SOURCE: Dimić, Milan V. “Ivo Andrić and World Literature.” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes: An Interdisciplinary Journal 27, no. 3 (September 1985): 269-83.

[In the following essay, Dimić discusses Andrić's place in the “universal heritage” of literature.]

Ivo Andrić was born in Travnik in 1892, when Bosnia was still under Austrian rule; he was brought up to speak and write in the “ijekavian” form of Serbo-Croatian and educated in a Catholic and Croatian environment. As a nationalist, he was jailed by the Austro-Hungarian authorities during World War I; he later made a brilliant diplomatic career in the service of the Yugoslav monarchy. During the German occupation, he devoted himself entirely to writing and after World War II he became, with Miroslav Krleža, one of the two star authors of the socialist regime. He died in Belgrade in 1975 as a self-proclaimed Serb, a writer who had come to use the “ekavian” form of the language. A poet and novelist, author of novellas, tales, short stories, literary letters and diaries, travelogues, essays, and dialogues, he won the Nobel prize for literature in 1961—the first and, so far, only Yugoslav to receive this honour. In making the award, the Swedish Academy singled out “the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies from his country's history.”¹

It is my purpose to show that Andrić belongs to world literature in the two typological ways in which this term is understood. The first, more pragmatic definition has evolved from Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur, that is, the domain of authors who are at home in international literary traditions and who are themselves well known in a broad context. The second, more theoretical concept, which can be found in some of Friedrich Schlegel's writings and in T. S. Eliot's essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” regards the whole of literature as a system, open-ended and permanently evolving; from this perspective, important literary works are those that add something unique to the system and, in doing so, make an individual contribution to the universal heritage.

Before attempting to assess the global value of Andrić's oeuvre, it is appropriate to point out his most important contacts with international culture. After attending high school in Sarajevo, he studied philosophy and Slavic literature and history at four universities in Central and Eastern Europe—Zagreb, Vienna, Cracow, and finally Graz, where he received a PhD in 1924 for his dissertation on Bosnian cultural history under the Ottomans. Between the two world wars he lived as a diplomat in Rome, Bucharest, Trieste, Graz, Madrid, Marseille, Paris, again in Madrid, then in Brussels, Geneva, and Berlin.² In the course of his studies and his career as a diplomat, Andrić became something of a polyglot. Having lived in Poland in 1913 and 1914, he knew the language quite well and used it, although hesitantly, during his postwar visit to the Jagellonian University.³ He knew German and Italian, though he preferred French, often making use of it for private notes and letters, for example in his correspondence with André Mazon.⁴ He had a solid grasp of Spanish and understood Russian, as well as some English, and Latin and Greek.

A person of great erudition, Andrić preferred to read literature in the original and was a self-declared “man of quotations.”⁵ A translator himself, he always praised the commerce between languages in Goethe's spirit: “when the last interpreter and translator fall silent, then cannons talk.”⁶ He kept copious notes on his reading, and while some have been lost, thousands of pages have been preserved and are now accessible in the archives of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.⁷ They concern primarily literature and secondary matters related to Bosnia and Hercegovina. The name and works of Goethe appear most frequently, then, among foreign writers, Gor'kii, Gogol', Balzac, Stendhal, Hugo, Francesco Guicciardini, and Léon Bloy. French authors and nineteenth-century writers in general are the most frequently mentioned, twentieth-century texts somewhat less so, and other periods, such as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque some way behind. Of the volumes annotated, only about five per cent were read in translation. The notes reveal Andrić's habit of reading certain books more than once and his insistence on reading as many works by a single author as necessary to obtain an insight into an oeuvre.

On the basis of these notes and Andrić's other written and oral statements, it is possible to outline his knowledge of world literature and his artistic and intellectual “elective affinities.”⁸ Throughout his life he was interested in the myths and folklore of many nations, but he paid particular attention to those of the Balkans. He knew the Bible well, in the translations by Daničić and Vuk, especially the book of Job, the Psalms, the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and the New Testament. His preferred writers from antiquity were the Roman moralists, Cicero, Seneca (a favourite of Andrić was his maxim “Vita sine literis mors”),⁹ Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, but he also read the Greeks, including Plato, and always kept in mind the fivefold narrative levels of the most profound part of the Symposium, in which the Athenian Apollodoros recounts the words of his friend Aristodemos, who remembers Socrates recollecting statements of the enigmatic prophetess Diotima.

From Indian poetry, he knew the work of Tagore and possibly others. He was acquainted with some Arabic, Turkish and particularly Persian literature, although apparently quite superficially.¹⁰ He frequently mentions Scheherazade and The Thousand and One Nights. It is apparent from the Travnička hronika (Bosnian Chronicle, 1945) that he had a keen interest in Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-73), the Persian poet and one of the greatest Sufi voices, who developed the concept of the “Perfect Man,” i.e., Insan ul Kamil (=Ćamil!). In all likelihood, the contact between Andrić and Rumi was established through Andrić's reading of German and French translations of the collections Divan Shamsi Tabriz and Ruba'iyat.¹¹ It is safe to assume that the novelist, as much as one of his fictional characters, felt close to such favourite lines from Rumi as the following:

… for I do not recognise myself.
I am neither a Christian, nor Jew, nor Gabr, nor Moslem.
I am not of the East, nor of the West, nor of the land, nor of the sea;
I am not of Nature's mint, nor of the circling heavens.
I am not of earth, nor of water, nor of air, nor of fire;
I am not of the empyrean, nor of the dust, nor of existence, nor of eternity.
I am not of India, nor of China, nor of Bulgaria, nor of Saqsin;
I am not of the kingdom of 'Iraquain, nor of the country of Khorasan.
I am not of this world, nor of the next, nor of Paradise, nor of Hell;
I am not of Adam, nor of Eve, nor of Eden and Rizwan.
'Tis neither body nor soul …(12)

Andrić was exceptionally well read in European literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He read Polish from an early age and was particularly drawn to Mickiewicz and Sienkiewicz (he read both the patriotic, historical romances and narratives about contemporary society) and, like Sienkiewicz, he found it easier to depict a past, rich in legends, myths, and archetypes, than the events of his own time. He read Słowacki, Krasiński, Prus, Żeromski, Reymond, and Przybyszewski among those of his own generation. He translated a lesser known writer, Adolf Rudńicki. The other Slavic literature which became his lifelong companion was that of Russia. In the original or, more frequently, in translation, he cultivated a knowledge of the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol', and Turgenev among others. He particularly emphasized the study of Dostoevskii, because of his interest in man's inner life rather than the external aspects of his existence.¹³ He also appreciated Tolstoi for his “objectivity” and epic power, Gor'kii, for his progressive humanism and narrative skill, and he was familiar with the works of Chekhov, Andreev, Erenburg, and Pasternak.

Andrić read German letters from early on. Of the classics and romantics, he read Schiller (whom he disliked), Goethe (with an abiding interest in many of his works, especially Faust), Schopenhauer, Lenau, Mörike, Grabbe, Heine, and others. He apparently liked both Heine's poetry and prose, and noted his aphoristic statements, such as “das Weib ist bitter,” and “aber der Tod ist nicht poetischer als das Leben,” although he was disquieted by his letters. In Andrić's well known line from his Nobel prize speech, “Or perhaps it is only that the narrator is telling a story to himself, as the child is singing in the dark to hide from its own fear,”¹⁴ there are echoes from the second and third stanza in Heine's poem “In mein gar zu dunkles Leben …” (from the cycle “Die Heimkehr”). He appreciated and translated Keller, and was familiar with Nietzsche, particularly his views on the lack of meaning in history. He had read Weininger, Stirner, Dilthey, Rilke, and Kafka (although denying any conscious influence),¹⁵ Carossa, Hesse (but apparently only his poetry), Remarque, Benn, and expressionist poetry. He maintained for a long time an intense dialogue with Thomas Mann, studying his essays (e.g., Adel des Geistes), his stories, and all his novels, including Josef und seine Brüder (probably important to Andrić both for its modern treatment of myth, legend, history, and psychology, and for the climactic chapter, “Ich bin's,” which is remembered in the form of Ćamil's “Ja sam to” in Prokleta avlija [Devil's Yard, 1954]) and Der Erwählte (Andrić had more than two hundred excerpts, clippings, and off-prints about bells,¹⁶ but it is only here that the bells ring out on their own as in “U ćeliji br. 115” [“In Cell No. 115”]).¹⁷

Of Scandinavian writers, Andrić knew and mentioned in his essays and conversations Swedenborg, Ibsen, Björnson, Jacobsen, Hamsun, Strindberg (whom he translated), and others, but his real companion was Kierkegaard. In fact, the only book he took to the Austrian prison was Enter-eller in German. He was deeply impressed by these meditations on the meaninglessness of existence, but he went further than Kierkegaard in viewing God as not only beyond human comprehension, but as totally withdrawn from the world or even non-existent.

Andrić's most wide-ranging readings, however, were in French. He often consulted Montaigne and the moralists, such as Vauvenargues, Chamfort, and Jaubert (he did not seem to care much for La Rochefoucauld), as well as Diderot and Voltaire. He was familiar with most of the writers of the nineteenth century, from Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, Leconte de Lisle, and Baudelaire to Flaubert, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Maupassant, Zola, Bloy, and Verhaeren. With the exception of Baudelaire, he seemed to be more interested in prose writers, not only for their epic qualities—he had particular esteem for Balzac—but also for their maxims and reflections. He wrote down, among many passages by Balzac, “nous n'inventons jamais que le vrai,” and the bitter observation “Only neglected souls and unhappy people know how to observe, because everything hurts them and understanding comes from suffering. Memory retains only what is painful.” [Translated from the Serbo-Croatian; I have not been able to find the quotation in Balzac.] Andrić was interested in some of the problems that haunted Flaubert, such as the relationship between the personal and impersonal in art, between identification and distance, which he saw in the light of Diderot's Paradoxe, Keats's “chameleon,” and Brecht's and Stanislavskii's theories of acting. Of the moderns, he read Anatole France, Maeterlinck, Barrès, Rolland, Claudel, Jammes, Proust, Valéry, Barbusse (especially Le Feu), Péguy, Giraudoux, Duhamel, Alain-Fournier, Mauriac, Cocteau, and Saint-Exupéry, a group of “leftist” authors, including Bloch, Aragon, Cassou, Guilloux, and Aveline, and even Robbe-Grillet and Butor. He particularly liked Bergson, Martin du Gard, and Camus; if he had mixed feelings about Gide the man, he was impressed by his literary experiments and penetrating mind; he also had sympathy and understanding for Montherlant at a time when this writer was unpopular in Eastern Europe.

In Portuguese literature, he esteemed the epic talent of Camões, whom he read both in the original and in a Spanish translation. In Spanish literature he studied Cervantes, especially Don Quixote (and the problem of a person identifying with a second personality), as well as Unamuno (where the tragic existential feeling of nada and the literariness of narrative fiction in works such as Come es hace una novela and Del sentimento tragico de la vida would have impressed him). He translated poems by Jiménez and was interested in South American modernismo.

Andrić was as much at home in Italian culture as he was in its cities and landscapes, and he translated the celebrated hymn of Saint Francis of Assisi, “Brother Sun and Sister Moon”; he read a great deal of Dante, Petrarch (with some translations), Michelangelo and other Renaissance poets (with translations), the moralist Guicciardini (on whom he prepared a study), and Aretino. He liked the Leopardi of the more personal writings (such as his Zebaldone), and read Manzoni's I promessi sposi several times; he had mixed opinions about Marinetti and D'Annunzio (he wrote essays about both), but valued Pirandello (whom he translated) very highly, particularly his preoccupation with problems of the self, of masks and illusions, of characters hounding the author, and of the artificiality of literature. Of his contemporaries, he knew Moravia and others.

Andrić read English and American authors mainly in translation, though he often referred to the originals; he was particularly interested in Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron (about whom he wrote a short story and whom he considered to be “an unusual poet, of exceptional talent and force”¹⁸), Wilde, Conrad, and Galsworthy; Whitman (he translated some of his poetry and wrote an essay laced with American expressions about him), Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner, Arthur Miller, and Malcolm Lowry (writing down in the notebooks Lowry's aphorism “Even bad poetry is better than life”).

Needless to say, Andrić read widely among Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene authors; he translated poems from Slovenian, and published essays about and reviews of Yugoslav books. In these texts and in some oral presentations he demonstrated both a sense of tradition and of evolution, especially in matters pertaining to language, style, and narrative technique. While this topic cannot be developed here, we must bear in mind his profound knowledge of and admiration for Vuk Karadžić and Njegoš, and his indebtedness to such “modernists” as Pandurović and Matoš with their deep blend of the national and international in culture and literature.

Although Andrić repeatedly claimed that it is “desirable and useful to emulate great writers”¹⁹ and generously granted the premise that he owed much to his foreign and Yugoslav predecessors, he was—like most artists—coy about specific influences. The case has been made most frequently in relation to the mainstream of nineteenth-century realism, especially Dostoevskii, Kierkegaard and Unamuno, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Conrad, and Pirandello, as well as symbolism and expressionism in poetry.²⁰ In my opinion, the fantastic elements in his fiction can be related not only to folklore, but to some of the romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann (one may compare the structure and setting of “Razgovor sa Gojom” [“Conversation with Goya,” 1935] and the “Ritter Gluck”), Gogol', whose techniques of introducing the devil and other elements of popular beliefs and legends into a “realistic,” historical context resemble Andrić's, and Gautier (compare “Žena od slonove kosti” [“The Ivory Woman,” 1922] and “La Cafetière,” “Pied de momie,” and other tales about disquieting encounters with objectified, phantom seductresses). “Jelena, žena koje nema” (“Helen, the Nonexistent Woman,” published in three installments, 1934, 1955, and 1961), while modern in its technique, appears to have hidden affinities with Hoffmann's ideal beauties (as in “Der goldne Topf”), with Dante's visions of Beatrice and Petrarch's obsession with Laura, the latter two being referred to in Andrić's essay “Legenda o Lauri i Petrarki” (“The Legend of Laura and Petrarch,” 1927). “Aska i vuk” (“Aska and the Wolf,” 1953) represents a development of one of Andrić's persistent metaphors about the people of Bosnia, but it is also an “answer” to Daudet's “La Chèvre de M. Seguin.” The “Cirkus” (“Circus”) episode in the posthumously published Kuća na osami (The House in a Secluded Space), while enlarging on one of the writer's obsessions, could be an intertextual unfolding and reversal of Kafka's “Auf der Galerie.” Be that as it may, there are almost no proved borrowings or direct influences in Andrić, at least in his prose, but rather a creative assimilation of his predecessors' work.

Besides belonging to world literature by virtue of his knowledge of letters, Andrić is very much an international presence as a fictional writer. He is the most translated and published Yugoslav writer: from 1918 to 1971 (I do not have complete data for the more recent period), 267 volumes of his works were published in 33 languages; for instance, there were 84 editions of Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina, 1945) in 32 languages, Travnička hronika appeared in 38 editions in 21 languages, and Prokleta avlija was printed in 33 editions in 19 languages. He was, at the same time, translated and published in German, Italian, all Eastern European languages, English, and French.²¹ Between World War II and 1979 most of his narrative fiction became available in all major languages and in many minor ones. To appreciate the significance of this achievement, one should keep in mind the extreme difficulty of translating the cultural association of ideas and the linguistic levels embodied in his discourse. While his syntax is usually limpid, his particular “parole,” especially in his Bosnian tales and novels, is not only very rich (all his life he searched for rare and new terms), but also modulates the standard “langue” according to the region, period, national, social, and cultural background of the characters and makes important allusions to folklore. It is characteristic that certain volumes of his “Collected Works” contain, even for the native reader, a “Dictionary of Turkish words, provincialisms, and certain less known expressions,” with a cautionary paragraph about the particularities of Andrić's vocabulary.

Studies of the translations and of the critical and scholarly reception of Andrić abroad document both the scope of his appeal and the difficulty of “acclimatizing” his oeuvre to other cultures, as well as the unfortunate obsession of many readers and critics, particularly in the popular media, with the “exotic” settings and strange characters found in his narratives.²² There have been many attempts in Yugoslavia to adapt Andrić's works for theatre, film, and television, but usually with poor or at least dubious results.²³

The oeuvre of Ivo Andrić thus certainly belongs to world literature in the Goethean or pragmatic sense. I should like to point out now how, because of its value and originality, it may be said to belong in the Schlegelian or systemic sense also. It was perhaps this idea of uniqueness that persuaded the Swedish Academy to give the Nobel prize to Andrić and not to Miroslav Krleža, the other Yugoslav contender. Krleža may have seemed not only too close to the communist regime and its Marxist ideology, but also less interesting since he belongs to a well known international family of modernist writers raised in the decadent society and culture of the Central European “Kakania.”

The specificity of Andrić has been generally perceived in terms of his privileged topics: the history of the Balkans, the contact and clash of “two worlds,” of three cultures and religions, and the particular mentalities of these regions, often embodied in dark and perverse characters. It may be less acceptable today to see merit in the depiction of reality, however unusual, legendary, or dream-like it might be. Commenting on life through the creation of a fictional world is, nevertheless, one of the oldest and most common aims of art. Durability and sense are given, according to this attitude, only to those phenomena that have been rendered “permanent” and “perceptible” through art. This is the meaning of Hölderlin's “was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter,” celebrated by no less a twentieth-century philosopher than Heidegger in “Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung” (1936). The same claim is made by Andrić's Goya on behalf of his friend Paolo (“Razgovor sa Gojom”).²⁴ Time and space in Andrić's works carry the constant implication that the particular is also the universal, that the Bosnian landscapes and even the accursed prison in Instanbul are archetypes, metaphors, or at least natural similes for Man's existential predicament.

In my view, Andrić has yet another claim to originality, that of combining in his narrative fiction traditional mimetic concerns with a distinctively modernist stance and form. (One might mention here that this combination, prominent in many recent Latin American works, appears early in Andrić's fiction, just as his existential approach predates Camus's narratives and plays.) It is of course generally acknowledged that Andrić's poetry is “modernist”; for example, the early collections of prose poems Ex Ponto (1918) and Nemiri (1920) display many of the characteristics of European post-romantic poetry, in particular, the influence of Baudelaire, symbolism, post-symbolism, and expressionism.²⁵ The posthumous collection of his poems and prose poems Šta sanjam i šta mi se dogada (Dreams and Experiences, 1976) is still more modernist in some respects. It contains texts such as “Lili Lalauna” (1950), in which the three quatrains are composed of combinations of syllables taken from the name of a Greek lady; these sounds, printed as if they were words, yield much music and a few suggestions, but no conventional “meaning” whatsoever.²⁶

The claim that there are modernist attitudes to be found in his narrative prose has, however, been less common, but recently it has been suggested that Andrić's first great novella, “Put Alije Derzeleza” (“The Journey of Ali Djerzelez,” 1918-20), represents an ironic distancing from the romantic use of folklore, which was then dominant in Yugoslav literature.²⁷ Far from being the glamorous hero typical of Muslim epic poetry, Alija Djerzelez, while brave, strong, and bad tempered in a very primitive way, is also short and stocky, very slow witted, full of sloth, and, while ever in pursuit of female beauty, so lacking in social grace and common sense that the only solace he can find is the caress of a chubby Russian whore. The story is told in a pseudo-realistic manner, full of irony and parody; it includes a good deal of psychological debunking of folkloric traits and there is a typically modern projection of Djerzelez's potentialities onto other deplorable characters. The same undercutting of traditions and legends, phenomena otherwise very dear to Andrić, takes place in the essay “Legenda o Lauri i Petrarki,” which demonstrates why historical lore is just “gossip sanctioned by time.”²⁸

It is easy to find modernist attitudes in such tales as “Jelena, žena koje nema” and “Letovanje na jugu” (“Vacations in the South,” 1959),²⁹ in “Razgovor sa Gojom,” if it is read as a story and not as an essay (though the latter approach is traditional in Andrić scholarship), and above all in the unfinished Kuća na osami, with its Pirandellian structure and an almost Latin American handling of the fantastic.³⁰ These elements can also be found in the story “Slepac” (“The Blind Man,” published posthumously in 1975). Kuća na osami, whether it is considered as a collection of tales or as a novel, undoubtedly belongs to the modern (post-modern?) subgenre of poioumenon or work-in-progress texts.³¹

The most complete and mature example of Andrić's way of casting elements of critical realism and folklore, especially legends, together into a modernist mould is Prokleta avlija. While writing the novelette between April 1952 and April 1954, Andrić read a number of historical sources and literary works. Among them were: Yourcenar's Mémoires d'Hadrien, a modernist and tragic historical reconstruction of the past and a sceptical search for the “I” that lies hidden behind masks and roles; Mérimée's “La Double Méprise,” a study of the impossibility of love, because of social prejudice and the difficulty of communication; Thomas Mann's Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull with its hero whose avocation is to live out illusions and wear disguises. It is also likely that he read Mann's Josef und seine Brüder and that he was impressed by the protagonist's consciousness of playing out an archetypal pattern and by the narrator's systematic transformation of the legend by means of modern psychology and irony. He may have been struck by Meredith's daring narrative technique in The Egoist, by the psychological analysis of human subjectivity, devoid of naturalistic details, in Constant's autobiographical works, which Andrić knew well, and, finally, by Camus's similar attitude towards man's existential predicament. Kafka too must have interested him both as a writer and as a person; Andrić read his works and consulted the biographical sources, and he could not have failed to note suggestive passages and devices, particularly in such a story as “In der Strafkolonie.”³² There are creative traces (“the anxiety of influence”) in external features, but also in the internal structures of Andrić's novelette. The forms and contents of oral literature—legends, folktales, songs, epics, proverbs—are all playfully distanced through a Freudian and Jungian filter; as in earlier works the reader may think of Balzac (e.g., the “dominant passion” motivating his characters), of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, but he is also reminded of the modernism of Mann and Kafka.

It is customary in criticism of Andrić's Prokleta avlija to distinguish three main narrative levels and points of view: the first is identified with the young man remembering Brother Peter's tales; the second belongs to Brother Peter's reminiscences; and the third to the multiplicity of voices (and points of view) reported by him. In fact, the story is told on five narrative levels and through an even greater variety of voices and points of view, with inversions and superimpositions of time, and with a complex arrangement of “vertical” and “horizontal” layers; there is also a variety of simultaneous and consecutive spaces.³³ The two additional narrative levels and points of view include that which arises when Haim speaks for Ćamil and, even more so, when Ćamil identifies with Prince Jem, as well as that corresponding to an “authorial” voice, which makes comments that obviously do not belong either to the novice or to his dead mentor. This is clear, for example, three pages into the introduction, in the observations about people making inventories, or, much later, when the narrative of Peter's memories contains names which “he could neither remember nor repeat.”³⁴ (One is tempted to compare this with Flaubert's device in Madame Bovary, when the “I” implied in the “Nous” of the first sentence continues, albeit amost invisible, to unfold the totality of the novel after having pointed out that “Il serait maintenant impossible à aucun de nous de se rien rappeler de lui [Charles].” A similar stratagem is adopted by Andrić in the short story “Slepac,” in which the story “knows” “what nobody can know.”³⁵) The narrative stances presented within these five levels range from omniscience to the limited point of view of certain individuals and, finally, to the fallible or unreliable narrator (not only “notorious liars” like Zaim, but also Haim, who “knew everything, and has seen even what one cannot see”³⁶). In an almost post-modernist gesture, the “authorial” or “basic” voice, which may in this instance belong to the young man, points out quite early in the narrative that the story has “many gaps and unexplained spots,”³⁷ that is, it contains the element of indeterminacy and “holes” (trous) so dear to Robbe-Grillet and other experimental novelists of the last three decades.

Dependent on the heterogeneous narrative voices, the narrated time is not only varied, but seems to recede forever towards the more distant and ambivalent past. In earlier works Andrić had experimented already with Chinese boxes of time; for instance in the novella “Anikina vremena” (“Anika's Times,” 1931) Vujadin's madness, in the 1860s, leads backwards to Anika's excesses in the days of Bonaparte and the First Serbian Uprising, and then to the uproar about Tijana, some twenty years earlier, and finally to Saveta's misdeeds, placed in the indeterminate past. Such a technique dissolves the seemingly solid present into the legendary days of a remote age and suggests through repetition the permanence of the human condition. This technique retains elements of the traditional “realistic programme,” such as the depiction of the typical and characteristic, but moves away from other vital elements, such as the creation of an “illusion of reality” through representations which are individual, particular, and concrete.³⁸ It is this combination of traditional materials and techniques, taken from folklore and mainstream realism, with the addition of modernist techniques and concerns that also constitutes the originality of Andrić.

In accepting the Nobel prize Ivo Andrić spoke of the desire of literatures in languages of lesser diffusion to become part of world literature, demonstrating that he was fully aware of the two dimensions of Weltliteratur. Fragments of this speech represent a fitting conclusion to this presentation of Andrić's achievement as an author both of and for the world.

In thousands of different languages, under the most diverse conditions of life, in century after century, from the archaic patriarchal story telling in huts or near a fire, to the works of modern writers of tales, who are printed right now in publishing houses of the great world centres, unfolds the yarn of the story about Man's destiny, which is told by men to men without end or interruption. The manner and forms of this story telling change with time and circumstances, but the need for the tale and the telling remain, and the story continues and there is no end to the narrative. Sometimes it seems to us that mankind, from the first dawn of consciousness and throughout the centuries, has been telling itself, in millions of ways, with the breathing of its lungs and the rhythm of its pulse, always the same story. And that story appears to be an attempt, like those tales told by the legendary Scheherazade, to trick the executioner, to postpone the inevitability of the tragic destiny which menaces us, to lengthen the illusion of life and existence. Or perhaps the story teller could with his work help man to find himself and his bearings? Is it perhaps his calling to speak for all those who died not knowing how or those who, prematurely cut down by life the executioner, did not have the time to express themselves? Or perhaps it is only that the narrator tells a story to himself, as the child sings in the dark to hide from its own fear? Or is the goal of this story telling to cast some modest light on the dark roads which life frequently compels us to take, and to show us something more about this life, which we live, but do not see and do not always understand, than we are able, in our weakness, to know or grasp? … Perhaps these narratives, oral and written, contain the true history of mankind and it is perhaps possible to find in them at least an inkling of that history's meaning. … And, of course, [in this story telling] there cannot be any rules and regulations. Everyone tells his story following his inner needs, according to his inherited or acquired inclinations and ideas and the strength of his expressive capacities; everyone carries the moral responsibility for his story and everyone should be permitted to tell it freely.³⁹

Notes

1. Quoted in Helen M. McDonals (Ed.), Nobel Parade: Selections by Winners of the Award for Literature (Glenview, Ill., 1975), p. 146.

2. For the biographical data in this paper see Njegoš M. Petrović, Ivo Andrić: L'Homme et l'oeuvre. Diss. Université de Montréal (Ottawa, 1969); Predrag Palavestra, “Prilog ranoj književnoj biografiji Ive Andrića,” Prilozi za književnost, jezik, istoriju i folklor, 42 (1976), pp. 446-58; Miroslav Karaulac, Rani Andrić (Belgrade, 1980); and such standard sources as Leksikon pisaca Jugoslavije (Belgrade, 1972), Vol. I, pp. 55-70, and Gordana Popović (Comp.), Ivo Andrić: Bibliografija dela, prevoda i literature (Belgrade, 1974). See also Ivo Andrić, “Kako sam ulazio u svet knjige i književnosti,” in Staze, lica, predeli, Sabrana dela, 10 (Belgrade, 1976).

3. Private communication from Professor Edward Możejko, who spoke with Andrić during that visit. Cf. Milorad Živančević, “Ivo Andrić u Poljskoj,” Letopis Matice srpske, 138 (1962), Vol. 389, no. 4, pp. 361-67; W[ilim] Frančić, “Ivo Andrić w Polsce,” Sprawozdania z posiedzeń komisji Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Oddział w Krakowie, Lipiec-grudzień 1961 (Kraków, 1962), pp. 384-88.

4. Ljubo Jandrić, Sa Ivom Andrićem: 1968-1975, Srpska književna zadruga, 470 (Belgrade, 1977), p. 12.

5. Ibid., p. 9.

6. From the speech “O prevodiocima i tumačima,” Zagreb, 1949, quoted in Ivo Tartalja, Pripovedačeva estetika: Prilog poznavanju Andrićeve poetike (Belgrade, 1979), p. 41. The translations from Serbo-Croatian are my own.

7. For a description and analysis of these notebooks, which range in time from 1933 to the writer's death, see Ivo Tartalja, “Pisac kao čitalac i čitalac kao pisac,” in Dragan Nedeljković, et al. (Eds.), Delo Ive Andrića u kontekstu evropske književnosti i kulture: Zbornik radova sa medunarodnog naučnog skupa održanog u Beogradu od 26. do 28. maja 1980 (Belgrade, 1981), pp. 15-25 (this book is hereafter referred to as Delo Ive Andrića).

8. The main sources for this overview are Andrić's own essays, collected for the main part in Istorija i legenda: Eseji, ogledi i članci, Sabrana dela, 12 (Belgrade, 1976) and Umetnik i njegovo delo, Sabrana dela, 13 (Belgrade, 1976); his recollections and notes, presented to some extent in Staze, lica, predeli, Sabrana dela, 10, and in Znakovi pored puta, Sabrana dela, 14 (Belgrade, 1976); his unpublished notes (see Tartalja, “Pisac kao čitalac i čitalac kao pisac”); and letters, when accessible (Jelena, žena koje nema: Pisma jednoj ženi [Belgrade, 1980]). I have also used his conversations as recorded in Kosta Dimitrijević, Razgovori i ćutanja Iva Andrića (Belgrade, 1976); Jandrić, Sa Ivom Andrićem; Rade Vojvodić, Sudbina umetnika: Razgovori s Ivom Andrićem (Belgrade, n.d.); and recollections by contemporaries in Radovan Popović, Kazivanja o Andriću: Uspomene savremenika (Belgrade, 1976). Useful are biographies (see note 2 above) and books such as Miloš I. Bandić, Ivo Andrić: Zagonetka vedrine (Novi Sad, 1963); Tartalja, Pripovedačeva estetika; Predrag Palavestra, Skriveni pesnik: Prilog kritičkoj biografiji Ive Andrića (Belgrade, 1981), and some volumes of essays: Vojislav Durić (Ed.), Ivo Andrić (Belgrade, 1962) (referred to hereafter as Ivo Andrić); and Delo Ive Andrića.

9. Jandrić, Sa Ivom Andrićem, p. 25.

10. Cf. Aleksandar Popović, “Ivo Andrić i ‘Kuća Islama’,” in Delo Ive Andrića, pp. 505-515.

11. Cf. Tartalja, Pripovedačeva estetika, pp. 190-210.

12. Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz, Reynold A. Nicholson, (Ed. and transl.), (Cambridge, UK, 1977 [1st ed. 1898]), p. 125, poem XXXI.

13. I should like to thank Želimir B. Juričić for providing me with additional facts on Andrić's interest in and affinities with Dostoevskii.

14. Sabrana dela, 12, p. 66. The link with Heine is pointed out by Tartalja, Pripovedačeva estetika, p. 97f.

15. See Branimir Živojinović, “Ivo Andrić i nemačka književnost,” in Ivo Andrić, pp. 256-58.

16. Arhiv SANU, Andrićeva zaostavština, kutija 164 (quoted by Tartalja, “Pisac kao čitalac i čitalac kao pisac,” p. 15).

17. For questions about Andrić and Thomas Mann, cf. Živojinović, “Ivo Andrić i nemačka književnost,” p. 258f.; Tartalja, Pripovedačeva estetika, pp. 81-91, 127f., 157f., and “Pisac kao čitalac i čitalac kao pisac,” p. 22 n. 8. See also Natal'ia Iakovleva, “Khudozhestvennoe vremia v proizvedeniiakh Ivo Andricha,” in Delo Ive Andrića, pp. 165-74, esp. pp. 166ff.

18. Jandrić, Sa Ivom Andrićem, p. 15f.

19. Ibid., p. 152.

20. See, for example: Dušan Puvačić, “Jedanaest lica traži pisca,” Savremenik, 46, no. 11 (1977), pp. 326-35; Tartalja, Pripovedačeva estetika, passim; Erwin Prunkl, “Eine archetypische Gestalt bei Andrić und Dostoevskij,” in Delo Ive Andrića, pp. 721-29; Sava Penčić, “Andrić i Turgenjev,” in ibid., pp. 731-41. On Andrić's poetry see Radovan Vučković, Velika sinteza: O Ivi Andriću (Sarajevo, 1974), pp. 13-34, and particularly Palavestra, Skriveni pesnik, and earlier articles by the same author, referred to in the book.

21. See Leksikon pisaca Jugoslavije, Vol, I, pp. 57-61; Ivo Andrić: Bibliografija, pp. 65-128, 231-38 (586 items); Jovan Janićijević, “Andrićev svetski put,” Politika, 15 March 1975, p. 15; Vladimir Kolar, Ivo Andrić: Govor tišine (Belgrade, 1975), p. 109.

22. Delo Ive Andrića, pp. 773-958. See also Albert Lord, “Ivo Andrić in English Translations,” Slavic Review, 23 (1964), pp. 563-73; Strahinja Kostić, “Ka proučavanju nemačkih prevoda dela Ive Andrića,” in Ivo Andrić, pp. 267-86; Vasa D. Mihailovich, “The Reception of the Works of Ivo Andrić in the English Speaking World,” Southeastern Europe/L'Europe du Sud-Est, 9 (1982), pp. 41-52; W[erner] Creuziger, “Ivo Andrić auf deutsch: Ziele und Probleme der Übersetzung,” Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 28 (1983), pp. 591-93; W[alter] Reiss, “Literaturtheoretische und philosophische Aspekte bei der Rezeption des Werkes von Ivo Andrić in der DDR,” Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 28 (1983), pp. 574-78.

23. See Sveta Lukić, “Andrićeva proza u svetlosti vizuelno-dramskih umetnosti (pozorišta, filma i televizije),” in Delo Ive Andrića, pp. 961-80; and Milenko Misailović, “Problemi dramatizovanja i pozorišnog transponovanja Andrićevog stvaralaštva,” in ibid., pp. 981-91.

24. Sabrana dela, 12, p. 15f.

25. See especially the essays and book by Palavestra, as well as Miroslav Šicel, “Modernistička faza Ive Andrića,” in Delo Ive Andrića, pp. 129-37; Radovan Vučković, “Andrićeva poezija u kontekstu ekspresionizma,” in ibid., pp. 743-52.

26. First published in Šta sanjam i šta mi se dogada: Pesme i pesme u prozi, Petar Džadžić (Ed.) (Belgrade, 1976), p. 106.

27. See Franjo Grčević, “Unutarnja Andrićeva poetika (na primjeru pripovijesti Put Alije Derzeleza,” in Delo Ive Andrića, pp. 331-58; Želimir Bob Juričić, “Andrić's Artistic Deformation of the Legend: The Two Faces of Alija Derzelez,” in ibid., pp. 359-72; Ivo Bogner, “Sukob sna i jave u Andrićevoj pripovijesti Put Alije Derzeleza,” in ibid., pp. 373-87. Examples of more traditional attitudes towards Andrić's realism and respect for folklore are: Petar Džadžić, Ivo Andrić (Belgrade, 1957); Bandić, Ivo Andrić; Predrag Palavestra, e.g. “Usamljenički nemir Ive Andrića,” Književnost, 24, no. 3 (1957), pp. 254-64; Vučković, Velika sinteza; Slavko Leovac, Pripovedač Ivo Andrić (Novi Sad, 1979); this orientation is also implied in such publications as Ivo Andrić and Tartalja, Pripovedačeva estetika. It comes as no surprise that his work is resolutely classified as a continuation of the realistic tradition by the Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia of 1973. For a reexamination of Andrić's modernity and modernism see Stanko Korać, Andrićevi romani ili svijet bez boga (Zagreb, 1970); Nikola Milošević, “Jedan antropološki vid Andrićevog književnog stvaralaštva,” in Ivo Andrić, pp. 43-79; Michael Wagner, “‘Extensive’ und ‘intensive’ Totalität im Roman (zur Modernität des Erzählens bei Ivo Andrić),” in Delo Ive Andrića, pp. 95-102; Jože Pogačnik, “Andrićeva radikalizacija tradicije romana,” in ibid., pp. 111-20; Svetozar Koljević, “Roman kao ironična bajka: Na Drini ćuprija,” in ibid., pp. 197-210; Petar Džadžić, “Hrastova greda u kamenoj kapiji,” in ibid., pp. 211-17.

28. Istorija i legenda, Sabrana dela, 12 (Sarajevo, 1976), p. 84.

29. For “Letovanje na jugu” Andrić acknowledged the influence of Thomas Mann's “Der Kleiderschrank”; he himself called his tale modernist (“this is my modernism”); see Jandrić, Sa Ivom Andrićem, p. 98f.

30. See for example: Kuća na osami, Srpska književna zadruga, 461 (Belgrade, 1976), pp. 23-42, 64, 73, 84, 123, 165f. For possible sources see Tartalja, Pripovedačeva estetika, pp. 61-71; for fictional, metaliterary, and autobiographical aspects see Vida Taranovski Johnson, “Ivo Andrić's Kuća na osami (‘The House in a Secluded Place’): Memories and Ghosts of the Writer's Past,” in Henrik Birnbaum and Thomas Eekman (Eds.), Fiction and Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe: Evolution and Experiment in the Postwar Period (Columbus, Ohio, 1980), pp. 239-50. For the fantastic in Andrić see Midhat Begić, “Jelena—priča Andrićeva,” Savremenik, 16 (1962), pp. 327-36 (cf. Svetozar Koljević, “O simbolizmu u Andrićevoj pripoveci ‘Jelena, žena koje nema’,” Izraz, 27 [1983], pp. 52-59); Novak Kilibarda, “Problem fantastičnog u jednom detalju romana-hronike Na Drini ćuprija,” in Delo Ive Andrića, pp. 219-25; Predrag Palavestra, “Elementi poetike fantastike u Andrićevom realizmu,” in ibid., pp. 27-55 and “Fantomski roman Ive Andrića,” Književnost, 71 (1981), pp. 678-94. For the poetic and lyric in his prose see Vojislav Durić, “Najnovija Andrićeva poezija,” in Ivo Andrić, pp. 131-49; Aleksandar Petrov, “Poetsko u Andrićevoj prozi,” in U prostoru proze (Belgrade, 1968), pp. 11-129; Vučković, Velika sinteza; Nikola Milošević, “Ivo Andrić i njegova ‘bodlja u srcu’,” in Zidanica na pesku (Belgrade, 1978), pp. 149-62; Palavestra, Skriveni pesnik.

31. See, for example, Kuća na osami, pp. 9ff., 13, 16f., 22, 23f., 27, 41f., 43f., esp. 56f., 63f., 73, 75f., 84, 97, 100, 112, 113f., 123, 139, 145ff., 151f., 165ff., 174. For this subgenre see Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 123-26.

32. Cf. Tartalja, “Pisac kao čitalac i čitalac kao pisac,” p. 22f.

33. Among the many interpretations see Petar Džadžić, O Prokletoj avliji (Belgrade, 1975); Mary P. Coote, “Narrative Structure in Ivo Andrić's Devil's Yard,” Slavic and East European Journal, 21 (1977), pp. 56-63; and Tartalja, Pripovedačeva estetika, pp. 78-163, 236-78.

34. Prokleta avlija, Sabrana dela, 4 (Belgrade, 1963), p. 98.

35. Sabrana dela, 15 (Belgrade, 1976), p. 232.

36. Prokleta avlija, p. 108, cf. pp. 56 and 76.

37. Ibid., p. 13.

38. For the “realistic code” see, for example, Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957), chap. I, and Philippe Hamon, “Un Discours contraint,” in Littérature et réalité, Points, 142 (Paris, 1982), pp. 119-81.

39. “O priči i pričanju,” in Istorija i legenda, pp. 64-68, the quotations are from pp. 64f. and 68.