mother by the Turks when he was a little boy and eventually became a vizer. Passing of time and fragility of human achievements label often Andric's work with a sad tone � only stories remain: "In a thousand different languages, in the most varied conditions of life, from century to century... the tale of human destiny unfolds, told endlessly and uninterruptedly by man to man," Andric has written.

In the postwar socialist period Andric's output included several short stories on contemporary subjects and themes, some travel memoirs, a number of essays on writers and painters, and two shorter novels. A supporter of Yugoslav Premier Josip Tito, Andric joined the Communist Party and served as president of the Union of Yugoslav Writers. In 1949 he was elected to Yugoslavia's federal assembly as a representative for Bosnia. During the period from the late 1940s to the early 1950s Serbian writers debated on modernism and realisms, and the stuggle ended in the victory of the modernists. Yugoslavia adopted the socialist system, but followed an independent policy, and socialist realism never took root in the country. Andric enjoyed in his own country a great acclaim, and was the most widely translated Serbian writer � only from the younger generation Miodrag Bulatovic's works arose neatly as much interest abroad. Andric spent the remainer of his life in Yugoslavia, where he was honored with the Prize for Life Work, an annual national award. In 1959 he married Milica Babic, a painter and designer. Andric died in Belgrad on March 13, 1975.

For further reading: Ivo Andric by P. Dzadzic (1957); Ivo Andric: Studien über seine Erzählkunst by R. Minde (1962); Ivo Anric: zagonetka vedrine by M.J. Bandic (1963); Turkisms in Ivo Andric's 'Na Drini cuprija,' Examined from the Points of View of Literary Style and Cultural History by Gun Bergman (1969); Ivo Andric: Bridge Between East and West by C Hawkesworth (1984); The Man and the Artist: Essays on Ivo Andric by Z.B. Juricic (1986); Ivo Andric by Vanita Singh Mukerji (1990); Ivo Andric Revisited, ed. by Wyne Vucinich (1995); The Failure of Multiculturalism by Andrew Wachtel (1998)

Selected bibliography:

• EX PONTO, 1918
• NEMIRI, 1920
• PUT ALIJE DJERZELEDA, 1920
• DIE ENTWICKLUNG DES GEISTIGEN LEBENS IN BOSNIEN UNTER DER EINWIRKUNG DER T�RKISCHEN HERRSCHAFT, 1924 - The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia Under the Influence of Turkish Rule (ed. and tr. Zelimir B. Juricic and John F. Loud)
• PRIPOVETKE I-III, 1924-36
• TRAVNICKA CHRONIKA, 1945 - Bosnian Chronicle (tr. by Joseph Hitrec) / The Days of the Consuls (tr. by Celia Hawkesworth & Bogdan Rakic) - Konsulit (suom. Elvi Sinervo)
• NA DRINI CUPRIJA, 1945 - The Bridge on the Drina (tr. by Livett F. Edwards) - Drina-joen silta (suom. Elvi Sinervo )
• GOSPODJICA, 1945 - The Woman From Sarajevo (tr. by Joseph Hitrec) - Neiti (suom. Aarno Peromies)
• MOST NA ZEPI, 1947
• NOVE PRIPOVETKE, 1948
• PRICA O VEZIROVOM SLONU, 1948 - The Vizier's Elephant (tr. by Drenka Willen)
• VELETOVKI, 1949
• PROKLETA AVLIJA, 1954 - The Devil's Yard (tr. by Kenneth Johnstone) / The Damned Yard and Other Stories (translated by: Svetozar Koljevic, Joseph Schallert, Ronelle Alexander, Felicity Rosslyn, Lenore Grenoble)
• The Pasha's Concubine and Other Tales (trans. 1968)
• KUCA NA OSAMI, 1976
• OMERPAŠA LATAS, 1976
• Letters, 1984 (translated and edited by Zelimir B. Juricic)
• Conversation with Goya; Bridges; Signs, 1992 (tr. by Celia Hawkesworth and Andrew Harvey)

Bibliography: Petri Liukkonen (author) & Ari Pesonen. "Author's Calendar Kirjailijakalenteri". Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto 2008. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/indeksi.htm