[In the following excerpt, Mukerji examines The Spinster as a “study of miserliness.”]

Money circulates in all that people create and obtain, invisibly like the circulation of blood in the body, but crucially for a person and all that is human. It gives people and objects an appearance and significance, and determines life and continuance in all. It supports some in life and elevates them and so they diverge and flourish, but it spoils others and so they dry up and die like withered trees.

—Andrić, “Panorama”¹

Set partly in Sarajevo and partly in Belgrade between the turn of the last century and the 1930s, The Spinster highlights individual and social attitudes to wealth, the opportunities it presents and the use to which it is put. As a story of human perverseness it is startling; as a study of miserliness it has few parallels in literature.

Obren Radaković, a prominent Serb in the Sarajevo čaršija, has behind him a life of steady success. Consolidating his commercial standing by marrying into “the old and respectable” (page 20) Hadži-Vasić family of Sarajevo, the former krajišnik went on to become a wholesale furrier, a shareholder in the first Kovačić beer factory, and a member of various administrative councils. With bankruptcy staring him in the face, however, Master Obren regrets what people commonly regard as “his kindness and his own old and antiquated conception of mercantile honor” (33). Disillusioned, embittered and hardened by failure, he prepares his daughter Rajka—the spinster-protagonist of Andrić's novel—for existence in a competitive society:

You should know, once for always, and never forget, that any person who does not know how to balance his income and expenditure as life demands of him, is doomed in advance to ruin. … Your income does not depend on you alone but on various other people and circumstances; your thrift, however, is entirely up to you. You should concentrate all your attention and all your energy on it. Here you must be merciless toward yourself and toward others. For it is not enough to withhold your desires and needs; that is the lesser part of thrift; rather it is necessary before all else to kill forever in yourself all those so-called loftier considerations, upper class habits of inner dignity, magnanimity and compassion. On all those weaknesses of ours which people, in order to trick us, call by the fanciest names, each one calculates when approaching us; they devour all the fruits of our abilities and efforts, they are most often the cause of our lifelong enslavement to poverty or even our total ruin. … In my life I had thought differently and acted contrarily. That is why I was ruined. … I would like my failure to serve as an example and a warning to you. … Work as much as you can and as you want, but save, always save, everywhere, in everything, not caring about anything nor anyone. … [P]eople are both good and scrupulous toward those who are not subordinate to them and seek nothing, but as soon as you come under an obligation and are in a dependent position, everything fails, God and the spirit, kinship and friendship, honor and consideration. … Remember well: all our emotions and considerations are only our weaknesses and everything around us watches for them and aims at them. From childhood get accustomed to not being flattered when they praise you and let it not disturb you in the least when they call you a miser, a heartless and selfish creature. The first is a sign that you should be on your guard, and the second that you are on the right path. It is not the good and generous man who is successful with people, but he who is capable of being neither one nor the other, and people cannot do anything to him.

[24-25]

With “the main and most important figure” (20) in her world gone but his counsel impressed indelibly on her mind, fifteen-year-old Rajka has clear priorities. Wasting no time, she is determined to understand the modus operandi of her father's business:

Already in the first weeks Rajka began to come round the store daily. Here with [the manager] Veso she inspected the books and accounts and discussed everything. Without words, somber and calm, she familiarized herself with bookkeeping, commercial correspondence and the entire method of transactions. They told her in vain that this was not a job for a female nor for her years … she wanted to study, to find out, to even see from that angle how the mechanism in which her father relinquished his life appeared, and which she now became acquainted with better and better while visiting banks and government offices and settling her and her mother's small and insecure property.

[37]

Cashing in on Master Obren's reputation and the common sympathy for her bereavement, Rajka approaches everybody matter-of-factly with “modest requests or specific demands” (33). Helped considerably by Master Mihailo, her godfather and guardian, and Dragutin Pajer, the director of the Union Bank, she succeeds in “making sure of many dubious positions out of her father's book-keeping, collecting payments for unsettled claims that were long considered lost and converting papers into money which lay dead in safes in other people's possession” (34).

The severity of Rajka's conservational drive initiates unprecedented changes in the Radaković household. Taking over its management, she informs her mother dryly of her decision:

—It is father's wish that we save and in that way at least repair to a certain degree the harm that people did us. I promised him this. It is necessary to begin with this immediately. From now on the big “visiting” room will not be heated, and neither will the earthen stove in the anteroom. We shall heat your bedroom, anyhow; you will spend your days there. From now on I will see to the servants, the food and everything else. You rest and pay attention to your handwork.

[38]

In spite of his willingness to stay on without a salary, Simo, a loyal servant to the Radaković family for seventeen years, finds himself dismissed. The cook Rezika quits after Rajka steadily whittles down the groceries. Sugar and coffee are locked up in the kitchen cupboard to prevent excessive consumption during the “idle conversations” (43) which take place when her mother's friends come visiting. The house itself loses all traces of its former character as Rajka lives with her idée fixe:

… that house, which had once both glowed and sparkled with the warm abundance that does not depend so much on wealth as it does on the heart and the innate nobility of the host, now became colder and more unpleasant from year to year. Not a single thing was taken out of the house, but all that which wears out with use and could be put away, was put far away from human hands and feet, and if possible even from sight. It seemed to the Miss that the things which were locked up in cupboards and chests were conserving along with her, while a little bit was being lost every day from those that were in use, because every touch, every glance from other people's eyes was taking something from them. To her those first ones were like hidden capital which multiplies, and everything else was like the principal which, diminishing and sinking uncovered and unprotected, was consuming itself and inviting new expenses around it. Even so, what remained in use was altered in some inexplicable way. All the things stood as if they had fallen out among themselves. It could not be said that the house was dirty and neglected, but it was just as far from that shining and healthy cleanliness that gleams and “sings” in happy homes, for parsimony is one of those passions which gradually attracts even physical dirt. … But the first signs were already announcing themselves. In all the rooms and around each individual object the atmosphere of gloomy tedium, cold and stony ill-humor, imperceptibly thickened. Everything that was found in this house slowly but continually lost, with each day and hour, a little of its luster and living warmth and was covered with that barely perceptible grey film that precedes dirt. … [O]bjects and rooms take on that sort of appearance in tekkes, in some monasteries, or in spite of eccentric single people who live just for one thought or a single passion. And everybody goes around them, visiting such houses infrequently and only by necessity.

[44-45]

Rajka's treatment of beggars particularly indicates the niggardliness she is capable of. This is significant considering the oriental milieu she has grown up in and a society which does not frown upon mendicancy but concedes to beggars the status of “God's people” (45). Respecting “their part in the happiness of the fortunate and the riches of the wealthy” (46), Mrs. Radaković always ensured that beggars were gratified kindly and amply, in accordance with “the ancient and established exchange between those who have and can [give] and those who are wretched and needy, the natural and adopted method of supplementing and rectifying what could not be or was not now known how to be corrected otherwise” (46). Unlike her mother, Rajka suspects that rags and physical disabilities may well belie “a perfidiously concealed affluence” (47) and dissimulation. Finding it difficult to break suddenly with custom, however, she gives alms in her own way:

When she acknowledges that a beggar is old and helpless indeed and there is no pretext on which she might dismiss him, she closes the house door and goes into the kitchen. Here she takes a piece of stale bread and hard cheese and sets off to give it to him. But, since she is still unsure and a real novice in the difficult art of thrift and parsimony, she, while going down the corridor, remembers that a still needier mendicant can appear, returns to the kitchen again and leaves the cheese in the cupboard. Starting out with just the bread, but observing it on the way, she perceives the portion to be too big and she comes back to the kitchen again, cutting the bread in half and leaving half in the small basket. And when she proceeds, with what she had eventually decided is a beggarly amount, she recoils, takes up the knife once more and slices off a thin portion even from that piece. But on giving it into the beggar's hand she still observes both the bread and the expression on the beggar's face, in the desire to so judge whether she was not mistaken and had given too much.

[47]

Rajka comes of age in a city in which “everyone needs money and everyone much more than what they have” (53). With full consciousness of bazaar economics, she invests her insurance money swiftly, shrewdly and discreetly. Forgetting everything but “her own craving for prey” (54), she becomes part of “the invisible, fine, steely and tenacious network of usury, a mute, nameless and powerful organization of those who have abandoned everything that is superfluous and secondary in life and found the path to what is, in their understanding, essential and basic in society” (56). In Sarajevo, around the year 1906, there are ample “slaves of usurious rates and inexorable time-limits” (51) who can be exploited:

First of all there is the high percentage of petty humanity which does not have even the bare necessities. Their life is nothing else but a vain desire and eternal quest for money. But even out of those who have a little, or appear so, each one desires more and better than what there is. … This urban world … already born with Turkish habits of indolence and the Slavic need for excess, now adopted Austrian formalistic notions too about society and social obligations, according to which individual reputation and the dignity of a person's class are established on a certain magnitude of unproductive, senseless expenditure, often only on empty and ludicrous luxury without the spirit and the taste.

[53]

Rajka's clientele grows but she shows little respect to distressed people. “Money that multiplies,” affects her with “a cold intoxication,” the kind that “secretly warms and lights up usurers in their damp storehouses, better than the sun and more nicely than springtime” (54-55).

The contact Rajka has with the people at large, however, is minimal, motivated by pecuniary considerations alone. Permitting Rafo Konforti—one of her first clients and a local Jew with his own little shop—to procure ducats at her expense, she enjoys a profit of 30 to 45 percent when he sells them for her at the peak of the annexation crisis in January 1909. With money being made as easily as it was lost during the Balkan War of 1912, the gains of the Rajka-Konforti partnership accrue from “a simple and neat operation with ducats … bought from widows or from the sons of begs who live in grand style but do not work and do not earn anything” (67). For the general interest and the national question Rajka could not care less and sees no reason to contribute to “humane and patriotic [fund-raising] societies” (73). Dubbed a veritable “Shylock in skirts” (73), “a freakish monster-child … a creature without a soul and pride, who is an exception among womenfolk, something like a modern witch” (71), public opinion leaves her indifferent. Steeped in “the spirit of materialism and ugly selfishness” (73), Rajka turns only to her father's grave in Koševo for “quiet strength” (76).

For years Rajka lives with “one big dream” (67) of avenging her father's death through her work. Her self-justification is simplistic:

Since she could not save him, she had to realize, without consideration and pity toward herself and towards others, at least his will, as she understood it.

[67]

Love and amusement being excluded from her world, Rajka's fantasies revolve around “an empire of acquisition and conservation” (68). The professed passport to success of an American newsboy turned millionaire appeals to her, the newspaper report convincing her she has found the symbol commensurate with her capacity for imagination:

What she had wanted and felt from the beginning acquired its name at that moment. Million! Now it was suspended in front of her like a star which does not fade by day or by night, not even in a dream. Catching sight of that distant, golden goal, she worked and saved, thought and dreamed in her own empty house, which resembled a grave more and more … living with it and by it, she passed by people as by the dead. From all that was happening around her here and in the world, that moved people including those who were closest to her and provoked and generated movements and events in lands and nations, she could hear and understand only what had to do with her dream: the endless, complex and constant talk of income and expenditure.

[67-68]

During World War I Rajka diversifies her business, all her thoughts and energies tending in one direction: “not to be on the side that is losing and suffering” (117). With the disappearance of the majority of Serbian businessmen from the Sarajevo market and the conscription of the remaining ones of other faiths and nationalities, economic life in the city adapts itself to the exigencies of wartime. The diminished competition enables unentbehrlich Rafo Konforti to become the leading military purveyor; Rajka operates and makes money “in his shadow” (102). She uses “every opportunity to publicly show her loyalty” (101) to the Austro-Hungarian authorities, puts their flags and emblems on her house, buys photographs of their sovereigns and commanders-in-chief, “taking care that all this is not expensive and that it is noticed” (101). In November of 1915, as Sarajevo's streets teem with soldiers wielding all sorts of weapons, and columns of Russian and Serbian prisoners of war as well as local captives and hostages move with the bayonet glinting over their heads, Rajka reacts perversely to the signs of dissatisfaction, want and misery she observes around her:

With evil and secret pleasure she saw how there was less and less loud merriment in the cafes and streets, less and less enjoyment, glow and laughter in homes, how everything was sinking in poverty here as in some sort of forced thrift and how the city and the people were becoming dumb and grey, and were more and more at her will and to her taste. If the word “happiness” had any meaning in her life, it could be said that in those days she was perfectly happy, with the happiness of a mole that burrows blindly through the darkness and silence of soft earth in which there is enough food and there are no obstacles nor dangers.

[104]

The social ferment in the summer of 1918 bodes ill for Rajka. With regret she witnesses Konforti's decline and mental breakdown. Things seem out of joint to her as the war nears its end:

Business is at a standstill, courts are empty, banks actually do not work, terms are not honored, papers of value lie nullified. Donations are sought of her from all sides, but nobody pays debts, rather each one smiles at his creditors and incurs new debts, as though tomorrow were the end of the world. And the newspapers write about the tax on war lucre, about the expropriation of property, about big and small plans according to which it would be necessary to take away billions from the ones who have them to benefit those who do not have anything.

[127]

Nemesis overtakes Rajka, but

insensitive to the entire range of social laws and moral feelings and reactions in a person, incapable of noticing their existence, not to mention understanding their order and their slow and implacable effect, she really could not begin to see the causal nexus between what was happening to her and what she had done, endeavored and obeyed during the years 1914 and 1915.

[126]

Castigated in the ultranationalistic daily Srpska zastava (Serbian Flag), the newly launched Narodni glas (People's Voice), and the Social Democratic paper Sloboda (Freedom), she is made rudely aware of the hatred that menaces her in Sarajevo. Nonplussed and living in fear of social confrontation, she eventually leaves the city for good at the end of 1919 “to forget and to be forgotten” (132).

Rajka stays awhile at the house of her maternal uncle Djordje Hadži-Vasić, a Belgrade businessman. She is ill at ease, however, with the prospective bankers and financiers, leftist-republicans, socialists, conservatives, newcomers from Croatia, Dalmatia and Slovenia—most of them carefree, battle-tested young men who have studied in France—entertained by her cousins Miša, Danka and Darinka. Petar Budimirović, a Young Bosnian poet interned in Austria during the war, particularly startles Rajka with the Marxist-Leninist idiom of a prose poem denouncing moneyed people:

You have divided the world nicely: everything is for you and for your children, for the children of your children and for your servants. You have divided the world well: you have taken all the light and beauty for yourselves but you have left us all the darkness and difficulty, and so now we are all born with clearly predetermined lots, you with a bright one and we with a dim. You have divided the world well! But your division is merely ugly, not eternal also. Our indignation will ripen, and the summer will be hot and the fruit pungent; your children will be ashamed of their name and deny their wealth, for that will be a burden to them and their ruin.

[145-146]

The ambitions of the business class are inseparable from its quest for reassuring solidity. Marriage, as in the case of Rajka's father as well as her uncle Djordje, is a commercial proposition to consolidate social position, a personal relationship with a cash nexus. Miša's friends await the return of all the expatriate Belgrade families in order to select a wife from the ones that happen to be “most influential and most affluent” (142). Not surprisingly, Danka and Darinka do not consider marrying any one of “their young friends nor the progressive poets that they [had] adored in the year 1920” (205): Danka takes a well known banker for a husband and Darinka a middle-aged architect who is a professor in the Technical Faculty.

In Belgrade which has “something of the wildness and chaos of an auriferous Eldorado” (151), where each one “finds his own piece and gathers hope of being able to find a still bigger one” (151), a new game suggests itself to Rajka. She visits different banks and Sephardic money-changing shops to ascertain the most favorable rate for her shares. Waiting two or three weeks to confirm how much she might have lost or profited by selling earlier, Rajka enters her imaginary gains or losses in an account-book that she peruses daily. The playing-field of speculation absorbs her completely:

In that game, which for her was a great deal more than a game, she found much and deep excitement, both pleasant and unpleasant, but also gained new experience and knowledge. And burying herself like a mole in that petty and unforseeable business, she thought of her past dream of a million more and more seldom and felt less and less need of it. … And the memories of Sarajevo started to fade quickly. Nothing drew her back, not even that grave in Koševo. … The ample and powerful life of the capital city swallowed everything, both good and evil, fame and disgrace both, and like a jungle or an ocean covered everything in oblivion.

[153]

Jovanka Tanasković, who makes friends with Rajka at the Hadži-Vasićs, invites comparison with her. A distant relative of Mrs. Hadži-Vasić, she comes from a well-reputed, affluent Belgrade family, and, as an only child, inherits “a considerable fortune in houses, lands and securities” (156). In her thirties, Jovanka lives “alone, modestly and eccentrically, not thinking of marriage nor of the love of men in general, not asking anything of life for herself” (156). She is particularly interested, however, in playing “the role of Providence” (157) in “the destinies, plans, passions and ambitions of other people” (156)—patients, friends of hers fleeing from their husbands, jilted girls, unassuming young men about to take examinations or aspiring to the civil service, unhappy lovers. Restless, evincing “a masculine energy and decisiveness” (156), she uses her connections and social standing in acting the “good Samaritan” with a difference:

The tangled affairs of unsuccessful or distressed people were her true element. She only approached people like that, imposed herself on them with overpowering persistence, showered them with advice and favors … and would all at once then, usually at the moment when their situation improved, turn away from them and like a bad and offended fairy banish them thenceforth with her dumb hatred and whispered defamations.

[158]

Jovanka's latest protégé, Ratko Ratković, plays his own money game with Rajka. Ironically, she is manipulated into patronizing this young man who is allegedly negotiating a contract with the Ford Motor Company for a dealership in Belgrade. Ratko appeals to Rajka initially because of his resemblance to her dead uncle Vlada and his talk of work, business prospects and plans—the very things “she loved solely and knew how to converse about” (161). What is more, she fancies Ratko to be a perfect model of what she had wanted her uncle to be and “what he had never been able to be: steady, a businessman who calculates carefully and anticipates everything, but speaks little about money, timidly, in an almost reverential tone” (164). Rajka loans Ratko a considerable amount of money on various occasions, happy to oblige him where she had denied others and even lowering the rate of interest to 8 percent—an alltime low for her—on a repayment. Unknown to Rajka, Ratko has no “actual and fixed occupation” (175). He is “a great ‘lover’ of beautiful women, entertainment and fun of any kind” (176); she is just “the old woman” (190) on Stiška Street whom he exploits so easily for cash which probably goes into his nightlife in the séparé in Belgrade's “Kasina”—the place where his “Parisian diseuse” (176), Karmensita, performs her own little money making act.

Rajka's unusual investment leaves her with a bitter aftertaste. Once more she communes with her father, to whom alone she feels accountable:

I know everything and remember all that you instructed and entrusted to me, but what good is it when the world is such that falsehood and deceit are more powerful than everything else in it. To insure myself I did everything, everything. But what is the use, when they approach you on the side you do hope they won't. And if no one deceives us, we are mistaken ourselves. Forgive me because I am lost and helpless like this after so many years and efforts, but I did not violate my promise, rather the world betrayed me. You know how I have worked, bloodily and hard. I had thought that your word, with my will and effort combined, would be adequate defense from everything. But it is not that way. In this world there is no defense nor certain protection. It is worse and harder, father, than you suspected. Who lives, only he sees what this world is and what the people in it are. Who does not have, they trample; who acquires, they rob.

[193-194]

Reaching a breaking-point and falling seriously ill, Rajka quickly rallies her drooping spirits. She looks to thrift for her salvation, writes off Ratko as a bad loss and refuses to be an object of Jovanka's commiseration.

After three years in Belgrade, Rajka finally finds herself at liberty to live the kind of life she had “unconsciously gravitated towards from the beginning but from which she was always separated by something” (203). She wastes no time mourning her mother's death:

The Miss immediately got rid of the big cat Gagan, a heavy glutton and an idler, on account of which she had so many clashes with her mother, until the last day. She even sold all her mother's books. … She threw out the flowerpots, that luxury which the old mistress had stubbornly defended for years. The flowers and the soil she hurled angrily and vengefully onto the rubbish heap, but left the pots in order to sell them when a good opportunity appeared. She stopped the big wall clock, which had also been the subject of long and constant bickering between her mother and her. The Miss was of the opinion that when there were two pocket watches in the house that antique clock was an expensive and redundant item, but the mother asserted that she had brought that clock from her father's house, that to its ticking she had spent a happy childhood and still happier years of marriage and that she wished to hear it till the end of her life, but afterwards let her do what she wanted with it. The Miss could never understand what sort of connection the ticking of the antique clock had with what her mother called happiness and now she jammed and stopped it nimbly and maliciously for ever, so that it would not require repairs, nor winding and oiling. She took off both the last tablecloths and the velvet covers which her mother had still preserved in her own room, and covered objects with newspapers. She took down all the pictures from the walls, except her father's. In the entire house there was no longer even one of those superfluous trifles that attract and consume our attention, and without which the majority of people do not think that life is life. Neither color, nor sound, nor a trace of harmful sensitivity and expensive amusement. In that way finally, after so many years of petty indulgence and concessions, the Miss was really free, in the house that best suited her deepest desires and needs. Free and alone.

[203-204]

Rajka sees to her finances in her own way. As banks and government offices displace the money-changing shops on Terazije, putting an end to clandestine games and speculation, she takes care to save the maximum she can from her income from the Sarajevo house rent as well as various stocks and shares, and adds that to her capital. Quick to gauge the economic and monetary crisis beginning around the year 1930, Rajka promptly withdraws her bank deposits. The desire to be on the winning side again makes her resourceful:

… she went into banks, requested and lied persistently and rather transparently that she urgently needed money to pay off some pressing debts. With bundles of thousand-dinar bank notes and hundred-dinar bills strapped like armor around her scraggy chest or sewn into her dress, she walked apprehensively on the streets, turning around constantly from fear lest anyone was following her. Deliberately and conspicuously she emptied her safe in the Danube Bank in which she kept ducats and valuable papers, claiming that she no more needed the safe, because there was nothing to keep in it.

[207]

Rajka's dread of losing “the packets of bank notes and bags of gold” (207) that she divides between tin boxes, hides in unused stoves, or boards up in secret places, however, sends her to the black market where she converts the dinar bills into less bulky Swiss francs. For all the foreign currency and valuables in her possession, she has a new hiding place that seems safe to her at least for the present. This “well known and precious but always new domain” (208), is Rajka's “‘window into the world,’ her society and reading matter, her faith and family, her nourishment and recreation” (210) as it were:

In addition to loose five and ten pound notes, fair as love letters, those precious Swiss bank notes lie here in picturesque disarray. Behind those mounds of valuable, colorful paper peeps the luster of gold, assorted jewelry which was inherited, bought, or left behind as a pledge for some loan. As accidentally scattered, and over everything, are lined up, all in the front, four hundred and eleven American gold coins of twenty dollars each. All of them are identical: broad, heavy, somehow warm and meaty, as though the sap of life circulates in them, as though they are breathing and growing. Only the sharp relief of the letters and the images on them shows that this is money, inanimate metal. On one side the big goddess Liberty … and on the other an American crest, with the small but clear inscription E pluribus unum. … Those big Americans stretch out so in a zigzag line: a golden army on a campaign across rosy, white, violet peaks and plains of jewels and bank notes. Side by side with them goes a column of apparently (only apparently!) dispersed and disorderly Turkish rušpi and Hungarian gold coins … notched and abraded irregularly around the edges. The insatiable greed of Jewish sarafa and all the other baptized and unbaptized money-changers of the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire gnawed and damaged them here in the course of many years.

All those Turkish ducats (the Miss remembers well) are from the critical years 1908, 1912 and 1913. … A hundred napoleons, small, lively, French roosters with bright and clearly defined faces, accompany the ends and flanks of both columns of gold coins. They are like some cavalry of skirmishing detachments and a rear guard.

[209-210]

Inspired by the old folk proverb “krpež i trpež kuću drže,” Rajka takes self-denial to ludicrous extremes in the interests of domestic economy. “Mending” and “enduring” give her immense pleasure in her “perpetual struggle” (16) against “that almighty force which consumes and attenuates everything … dogs each human life and each movement, like the curse that came upon human existence with the sin of the First Man” (16). A slipper or some piece of linen, which “is not fit for anything anymore” (16), presents “splendid prospects of big victories” (16) for her. She lovingly admires the slipper she salvages, which, having shrunk in the process, “is no longer beautiful to the eye, to be sure” (17).

Determined, nevertheless, to despise beauty “like a heresy, like an evil, rival idol that seduces people into lamentable wrong ways and turns them away from the only true deity, from saving” (17), Rajka gladly endures the “sweet pain and happy wound” (17) that the chafing slipper inflicts on her foot. Attacking a new hole in an old stocking—not merely another household item in her account-book of profits and losses—which she darns time and again, she has the satisfaction of scoring “yet another victory … on the large galley of the universe, which is constantly imperiled,” and of filling up “one more treacherous fissure” (19).

Rajka even tries to emulate “the zealous fortitude of a martyr” (18), by braving the winter cold in her “cheerless room” (15), stopping short of committing “a big and irreparable crime” (18), with a small shovel of coal, which she conserves from the Etna and Vesuvius-like fires of her stove, and walking away from it with clenched teeth. Like those “good, able warriors who cannot avoid a brief shiver in moments of danger, but overcome it with heroism” (19), she resumes her position by the window and continues to mend and endure. In this desert of thrift, one evening in February of 1935, Rajka's life ebbs away.

The Spinster offers subtle insights into facets of life in the two cities that continued to inspire Andrić's creative writing. In both milieux, money plays an important part in the joys and sufferings of people. The appetite for money and the race for riches in the novel, notwithstanding its satiric thrust, also make the unusual tragedy of an individual who condemns herself to receiving so little from life before she has hardly begun to live.

Note

1. See Deca, Sabrana djela, IX, p. 138.