SOURCE: Hawkesworth, Celia. “Short Stories.” In Ivo Andrić: Bridge between East and West, pp. 68-122. Dover, N.H.: Athlone Press, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Hawkesworth looks beyond the apparent objectivity in Andrić's short stories to discover the writer's subtle insertion of his own individuality in his narratives.]

(I) 1920-41

After the personal, confessional nature of the early prose poems, the first impression conveyed by Andrić's short stories is of their objectivity. Andrić 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 situations portrayed all tend to illustrate those fundamental facts of human existence with which Andrić 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 Andrić'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.

Andrić 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 professional artists, but by “wise men, sorcerers, witches and saints”. Andrić'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 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 Andrić's fictional characters' reaction to the world, which is also essentially emotional. In the majority of his stories Andrić 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 Višegrad, 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 Andrić 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 Višegrad, in 1878. There are also several characters who seem to have particularly appealed to Andrić's imagination and who recur in a series or small cycle of stories: the two monks, Brother Marko and Brother Petar, the half-gypsy Ćorkan 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 Andrić's writing is consequently varied. There are also some pieces of fantasy which are closer to Andrić's prose poetry or reflective prose than to conventional narrative fiction.

We may, then, attempt to organize the abundant variety of Andrić'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 printed 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 importance 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 isolation, 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.

This can be seen in Andrić'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 Andrić'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 Andrić'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 Andrić 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 Kraljević, were those prevailing in an aggressive, masculine culture. The traditional ballads concerned with Alija deal exclusively with his prowess on the battlefield. Andrić 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 magic 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: “Derzelez 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. Andrić 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 Kraljević. Marko's reaction is, however, generally more subtle. Derzelez, in Andrić'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 Andrić'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 Andrić's outsiders, the social misfit who pursues an unattainable illusion. This illusion comes in several forms in Andrić's work. It can be beauty (as here), power, happiness or escape. The sense of helpless constraint which overcomes Derzelez is one to which every individual is ultimately condemned.

This story establishes the pattern for many of the later ones: an 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 experience 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 Andrić'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 of Derzelez, 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 circumstances in which the character is placed. Such bewilderment can mark equally the “victims” and the “aggressors” in Andrić'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 Andrić 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 Andrić 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 Andrić'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 Andrić'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 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 Andrić'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 Andrić 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 contributing 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 Ćelebi-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, Ćelebi-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 Andrić'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; Ćelebi-Hafiz simply falls from 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 forgotten.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 Višegrad 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 schizophrenia of the parish priest of a village outside Višegrad 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 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 Andrić. As in the case of Alija Derzelez 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 Andrić'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 Andrić'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 similarly 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 step over the border of sanity before he can realize the strength of these currents.

Vujadin's case suggests that in Andrić'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.

Andrić'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 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.

Although 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.

“I knew that You did not forget anyone, not even stuttering Marko or that sinful Osmo Mameledžija. 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 Andrić 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 Andrić's view of life as a perpetual ebb and flow. Petar and Alidede are also monks. Such men are confronted 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 Andrić's works may evolve their own ritual to order their experience, 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 Andrić'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 Andrić'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

The question of the balance of good and evil has important implications in Andrić'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 Andrić 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 Ćorkan, 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 Andrić, recurring as the central figure of one story, “Ćorkan and the German Girl”²⁸, in the story “Mila and Prelac”²⁹ and in the novel The Bridge on the Drina.

Ćorkan is a general scapegoat in Višegrad, a figure of fun who himself joins in the mockery. In the story “Ćorkan 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 Ćorkan's personality. The object of his obsession is physically inaccessible: a tight-rope walker in an Austrian circus company visiting Višegrad. The chaos caused by the circus eventually results in Ćorkan'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 Ćorkan emerges from the hayloft where he crawled to recover, laughing at the way he climbs down the ladder. Ćorkan's resilience, good humour and spontaneity are always associated with the sun, the central symbol of positive forces in Andrić's work. Indeed, the character can be seen to have grown out of the role played by the sun in Andrić's writing.

When, in his old age, Ćorkan 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

Ćorkan's death is a rare example in Andrić'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 everything that is lost and all that is found, between what is and what ceases to be.”³¹

Ćorkan provides a counterpoint to the weight of evil in Andrić'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 Andrić's world are constant. The distribution of good and evil, aggression and suffering, positive and destructive forces varies from one individual to another depending 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 institutionalized 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, Andrić 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 Andrić'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 Andrić 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 Andrić'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 Andrić'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 Žepa”³⁶ is one of the stories richest in ideas which recur elsewhere in Andrić'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 Žepa 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 Constantinople, 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 river and sweeps away the preliminary structure. As in The Bridge on the Drina, 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 Andrić'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 movement in Andrić's work away from analysis, in favour of complete entities, stories which communicate through their various components—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 Andrić'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 development of themes and ideas, in which his personal experience is only indirectly reflected. Nevertheless, a number of short stories published 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 Yugoslavia'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. Andrić, who made a major contribution 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. Andrić published some eighteen stories between 1945 and 1948, covering a range of themes and styles; from the tales set in Bosnia under 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 inadequate 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 undermined 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 accounted 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 members 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 jewelry 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 Andrić 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 Ković, 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 Ković's character is also generalized in the manner typical of Andrić. 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 Ković is developed into the portrait of an inadequate, dissatisfied and consequently potentially dangerous personality. He is a man who needs some outward sign of importance: 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

Ković 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 Ković 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 Ković'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 Ković's aggression, which in turn functions as compensation for his own sense of uneasy dissatisfaction.

It is at first sight perhaps surprising that Andrić 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 circumstances of the War in Yugoslavia, it is quite understandable that Andrić'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 circumstances are not treated directly, however, much of Andrić'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 Andrić 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 Andrić 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 Andrić as a young man. The substance of the piece, and letter itself, however, need have existed only in Andrić's imagination, stimulated by his understanding of Bosnia and his knowledge of the repercussions 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 Andrić's experience of war the irrational fear characterizing human existence can be seen to have been channelled in a particular direction. The Fascist Ković'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 consumes everything around it, to perish itself in the end, for such 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 …⁴⁴

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, Andrić undermines his character's brave attempt to break out of the pattern in this briefly stated ironic final note. As always in Andrić'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, Andrić 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 transformed 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

Andrić'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 development 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 Andrić'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 Andrić an essential feature of human relationships remains attack and defence, and he examines this now in his depiction of 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 Andrić's concern with the reality underlying social convention, 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 Zereković, 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 Andrić'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, in an aphoristic general observation typical of Andrić:

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 idiosyncratic behaviour of one individual. It is a reflection of a common aspect 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 compensates 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 unpredictable periods of silence.

There are references throughout Andrić's works to the power of words for good or evil, one of the earliest examples being the “Bridge on the Žepa”. 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 together had been an example of real communication and understanding, 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.

Andrić 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 compelling 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. 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 “Panorama”,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 experience.

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 Andrić's own. In connection with the picture of a fortress in Rio, for example, the child's attention is caught particularly 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

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 Andrić'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 different forms and a range of tones.

The conclusion of the story offers an apt description of Andrić'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 Andrić'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, Andrić seems also to have 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 Andrić's found in Anxieties and Signs by the Roadside. Sometimes by the sea, which he loved, Andrić found himself thinking of the perfect salvation of simply dissolving into its salty, iodine evaporation.

“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 Andrić'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, Andrić 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 Andrić 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 observations:

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

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 Derzelez 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 Andrić'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 Andrić. 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 the impasse 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 livelihood 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 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 Miloš Obilić, 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 Andrić's mature years.

(III) THE HOUSE ON ITS OWN⁸²

In 1960 Andrić 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 Andrić 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 Andrić 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 Andrić'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 Andrić's typical 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 Andrić 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 Andrić'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 extinguishes 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 Andrić's works that his introductions serve to create a certain frame of mind in the reader, which will 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 Andrić's writings: what kind of stories capture the imagination and demand to be handed down through the generations, 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 Andrić'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 Andrić'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 Andrić dismisses with characteristic irony and scepticism.

Two of the portraits describe the type of ostensibly “unbalanced” character who always particularly interested Andrić. 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 Andrić uses elsewhere of more serious psychological derangement. The Baron can thus stand for any of Andrić'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 Andrić'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 unacceptable 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 Andrić with its recurrent theme of a lie, an illusion, being more real than any truth. Andrić conveys this absurdity by stressing the arbitrary dividing line between “truth” and “falsehood”. 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 Andrić'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 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. Andrić'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 Andrić'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 Andrić'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 Andrić 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 Andrić. One concerns an historical figure—the Vizier of Mostar, Alipasha Rizvanbegović—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 “arbitrary and cruel”. The ironic tone in which the brief account of Alipasha's life is given increases its generalized quality by reinforcing 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 humiliation 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. Andrić 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 Andrić, 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”,⁹⁷⁹⁸ 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 memories. 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.⁹⁹

This story offers a vivid illustration of Andrić'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?”¹⁰⁰—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”.¹⁰¹ Andrić, 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 …”¹⁰²

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”.¹⁰³

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 style and technique. It describes a character renowned for his ability as a teller of tales. He is essentially self-effacing:

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.¹⁰⁴

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 not 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.¹⁰⁵

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 Andrić'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.¹⁰⁶

These last words touch on three related reasons for the telling of stories which we have met in Andrić'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 Andrić's short-story telling in miniature.

Notes

1. “Put Alije Derzeleza”, Znakovi (vol. 8), pp. 9-34. The first part of the trilogy, “Derzelez u hanu” (“Derzelez at the Inn”) appeared first in Književni jug, 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 Alije Derzeleza”, p. 10.

3. Ibid., p. 11.

4. Ibid., pp. 10-11.

5. Ibid., p. 30.

6. “Mustafa Madžar” (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), Žed (vol. 6), pp. 105-17.

10. Ibid., p. 108.

11. Ibid., p. 111.

12. Ibid., p. 107.

13. Ibid., p. 112.

14. Ibid., p. 116.

15. “Mara milosnica” (1926), Jelena, žena koje nema (vol. 7), pp. 91-176.

16. Ibid., p. 97.

17. “Anikina vremena” (1931), Jelena, žena koje nema, pp. 9-90.

18. Ibid., p. 73.

19. “Smrt u Sinanovoj tekiji” (1924), Žed (vol. 6), pp. 199-211.

20. Ibid., p. 206.

21. “U musafirhani” (1923), Žed, pp. 9-20.

22. Ibid., p. 11.

23. Ibid., p. 19.

24. “Proba” (1954), Žed, pp. 73-104; p. 93.

25. “Kod kazana” (1930), Žed, pp. 53-94.

26. Ibid., p. 54.

27. Ibid., p. 58.

28. “Ćorkan i Švabica” (1921), Jelena, žena 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. “Čudo u Olovu” (1926). Žed (vol. 6), pp. 165-73).

33. “Jelena, žena koje nema” (1934) (vol. 7), pp. 245-79.

34. Ex Ponto (vol. 11), p. 63.

35. “Rzavski bregovi” (1924), Žed (vol. 6), pp. 153-66.

36. “Most na Žepi” (1925), Žed, pp. 185-94.

37. “Priča 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. “Reči” (1954), Znakovi (vol. 8), pp. 81-8.

58. “Osatičani” (1958), Znakovi, pp. 289-328.

59. Ibid., pp. 290-1.

60. Ibid., p. 298

61. “U zavadi sa svetom” (1958), Deca (vol. 9), pp. 17-24.

62. Ibid., p. 17.

63. “Panorama” (1958), Deca, pp. 119-49.

64. Ibid., p. 122.

65. Ibid., p. 123.

66. Ibid., p. 125.

67. Ibid., p. 126.

68. Ibid., p. 133.

69. Ibid., p. 137.

70. Ibid., p. 138.

71. Ibid., p. 149.

72. “Letovanje na jugu” (1959) Žed (vol. 6), pp. 247-256.

73. Ibid., p. 248.

74. Ibid., p. 253.

75. “Žena od slonove kosti” (1922), Jelena, žena koje nema (vol. 7), pp. 233-8.

76. “Aska i vuk” (1953), Deca (vol. 9), pp. 187-96.

77. Ibid., p. 193.

78. “Priča o vezirovom slonu” (1947), Nemirna godina (vol. 5), pp. 41-90.

79. Ibid., p. 41.

80. Ibid., p. 72.

81. Kuća na osami (1976), (vol. 14).

82. “Lica” (1960), Kuća na osami, pp. 226-33.

83. Ibid., p. 226.

84. Kuća na osami, p. 10.

85. Ibid., p. 10.

86. Ibid., pp. 10-11.

87. Ibid., pp. 11-12.

88. “Baron”, Kuća na osami, p. 39.

89. Ibid., p. 38.

90. Ibid., p. 43.

91. Kuća na osami, p. 80.

92. “Robinja”, Kuća na osami, p. 92.

93. “Bonvalpaša”, Kuća na osami, p. 17.

94. “Alipaša”, Kuća na osami, p. 23.

95. Ibid., p. 32.

96. “Cirkus”, Kuća na osami, p. 23.

97. “Cirkus”, Kuća na osami, pp. 55-76.

98. Ibid., p. 59.

99. Ibid., p. 61.

100. Ibid., p. 69.

101. “Geometar i Julka”, Kuća na osami, p. 47.

102. “Priča”, Kuća na osami, pp. 81-90.

103. Ibid., p. 81.

104. Ibid., p. 82.

105. Ibid., p. 86.