briefly each appears. As a result, the reader knows all the characters intimately, yet the narrative flow is never unnecessarily interrupted in order to impart this information. It is a technique that serves Andri’s thematic purposes as well, for it embeds his characters more deeply in the stream of time. The plots of his novels develop out of this careful delineation of his characters’ pasts. The meaning of their lives is the product of that confluence of personal and national history of which all humans are made and yet relatively few novelists have portrayed as successfully as has Andri.

Bosnian Chronicle

Although Andri’s first three novels were published simultaneously in 1945, Bosnian Chronicle was the first to be written after he returned to Belgrade in 1941. He began writing, he says, because it was a way of surviving. I remembered the moments in history when certain peoples seemed to lose out. I thought of Serbia and Bosnia blacked out in the Turkish tide of the sixteenth century. The odds against one were so monstrouseven hope was an aspect of despair.I pulled the past around me like an oxygen tent.

The act of writing under these conditions, he goes on, was “like drawing up a testament.”

Bosnian Chronicle is set in the town of Travnik during the period when French emperor Napoleon I was at the height of his power, from 1806 to 1814. Its main characters are the consuls and viziers who represent the various governments having an interest in Bosnia. The Turkish vizier is there because his empire “owns” Bosnia; the French consul, because the French are trying to extend their power inland from the coast; the Austrian consul, because the Austrians fear French power as a threat to their own. The protagonist of the novel is the French consul, Jean Daville, and the plot grows out of his efforts as a European to comprehend the strange mixture of Eastern and Western cultures that is Bosnia. He is alternately bewildered, frustrated, and horrified at the barbarity of Turkish rule, the ignorance of the peasantry, and the endless intrigues of the contending powers represented in Travnik. Daville’s ideals, formed during the French Revolution, are slowly being eroded and betrayed in this outpost of the empire; he comes to see that he is merely a pawn in a game of international politics played without principle or mercy.

Daville has trouble working with his friends as well as with his enemies. He and his assistant, Desfosses, a generation apart in age, epitomize the opposite approaches that Westerners take toward the Orient. Daville follows the “classical” strategy: He emphasizes order and form, tradition, pessimism about sudden change, and a refusal to take local culture seriously. Desfosses, on the other hand, follows the “Romantic” attitude: He approaches problems with optimism, energy, impatience with tradition, and a great respect for local culture.

The several Turkish viziers with whom the French consul must deal present him with complex moral and political dilemmas. The first one, Husref Mehmed Pasha, poisons an emissary from the sultan who has come to order Husref Pasha’s removal. Daville is shocked but can see no ready way to deal with the situation or even to reveal it to anyone. The second vizier, Ibrahim Halimi Pasha, is, like Daville, incurably pessimistic, but he is even more violent than Husref Pasha. Just when Daville believes he has found someone with whom he can solve diplomatic problems rationally, Ibrahim Pasha gives Daville a present of a sack full of ears and noses purportedly severed from the heads of rebellious Serbs; in actuality, the body parts were taken from Bosnian peasants who were massacred at a religious festival. Ibrahim Pasha also shoots one of his own army captains merely because the Austrians ask him to do so. Daville must acknowledge that “morbid circumstances, blind chance, caprice and base instincts” are simply taken for granted in Bosnia. A mindless anarchy seems to pervade everything when the bazaar riots against some captured Serbs, brutally torturing and executing some of them in the town square. The third vizier to appear in Travnik, Silikhtar Ali Pasha, makes no pretense of using anything but unbridled terror as his main instrument of policy.

One of Andri’s most common themes involves the various ways human beings attempt either to live with or to escape from the dismal conditions of human life. Desfosses and the Austrian consul’s wife try to escape through sexual desire, but their efforts are frustrated by chance and, in the wife’s case, by extreme instability. Cologna, physician at the Austrian consulate, converts to Islam to save his wife during the bazaar riots but is found dead the next morning at the base of a cliff. Daville himself attempts to bring order to his life through an epic he is writing about Alexander the Great; he never finishes it because, the narrator implies, he has no roots in this culture and therefore no way to nourish his creativity. Only Daville’s happy family life keeps him from losing his reason as the years pass. As he nears the end of his tenure in Travnik (Napoleon has been defeated in Russia and will soon abdicate), he concludes that there is really no such thing as progress in human affairs: In reality all roads led one around in a circle.The only things that changed were the men and the generation who travelled the path, forever deluded.One simply went on. The long trek had no point or value, save those we might learn to discover within ourselves along the way. There were no roads, no destinations. One just travelled onspent oneself, and grew weary.

Even though the reader undoubtedly must take Daville as a “chorus” character reflecting Andri’s own views, Daville does not have the last word in the novel. The work begins and ends not with Europeans but with native Bosnians in the small coffeehouses as they assess the import of the events in their region. The narrator shows that, ultimately, the Bosnian people will survive these various foreign occupations, their character having been tested in these trials of the body and spirit. As one of them says to Daville while the latter prepares to leave Bosnia forever: “But we remain, we remember, we keep a tally of all we’ve been through, of how we have defended and preserved ourselves, and we pass on these dearly bought experiences from father to son.” The stream of history carries away much good along with the bad, but their cumulative knowledge has formed the bedrock of the Bosnian character, and they will survive.

The fact that Andri did not write his first novel until he had more than twenty years’ experience with successful short stories meant that Bosnian Chronicle emerged as an unusually mature work. One of its weaknesses, however, is the characterization of its protagonist, Jean Daville. Even though the story is narrated from his point of view, he is never as fully developed or as believable as most of the other characters in the novel. The plot also suffers from being too episodic, lacking the sense of direction that a journey, for example, can give an episodic plot. Nevertheless, Bosnian Chronicle remains an impressive work, showing Andri’s extraordinary descriptive powers and his great gift for developing a memorable group of characters.

The Bridge on the Drina

Nowhere in Andri’s fiction is the handling of the great flow of history more impressive than in his novel The Bridge on the Drina. This work is a marvelous condensation of four centuries of Bosnian culture as acted out in the town of Viegrad and on its bridge across the Drina, linking Bosnia and Serbia, East and West. In its structure, this novel, too, is episodic, a fact that Andri emphasizes by labeling it a “chronicle.” Yet its plot is more successful than that of Bosnian Chronicle because the episodes, though they cover many years, are unified by the novel’s two great symbols, the bridge and the river. In addition, the author wisely devotes about half of the novel to the fifty-odd years before the destruction of the bridge at the beginning of World War I, the years in which all those things the bridge represents are most severely tested.

The bridge originated in the sixteenth century in the dreams of the grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed Paṣha Sokollu. As a young peasant growing up in the nearby Bosnian village of Sokolovii, he had witnessed the horror of children being ferried across the Drina as blood sacrifices for the empire. Later, though he was to serve three sultans for more than sixty years and win battles on three continents, he would still remember his boyhood home by ordering that a bridge be built across the Drina at Viegrad as a way of exorcising his memory of the ferry of death. Ironically, in the first of many arbitrary deaths in the novel, Mehmed Paṣha himself is assassinated shortly after the bridge is completed.

The Bridge on the Drina, like all of Andri’s fiction, is filled with memorable characters. Early in the novel there is Abidaga, the ruthless supervisor of construction of the bridge. In what is undoubtedly one of the most horrifying scenes in Western literature, Abidaga catches a young Bosnian attempting to sabotage the project and has him impaled alive on a huge stake. There is Fata Avdagina, the ravishingly beautiful merchant’s daughter on her way to a wedding that will join her with a man she does not want to marry. There is Alihodja Mutevelic, the Muslim merchant and cleric whose fate in the last half of the novel personifies that of the bridge and of the Ottoman Empire: He dies gasping on the hill above the town, old and worn out, as the bridge just below him is destroyed by the opening salvos of what will become a world war. He cannot believe that a work made centuries ago for the love of God can be destroyed by human beings. There is Salko Corkan, the one-eyed vagabond who, drunk one night, dares to attempt what no one has before: to walk the ice-covered parapet of the bridge. He succeeds and becomes in later generations part of the folklore of the town. There is Milan Glasicanin, a wealthy young man who cannot stop gambling. One night on the bridge, he meets a mysterious stranger who, in a game of chance, takes him for everything he has. Andri had a great interest in and respect for the folklore of Bosnia. His merging of history and folklore in The Bridge on the Drina is one of the novel’s most impressive characteristics.

The symbolic function of the bridge and the river is obvious enough, verging on cliché, yet in Andri’s hands these obvious symbols become profoundly suggestive of what is ephemeral and what is permanent in human life. The river represents, above all, the ceaseless flow of time and history that continually threatens to obliterate all evidence of human effort. The bridge is many things. It is permanence and therefore the opposite of the river: “Its life, though mortal in itself, resembled eternity, for its end could not be perceived.” It is the perfect blend of beauty and utility, encouraging and symbolizing the possibilities of endurance: Life is wasted, and life endures. It is a symbol of humankind’s great and lasting works, of the finest impulses as expressed in the words of its builder: “the love of God.” Like all great works of art, though it is not completely safe from the ravages of time, it remains for generations and centuries to inspire humankind, to provide comfort and constancy in an uncertain universe. The bridge says to human beings that they need not become paralyzed by fear and by change. In this novel, as in Andri’s other fiction, no one can escape the fear and uncertainty that is the human lot, but the bridge enables the reader to perceive those aspects of life in their true proportions. In the end, the people will endure, because the bridge sustains their vision as well as their commerce.

The Woman from Sarajevo

Ivo Andri’s achievement in the novels written during World War II is all the more remarkable in that the three works he produced are so different in purposes, plots, and settings. In The Woman from Sarajevo, instead of the vast canvas of four centuries of history or the political intrigues of diplomats, he concentrates on one ordinary person: a moneylender, Raika Radakovich. “Miss,” as she is universally known, lives an outwardly uneventful life, dying old and alone in a Belgrade apartment in 1935. Yet Miss Raika becomes for Andri an example of how human beings often attempt, unsuccessfully, to fend off the dangers and uncertainties of life. His exploration of the development of her personality from childhood to old age is one of the masterpieces of characterization in world literature.

Miss Raika can deal with life only through an extreme miserliness. For her, thrift is something almost spiritual in character. Her miserliness originates in her youth, when the father whom she idolizes loses everything and dies a pauper. On his deathbed, he tells her she must suppress all love of luxury, “for the habit of thrift should be ruthless, like life itself.” Thereafter, as a young woman in Sarajevo, she becomes an extremely shrewd manager of her money, relishing the power that having money to lend gives her over the lives of other people. Money enables her, she believes, to avoid the desperation and unhappiness that she perceives in the eyes of those who come to her to borrow. If through thrift and careful lending she can become a millionaire, only then will she be able to atone for her father’s death. She vows never to make his mistakes, such as feeling compassion for or generosity toward another human being. If one has no emotional ties to anyone, then one is not obligated to be compassionate.

The outbreak of World War I seriously threatens Miss Raika’s financial situation. Surrounded by people who feel intensely the great social and political changes then taking place in Bosnia and in Eastern Europe, she searches desperately for someone with whom she can have a strictly “business” relationship, but there is no one except the memory of her dead father. Shunned by the town as a “parasite,” abandoned by her advisers (who are ruined by the war), unable to lend money at interest, she leaves Sarajevo in 1919 and moves to Belgrade. There, among relatives whom she detests, she resumes her career.

In one of the most revealing episodes in the novel, she repeatedly loans money to a charming young man despite clear evidence of his irresponsibility. The narrator makes the point that because her miserliness never allowed her to develop either knowledge of others or self-knowledge, she cannot prevent herself from making the same mistake again and again. Her last years are increasingly lonely, as money turns out not to be the protection against unhappiness that she had imagined. More and more fearful of robbery, she bars doors and windows to guard her gold. In the powerful last scene of the novel, Miss Raika dies of a heart attack brought on by her irrational fear that every sound she hears is that of a thief breaking in to steal her money.

In this novel, as in his others with much vaster canvases, Andri’s strength is to be able to relate the life of Miss Raika to the historical currents of her time and place. The acid test for Andri’s characters is always how well they can adapt to the constant change and uncertainty that is human life and human history. Miss Raika fails not simply because hoarding money is somehow “wrong” but because, in being a miser, she fails to understand either her own life or the lives of others. There is perhaps also a hint that Miss Raika fails because she represents the decay of the capitalist ethic, which can think of no other response when its values are challenged but to hoard what it has left. More tightly plotted than Bosnian Chronicle or The Bridge on the Drina, The Woman from Sarajevo is, in its structure and in the characterization of its protagonist, Andri’s most successful novel.

The Vizier’s Elephant

In answer to an interviewer’s question, Andri stated that he thought the novella form more congenial to the Yugoslav temperament than the full-length novel. The Vizier’s Elephant, one of three novellas that Andri wrote in the first few years after World War II, is based on a kind of folktale that circulated unrecorded in Bosnia during the nineteenth century. The story takes place in Travnik in 1820 (in the same location as, and only a few years later than, Bosnian Chronicle). A new vizier, Sayid Ali Jelaludin Pasha, proves to be unusually cruel even for a Turkish imperial official. The Ottoman Empire is decaying in its outlying regions, so the sultan has sent a man known for his viciousness to conquer the anarchic Bosnian nobility. The new vizier has a two-year-old pet elephant that, in its rambunctiousness, destroys the town market, frightens people away, and in general causes havoc in the town. The vizier’s retinue makes things worse by punishing anyone who dares to object to the elephant’s behavior. Finally, the merchants decide they must act. One of their number, Alyo, volunteers to go see the dreaded vizier about the problem. He is too frightened to go into the palace, however, so instead he fabricates a story about his “visit,” claiming that he has told the vizier that the people of the town love the elephant so much, they wish to have more elephants. Finally, the merchants make repeated attempts to poison the beast—attempts that never succeed—until the vizier himself commits suicide when he learns he is to be replaced because his cruelties have created more, not less, anarchy.

As always, Andri tells an interesting story, but The Vizier’s Elephant is perhaps his least successful novella, especially in its halting attempts to attach a larger significance to the eccentricities of its characters. The narrator encourages the reader to view the elephant as a symbol of the empire: Causing constant fear and apprehension, behaving in a mindless, destructive way, the elephant is ungainly and out of place in a changing world. Andri, however, never commits himself completely to this or any other narrative approach. The vizier and Alyo never emerge as more than stereotypes, and Alyo’s motives especially are too often left unexplained. The work is less successful in depicting the anguish of human existence than are most of Andri’s stories; the comic effects of the elephant’s behavior are not developed enough to make the humor dominant, yet these same comic effects dilute the force of the tragedy that lies behind the vizier’s cruelties.

Anika’s Times

Anika’s Times, a novella also published in 1948, is more complex and satisfying than The Vizier’s Elephant. It is set in the village of Dobrun in two different time periods. The first part concerns Father Vuyadin Porubovich, the Orthodox parish priest, and takes place in the 1870’s. After the death of his wife in childbirth, Father Vuyadin gradually loses his grip on reality. He comes to feel enormous disgust for the people whose spiritual needs it is his job to satisfy. His behavior becomes erratic, and he refuses to speak to anyone. Finally, no longer able to stand the strain of his own hypocrisy, he seizes his rifle and fires at some peasants visible from his window. He then flees into the night but is later captured and confined to an insane asylum. How, the narrator asks, is one to explain the priest’s behavior?

The narrator’s “answer” to this question takes the reader back to the time of Vuyadin’s grandparents. The story at this point concerns a beautiful young woman named Anika, her feebleminded brother, Lale, and the various men who cannot resist Anika’s charms. She first has an affair with a young man named Mihailo. They break up, and Mihailo takes up with a married woman whose husband he unintentionally helps the wife to murder. Although he returns to Anika in the hope of forgetting his guilt, Mihailo cannot hold her, and she develops into the classic “evil woman,” inflaming men and causing them to act like fools. She takes up with Yaksha Porubovich, the future grandfather of Father Vuyadin. This is too much for Yaksha’s father, who calls the police to have Anika arrested. Hedo Salko, the chief of police, is reluctant to carry out the order. He believes that no problem is ever solved: “Evil, misfortune and unrest are constant and eternal andnothing concerning them can be changed.” On the other hand, he says, “every single problem will somehow be resolved and settled, for nothing in this world is lasting or eternal: The neighbours will make peace, the murderer will either surrender himself or else flee into another district.” Because Salko will not act, the mayor intervenes, but Anika seduces the mayor.

Anika’s tangled love affairs now begin to trap her. When she visits a religious festival in Dobrun, huge mobs surround her, and Yaksha’s father attempts to shoot her from the same window from which his great-grandson Vuyadin will try to kill the peasants seventy years later. The family steps in, however, and Yaksha’s father can only curse Anika from his darkened room. Yaksha himself attempts to kill the mayor in a fit of jealousy, but he fails and flees into the hills. It is here that Andri shows his supreme skill at managing the climax of a narrative involving many characters. Mihailo reappears, still haunted by the murder of the husband eight years before and convinced that the husband’s death foretold his own. No longer able to distinguish Anika from the married woman he had also loved, he goes to her house intending to kill her, but he finds that someone else has already done it and fled. No one is arrested, though it appears that Lale may have been the killer. Yaksha is reconciled with his father, but his father predicts that Anika will poison the town for a century.

Andri’s handling of theme and atmosphere in Anika’s Times is similar to that in many stories of the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Like Hawthorne, Andri in this novella is concerned with the ways in which “the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons.” He is able to suggest in subtle and complex ways how behavior patterns in the village are constantly changing yet remain fundamentally the same. A number of his characters, even those, such as Salko, who appear only briefly, come vividly alive. Andri knows how mysterious human behavior can be, and how ambiguous and tentative explanations of it must often remain.

Zeko

The longest of the three novellas published in 1948, Zeko is Andri’s only piece of long fiction concerned with the World War II period in Yugoslav history. It is the story of a meek little man, Isidore Katanich, nicknamed Zeko (meaning “Bunny”), who in the course of his various tribulations comes to understand the meaning of his own and his country’s life during the years of depression and war. The other main character aside from Zeko is his domineering wife, MargaritA&Mdash;nicknamed Cobra. She is full of aggressive energy, constantly twitching, with “greedy, mistrustful, deadly eyes.” Her occupation is managing the apartment building that she and Zeko own. They have a son, Mihailo, a handsome, egocentric, and entirely shiftless young man without moral values; his nickname is “Tiger.” The son and his mother take sides constantly against Zeko, and it is an uneven match: Cobra and Tiger versus Bunny.

There are signs in the book that Andri intends Zeko’s life to parallel and therefore to comment on the development of the Yugoslav people during the twentieth century. Although not strictly speaking an allegory, Zeko shows through its protagonist the developing national consciousness and desire for freedom of the South Slavs. Zeko had been a gifted artist, but he lost confidence in himself and went to law school at the time of the Austrian annexation of Bosnia in 1908. When the 1912 Balkan War begins, Zeko joins the army but suffers continually from typhus and is finally forced to return home. He marries Margarita, but World War I intervenes. He returns home in 1919 to find his wife a horrible shrew. He hears rumors that Mihailo was fathered by someone else while he was away at war, but he cannot establish the truth or falsehood of the rumor. “Everything around him was changed, turbulent, shatteredthis was a time of fatigue and of the acceptance of half-truths.” As the years go on, Zeko is increasingly desperate to find a way out of his marriage (his years with Margarita corresponding to the years of the “marriage” of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in the Kingdom of YugoslaviA&Mdash;that is, 1919 to 1941).

Zeko finds several forms of escape. He associates more and more with his sister-in-law and her family, and he discovers the subculture of those who live on and by the Sava River. Their lives are uncertain and dangerous—what the narrator calls “the true life of most people.” Zeko does manage to find true peace and acceptance among these “strenuous, unsettled lives, full of uncertainty, where efforts invested in work were out of proportion to the rewards.” The members of his sister-in-law’s family become Communists, and, symbolically, as it were, Zeko gravitates increasingly toward their values, away from the greed and selfishness of his capitalistic wife and son. Zeko becomes, then, a true man of the people and, in embracing their fate and their future, finds meaning for his own life.

With the coming of Adolf Hitler’s invasion, Cobra and Tiger, because of their fear and lack of self-knowledge, do not have the inner resources necessary to withstand the despair of war. Zeko, however, does: Becoming more aware of the need for meaningful action, he is less tempted to hide from conflict, as he had done on the river: “The most important thing was to do away, once and for all, with a barren and undignified life, and to walk and live like a man.” Like Yugoslavia itself, Zeko learns the value of independence. He finally joins the Partisans (Tito’s anti-Nazi guerrilla organization) while his wife and son, finding it difficult to orient themselves amid the suffering of war, flee Belgrade and disappear. On Zeko’s first mission against the Germans, he is caught in an ambush and, attempting to flee, drowns in the Sava River. Zeko’s death is not a defeat, however, for, like his country, he was finally learning how to live with dignity; like his country, he had finally decided what creed he would follow.

One of the chief virtues of Zeko is that Andri allows the parallels between Zeko and Yugoslavia to resonate within the story without ever forcing them on the reader. The other main characters have a vividness that prevents them from fading into stereotypes. The gradual awakening of Zeko’s consciousness is portrayed with much of the same skill that Andri displayed in the characterization of Miss Raika in The Woman from Sarajevo.

Devil’s Yard

If each of Andri’s novels and novellas employs important images representing the dangers and uncertainties characteristic of human life, in his last novella, Devil’s Yard, such an image for the human condition comes to dominate everything in the story: Devil’s Yard, the notorious prison in Istanbul under the Ottoman Empire. One can be thrown into this prison on suspicion of almost anything, on the principle that it is easier to release a man who has been proved innocent than to track down one who has been proved guilty. The inmates are mostly the weak, the poor, the desperate of society. In Devil’s Yard (and in roughly the first half of the novella), the dominant character is the warden, Karadjos. His name means “shadow show,” and he will appear anywhere in the prison without warning, trying to trick or frighten a confession out of a prisoner. He is overweight, horribly ugly, with a powerful, piercing eye. His governing principle is that, because everyone is guilty of something, everyone who ends up in Devil’s Yard belongs there, whether guilty or not of the particular crime with which he is charged.

In Devil’s Yard, the prison is a metaphor for human life, with Karadjos as its “god,” or fate. He is inscrutable, unpredictable, and tyrannical. In addition to the constant fear felt by the inmates, there is the constant mingling of truth, half-truth, and falsehood that, according to Andri, is a basic characteristic of human existence. Karadjos fosters this climate of rumor and suspicion with an endless series of threats, cajolery, incredible jokes, and surprise remarks. The prisoners “complained about him the way one complains about one’s life and curses one’s destiny. Their own damnation had involved them with him. Therefore, despite their fear and hate, they had grown to be one with him and it would have been hard for them to imagine life without him.”

Devil’s Yard is Andri’s only piece of long fiction told as a story within a story (in fact, it includes several stories within stories). This technique, which Andri handles with great ease, seems meant to reinforce the notion that in life itself there are layers of truths, half-truths, and falsehoods among which one must try to distinguish. The outermost frame of the story concerns a young monk: He is helping sort through the effects of another monk named Brother Petar, who has recently died. As the young monk does so, he recalls Brother Petar’s story of having once been held for several months in Devil’s Yard while on a visit to Istanbul. The next frame is that of Brother Petar narrating his stay in the prison. While there, he meets a young, educated Turk, Djamil Effendi. The story of Djamil’s life is actually narrated by Haim, a depressed, apprehensive, and talkative Jew from Smyrna. Haim has “a passion for narrating and explaining everything, for exposing all the errors and follies of mankind.” The story he tells of Djamil’s life, although at times incredible, has a ring of truth about it simply because its teller has such a passion for the truth, or at least for detail.

It seems that Djamil has studied the history of the Turkish Empire to the point where he has begun to imagine himself one of its ill-fated sultans—Djem Sultan, who in the late fifteenth century was bested in a struggle for the throne by his brother. When Djamil himself returns to the prison yard after several days’ interrogation, he tells Petar the story of Djem Sultan. Djamil’s story of Djem Sultan is the innermost tale in this intricately narrated novella. He has been confined in Devil’s Yard because his complete identification with Djem Sultan bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to the life of the current sultan, whose own throne is threatened by his own brother. Djamil thus seems to illustrate the danger of people accepting too completely the accounts of their own history and therefore the meaning of their lives as embodied in that history. Djamil finally disappears, and the very mystery of his fate—Is he free? Was he murdered? Is he confined in a hospital for the insane?—only underlines the confusion that passes for human knowledge.

As his imprisonment drags on, apparently for no reason except the arbitrary will of some higher authority, Brother Petar realizes that he is becoming irrational. He cannot find anyone whose talk seems sane. The brutal Karadjos has dominated the first half of the novella, and Djamil Effendi, equally irrational, has dominated the second half. Under their influence, Brother Petar could not have retained his own sanity had he remained in prison much longer. Like most of Andri’s protagonists, Brother Petar has had to spend all of his energy simply to escape madness and despair. When the first narrator, the young monk, resumes his own tale at the end of Devil’s Yard, he is forced out of his reverie by the “dull clang of metal objects thrown on the pile” of Petar’s earthly possessions. This is a “reality” that the reader views in a light far different from that of any earlier impression.

There is no use pretending that Andri was an optimist about the human condition. His impressive accomplishments in the novel and the novella hinge on other things: an impeccable style; a depth of insight into human motivation almost unmatched in Western literature; a profound sympathy for the sufferings of his characters; vivid dramatization of the ethnic character of his province, built up over the centuries against oppression and civil war; and, perhaps most important, an ability to turn local history into universal symbols, so that readers knowing nothing of Bosnia can see in his fiction the common lot of humankind.