SOURCE: Hawkesworth, Celia. “Essays and Reflective Prose.” In Ivo Andrić: Bridge between East and West, pp. 206-33. Dover, N.H.: Athlone Press, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Hawkesworth examines major themes in Andrić's nonfiction prose.]

ESSAYS AND CRITICAL WRITINGS

Andrić wrote a number of essays, reviews and articles which were scattered through various newspapers and periodicals. They were not collected in book form until the writer's death, but now a good idea of the range of Andrić's interests in these writings, and their quality, can be gained from the selections published. Until recently these writings have been considered only as a kind of appendage to Andrić's fiction and verse, and the writer himself has said that he wrote them only in the intervals between his fictional works, when he was exhausted. Nevertheless, it would be equally appropriate to consider them before the rest of Andrić's works, since they contain many ideas and preoccupations which are developed fully in his fiction.

These writings cover a wide variety of subject matter, reflecting many aspects of twentieth-century cultural life, particularly of Yugoslavia but including also essays on such figures as Goya, Heine, Gorky and Walt Whitman. They fall into three main categories: short reviews of individual works, analyses of specific aspects of a writer's work, written often on the occasion of an anniversary or other celebration, and longer essays springing from Andrić's own particular interests.

Andrić began writing reviews in 1914. The published selections show a relatively prolific output in that year and in the years immediately following the First World War, reduced thereafter to one or two pieces a year, with a renewed burst of activity in 1945 and 1946. The earliest reviews, marking the beginning of Andrić's literary career and written between 1914 and 1920, are often impatiently negative and arrogant, but after these beginnings the tone became steadily more sober and thoughtful with Andrić's growing confidence and stature as a writer.

The first of his articles to receive attention was a portrait of the Croatian writer and critic A. G. Matoš, on the occasion of his death in 1914.¹ Matoš had made a great impact on the cultural life of Croatia in his day. In Zagreb he was known as “Rabbi” and was regarded as the chief authority in all questions of art and taste. The gently mocking tone of Andrić's article offers an insight into the personality of Matoš and his influence on others. Andrić's style in this piece conveys much of the energy and rapid impressionistic quality of Matoš's own critical writings:

His restless eyes observe everything, his inquisitive mind skims over everything and reacts to everything swiftly, abruptly, bitterly, delightedly, justly, unjustly, no matter, it always reacts. It is as though all things and people and events were invisibly interviewing him, and he, with a speed that amazes, gives his answers unsparingly personally, frequently unjustly, but he always gives them, and consequently there is little question of precision or skill in his answers.²

As might be expected, in these critical pieces Andrić tends to consider each artist in his historical context. Here the atmosphere of the Croatia of Matoš's day is evoked in an impressionistic style typical of the Young Bosnians. As this was the atmosphere in which Andrić began his literary activity and which he subsequently left to take up his diplomatic career in Belgrade, it is worth quoting:

His Croatia is somnolent, dejected; apathetic to the point of tears … “No one cares about us, not even we ourselves.” His Croatia is a beautiful, downtrodden land, thrown into slavery by an historical absurdity, betrayed, exploited, half de-Croaticized. It is painful to live in the Croatian night … People's eyes have grown heavy with waiting for the sun from the West, seeking the dawn from where it has never broken on anyone … The whole of Croatia is snoring gracelessly. Only the poets and terrorists are awake.³

This article is typical of many of Andrić's essays. They do not offer a distanced critical appraisal of the merit of a given artist's work, but an account of the essential qualities of that work. Many of them are in fact imaginative portraits. In a more restrained style, the passage quoted on Matoš could have formed one of the character sketches included in Signs by the Roadside. Another illustration of this approach is provided by the beginning of the essay on Walt Whitman, written in his centenary year, 1919:⁴

This is not poetry from which one could extract one word or one line, dissecting and measuring, it is the work of a life and the expression of a personality … His life and his poetry … are closely connected like the light and dark rings of growth and development in a tree trunk.⁵

It can be seen, then, that there are several points of contact between these essays and Andrić's fictional portraits, particularly in view of the fact that many of those portraits are based on historical figures. As the longer essays—as opposed to brief reviews—tend to be concerned with artists or historical figures to whom he was drawn for a particular reason, his starting point in selecting historical figures to be portrayed in his works of fiction and his essays is similar. They represent certain abstract ideas. In the works of fiction the details of the characters' lives may be modified to convey these ideas as they are developed at greater length. But, however they are treated, all these portraits contribute to Andrić's exploration of the relationship between “history” and “legend”. The two are closely connected: “history” is seen as one dimension of the lives we all lead and “legend” as what the human imagination extracts from random experience, the selected historical fact which survives transience.

Several essays illustrate Andrić's approach is selecting historical figures: “The Legend of St Francis of Assisi”,⁶ “The Legend of Laura and Petrarch”,⁷ “Simón Bolívar Liberator”.⁸ Each of these figures appeals to Andrić's imagination for a different reason. Simón Bolívar, on the centenary of his death, is described as “an unusual figure, who bears the finest of all titles a living man can attain—Liberator”.⁹ St Francis represents the ascetic ideal, which Andrić maintains is not understood, let alone practised, in the twentieth century.¹⁰ Petrarch is discussed on the 600th anniversary of his first seeing Laura. Andrić is interested in the facts of this love story as they have been handed down to illustrate his definition of tradition as “gossip sanctioned by time”.¹¹

In his works of fiction, where Andrić explores the circumstances out of which the “legend” emerged, his characters are seen too closely, from too many angles to appear as “heroes”. Where a character has the reputation of a “hero”, like Alija Derzelez or Mustafa the Hungarian, Andrić is concerned with the discrepancy between his reputation, conditioned by the needs of others, and the true nature of the character.

All these essays illustrate the method of a creative artist rather than an objective critic, an ability to enter into the minds of his subjects and to identify himself with their situation and their attitudes. This human capacity for identification with others was, of course, explored in Devil's Yard, in the extreme case of Kamil and the more sober manner of Brother Petar. In his essays Andrić demonstrates the warm sympathy of Petar, the ideal, self-effacing story-teller who allows his characters to speak for themselves.

Andrić returns with particular sympathy to two figures of outstanding importance in the Serbian cultural tradition to which he belongs: the collector of folk literature and reformer of the Serbian language Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787-1864) and the Montenegrin poet P. P. Njegoš (1813-51).

Vuk Karadžić is admired for his personal qualities and for his instinctive literary gift. In his essays, Andrić does not question the value of Vuk's achievements in the sense of acknowledging that there may have been a negative side to his uncompromising attitude. As is the case with Andrić's fictional characters, while Vuk is on the stage he dominates it and Andrić looks out at his opponents largely from Vuk's point of view. The reader is himself involved and convinced by Andrić's presentation of the case.

Andrić takes a quotation from one of Vuk's letters as a motto to define his essential quality of determination against great odds: “Ne da se. Ali će dati!” It is impossible to render its terseness exactly but it could be clumsily translated: “It's hard. But it will be done!” Andrić admires Vuk for his great personal courage, his clear sight and unwavering belief in the future and in the righteousness of his aims. He likens him to one of the great explorers, setting out into the unknown and convincing others of the existence of new worlds.

Vuk's instinctive recognition of artistic quality has been acknowledged in connection with his selection of the best examples of the South Slav oral tradition. Despite poor health and financial hardship, Vuk would travel great distances in search of the best version of a particular ballad. He recognized the talents of individual singers and would return to them again and again to record their songs. Andrić examines another aspect of Vuk's literary gift in his essay on “Vuk as a writer”,¹² seeing in his historical writings and descriptions of aspects of Serbian life the qualities which denote a true realist: “observation, selection and a rare sense of the characteristic detail”.¹³ Andrić suggests that it is on the basis of this observation and selection that we acknowledge the writer as “witness” and accept his account as convincing and truthful. These qualities are precisely those which Andrić pursues in his own writing. Another general point which could equally well apply to Andrić's style is what he describes as the “calm” of Vuk's writing: “a calm which is essential to a good writer, for the writer must excite his readers; he must not himself fall before them in rapture”.¹⁴

Perhaps the most important aspect of the achievement of Vuk Karadžić for Andrić, however, is the fact that his work is focused entirely on the traditions and culture of the Serbian people. Vuk derives his strength from his roots and close connection with these people. Andrić describes Vuk as better aware than anyone of his people's backwardness under Turkish occupation, but all the more determined to seek out and preserve their real achievements:

No one did more, first to recognize under the mud and silt of five centuries, and then to bring to light, all that was fruitful, creative and of value in our people, all that Vuk believed ought to be our contribution to general culture.¹⁵

Similarly, in the essays on Njegoš, Andrić is drawn to the poet as the personification of an essential principle of Serbian culture. Where Vuk was the man of action, whose courage took the form of readiness for constant struggle against opposition to his linguistic reforms, Njegoš was a thinker, embodying courage on a philosophical as well as a practical level. Njegoš had three functions, all of which made great demands on him: he was “Vladika” of Montenegro: “Prince-Bishop”, at once head of the church and ruler of the land, as he was a poet. These three functions conflicted with each other and led to contradictions in all aspects of Njegoš's life. He had to face the backwardness of which Vuk was aware daily in his political plans for his country, setting out energetically, only to be rebuffed ungratefully, even brutally. He was forced all the time to face the discrepancy between his surroundings and his sensitivity and intellect. Andrić describes Njegoš as on the one hand isolated by all that he was, and on the other caught up at the centre of the struggle between East and West, a tragic struggle often involving fratricide, described by Andrić as “not only the conflict of two faiths, nations and races, but of two elements”.¹⁶ For Njegoš the Ottoman Empire was the embodiment of Evil, a Hell on earth with which it was his duty to struggle without hesitation or conciliation and without any hope of victory. This daily experience drove Njegoš to see conflict as the essential principle of the Universe: constant even in Heaven, where God/Light must struggle perpetually for victory over Evil. Out of his experience grew Njegoš's particular brand of courage, expressed in the famous line from his masterpiece The Mountain Wreath—“Let what cannot be occur!”¹⁷

It is a line so succinct as to defy translation, but one with which all Serbo-Croat speakers are brought up. Andrić describes it as

a unique, desperate motto which seems absurd, but which is in fact the very truth of life … I have not found a more terrible motto anywhere in the poetry of the world or the destiny of peoples. But without this suicidal absurd, without this, to put it paradoxically, positive nihilism, without this tenacious denial of reality and the obvious, neither action nor the very thought of action against evil would be possible.¹⁸

The principle which Njegoš embodies for Andrić, and which is expressed in this line, is the “Kosovo principle”. The defeat of the Serbian state by the Ottoman army on the field of Kosovo in 1389 is the central fact of the oral tradition of the South Slavs. It was a defeat out of which the people forged a desperate heroism, a readiness for self-sacrifice and an unassailable belief in the future. Njegoš expresses this principle with particular intensity:

In this, Njegoš is the expression of our fundamental and deepest collective emotion, for it is under his motto, consciously or unconsciously, that all our battles for freedom have been waged, from Karadjordje (1805) to the present day.¹⁹

The essays concerned with Njegoš evoke the essential drama of his situation. Andrić identifies himself imaginatively with his subject and enters into his dilemma, conveying the poet's isolation, despair, frequent bitterness, and spiritual strength. There is also the additional dimension of Andrić's personal admiration of the poet and his acknowledgement of the extent to which Njegoš remained a vivid presence in his mind—from his youth, when most people in Višegrad would quote lines from The Mountain Wreath in the course of conversation, to the Second World War, when Njegoš's expression of the traditional faith in the “impossible” was a source of inspiration to so many.

The essays are, then, both imaginative portraits and illustrations of the continuing meditation explored in detail in Devil's Yard. There are points of contact both with Andrić's fictional works and with the character sketches and reflections of Signs by the Roadside. The work—included in the various published volumes of Andrić's essays—which most obviously spans the categories of fact and fiction, history and legend is the “Conversation with Goya”.²⁰ Here, the author's identification with his subject is complete. The ideas attributed to Goya are in fact Andrić's own reflections on the nature of art, provoked by an affinity with the painter's work. Had Andrić been interrogated as Kamil was, he would have had to reply “I am he”.

The form of this piece, which has been used by other modern writers, brings it closer to a work of art than an essay. Goya's physical appearance is described briefly with particular attention to his hands, the bridge between the painter's physical existence and the world of his imagination. The “conversation”, like so many of Andrić's works, is set in a frame. The frame itself has two dimensions; the timelessness of a small French café, and the reference to a circus being set up outside it. The fact that the café is near Bordeaux rather than in Spain suggests the insignificance of man-made geographical divisions. The circus carries associations of Andrić's exploitation elsewhere of the image of a different, man-made, reality. As in other works, some of the more contentious views expressed in the essays are attributed to a third party, a painter friend of Goya.

The timelessness of the setting is reinforced by the fact that the “conversation” begins with the word “Yes”. It is part of a continuing reflection without real beginning or end, only provisionally fixed here in a form which gives it shape and permanence, while also suggesting the fluidity of the material itself.

Within this frame the essay makes a number of statements about the nature of the artist, and the artistic technique. The fragility of the process of transposing human experience into art is conveyed in a series of images:

What is this irresistible and insatiable desire to take from the darkness of non-existence or the prison which the interconnection of all things in life represents, to wrest from this nothingness or from these chains piece by piece of life and the dreams of men and to give it form, to fix it “for ever” with this brittle chalk on flimsy paper?²¹

The situation of the artist is described as ambiguous and often painful. He is resented as suspect, concealed behind a number of masks. The artist's destiny “insincerity and contradiction, uncertainty and a constant vain endeavour to bring together things which cannot be joined”.²² The image of the circus is used to develop the theme of the artist as illusionist, obliged to play a role in public, to conform to an identity imposed from outside. The circus is seen as the most acceptable form of theatrical performance. The theatre itself provokes only an intense awareness of the futility of any crude attempt to reproduce the forms of reality, rather than its essence.

Ways of avoiding this sense of “poverty and vanity” are suggested in a long reflection on the difficulties entailed in the painting of portraits, the need to free the individual completely from his surroundings and the arbitrary moment, seeing at once the beginning and the end of his life. In a passage reminiscent of “The Bridge on the Žepa” Goya is presented as having been tempted at first to comment on his portraits, but to have realized that they must be left to speak for themselves to different generations in different circumstances as flexibly and fully as possible.

A particuarly interesting passage concerns the accusation that Goya favoured the dark sides of life, violent or ambiguous scenes, in his paintings. Andrić maintains that all human movements are either aggressive or defensive. He recognizes that there can be rare moments of pure frivolous joy, but these are balanced by the millions expressing anxiety or attack. These impulses are diluted in daily life by many tiny actions which are neutral in themselves. But the artist must depict a concentration of such movements in their essential tone in order that they should be expressive and convincing.

The last passages of the essay move away from the narrower issues of the artist and his craft to more general ideas seen as deriving from the painter's experience of life. One is the passage quoted in the introduction to this study concerning the value of legend and fairy-tale as casting light on the true nature of human existence. Another describes the painter's initial creative impulse as springing from “fear of the thought of evil”. Once Goya has controlled the idea of death by painting the word “mors” in a triangular frame on the wall of his room, it acts as a kind of amulet which protects him from irrational fear.

As in Devil's Yard, where the three separate narrators cast light from different angles on the central statement, so here the fact that the ideas are conveyed through a “conversation” involving the narrator, Goya, and his painter friend reinforces Goya's insistence at various points in the essay that there is only one “truth” and one “reality”, but a number of different approaches to them. Goya is depicted as a wise old man who has seen “everything”, who knows people of all kinds. For him only one aspect of existence inspires awe—the world of ideas, the only true reality without which there would be only nothingness. Recurrent thoughts from all Andrić's works can be seen in the final words Goya is made to speak:

Living among people, I have always wondered why everything intellectual and spiritual in our lives is so powerless, defenceless and disjointed, so odious to societies of all times and so alien to the majority of people. And I came to this conclusion: this world is the realm of material laws and animal life, without sense or purpose, with death as the end of everything. All things spiritual and abstract in it have occurred by some accident, like shipwrecked travellers from the civilized world finding themselves with their clothes, machines and weapons on a distant island with a completely different climate, inhabited by wild beasts and savages. This is why all our ideas bear the strange and tragic character of objects salvaged from a shipwreck. They bear on themselves also the marks of the forgotten world from which they once sprang, the catastrophe that has brought us here, and the constant, vain effort to adapt to the new world. For they struggle ceaselessly with this new world in which they find themselves, a world that is essentially opposed to them, and at the same time they are constantly transforming and adapting themselves to this world. Hence the fact that every great and noble thought is a stranger and a sufferer. Hence the inevitable sadness in art and pessimism in science.²³

Typically, the essay does not end with these solemn words. It returns to the frame of the circus, with all its associations of illusion, ambiguity and elusiveness; to a description of the narrator searching through the crowd for a figure of the old man he believes he glimpsed in the distance, but this may have been merely a trick of his imagination and the light.

SIGNS BY THE ROADSIDE

We have seen that even Andrić's longest works are often composed of several smaller components. It is in the fixing of detail in a precise context that the writer excels. His natural medium seems to have been the short, succinct statement, which could be expanded or left complete in itself. The two volumes of prose poems written during the First World War can be seen as marking the beginning of a dialogue between Andrić, the world around him, and the life of his mind, which continued until the last stages of his final illness. This dialogue takes the form of notes, reflections, observations, sketches, snatches of overheard dialogue, impressions from travels, thoughts on art and the nature of human existence. If the early volumes can be seen as a storehouse of themes and ideas developed in Andrić's later prose works, then this volume offers a virtually inexhaustible well-spring, only a fraction of whose material was worked into Andrić's creative writings.

The collection of these notes entitled Signs by the Roadside can perhaps best be described as an intellectual diary. As may be imagined of a man who recoiled so consistently from any exposure of his private life and thoughts, Andrić was equally consistent in his dislike of the diary as a genre, seeing it as a misguided search for permanence. He was sceptical also about the publication of the private letters of the famous. In a review of Heine's letters, written in 1914, he states: “An unpleasant sense of the degradation of greatness, such as I had when reading the letters of Michelangelo; it is as unsightly as behind the wings of a stage, as a workshop; in the studio of even the most delicate painter there is a smell of oil, paint, anxiety, etc.”²⁴ And yet it is precisely because it resembles a workshop—a random assortment of the tools, colours, sketches, completed fragments—which reflects the artist's creative activity, that this volume is of particular interest. To use Andrić's basic image: Signs represents a bridge between the experience on various levels that is the material of art, and its processing in enduring works. It is a record of this intermediate stage; its contents have been carefully selected. It is clear, from Andrić's statements about the irrelevance of biographical information to an assessment of a writer's work, that the material Andrić did record in his “intellectual diary” over the years was of a particular kind, and committed to paper in the knowledge of its public interest. Many of Andrić's notes remain unpublished, including some of his more personal statements. The notes he was prepared to see published, then, appeared in this approved selection of some six hundred pages.

There are three main thematic categories in the work, reflected in its organization: general statements on the nature of existence, human behaviour, society and history; reflections on art, and in particular on writing; and incidental impressions and character sketches which can frequently be seen as having inspired or been worked into a work of fiction. There are also two shorter sections: one entitled “Sleeplessness”,²⁵ devoted to the preoccupations and musings of the insomnia which afflicted Andrić; the other, under the title “Eternal Calendar of the Mother Tongue”,²⁶ marks the beginning of a collection of personal reactions to individual words and phrases in the writer's native language, and conveys something of the vital fascination of language for him.

The first section, consisting of general reflections on human life, is preceded by a piece which can form an introduction to and explanation of the pages that follow it:

Some traditional tales are so universal that we forget when and where we heard or read them, and they live in us like the memory of some experience of our own. Such a tale is the one about the young man who, wandering through the world, seeking his fortune, set out along a dangerous road, not knowing where it was leading him. In order not to lose his way, the young man carved with an axe in the trunks of the trees beside the road signs which would later show him the way back.

That young man personifies the common, eternal destiny of mankind: on the one hand a dangerous and uncertain road, and on the other the great human need that a man should not get lost, but find his way in the world and leave some trace behind him. The signs which we leave after us will not escape the destiny of everything human—transience and oblivion. Perhaps they will never be noticed at all. Perhaps no one will understand them. But still they are necessary, just as it is natural and necessary that we should open our hearts and communicate with others.

If these small obscure signs do not save us from disorientation and trials of all kinds, they can make them easier, and help us at least in so far as they convince us that, in everything we do, we are not alone, nor the first, nor unique.²⁷

This passage offers a succinct account of Andrić's intention and method in his art: driven by an irrational human search for permanence, he is drawn to the simplest parables and legends as expressing, always in new terms, the unchanging human condition. The “signs” men leave can take many forms, from a book to an elaborately engineered bridge. The book Andrić had with him in prison consoled him simply because it was a book, a sign. When Brother Petar awoke to find Kamil beside him in Devil's Yard, the first thing he noticed was a book:

The first thing he saw was a small book bound in yellow leather. An intense warm feeling of joy ran through his body; this was something of the lost, human, real world left far beyond these walls, beautiful but uncertain as a vision in a dream.²⁸

The content of the book and its author are insignificant; just as the sign on the tree is anonymous and conveys nothing other than the fact that someone once passed that way and made it. These small signs are too often obscured by “the insignificant but apparently important events” taking place around us. In Bosnian Story this essential difference in outlook divides the French Consul Daville from his young assistant des Fossés:

“Oh”, sighed Daville, “this Travnik and the country for hundreds of miles around are nothing but a muddy desert inhabited by two kinds of wretches: tormentors and tormented, and we unfortunate creatures have to live among them.”

“On the contrary,’ said the young man, “I think there are few areas in the world that are less barren and monotonous. You have only to dig down a foot or two to find graves and the remains of past ages. Every field here is a graveyard with several layers; one necropolis on top of another, as the various inhabitants were born and died over the centuries, one epoch after another, one generation after another. And graveyards are evidence of life, not a desert.”

“Well”, as though it were an invisible fly, the consul protected himself from the young man's way of speaking, to which he could not accustom himself.

“Not only graveyards, not only graveyards! Today, as I was riding towards Kalibunar, I saw in one place that the rain had eroded the soil under the road. To a depth of some six yards you could see, like geological layers, one on top of the other, the traces of former roads that had passed through this same valley …”²⁹

When one uses the word “truth” of Andrić's work, one must remember that it is this kind of minimal truth: the simple fact that others have been here before, exposed to the same kind of torments. There are no answers to the perennial questions, but the knowledge that others have also asked them gives us a sense of continuity which is the only solace we can expect.

The “signs” Andrić speaks of are no more than that. The bridge which dominates the life of Višegrad and gives it its shape is a link between two worlds and two different ways of life, but that is only the temporal, functional level of its significance. What is stressed in The Bridge on the Drina, as we have seen, is that the bridge is also a symbol of the continuity of life which, for all its changes, endures. One of the obviously important features of the bridge is that it stands over running water. The running river itself—the conventional image of passing time—cannot convey the quality of tranquillity and stability of the bridge and the mountains. Nevertheless the notion of the fluctuating moods of the sea, now rough, now still—of the perpetual “ebb and flow” of life—also recurs frequently in Andrić's work.

In the following passage, Andrić expresses a moment of vision. It is an example of the kind of circumstances out of which a legend might grow:

On one of the ramparts of the Kalemegdan fortress, I shaded my eyes from the sun with my hand and in the broad space above the shadowy ditches, full of grass, I caught sight of a whole world of bugs and flies, cobwebs and birds. The air around me was filled with innumerable living creatures in motion. Over the stones under my feet ran lizards and spiders, in the freshly dug soil beside me larvae and worms writhed struggling with the air and light. Then I felt how innacurate our egocentric notion is that we walk on the earth and stand in the air as though separated by something, as though something separate; I felt that the truth was that we, with everything around us, form one sea of living beings, now storm-tossed, now calm. We do not live, we are life. Individual existence, like individual death, is only a transient illusion, two minute waves in the ocean of movement around us. And it seems to me that I have glimpsed the root of our idea of eternal life and resurrection. Eternal life lies in the realization that all our limitations, all states and changes, are only imaginary, inherited delusions, and resurrection lies in the discovery that we never did live, but that, with life, we have always existed.³⁰

Much of this collection consists of reflections on the way in which this experience of life is transformed into art; and the demands of the artist's commitment:

An enormous effort of the imagination is required in order for a work of art to be created. And this effort should not be estimated only on the basis of what is successfully realized, but also by what did not succeed and was rejected in the course of the work and which will remain for ever unknown to us, readers and audience. When you think of all this, you wonder how a writer can endure such a vocation. How is it that the tool he uses does not explode in his hands and kill him, instead of creating according to his will? But it seems that those who are engaged in such dangerous work are protected precisely by the fact that they live inside the events, at the very heart of the danger.³¹

Sometimes it is possible to trace the workings of the writer's imagination, from a brief sketch recorded in the notebooks to a complete story. We have seen, for example, the way in which the theme of excitement and disillusion was developed in the story about the circus in The House On Its Own, and that a similar theme formed the basis for the story “Panorama”. In Signs by the Roadside one passage records the experience which was the origin of this persistent theme. It also describes how such memories may be brought to the surface, and demonstrates the simple stylistic devices which transform a personal memory into a general statement:

Above Belgrade the sun shines as though it will never set. But when it does start to go down, on these autumn days it is extinguished like a live coal in water. It seems as though it were not only the sun that is going down, but the whole earth with it. The blue ridge of hills in the distance sinks with the sun, and then the great plain of Srem starts to disappear, rolled up like a painted canvas.

They are rolling up the carpet. The performance is over.

A momentary illusion which passes without leaving a trace, like an incomprehensible shiver down the spine.

One of the greatest and most splendid sensations of my childhood was the first circus performance I was taken to. Only here too there was a moment of alarm and tears.

When they began to roll up the carpet after the first act, of acrobats and clowns, and to prepare for the next, the child burst into tears. He implored his elders not to allow them to roll up the beautiful big carpet that seemed to him as spacious and brightly coloured as the Elysian fields, and not to let the wonderful game of the acrobats and clowns come to an end. In vain they tried to console him, saying that this was only the first act, that the performance would continue and that there were still many wonderful things to come. The child wept bitterly and loudly, and calmed down only when horses and white mules appeared with bells and blue ribbons plaited into their manes. And as, in wonder, he laughed again, the tears dried on his face.

The sun has long since set. The momentary illusion has vanished. The familiar, motionless shapes reappear. The plain grows dark and becomes rigid, with a sharply etched line on the horizon. Belgrade lights up as far as the eye can see and looks like a giant's toy.³²

Another example may have been the starting point for the story “Summer Holiday in the South”, in which an Austrian teacher is absorbed into the sea air:

A strong south-east wind, and still stronger huge waves, splash the low, pebbled shore. I stand, bare-headed, on a high place. The waves break with a great roar in white foam around my feet, sometimes sprinkling even the top of my head. The powerful clamour of the pebbles blends with the sound of the waves as the tide constantly shifts and sorts them, coming and going, moving them now forwards, now backwards.

The air is saturated with sea spray, which I breathe in joyfully as deeply as I can. In this way, perhaps, a man could be transformed into sea water, or iodine, or something stronger and more refined, a few degrees above iodine in the scale of development and perfection.

And so on and up, to complete non-existence.³³

Those two passages are examples of the kind of mood or emotion that might colour the presentation of a story or an individual character. Such stories or characters can then be seen as projections of Andrić's own moods. His prose always has a strong emotional and psychological dimension. This is illustrated by the following passage, giving a brief outline of situations for potential stories. It shows also the writer's self-conscious observation of his work, his awareness of its artificiality. Like a skilful conjuror he is interested in trying out increasingly difficult tricks:

A writer who shows a certain skill and conviction in describing people, their actions and states of mind, begins with time to set himself new, ever more difficult and complex tasks. As he does so, he can see what hard, almost hopeless work it is, and how few human thoughts and feelings can be grasped and captured, expressed and presented. What do people feel and think at exceptional, fateful moments? How do they behave, how do they defend or console themselves?

For instance: a young man, who had set off with the girl he loves into the mountains, wanted to pick a flower and give it to her (and demonstrate his agility, strength and devotion); he set off down the cliff and is now falling headlong, straight into a deep chasm.

Or: a conspirator who, according to a well-thought-out plan, comes to the place where he is supposed to meet the companions with whom he is supposed to carry out the coup d'état and depose the hated tyrant, but instead of his fellow-conspirators he finds the tyrant's agents, and now they are tying him up, with curses and blows, while in the corner of the large room he sees his companions, who have already been bound.

Or: a man with thirty passengers in an aeroplane which has caught fire and is falling with its own weight, from a height of ten thousand feet.

That's what you ought to be describing!³⁴

Sometimes a scene which is complete in itself will impress itself on the writer's imagination, to be recorded for its own sake:

They were reading together from a large book. The text was about love and conflict, strife and defeat some two thousand years ago, about parting without tears or words, with no hope of being reunited. The woman was silent, and kept turning her face to one side. He immediately regretted that he had opened the book at this particular page. By a sudden movement of her neck and head, he realized that she was going to cry. Then she quickly turned her head away, but still a large tear fell on to the page of the open book. She lowered her head more and more and turned still further away. He said nothing, but sat in great confusion and embarrassment and stared uncomfortably, with a dull sense of surprise, at the large, clear tear shot through with light on the printed paper. The tear slowly slipped down the titled page and the letters under it could be seen enlarged, as under a magnifying glass.

For a film-script.³⁵

Most frequently, these initial ideas are recorded in the form of character sketches:

He was so clever and cunning that he was able, when he needed, to divide the simplest human word, “yes”, into two syllables and so make two words which contradicted and refuted each other. But he could not do the same thing with “no”. (His skill did not extend quite so far!) Consequently, he always answered all questions with “yes”, and then, if he changed his mind, he would set his skill into operation and begin to break the word in two, until he had made of it the “no” he needed.³⁶

A sketch such as this one is probably based on observation of an individual who caught the writer's attention. In a similar way he will record snatches of conversation overheard, or incidents observed around him. Other sketches are generalizations which may be used verbatim at suitable moments in the writer's work, or expanded into a full description of a character or situation. This kind of passage is often used to illustrate a point in a longer piece, and is introduced by a phrase such as “he was one of those people who …”:

With people who are completely and irretrievably committed to a passion, to alcohol, cocaine or eroticism, you can observe a particular kind of absentmindedness. They look at you and appear, more or less, to be listening to what you are saying to them, but you see that they are lost in their own thoughts, and their faces have an expression as though they were carefully and anxiously listening to something in themselves, something about which they care a great deal and which only they can hear. This is why your questions disturb them, anger them, and this is why they answer them briefly and vaguely. All of this means that they are resentful, although they do not show it, and you are uncomfortable, although you try to hide it.³⁷

Some of these general observations are expressed in a form which can readily be incorporated into a work of fiction, like the observation of the peasant's behaviour below. Others are abstractions which are complete in themselves and for which a series of jottings such as Signs by the Roadside is the only suitable vehicle:

When a peasant has some great family care or serious damage has occurred to his property, you can see how he thinks, “racks his brains” or grieves, as though he were performing some difficult physical task. He sits, a little bent, sweat breaks out in beads on his brow, he looks straight ahead and from time to time speaks semi-audible words. All this with a heavy and dignified seriousness which townspeople and the educated do not know. It is apparent that he gives himself completely to every anxiety that comes upon him, and that he spends himself and toils without respite until he solves it or recovers from it. But, on the other hand, both before and afterwards, his soul is genuinely at rest and does not know our unhealthy unease, our conceit and the way we taunt our imagination, spoiling our days and nights and weakening ourselves for the important efforts of life.³⁸

As I have lived among intellectuals, I have been able to see that every individual really does represent a “world in himself”, or at least a state. That means roughly that everyone has his own inner laws which take little, or as little as possible, account of the other laws of the world. Everyone has his own conception of the world and life, his art or science (or religion). And not only that. Everyone has his own internal and foreign policy, his army and armaments and his economy, and his own seas and deserts, his judges and murderers, his theatres and pubs and brothels.

They create and elaborate all of this in themselves, at the expense of considerable effort, until they cut themselves off from the rest of the world, in complete autocracy and isolation. The first part of their lives is spent in this activity, while in the second they try to find a way back to the world of other ordinary people from whom they have so successfully separated themselves.³⁹

These general observations may also be extended from individuals to whole people and cultures. We have noticed a number concerning the people of Bosnia and the kind of men who characterized the Ottoman administration there, the particular characteristics of the Levantines and Jews. Such observations are sometimes coloured by the outlook of the character to whom they are attributed, but more frequently they take the form of direct interventions by the narrator himself. Several of the observations recorded in Signs by the Roadside concern the Balkan peoples in general. The following example reflects something of Andrić's personal experience of the two world wars and the bitter conflict between national groups in Yugoslavia, openly expressed between the wars and enduring under the surface today:

This nation has suffered too much from disorder, violence and injustice, and is too used to bearing them with a muffled grumble, or else rebelling against them, according to the times and circumstances. Our people's lives pass, bitter and empty, among malicious, vengeful thoughts and periodic revolts. To anything else, they are insensitive and inaccessible. One sometimes wonders whether the spirit of the majority of the Balkan peoples has not been for ever poisoned and that perhaps they will never again be able to do anything other than … suffer violence, or inflict it.⁴⁰

Related observations were prompted by the writer's travels; a considerable number, for example, describe his impressions of Spain, a country which particularly appealed to him, as well as of Scandinavia, Turkey and China. Some of the most pertinent to his work are observations of the differences between East and West; they convey something of Andrić's ambivalent attitude to both cultures, attracted and repelled as he is by individual manifestations of each:

It is hard to find in the East a building which is altogether fine, pure, in which nothing could be criticized. But, on the other hand, there is not in the East a building, however dilapidated or neglected, which has not at least a foot of green garden, or a fountain of running water, or just one single flower-pot with carefully tended fuchsias or Chinese roses.

That place is the soul of the ruined house. Buildings in the West have nothing like it.⁴¹

In the East the earth is still raw, alive; none of its juices has dried up; it has all its energy and all its poisons.⁴²

People in the East.

They live indirectly. They progress in a roundabout way through life, and as they go it seems that the actual progress itself is not as important as the way of walking, what is said as they walk, or the name that is given to the places through which they pass.⁴³

This last passage succinctly illustrates the complete mutual incomprehension of the local Bosnian population and the Austrians, so “purposefully” involved in building roads and railways, described in The Bridge on the Drina.

All these passages concern the material of art, “wrested”, as Andrić puts it, “from life—mine and yours”. In the section of the volume entitled “For the Writer”, Andrić comments also on the method of art and the process of artistic creation, as well as on his own personal view of the writer's position:

I do not think I shall ever succeed, even remotely, in expressing the beauty of the ordinary actions, trivial events, and small joys of everyday life, as they are seen through some great anxiety or sorrow which momentarily obscures the world from us.

Through our boundless cares and efforts, the joys of life look perfectly and enchantingly beautiful. And if later, when the cares pass and the efforts cease, we could see these joys with the same eyes, we would be rewarded for everything.

But we cannot.⁴⁴

In books there have always been, and there are today, plenty of untruths, half-truths, and, above all, blank spaces; that is, places which are neither truths nor half-truths but hollow, conceited narration which says nothing, but confuses the reader and, like weeds, smothers whatever is significant and valid in the text. Because when we have nothing to say, but nevertheless talk or write, we do so always, directly or indirectly, at the expense of truth. Every truth, in order to be revealed and communicated to others, demands a great deal of time and space, strength and patience; it matures slowly and is not easily recognized, and there are often difficulties and obstacles in its way; we should not then ourselves add to the burden.

Perhaps it would be better to shorten this brief note of mine, and cut it off right here.⁴⁵

Style? We have always talked a great deal about it, but today I wonder what it is. The art of clothing one's thought, communicating it to others in the best and most convincing way? If I think about it, I feel that it could be a great deal more besides. I sometimes feel that style, that is the actual sound of the words, the sentence and the composition of the whole, is also the main test of the truth contained in a sentence.

If a wine-barrel which we tap with our index-finger crooked tells us by the sound it makes whether it is full or empty, why should the music of our sentence not be able to tell us something about the presence or absence of intellectual or emotional content?

We do not discover truths but merely recall them, in moments of clarity, and give them “stylistic expression”.⁴⁶

The aphoristic expression of the last sentence of this passage is characteristic of Andrić's whole way of thinking. It is the chosen medium of many reflective writers of his kind, from Marcus Aurelius and Pascal on; it is also of course a favoured form in oral culture.

A great many of the comments on the writer's craft express the dedication which Andrić has described in various works in connection with the “builder”. The individual writer should be as anonymous as the traditional builder. His task is not to discover truths but to set up in himself, through concentration and in solitude, the conditions in which he can become the vehicle for their expression in as precise a form as possible.

No matter how serious the craftsman's approach, however, he will not always be understood. The fact that artists and their audience are fallible and often misguided human beings is one with which the writer must also come to terms: “To be a productive, well-known writer means to put between yourself and others a little hill of printed paper and a whole mountain of inexactitude and misunderstanding.”⁴⁷

This brief statement, perhaps, suggests another reason why Andrić should have returned so readily to the image of the builder. An architect's intentions may sometimes be misunderstood, but stone is plainly a medium with qualities quite different from those of language. Several of Andrić's reflections in this section concern the nature of his material:

There was a time when I believed in words (in the value of words as such), swore with them, encouraged and consoled myself and others with them, wrote them down and remembered them, accepted them with blind faith and sincere enthusiasm, and offered them to others as gifts. And then, gradually, with time, I began to realize the truth about words, to see increasingly clearly where they came from, how they came into being and disappeared and how they changed their form and meaning, to understand both their temporary price and their real worth and durability. Until, finally, I realized clearly what they were: smoke and nothingness, the fruit of chance and disorder, like everything else around me, mere illusions, the offspring of illusions and the mothers of new illusions.⁴⁸

Apart from observations more or less directly related to art, its nature, method and material, Signs by the Roadside is made up of reflections on Andrić's own life and on the human condition. Many of these fragments are similar in tone to the early prose poems and to Andrić's verse: they express the strong lyrical current of all his writing.

It is incredible how little we know about ourselves, the world around us and the life we live. Only great and unexpected joys or heavy blows and great losses can show us that human life is far richer and more complex than we imagine, that everything in it has two sides or several sides, two meanings or many meanings, everything, from pleasure and joy to pain and disaster, from the slightest trifle to existence itself. Everything changes and repeats itself: a man is born several times, he grows and falls in turn, recovers and falls ill; he dies several times, and is reborn; and everything that happens to him is almost always unpredictable and therefore apparently full of contradictions, hard to comprehend and inexplicable, and his end is lost in mist, silence and oblivion.⁴⁹

Every conversation about death sobers me, disturbs me, stops me in my tracks, and I can never accept the fact that I talk about it in passing, lightly and irresponsibly. I always think that a person ought to take off his shoes when he steps into this area, to lift up his thoughts and lower his voice, and to choose his words carefully, if he cannot actually remain silent.

This respect for our departure from the world has nothing to do with the bogeyman death represents for us, but springs, on the contrary, from life itself and my great love for it.⁵⁰

Freedom, true freedom is a dream, a dream which, more often than not, is not destined to come true, but anyone who has not once dreamed it is pitiable.⁵¹

Many of the later fragments concern Andrić's reflections on the process of ageing and the distinctive features of youth and age:

Many of the great and fateful passions of our youth are founded on a simple misunderstanding. We are like an awkward, clumsy person who goes into a shop, points to something in the window and says in the tone of one who is ready for anything: “I'll take that and pay whatever you ask.”

And afterwards, afterwards when it is all too late, you see that you went into the wrong shop and asked for something you did not need and which you never actually wanted.⁵²

Once not only every word, but every sound was accompanied for me by a whole procession of emotional and intellectual associations. Now that no longer happens. Sounds are isolated, and words weak, so that people have to repeat them; and that does not help at all.

And it would all be bearable if I were not tormented by the thought, clear and exact in itself, that all these associations still exist and live around me, but I do not feel or hear them. And all this beauty, inaudible to me, is heard by others, gathered and carried home, like armfuls of flowers.⁵³

It is only to be expected that this volume should include references to the most characteristic aspects of Andrić's response to the world—silence and solitude:

At the worst moments, when the din around me is at its peak, when the last traces of reason and kindness are obscured and when every word and grimace expresses only evil and misdirected impulses, then, with a desperate movement of my mind, like lightning, I demolish the whole world, erase and consign to oblivion everything down to the last trace of existence. Over all that men have done and said, inexpressibly terrible things, now vanished and buried for ever, silence reigns, not the dead, faceless silence of human habitations, but a great silence from outer space, a new world, built entirely of silence, a wondrous Jerusalem, a holy city, magnificent and enduring. Blocks of silence, arches and corners of silence, shadows and patches of light on the buildings and, as far as the eye can see, a new world for those who have been defeated in this one, a paradise which remains after the material world has burnt itself out in the form which we see and touch every day and which poisons and crushes us each instant.⁵⁴

Whoever succeeds in penetrating silence and calling it by its true name, has achieved the most that a mortal being can achieve. It is then no longer cold nor dumb, nor empty nor terrible, but it serves him and comes to his aid in every adversity, as in the traditional song where the hero caught a fairy by her hair and made her his blood sister and bound her to him for ever. Whoever succeeds in warming solitude and bringing it to life, has conquered the world.⁵⁵

To make an adequate selection from this varied material in a short space is difficult, and to make any relevant comment on Andrić's own succinct statements is still more so. As Andrić himself has put it:

Words seem so “eloquent” while they stand alone, innocent and unused; if one or another of them fails, the third will speak for both of them and say much more than that. They are linked in a magic ring dance through which the rhythm of the whole runs; if one of them is lame, clumsy or weary, the others drag it along with them, so that its faltering is not noticed, and the dance goes faultlessly on.

It is more difficult when you have to use words to say something about words themselves and the way they are used in story-telling. Then they are suddenly dumb, cold, and they lie like dead stones, as though they had never spoken, danced or sung. When they deal with words, words are silent, while they can always say something, sometimes more, sometimes less, about everything else connected with man. Even about silence.⁵⁶

In this volume, as in all Andrić's works, everything is provisional. The enduring impression it leaves is that it offers glimpses of “truths” which are immediately questioned or denied in a subsequent piece. Typically, Andrić warns himself and his readers against the simplistic truths apparently offered by the attractive aphoristic form which so appealed to him:

The aphorism as a form represents an imperceptible danger for all of us. At first sight the aphorism appears to be a neat and pleasing form which enables us best and with the least effort to present our life experience, which we always feel is hard and important, and to demonstrate our intelligence, of which we usually have the highest opinion. But we are generally badly mistaken. An aphorism is thin ice on to which we are led by our desire to show cheaply and quickly what we know and what we can do. It is a mirror in which we catch the people and the world around us, without noticing that at the same time we are ourselves caught and reflected in it, with all our motives and intentions.⁵⁷

Fluctuation of mood is, then, the one constant aspect of Andrić's thinking. But, for all his awareness of fear and suffering as the essential features of the human condition, a positive acceptance of life at this price is nevertheless the dominant tone of his writing. The following piece may serve as a commentary on his work as a whole, but the irony of its mock-heroic tone should warn us against taking even it too seriously:

Let me, for a moment or two, appear only and solely as a poet of transience, let me be its herald, the one who escorts it and sees it on its way.

You who love life—and who does not really love it at heart?—do not recoil from this poem of mine; it is not the enemy of life, but its friend, its whisper and its music which accompanies the flow of life's sap like the murmuring of water.

The music of transience, that is the voice of what once was, what is and what will be again somewhere and for someone, it is what endures amidst eternal disappearance. Only people who love life can hear and record the soft melody of transience. Do not interrupt or deny it, and do not try to outshout it. Listen carefully! It is nothing but the hymn of life of which we know neither the beginning nor the end, into which no one invited us, which no one gave us, and which we must sooner or later leave, although we do not know when, why or where we go.

Do not recoil from this song!

Transience, that is the only aspect of permanence accessible to us, for whatever does not pass is dead or unborn. Transience is life itself, our most potent experience of life. It is in fact—ourselves.⁵⁸

In his work Andrić always avoided a sense of things being neatly completed, an impression that with one individual's death, or the end of one historical era, a part of life was ended. There is always a sense of life continuing. This perspective also characterizes several of the writer's last reflections, inspired by his approaching death:

If costly life and many stormy years have taught us nothing else, they have taught us one thing: to part. Without words, without trembling, without blinking, with dry eyes, steady hands. If I am true to myself, the last thing I can do in your honour is to part from you too like that, light, dear name, for in you is all good and all beauty, and you deserve every effort and sacrifice. Anyone who does not know how to endure the pain of parting has not truly loved the light of the world!

Farewell! I say, or rather, I think, for I have no one to say it to, nor is there anyone to hear me, and the light goes on like a river which has dried up at its source but still the water goes on flowing. Farewell! And the light drains away in silence, for sound too has died out, the companion which so often goes with you. It is disappearing. It remains only in my eyes. Farewell! There will be light. There will be other eyes.⁵⁹

Notes

1. “A. G. Matoš” (Vihor, Zagreb, no.5, 1914). Collected works, vol. 13, Umetnik i njegovo delo, pp. 196-200.

2. Umetnik i njegovo delo, p. 199.

3. Ibid., p. 200.

4. “Walt Whitman (1819-1919)” Književni jug, Zagreb, no. 2-3, 1914). Collected works, vol. 12, Istorija i legenda, pp. 75-83.

5. Istorija i legenda, p. 75.

6. “Legenda o Sv. Francisku iz Asizija” (Srpski književni glasnik, no. 4, 1926). Istorija i legenda, pp. 84-93.

7. “Legenda o Lauri i Petrarki” (Srpski književni glasnik, no. 5, 1927). Istorija i legenda, pp. 96-105.

8. “Simón Bolivar Oslobodilac” (Srpski književni glasnik, nos. 1 & 2, 1930). Istorija i legenda, pp. 118-43.

9. Istorija i legenda, p. 118.

10. Istorija i legenda, p. 84.

11. Ibid., p. 97.

12. “O Vuku kao piscu” (Naša književnost, Belgrade, no. 2, 1946). Umetnik i njegovo delo, pp. 78-91.

13. Umetnik i njegovo delo, p. 83.

14. Ibid., p. 88.

15. “Vukov primer” (Politika, Belgrade, 14.ix.1947). Umetnik i njegovo delo, p. 108.

16. “Njegoš kao tragični junak kosovske misli” (Kolarčev narodni univerzitet, Belgrade, 1935, 22pp). Umetnik i njegovo delo, p. 16.

17. “Neka bude što biti ne može!”, Gorski vijenac.

18. Umetnik i njegovo delo, p. 16.

19. Ibid., p. 16.

20. “Razgovor sa Gojom” (Srpski književni glasnik, no. 1, 1935). Istorija i legenda, pp. 11-30.

21. Istorija i legenda, p. 15.

22. Ibid., p. 14.

23. Ibid., pp. 28-9.

24. “Heine u pismima” (Hrvatska riječ, 25.vi.1914). Istorija i legenda, pp. 159-64. See p. 159.

25. “Nesanica” (Znakovi pored puta, pp. 581-592).

26. “Večiti kalendar maternjeg jezika” (Znakovi pored puta, pp. 599-602).

27. Znakovi pored puta, p. 11.

28. Prokleta avlija, p. 45.

29. Travnička hronika, pp. 141-2.

30. Znakovi pored puta,, p. 199.

31. Ibid., p. 224.

32. Ibid., pp. 342-3.

33. Ibid., p. 509.

34. Ibid., pp. 286-7.

35. Ibid., p. 383.

36. Ibid., p. 578.

37. Ibid., p. 388.

38. Ibid., p. 354.

39. Ibid., p. 290.

40. Ibid., p. 200.

41. Ibid., p. 351.

42. Ibid., p. 353.

43. Ibid., p. 494.

44. Ibid., p. 226.

45. Ibid., pp. 292-3.

46. Ibid., p. 293.

47. Ibid., p. 247.

48. Ibid., p. 294.

49. Ibid., pp. 174-5.

50. Ibid., pp. 161-2.

51. Ibid., p. 72.

52. Ibid., p. 64.

53. Ibid., p. 282.

54. Ibid., p. 21.

55. Ibid., p. 41.

56. Ibid., p. 288.

57. Ibid., p. 296.

58. Ibid., p. 183.

59. Ibid., p. 217.