[In the following essay, Butler analyzes Andrić's shift from writing in his native Bosnian ijekavian dialect to the Serbian ekavian.]

Ivo Andrić, the Nobel Prize laureate for literature in 1961, author of Bridge on the Drina and Travnik Chronicle, wrote in a style that is deceptively simple, in seamless sentences in which words seem to slip into place almost by accident, a style that is so “easy” we feel we are listening to the tale of a village storyteller and not to the creation of a very wise man. As Miloš Bandić notes, “Everything seems to be created without effort and strain, by some magnanimous grace. From this comes the unobtrusiveness and simplicity of Andrić's art, which really is the result of a methodological, systematic and prolonged work of filigree.”¹

Andrić showed his concern about the external form of his writing on more than one occasion. In describing the polemic between Vuk Karadžić, the nineteenth-century founder of the Serbo-Croatian literary language, and Milovan Vidaković, the first Serbian novelist, he suddenly stops his account of their acrimonious debate and wonders aloud if his own language will seem as strange to readers one hundred years thence as does Vidaković's mixture of spoken Serbo-Croatian and Church Slavonic. Andrić confesses that he is worried, yet he lightheartedly admits that he has no control over what future generations will think about his work.²

Given Andrić's perfectionism, the shift in his writing from his native Bosnian “ijekavian” dialect (mlijeko for “milk,” tijelo for “body”) to the Serbian “ekavian” variant (mleko, telo) cannot be considered inconsequential. As Jovan Deretić says, “Everything he did was deliberate; he left nothing to chance.”³ The question therefore arises, Was his change of dialect politically motivated (as a declaration of allegiance to Serbia and by extension to the pre-World War I “Yugoslav idea”)? Was it aesthetically inspired? Or could it have resulted from a combination of factors? An examination of this problem will provide insight not only into Ivo Andrić the man but also into the times in which he developed as a writer.

It may be useful here to remind the reader that not only Bosnians and Hercegovinians spoke and wrote ijekavian; it was also the dialect of a large Serbian minority in Coatia as well as of the inhabitants of Montenegro and southern Dalmatia. In addition, the northern Croats in the middle of the nineteenth century had accepted the ijekavian pronunciation proposed by the Serb Vuk Karadžić and their own reformer Ljudevit Gaj as a way of promoting a single South Slavic literary language, which Gaj called “Illyrian.” Ironically, the Serbs in the Principality of Serbia by and large did not accept Vuk's suggestion and continued to write in their native ekavian. In 1913 the Serbian cultural historian and critic Jovan Skerlić came up with a different proposal: he suggested that the Croats discard ijekavian and the Serbs their Cyrillic alphabet. Thus everyone would write in ekavian, and the common alphabet would be latinica, the modified Latin letters used by Croats.⁴ In Srpski književni glasnik (The Serbian Literary Herald) Skerlić then conducted a poll among Croatian and Serbian writers, including those in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to find out what they considered the preferred dialect for a unified literary language.⁵ The great majority of the respondents agreed with Skerlić, not because of the superiority of ekavian (as he had asserted), but for patriotic reasons. The Serbian victories at the battles of Kumanovo (1912) and Bregalnica (1913) in the Balkan Wars were mentioned by several ijekavian respondents as sufficient justification for their shift to ekavian. The fine Herzegovinian poet Aleksa Šantić, an ijekavac who shifted to ekavian, as did the poet Jovan Dučić, cited the need to show solidarity with the Serbs “who left their bones in Old Serbia, Macedonia, Thrace, and Albania.” Meanwhile Josip Smodlaka, a Croat from Split, answered Skerlić's poll: “Croatian separatists who wish to maintain an artificial wall between the two parts of our one people are against ‘Serbian’ ekavian, not because they love ijekavian, but because they regard it as specifically ‘Croatian,’ which it is not.” According to Smodlaka, “any objective person who is for our [Yugoslav] literary and cultural unity should be won over by Skerlić's reasoning.” But he also reminded the Serbs that if they expected ekavian to be promoted in the Croatian lands, they should show their good faith by writing in latinica, “the universal European alphabet.”

Not only writers but also linguists participated in the dialect discussion. The Croats Tomo Maretić and Petar Skok as well as the Serb Aleksandar Belić did not regard the difference in the pronunciation of one syllable (vreme vs. vrijeme) as significant. According to Skok, “No one would contend that there are differences in the grammar of the Serbian and Croatian literary languages. … Supporters of national unity should rejoice that the differences between the two literary languages are minimal.” The Dalmatian Milan Rešetar, then a professor in Vienna, reluctantly decided to accept ekavian, as a token of regard for the Serbian military victories, but he reminded the Serbs that they must show goodwill by transliterating road signs into Croatian latinica (e.g. Šabac) and not according to German usage (Chabatz). And Vladimir Čerina, a young Croatian writer and later friend of Ivo Andrić, responded, “To adopt ekavian as the written and spoken form of speech is the duty of all those who see the cultural union of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as the only outlet from our battered and dismembered life, which leads nowhere.”

It is against this background of accelerating momentum toward the cultural and political unification of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes that Ivo Andrić began his writing career. As a Bosnian living in a land that had been occupied and then annexed by Austria (1908), he shared in the enthusiasm for a Yugoslavia in which Serbia would play the role that the Piedmont had played in the unification of Italy. Andrić, like other graduates of the Sarajevo gymnasium in those times, followed the lead of writer Petar Kočić in resisting the assimilationist strategy of Austria, which tried to separate Bosnia from Croatia and Serbia by fostering the notion of a Bosnian culture and language (called bosanski, “the land language”). A Croat Catholic for the first thirty or so years of his life, Andrić, like many Croatian writers, showed his solidarity with Serbia and “Yugoslavism” by using ekavian in his first two published poems, “In the Twilight” and “Gentle and Kind Moonlight,” which appeared in 1911 in the pro-Serbian Sarajevo journal Bosanska vila (Bosnian Nymph). In subsequent issues Andrić published three more poems, two in ekavian and one, “Last Year's Song,” in his native ijekavian. In the same journal he also published in ekavian his translations of five Slovene poems, a Walt Whitman poem from Song of Myself (“I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul”) and a short excerpt from Strindberg's Red Room.

Andrić's use of ekavian in his Bosanska vila phase was obviously politically inspired and quite in the spirit of the times—like waving a Serbian flag in the face of the Austrian censors. In terms of his creative development, however, far more important was his use of ijekavian in his best poem, “Last Year's Song,” where Andrić found his subjective poetic voice, what Predrag Palavestra calls “the confessional character”⁶ of Andrić's lyric poetry. Nearly all his subsequent published poems are in ijekavian. Thus Andrić's poems in the anthology Young Croatian Lyric Poetry,⁷ published in Zagreb in 1914, are all in ijekavian, including “Darkness” and “Sunk,” which he had previously published in ekavian in Bosanska vila. The change of dialect, of course, affected the rhythm, and he had to make adjustments accordingly.

Whereas Andrić's subsequent poems in Književni jug (Literary south), are in ijekavian as well, his review articles and other criticism in that journal are in ekavian, as, for example, his marvelous piece “Walt Whitman, 1819-1919.”⁸ With a few exceptions, such as his review of the Croatian novelist Tomo Kumičić's Erna Kristen⁹ and his obituary for the Croatian writer A. G. Matoš,¹⁰ ekavian early became for Andrić the standard medium of his nonfiction writings. Thus, whereas ijekavian was the voice of his lyrical poetry, of his heart, ekavian was the voice of analysis, of his head, bearing with it a pro-Serbian and, according to the psychology of the times, pro-Yugoslav nuance.

In Andrić's early short stories, milieu was clearly the determining factor in his choice of dialect. His “The Road of Ali Djerzelez”¹¹ is written in ijekavian because it is set in Bosnia, Andrić's heartland. In the love of a legendary Moslem hero, Djerzelez Ali, for a “Latin” temptress, we see a thinly disguised young Andrić. The omniscient narrator speaks ijekavian, which makes him a native of the area and thus credible. In the same vein, ijekavian is used in Andrić's masterful Bosnian stories, published in Srpski književni glasnik in the 1920s. But when he changes ambiance, as he does in the story about a Serbian courier in Rome during the war (“A Day in Rome”),¹² he uses ekavian.

The year 1925 was a milestone in Andrić's stylistic development. In that year he published in Srpski književni glasnik his brilliant short story “Bridge on the Žepa,” a tale about the building of a bridge in Bosnia. Why, then, did he write it in ekavian? One should note, first, that the story is also about a grand vizier in Istanbul who had experienced a temporary fall from grace and while in prison had remembered his native Bosnia. Thus the story is about Istanbul as well as Bosnia, and it also concerns a master builder from Italy. Andrić's narrative has widened its horizons to embrace West and East, with Bosnia in between. Moreover, “Bridge on the Žepa” is rather sophisticated and cerebral, quite different from Andrić's more earthy Franciscan stories. In the closing line the narrator calls it an istorija, which can mean either “history” or “story.” The ambiguity suits Andrić's purposes because “Bridge on the Žepa” is a chronicle of the events surrounding the building of the bridge, with only one snippet of dialogue. Clearly here Andrić has decided that for pure narrative or chronicle the less localized (as he perceived it) ekavian is more appropriate.

Andrić's second collection of short stories, published in 1931, contained four pieces in ijekavian and two in ekavian, “Bridge on the Žepa” and “Anika's Times,” also a kind of chronicle. By the time Andrić published his third collection, in 1936, he had opted completely for ekavian, except where the dialogue required ijekavian. In my opinion, his now undifferentiated use of the Serbian ekavian can be attributed primarily to his gradual change in perspective and theme. His major novels, Bridge on the Drina (1945) and Travnik Chronicle (1945), concern not only Bosnia but also world events and their effects on that unhappy land. Like “Bridge on the Žepa,” these works are histories (Andrić himself refers to each of them as a hronika), and for that genre he chooses an omniscient narrator whose language does not mark him as local. Such an approach also suits his aphoristic style.

Did Ivo Andrić consider himself a Serbian rather than Croatian writer, and could this view have contributed to his eventual decision to restrict himself to ekavian? In answering that question, one should take into account that in his student days he, like many other young intellectuals, called himself a Yugoslav, which meant that he was spiritually both a Croat and a Serb. In 1913, while at the University of Vienna, Andrić had joined both the Croatian (Zvonimir) and the Serbian (Zora) student organizations. Illustrative of the Yugoslav spirit of the times was the fact that the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, as well as many Croatian writers, drew from Serbian themes, including the battle of Kosovo (1389), the mother of the nine Jugović brothers, and the legendary hero Marko Kraljević, in an effort to create a common Yugoslav mythology and ethos. In the same endeavor Andrić offered his Friar Marko and the Croatian Franciscan monks as historical figures of great endurance, heroes not of the mace but of the breviary, committed to their people under the ignominious conditions of the Turkish yoke. It seems significant that he published his Bosnian stories in Srpski književni glasnik, which was truly Yugoslav in its outlook. Clearly he did not discard his Serbian half in the late 1920s, as did many Croatian writers who were disillusioned with King Alexander and his government. In his lectures to Belgrade audiences in the 1930s he referred to Vuk Karadžić as “our Vuk” and to the Montenegrin poet Njegoš as “our poet.” Apparently he never lost his youthful vision of a united Yugoslav people, and for that reason the Nobel Prize committee was quite correct in referring to him in their award as a Yugoslav writer.

Notes

1. Miloš Bandić, “Ivo Andrić—neki momenti duhovnog razvoja i stvaralaštva,” in Zbornik radova o Ivi Andriću, Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, Posebna izdanja, 505 (Belgrad: SANU, 1979).

2. Ivo Andrić, “Beleške za pisca,” in Sabrana djela, vol. 12 (Sarajevo, 1976).

3. Letter to Thomas Butler, November 6, 1989.

4. Jovan Skerlić, “Istočno ili južno narečje?” Srpski književni glasnik 31, no. 10 (1913): 756-770; 32, nos. 11-12 (1914): 862-873.

5. “Anketa o južnom ili istočnom narečju u srpsko-hrvatskoj književnosti,” Srpski književni glasnik 32, nos. 2-5 (1914).

6. Predrag Palavestra, “Andrićeva lirika,” in Zbornik radova o Ivi Andriću.

7. Mlada hrvatska lirika, ed. Ljubo Wiesner (Zagreb, 1914).

8. “Walt Whitman: 1819-1919,” Književni jug (August 1919).

9. “Erna Kristen,” Književni jug (January 1918).

10. “A. G. Matoš,” Vihor 5 (1914).

11. “Put Alije Djerzelez,” Književni jug (July 1918 and June 1919).

12. “Dan u Rimu,” Srpski književni glasnik 1, n.s. (1920).