SOURCE: "Between Two Worlds: Andrić the Storyteller," in Review of National Literatures: The Multinational Literature of Yugoslavia, edited by Albert B. Lord, Vol. V, No. 1, Spring, 1974, pp. 112-26.

[In the following essay, Loud surveys the major themes of Andric's short fiction]

When he accepted the Nobel Prize in literature in 1961, Ivo Andrić took pains to describe himself as a storyteller above all else. Though his international stature at that time, certainly in England and America, was doubtless attributable to the three novels written between 1941 and 1944 at the midpoint in his career, in his native land it was Andrić's work in the short story that had established him as a major writer. Between the wars, his stories appeared at a regular rate of two or three yearly, while their author in the meantime rose in the Yugoslav diplomatic service. They attracted particular attention as studies in psychological excess and as suggestive portrayals of nightmare and ecstasy, those inner worlds where the true lives of Andric's characters unfold. Not only for his unusual philosophic outlook did Andrić attain eminence, but also for his use of language: measured, rhythmically balanced periods, stylistic choice and, on a larger scale, that impeccable craft and economy of organization which distinguishes most of his narratives. These are the qualities that have made of Andrić a classic in his own country. To the nearly fifty pripovetke (stories and novellas) published between the wars, he has added more than ninety since 1945, once again devoting himself exclusively to this genre.¹

The majority of them are set in Bosnia, where Andrić was born and schooled (1892-1912). Although Bosnia is exotic, more or less 'Eastern' to us, to Andrić the most significant fact is her historic and tragic fragmentation into sectarian and social groups with profoundly opposed views on life. Thanks to her ethnic and geographic features, (so he wrote in his 1924 dissertation on the intellectual development of Bosnia under the Turks), this region was destined to mediate between the Danubian lands and the Adriatic, to act as a broker between the two peripheries of the Serbo-Croatian element in the Balkans and between two different zones of European culture. The Ottoman conquest (1463,1482) decisively prevented Bosnia from fulfilling her "natural mission" and from participating in the cultural development of Christian Europe. To this was added the Islamization of the local Bosnian nobility, adherents of a heretical sect known in the Balkans as the Bogomils, or Patarenes, in the West as Cathars, thus reinforcing the political with a spiritual "bulwark" against the Christian West. Life in Bosnia, as in the Balkans generally, was, to borrow his image, for centuries thereafter conducted in the long shadows cast on either side by this wall.² The characteristic Andrićevan longing for permanence and stability in a dark world of senseless fluctuation, of illusory change, has been enriched by this historical dimension to his writing which was already worked out at an early point in his career—and Andrić is very much the archivist and historian, as well as the diplomat and man of letters.

Indeed, his storytelling is rooted in historical Bosnia as a secluded border province of the Ottoman Empire, 'between the two worlds' of Islam and the West, belonging to both but ambiguously remote from either one. It was under the de facto control of a feudal class, the Bosnian begs or 'Turks,' as they were locally termed, ethnically and linguistically Slavic but converts to Islam, the better to retain the property and status which had been theirs at the moment of absorption into the Ottoman sphere. Presumably they have been a historic channel for the transmission of the dualistic cosmology propagated by the Bogomils, whose leaders they had been. (Andrić devoted considerable space to the Bogomils in his dissertation, and his fiction often bears the stamp of their views.) The Turkish element in Bosnia was profoundly conservative in its new allegiance to the forms of life and thought which in the Moslem world are one with religion, capable of violent reaction against all that was felt to be foreign and alien, outdoing in fanaticism their Osmanli overlords. Cramped and constricted by the mountainous terrain, Orthodox Serb, Sephardic Jew, Roman Catholic and 'Turk' lived cheek by jowl in uneasy proximity. Over the two and a half centuries of gradual Ottoman decline, the hand of central authority was felt intermittently in the best of times, while in the worst (which was not seldom) brigandage became the general rule in the back country (the hajduks) and, in the towns, those latent animostities dividing the inflammable lumpenproletariat, as Andrić has called it on occasion, encouraged by some event shaking the established order (unstable in any case), could suddenly rise to the surface in hysterical mob violence and sanctioned cruelty.

Not all these ingredients are to be met in every Andrić tale, but they are typical; he is a writer who likes action. Moreover, they support an often voiced attitude underlying his work that civilized empathy is an illusory gloss on history and that men, forced by whatever needs to retreat into their inner worlds, are divided unbridgeably by reality—stvarnost.

Andrić has populated his stories with the richest conceivable assortment of characters drawn from this locale. Turks, both ethnic and of the converted variety, Franciscan monks, gypsies, janissaries, Pashas and Grand Viziers, Orthodox peasants and their priests, men and women from the world outside 'dark Bosnia,' existing there as if in exile from some brighter land, traders in passage—"Derzelez at the Inn" (1918), Andrić's first story, opened with a catalogue such as this of travelers waiting to cross the Drina in flood and temporarily confined at a han (roadside inn) during the very early period of Ottoman rule.

Derzelez Alija is the stock hero of Moslem epic. Andrić, though, presents him off his horse, as off some pedestal, stocky and disproportioned, bandylegged, gullible and easily carried off into fantasy. Like many Andrić heroes, the strength of his inner world constitutes his exceptionality. He is a man driven by an overriding thirst for woman, but whose reach falls comically short in each of the three episodes comprising his cycle, "The Journey of Derzelez Alija" (1920).³ Persuaded that a lady from Venice, one of the travelers staying at the han, belongs to him by right of his own desire, Ðerzelez is inveigled into agreeing to race a competitor for this prize, symbolized by an apple, only to find that there is really no competitor and that the prize is in fact the apple. Again carried away, in the second episode, by the gypsy girl Zemka as she swings, suspended in a pear tree, over his head "in a great, bold arc," he staggers after her when drunk on rakija and ignominiously tumbles into a ravine. In Sarajevo he sits for days outside the courtyard of Katinka, that "fruit ripening in the shade" who is sung for her fatal beauty through all Bosnia, though she has long since been spirited away unseen from the house. Alternately rising into a world of illusion which he takes for reality and falling back with anger upon his own finitude, Ðerzelez utterly lacks perspective on himself, perceiving his legendary fame and strength as 'excessive' rather than misapplied.

Typical of many Andrić heroes is that yearning for the inaccessible and impossible which he first embodied in Ðerzelez Alija coupled with delusions of its attainment. "I have seen that this life is a painful affair which consists in the unequal exchange of sin and misery, that to live means to pile illusion upon illusion," he wrote in a Kier-kegaardian mood at the end of his lyrical, painfully felt, confessional prose poem Ex Ponto, begun during internment under the Austrians in the First World War. Completion of that work coincided with his turn to objective prose fiction. Yet paradoxically he chooses not to "slumber" but to live.⁴ The passage illuminates the final lines of Ðerzelez Alija's "journey" and the inner dynamics of his own work to follow.

Many of Andrić's tales are grouped in cycles framed by a single narrator, or focused on a single hero. A familiar favorite is Ćorkan ('one-eyed'), the bastard son of a local gypsy and an Anatolian soldier of fortune, the lowest of the low in the kasaba, or small Bosnian market town which is this author's standard setting.⁵ Street sweeper, hauler of dung and all-purpose porter, orkan is another of those heroes enraptured by an ideal of grace, beauty and harmony incommensurably 'higher' than he (represented, in Andrić's first story about orkan, by an Austrian girl, a tight-rope dancer), who easily slips into a visionary paradise foreclosed to him in reality, losing himself in dreams of height, perspective and potency. He is a passive character, like many whose inner life interests Andrić, always ready to serve the gazde, or shopkeepers, and play the fool, everyone's errand boy. But orkan is invested with great charm because, no matter how hard he is put down, no matter how painful his inevitable return to harsh reality (in "Ćorkan and the German Woman," 1921, he is mercilessly whipped as a scapegoat and needs a week to recover), the world of the dreamer in him is simply irrepressible. When at the story's end, life and work spread out before him as an unlimited vista, he returns dancing across the čaršija (bazaar), under the illusion that it is a spacious, joyous sea.⁶

One of this writer's best-known cycles is about Fra Marko, a Franciscan monk at the Kreševo monastery west of Sarajevo. Isolated from his brother monks in the Order, Fra Marko is interesting for the contrast between his rough, unpliant and stubborn personality, slow on the uptake and the butt of jests, and his inner nature, compassionate and endearing in its own way, cherishing a secret desire to save the heathen soul. Given to prolonged visions in which he feels himself to be flying up into the air, swift as an arrow, and holding eloquent conversations with God, or on one occasion speeding across the sea to salvation at the helm of "God's ship," but on the other hand ever perplexed by the entangled, overlapping competencies of God and Satan, Fra Marko is not an ordinary Franciscan. His determination to transcend the abyss separating men and their faiths emerges in the scenes when he attempts to convert a wounded and dying Turk who has been left on his hands, Osmo Mameledžija—with, it must be said, a notable lack of success, as Osmo finally spits in contempt on the little cross Fra Marko holds to his lips ("In the Guest House," 1923).

Andrić has elsewhere and often suggested the 'dread of isolation' which was so marked a feature of Ex Ponto by a recurrent motif of hopeless love across irreducible barriers, be they Moslem or giaour, Catholic or Jewish, or other less immediately obvious cross-relations—a traditional motif in itself, to which his Levantine locale naturally lent itself. His interest in monks, around whom he has centered many stories, seems to arise from their ambiguous, intermediate position between worlds, which in the case of Fra Marko is not only sexual but doctrinal. The four stories about him are centrally concerned with his experience of evil as an independent principle and with his readiness, rooted somewhere in the personality with which Andrić endows him, to cross over and grapple with it on its own ground.

Stories and characters like these are the brighter side, for Andrić has in general focused more directly on pain, hatred, cupidity, on all that is vicious, as manifestations of inherent evil in the created universe; and on fear, despair and guilt almost as theological categories. Who can forget the impaling of Radovan, described with memorable, chilling restraint, which cleared the way, as it were, for a more permanent bridge over the Drina? The paralytic, cretin daughter of a well-to-do Sarajevo family in "Miracle at Olovo" (1926), with her stickly and oddly sensual smile, seems at first to be the victim of some congenital defect. Yet the author contrives to suggest another order of cause, a different origin, more sin than disease. The girl's vision of Jesus descending a shaft of light in the enclosed Turkish bathing pool, where she has been taken by her mother in hopes of a cure, is wholly sensual.

The powerful figure of Mustafa Madzar, in the 1923 story by that title, haunts all of Andrić's pre-war fiction. A professional warrior who plays the flute in the intervals between campaigns and dreams of the refreshing slumber of his student days on the grass of a river bank, he is a man of extremes, savage and brutal. Madzar is still another hero out of touch with reality. The apprehension of certain apparitions, fragmentary scenes of sexual violence which float uncontrollably out of his past when he sleeps, have driven him to insomnia. Dark, bent and wrapped in gloom, obsessed by dread of sleep and what it invariably brings, Mad ar compensates with gratuitous bloodshed. Characteristically, Andrić portrays fear and guilt in terms not only of visions but of sense perceptions: pins-and-needles sensations, suffocation, numbness, shudders and spasms, crushing weight. Fear-ridden, Madzar on impulse flees his ardak (blockhouse) in the silence of the night, seeking escape from his appalling visions, more palpable than reality, in a wild, three-day ride across country to Sarajevo, pursued all the way by imaginary phantoms and deterred by no fresh crime that might block his flight headlong to death.⁷

States of obsession interest this writer most, and with his sensitive, evocative delineation of the symptoms of insanity he has become known for his psychological realism, which is of course a phrase open to qualification. Andrić is minimally interested in the dynamics of fear and guilt, in their psychic origin, except for plausibility's sake. Employing realism for non-realistic ends, he has from the start been preoccupied with fear as an ultimate determinant of human behavior and seeks means to embody or suggest it. "All human motions derive from the need to attack or to defend," he wrote in a remarkable monologue attributed to the Spanish painter Goya, which sets forth Andrić's aesthetic (both his manner of writing, from the standpoint of plastic representation, and its philosophic underpinning):

True, there are painters who have depicted only idyllic scenes and figures full of an easy nonchalance. There is something of that, too, in life and I myself have painted it at times, but for every such pose, free of instinctual fear and apprehension, several million of those other watchful, combative gestures are needed to support and protect it in its unnatural and shortlived beauty and freedom. In any case, beauty is always surrounded by the darkness of man's destiny or the shine of his blood. It must not be forgotten that every step leads to the grave. . . .⁸

Characteristic of Andrić is a special state of consciousness, izmedu sna ijave (between sleep and waking), when dreams take on the semblance of reality and one is subject to a piercing sense of desolation, anxiety and causeless guilt: a crisis of the psyche. In a little-known story of 1926 with over-tones of Kafka and Dostoevsky, "Pakao" ("Hell"), a diplomat who has had a successful and umblemished career falls prey to a strange dream about his personal future after death (by execution, for the good of the State). What he takes at first to be heaven is a boundless, formless gray space with no furnishings but the chair he finds himself sitting on and, in the far wall, half-concealed behind a curtain, a door ajar. Beyond—darkness. By degrees this reminds the Consul of an insignificant sexual encounter, long since forgotten. Its insignificance is the whole point. Unable to reach the door to close it, unable to turn his back on it without the sensation of being kicked from behind, the Consul realizes he has been condemned to an eternity of watching this slightly open door in an infinite gray chamber.⁹

Alideda also, in the 1932 story "Death in the Sinan Tekke" (a tekke is a monastic establishment in certain dervish orders), has led a blameless life but at the moment of death he recalls two incidents from his childhood and youth involving women, which aroused a feeling of incomprehensible guilt, the need to confess, and the impossibility of doing so. In the second, as a young man of twenty-five during a moment of night-time wakefulness, he observed out the window of his monastery in Istanbul a woman swiftly and silently running down the steep street that led to the gate, obviously maddened with fear and pursued, just as silently, by two men. He hears the dull thud of her body against the locked door. Leaning out, he can see her slumped against it, hand stretched in vain for the knocker which is higher than she can reach. But "as if in that extraordinary night scene he too had a role of his own to play," Alideda returns to bed. Quickly he falls asleep, only to wake in a few minutes and lie paralyzed by the thought that it was all a dream, but that his rising to verify it will make the dream reality. Thus he passes the night between sleep and wakefulness, prey to the obsessive, shuttling thought, "What if I don't get up?—What if I do?" and to an irrepressible fear that he will at any moment hear the expected knock which never comes. When day finally dawns, it appears that nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the night. But Alideda never can be sure. He is incapable of bringing himself to speak of his experience with his brother dervishes. And so night after night passes in torment "in the indefinable yet deep sense of guilt and fear, from which he could not escape, . . . knowing only that he bore within himself some mysterious, dark object."¹⁰ Transfixed by anxiety, his posture is analogous to Goya's prescription, in painting, for the reduction of all life's movements, birth to death, into one.

Distinctly Andrić's in modern Serbo-Croatian literature is the combination of visionary flights of the unconscious self and a consistent depreciation of the material and temporal world of restless evil and pain, lacking permanence or significance. His writing often leaves the impression of fatalistic pessimism. The legacy of Platonic and Gnostic philosophy with the division of the cosmos into two worlds emanating from autonomous principles of good and evil, taken up by the medieval Bogomils and passed on to the Bosnian Turks as their direct successors, was the object of special interest and study by Andrić in his doctoral research and doubtless reached him through other channels, such as oral tradition. That "ancestral inheritance," as he once wrote of it, has been most directly articulated in "A Conversation with Goya":

This world is the kingdom of material laws and animal life, without sense and object, and with death as the end of all things. All that is of the spirit and the intellect has turned up here by some chance, as when civilized survivors of a shipwreck, with their clothes, their equipment and weapons find themselves on a remote island with a completely different climate, inhabited by wild beasts and savages. Hence all our ideas bear the alien and tragic stamp of objects which have been salvaged from a shipwreck. They bear also the marks of that forgotten other world from which we once set out, of the catastrophe which overtook us here, and of our incessant, vain yearning to assimilate to the new world. . . . Hence every great and noble thought is an alien in pain. Hence the unavoidable sorrow in art and pessimism in all branches of knowledge.¹¹

In the stories, this dualistic cosmology is, for example, expressed in the ambiguous reflections of Fra Marko, as he gazes out the window of his monastic cell into the moonlit Bosnian night ("Kod Kazana," "Over the Brandy-Still," 1928). Two worlds are envisioned by the friar: the one, symbolized by an eternal flame which he had once seen in the catacombs of Rome, the other likewise represented by the great nighttime city above that underground light, given over to its pitiful temptations and transitory values. Coterminous with God's intangible order is his spacious world of creation, as Fra Marko views it, with its innumerable cities "like fiery stains stamped on the earth by the devil":

In Fra Marko there arose, not for the first time, the terrible thought that what is God's and what the devil's are neither clearly nor rightly set apart and that it cannot be known, no one knows, how great is the power of each, nor where their real boundaries lie.¹²

The janissary Mehmedbeg, however, Fra Marko's antagonist on the plane of ideas in this story, has a different vision and understanding of the cosmos. He is carried away by dreams of a cool, shaded garden he knows of, with fountains and a beautiful woman. "You are opposed to God's gift of creation," he says to the monk. Andrić does not finally identify with either of these conflicting views, in whose context Fra Marko meets his death. The boundaries between the "two worlds" are indistinct, be they the worlds of history, geography, human society or value. Ambiguity is one of Andrić's strongest features.

And the prison cell is one of his most widely appreciated symbols, his archetypical setting. There are in his works a number of real prisons, but in fact any enclosed space with its window or other aperture lends itself with ease and regularity to the metaphor of confinement and release. The scene just referred to or the Turkish bath at Olovo may serve as examples. This fundamental building block is perceptible also in such larger settings as the mountain rimmed kasaba; Bosnia itself, felt by many a protagonist as both exile and confinement; Austria-Hungary, "prison of peoples." Andrić's characters lead boxed-in lives, and he is always able to find a new way to suggest that suffocation of the psyche which has been one of his most prevasive themes from the beginning. His seemingly infinite resourcefulness in generating prison settings, every story a new one, sets off the monolothic simplicity of this one building block. The modest comment that "from 'Put Alije Berzeleza' I have always been the same" should be understood in this spirit.¹³

In a sense Andrić fell heir to the symbol. Developmentally, it takes its origin in his own experience with imprisonment. During his last school year in Sarajevo and the first period of doctoral study (1911-1914) Andrić had, it appears, been rather closely associated with the Bosnian Youth movement, and as a consequence was arrested in Split on the opening day of the First World War, spending more than three years confined to various prisons and internment camps in areas then under Austrian control.¹⁴Ex Ponto, with its strong Platonic foundation of the body as prison of the soul which repeatedly, painfully attempts to rise out in ecstasy, was written out of this experience and, as has been more than once observed, was programmatic for all his work to come.¹⁵

Of Andrić's many prison settings the most concentrated and intricate is Prokleta avlija (Devil's Yard, 1954), one of his longest stories.¹⁶ The accursed courtyard' of the title is a holding depot in Istanbul for those under investigation or awaiting trial. Within its walls the prisoners are free to mingle, exchange their stories and play out their roles. In charge is the notorious Karadoz (black, or 'evil' eye), an ambiguous, Mephistopholean figure and one of Andrić's finest creations. With his uncanny right eye which leads an independent life of its own, with the oppressive, wheezing 'phkee-ee' that accompanies his interrogations, enormously heavy but able to move with agility and power, with the trick of combining inner laughter and outward seriousness, loathing and a suggestion of sympathy and understanding, now friend now foe, this contradictory man demoralizes all who for any reason cross his path. Where everyone is acting a role of some kind, Karadoz is in a class by himself, playing a script which only he knows and which can take unexpected turns.

Prokleta avlija is deceptively simple in the telling. Its underlying intricacy arises from the theme, or multiple theme, of two worlds and the superimposed frames that carry it. Karadoz, for example, came from a respectable, well-to-do family and gave promise of a brilliant worldly career but he early became an habitué of the nether world of vice and crime—oddly enough, though, never as participant, only as a familiar, possibly an accessory to crime, no more. Hence the job of chief warden was found for him, capitalizing both on his vast knowledge of the Istanbul underworld and on his never having passed irrevocably into it. Karadoz operates in two worlds. On a hill slope just outside the Yard, with cool gardens and bright vistas, he has a home in the upper world and passes between the two undetected, using tunnels and hidden by-ways and turning up in the avlija where least expected.

This is the devil's yard, our created world policed by Karadoz and reflecting the macrocosm on which it draws and whose functionary he is; as he is wont to shout to his terrified victims, "there are no innocent here," nor on the outside. Guilt has been incurred, if only in sleep. In this sense, the two worlds which Karadoz mediates are not separate but equal. Andrić is fond of playing with opposites. The borders between two worlds are equally fluid on the psychological plane: where is the transition from reality to illusion, and is the latter not just as vivid, meaningful, real? The Yard is the domain of fantasy, its inmates fear-ridden. This one is paranoid, that one can talk only of the women he has known, or known of, or neither of these. None is more obsessed, more out of touch with reality than Ćamil of Smyrna. Quiet, reserved and bookish, even among the exceptional, this young man stands out for the extreme to which he carries his fixation on Džem Sultan.

Ćamil has devoted himself to the history of Mehmed the Conqueror's two sons, Bajazit and Džem, whose prolonged rivalry for the throne began with their father's death in 1471. Years of study and reflection have created a richly detailed, sympathetic picture of the unhappy younger brother and unsuccessful pretender who was compelled to place himself under the protection of the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John on Rhodes. Supported only with fine words and promises, shifted in captivity from Rhodes to France to Italy and from court to court, Džem Sultan was for many years cold-bloodedly exploited as a pawn of great value in the Mediterranean intrigues of that day. In the endless mortal struggle of two irreconcilable worlds, Džem found himself caught in the middle and at odds with both. Though he maintained his dignity and constancy of purpose to the end, he did escape alive.

This inmost of the frames of Prokleta avlija is a retelling, Andrić says, of the "ancient story of the two rival brothers," with its predestined outcome. The elder, in full touch with the everyday realities that move human affairs, knowing what at any moment is possible and what not; the younger, his polar opposite, variously talented and given beyond measure to his dreams and pleasures, living to the full in the moment. So complete and self-contained is amil's reconstruction of Džem Sultan's life in exile, as though it had been his own that indeed the two merge. Under pressure he admits his own identity with that long-dead rival of a reigning Sultan, and vanishes. It is another case of some inner reality displacing the outer and bringing death in its train—an Andrić narrative pattern.

Like the other denizens of the Yard, Ćamil feels an urge to confess, confess without omissions, though he does it in his own way, piecemeal. The listening ear through whom we come to know about him and the devil's courtyard is in a way his complement. Fra Petar, like other Catholic friars in Andrić, belongs to the world of sober reality and clear judgment and keeps a sane perspective on what he sees and hears. (True, his own mind slips a little as he too falls under the spell, not only of the story but of its teller.) Like Ćamil he has fallen into the Yard entirely by random mischance, but his belonging there is symbolically suggested by his life-long hobby, which is to repair timepieces, guns and other such apparatus. What he has seen and heard in the Yard is relayed to us after his death by one to whom he in turn has confessed disconnectedly, on his deathbed. Andrić appears to be setting up another dimension to that noise-filled play of shadows which is the true curse of the courtyard, one which might form with it still another frame: a world 'outside of outside' a different order which is timeless, silent and intangible, which cannot be known or measured as can finite mechanisms. An order which, on the analogy of ćamil's worlds of Islam and Christendom, coexists in permanent conflict with the created universe, "with no real contact nor possibility of agreement" between the two.¹⁷

One may leave the Yard, as does Fra Petar after a time, and remain confined to the four-dimensional world. There is nothing beyond the world that exists "behind my closed eyelids" (Ex Ponto). Yet intimations of a transcendent order are an important element in this writer's work, or it is better, perhaps, to speak of čežnja, that characteristic Andrić term for yearning, pining desire, manifested now in song, now dream, now fantasy-stories. In his renewal of the legend about two brothers and the tragic fall of one into a world totally alien to him, Andrić is expressing—not for the first time—a fatalistic approach to life which seeks support and legitimacy in tradition. In his Goya monologue, the spokesman for his own aesthetic vision as a storyteller is made to say: "We must listen to legends—"

. . . In the second half of my life I came to the following conclusion: that it is futile and misleading to look for meaning in the senseless, though to all appearances so significant, events with which we are surrounded. One must seek it in those layers which the centuries have deposited around some of the most important of man's legends. Constantly, though ever less faithfully, these layers recapitulate the form of that grain of truth around which they accrue, and so carry it through the centuries. The true history of mankind is in its tales; from them its meaning can be surmised, though hardly discovered in full. Mankind has several basic legends which expose to view or at least illuminate the road we have traveled, if not the object of our journey: the legend of the first sin, the legend of the flood, the legend about the Son of Man, crucified for the world's redemption, the legend of Prometheus and the stolen fire . . .¹⁸

Notes

¹ The ten-volume collection of Andrić's works ( Sabrana dela, 1963) contains hardly two-thirds of his published stories to date, and only a sampling of his essays, travel pieces and other nonfiction. The forthcoming Bibliogrqfija dela, prevoda i literature (a bibliography of original works, translations and literature about the writer), to be published by the Serbian Academy, is intended to be exhaustive through 1971. I am indebted to the Academy for permission to consult this bibliography in manuscript.

² Ivo Andrić, Die Entwicklung des Geistigen Lebens in Bosnien unter der Einwirkung der Türkischen Herrschaft, unpublished dissertation (University of Graz, 1924), pp. 43-44.

³ Translated by Joseph Hitrec in The Pasha's Concubine and Other Tales (Knopf, New York, 1968).

⁴ Ivo Andrić, Ex Ponto (Izdanje Cvijanovića, Beograd, 1920), p. 110.

⁵ In point of fact, it is Višegrad, hemmed in by steep hills on the Drina in Eastern Bosnia, where Andrić passed his childhood.

⁶ Ćorkan reappeared in a story of the 1930s which deals movingly with his death, and again in one of the most memorable episodes of The Bridge on the Drina, in which he dances across the bridge's icy parapet in winter. Andrić gives some of the personal background in his memoiristic little sketch Prvi put u cirkusu (My First Trip to the Circus, Maribor, 1967).

⁷ An English translation of this and the preceding story can be found in The Pasha's Concubine, op. cit.

⁸ Ivo Andrić, "Razgovor sa Gojom" ("A Conversation with Goya," 1935), in Zapisi o Goji (Novi Sad, Matica Srpska, 1966), pp. 57-58. The idea was originally expressed in Ex Ponto, in slightly less categorical a form (the dread of solitude). My translation.

⁹ Ivo Andrić, "Pakao," Misao (Belgrade, 1926), Book XXI, vols. 5, 6, pp. 277-280. This story is not included in the collected edition.

¹⁰ Ivo Andrić, Sabrana dela (Belgrade, Prosveta, 1963), vol. VI, pp. 204-207. My translation. Primal knowledge of sin as an object, provenance unknown, which turns up in the solar plexus, throat or mouth, where it can neither be swallowed nor spat out, is a recurrent image, highly characteristic of Andrić's symbolism of the senses.

¹¹ Ivo Andrić, Zapisi o Goji, op. cit., pp. 71-72.

¹² Ivo Andrić, "Kod kazana" ('Over the Brandy Still," 1928), Sabrana dela, VI, 49. My translation. This story appears in the collection translated by Hitrec, The Pasha's Concubine. The title literally means "By the Cauldron."

¹³ Quoted by Bojislav Ðurić in the collection Ivo Andrić (Institut za teoriju književnosti i umetnosti, Belgrade, 1962), Posebna izdanja, I, 3.

¹⁴ In 1911-1912, Andrić presided over an organization of gymnasium youth, the "Sprsko-hrvatska napredna omladina" (Serbo-Croatian Progressive Youth). See Vojislav Bogićević, Miada Bosna, pisma i prilozi (Sarajevo, 1954), p. 320. Also a reproduction of Andrić's diary dated August 8, 1912, where an assassination attempt is related with apparent approval, though the author dissociates himself from its perpetrators. Confiscated, the diary led directly to his arrest. (Ibid., p. 135) He later published a record of that fateful day, July 28, 1914: "Prvi daň u Splitskoj tamnici. Pre deset godina" ("My First Day in the Split Prison. Ten Years Ago"), Vardar, kalendar za prostu godinu 1925 (Belgrade, Koko srpskih sestara, 1924), pp. 68-70, several times republished over the years. Correlated with this record is the 1931 story Zanos i stradanje Tome Galusa (The Ecstasy and Suffering of Thomas Galus). See also the interview "Ponekad se pitam da li to nije neka vrsta mistične kazne za nas koji smo preživeli" ("Sometimes I ask myself if this was not some kind of mystical punishment for us who lived through it"), Ideje, 17 XI 1934, p. 2.

¹⁵ Andrić worked for many years in the genre of prose poetry, with more than fifty original lyrics published by 1934, in addition to the two large, integrated meditations Ex Ponto and Nemiri (Disquietudes) when this channel appears to have run dry. He also translated a good deal in the early years. Of particular interest to Americans is his interest in Walt Whitman, the only non-Slavic poet he worked with before 1919. The longest and most significant of his translations of the American poet is section 21 of Song of Myself (in the 1855 edition, or those which follow it), beginning "I am the poet of the Body / And I am the poet of the Soul," translated in Bosanska Vila (30 June 1912), XXVII, 165-166. See also the most substantial of his early essays, in the periodical Književni jug (The Literary South), IV, 2-3 (1 August 1919), pp. 49-55: "Walt Whitman (1819-1919)."

¹⁶ Translated by Kenneth Johnstone (Grove Press, N.Y., 1962).

¹⁷ Ivo Andrić, Sabrana dela, IV, 97.

¹⁸ Ivo Andrić, Zapisi o Goji, op. cit., pp. 65-66. My translation.