Ivo Andric Bridge Between East and West

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

Ivo Andric

photograph by Radoslav Grujic

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West Celia Hawkesworth

THE ATHLONE PRESS London and Dover N. H.

First published 1984 by The Athlone Press Ltd 44 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4LY and 51 Washington Street Dover, N. H. 03820, USA © Celia Hawkesworth 1984 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hawkesworth, Celia Ivo Andric. 1. Andric, Ivo - Criticism and interpretation I. Title 891.8'235 PG1418.A6Z/ ISBN 0-485-11255-8 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hawkesworth, Celia, 1942Ivo Andric: bridge between East and West Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Andric, Ivo, 1892-1975—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PG1418.A6Z69 1984 891.8'235 84-9186 ISBN 0-485-11255-8 Published with the help of The Ivo Andric Foundation All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Yugoslavia

Foreword The works of Ivo Andric may be read in numerous languages, from Italian and Finnish to Japanese. In Europe the first translations appeared in Czech and French in 1919. Since then Andric has become best known in Poland and Germany, where virtually all his works have been published. The first work to be translated into English was Bosnian Story which appeared in 1958, translated by Kenneth Johnstone. After the award of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1961 several more works appeared in English, both in Britain and the United States, and they have continued to be published intermittently ever since. Nevertheless, Andric has remained relatively neglected in the Englishspeaking world, known for the most part only to those involved in Slavonic studies. Several scholarly articles have appeared in English, but these are accessible only to the narrow readership familiar with Andric's writing in the original. The present work is an attempt to introduce Andric to the more general reader. It assumes no knowledge of the writer and endeavours to offer a comprehensive survey of his work. To this end, Andric has been left as far as possible to "speak for himself". It is to be hoped that new editions of Andric's works in English may lead to a revival of interest in this important European writer. The way would then be open for the publication of more narrowly based critical studies. All the passages quoted in this volume have been translated by the author in order to ensure consistency of tone. A list of existing translations into English is given in the Select Bibliography. The titles of published translations have been retained, in the text, for ease of identification.

For Nada Prodanovic-Curcija and in memory of Mira Rotter, with whom it all began.

Contents Foreword Acknowledgements Note on the Pronunciation of Serbo-Croatian Names 1 Introduction 2

Verse

v viii ix 1 51

3 Short Stories

68

4 The Novels

123

5 Devil's Yard

189

6

206

Essays and Reflective Prose

7 Conclusion

234

Notes

250

Select Bibliography

261

Index

269

Acknowledgements This work could not have been written without the invaluable advice of many friends and colleagues both in Yugoslavia and Britain who have found the time and the patience to read the manuscript in whole or in part. I am particularly grateful to Professor Svetozar Koljevic of the University of Sarajevo, Dr Vladeta Jankovic of the University of Belgrade, Dr Predrag Palavestra of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Dr E. D. Goy of the University of Cambridge, Mr Dusan Puvacic of the University of Lancaster and Dr Robert Pynsent of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. My thanks are also due to Dr Michael Branch, Director of SSEES, for his personal encouragement, and to the School's Publications Committee for their support. I am grateful also to SSEES for granting me a period of study leave in the early stages of the work, and to the British Academy for enabling me to spend some time in Yugoslavia. Above all, I am indebted to the Andric Foundation in Belgrade, whose staff have been an unfailing source of encouragement, support and concrete assistance. I am particularly grateful to Mr Miodrag Perisic for all his willing and energetic help and to Vera Stojic, who worked closely with Andric for many years, for her advice. A generous grant from the Foundation has made it possible for the work to be printed in Yugoslavia. I am grateful to Radovan Popovic and Miroslav Karaulac for permission to use material from their works in the biographical section of my introduction. Finally, the work could not have been completed without the patient help of Mrs Jeanne Clissold in typing sections of the manuscript and of my family in simply being there.

Note on the Pronunciation of Serbo-Croatian Names With the exception of some Turkish words and names (e.g. Cem, the younger son of Sultan Bayazid II, whose story is told in Devil's Yard), Serbo-Croatian spellings have been retained. The language may be written in either the Cyrillic or the Latin alphabet. The Latin alphabet includes a number of unfamiliar letters listed below. Serbo-Croat is strictly phonetic, with one letter designating one sound. The stress normally falls on the first syllable, never on the last. c c c

- ts, as in cars - ch, as in church - tj, close to c, but softer i.e. t in future

dz-j,as in just

dz j s z

-

j, as injustd- dj, close to dz, but softer i.e. d in verdure y, as in yellow (Jugoslavija) sh, as in ship zh, as s in treasure

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1 Introduction Andric and Bosnia: the source and the spirit of a life work The work of Ivo Andric is deeply rooted in his native culture: by concentrating on what is most characteristic, most significant and creative in his own immediate surroundings, Andric seeks to identify what is most universal. To the outsider this setting may seem obscure, remote and exotic, and it has often proved difficult to penetrate beyond this initial impression. Because of its unfamiliarity, the aroma of the East that fills so many of Andric's pages has tended to dominate our reading. Andric's work arises out of a collision of cultures particular to his birthplace, the rugged Balkan region of Bosnia. Bosnia is probably chiefly known abroad for its capital city, Sarajevo, and the assassination there in 1914 of the Austrian Crown Prince Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, which was the immediate cause of the outbreak of the First World War. Born in 1892, Andric was a product of the atmosphere prevailing in Central Europe at the turn of the century; his work is rooted in Bosnia, in this otherwise obscure corner of Europe, meeting-place of East and West, where for so long the Ottoman Empire confronted the Habsburg Monarchy. For West Europeans, whose attitude to "The Turk" was for centuries hostile, Andric represents one of the brightest aspects of this meeting in his positive fusion of features of each culture. His experience led directly to the emergence of one of the most important symbols of his work: the bridge. The phrase "meeting-place of East and West" may be felt to have become a cliche with regard to the Balkans, but the concept applies uniquely to Bosnia for particular historical reasons. And it is only out of this exceptional coincidence of cultures that Andric's blend of European and Oriental attitudes could have grown. What makes the territory of Bosnia unique in the whole of

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Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

erstwhile Turkey-in-Europe is the size of its Moslem population. There are well over a million Moslems in Yugoslavia, and most of them are in Bosnia and the neighbouring region of Hercegovina. Despite the fact that they used to call themselves "Turks" - and this is consistently reflected in the work of Andric - they were so only in religious allegiance. The only actual Turks in Bosnia throughout its history were the handful of administrators appointed from Istanbul. And even then, the nature of the Ottoman Empire meant that these "Turks" could well have belonged to any of the subject races, many of whose members were taken at an early age from their homelands and brought up in the Ottoman capital, bound to no ethnic group but to the Sultan alone. The large Bosnian Moslem population is Slav and speaks the same Serbo-Croatian language as its Christian brethren. Most of the lands of Ottoman Europe consisted of an indigenous rural Christian subject people, administered by Turkish officials and soldiers living in towns. In Bosnia, however, there was a native Moslem ruling class - the Beys - and a large rural population of converts. The Beys were landowners, either representatives of the old feudal nobility or adherents of the Bogomil heresy who had preserved their lands and property and their old way of life by exchanging one religion and one sovereign for another. The Vizier, appointed from Istanbul, with his residence at various times in either Banja Luka or Travnik, represented the Emperor, but his influence over the powerful Beys was limited - to the extent that he was barely allowed into the town of Sarajevo. It was always the policy of the Ottoman conquerors that those of the subject people who were willing to accept Islam should be permitted to retain their property, but the exceptionally widespread and profound conversion that took place in Bosnia was the result of the particular circumstances prevailing there before the conquest. It is generally accepted that the main factor was the widely established Bogomil heresy, which spread from Bulgaria through Macedonia, persecuted by the early Christian churches there, but welcomed when it reached Bosnia. It was a form of dualism, influenced by the Massalian and Paulician heresies of Asia Minor and closely related to the Albigensian heresy. When it began to gain a hold in Bosnia, in the late twelfth century, it had been modified so that it appealed to the ruling class and the peasantry alike. It soon acquired its own hierarchical organization

Introduction

3

and became known as the "Bosnian Church". Naturally enough it was fiercely persecuted by the Catholic Church, and by the time the Turkish conquest was complete, in 1463, many of its adherents were inclined to favour conversion to Islam rather than Catholicism. So it happened that under Ottoman rule there were in Bosnia a landowning class of native Moslem Beys and a population of Catholic, Orthodox and Moslem peasants and small-town dwellers. To these were added, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a significant number of Sephardic Jews. The last element in this exceptionally varied cultural landscape were the gypsies who were widespread throughout the Balkans. This confusion of cultures was, until the relatively recent Europeanization of all aspects of life, immediately visible in the villages and towns. It was described by a Scottish traveller, R. Munro, on a journey through Bosnia in 1894 - two years after Andric was born: But whatever be the race or creed of the modern Bosniac - Slav, Semite or Turk: Christian, Jew or Moslem - he still lives, moves and has his being in the traditional work of his forefathers. Hence, as might be expected, the costumes seen in Sarajevo are somewhat bewildering. Of the men, some wear the fez or turban, along with a tight jacket, loose knickerbockers, stockings and pointed slippers. Others have costumes which appear to have borrowed their individual elements from mixed sources. Almost every man wears round his waist a sash or leathern girdle, in the folds of which he carries such necessary objects as tobacco, knife, etc. The Mayor of Sarajevo wears European dress and a fez. Women also adhere to their traditional costumes. Veiled or unveiled, they strut along on wooden slippers and the divided skirt a la Turque. Mussulman women seldom appear on the streets; but a Catholic or Jewish girl may be seen wearing a fez, or a small round cap ornamented with coins, by way of setting off her coquettish face.1 Bosnia, then, at the time of Andric's birth, was more than merely the frontier between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires - it was an area where East and West met and intermingled to a far greater extent than in the rest of the Balkan peninsula. To describe it as the "meeting-place of East and West" is to describe not only its historical and geographical role, but the daily experience of its inhabitants.

4

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

It is an ostensibly Christian country where minarets dominate the urban skyline, where aspects of Islamic observance have crept into the Christian rite, where the air is filled with the aroma of freshly ground Turkish coffee and leisurely narghiles, with the regular call of the muezzin and traditional Slavonic song. Orthodox and Catholic festivals alternate with each other and with the holy days of Islam, and richly ornamented oriental wares and foodstuffs fill the markets alongside stalls selling Croatian and Serbian national dress. Eastern features dominated the life of the towns until the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1878, when rapid changes were introduced. Nevertheless, despite Central European administrative buildings dating from that period and the extensive industrial and residential expansion since the Second World War, the main impression of the centre of Sarajevo is not very different today from this description by Arthur Evans in 1876: But a turn in the road reveals to us the Damascus of the North - for such is the majestic title by which the Bosniac Turks, who consider it, after Stamboul, the finest city in Turkey-in-Europe, delight to style Sarajevo. Seen, indeed, from above, in an atmosphere which the Bosniac historian has not inaptly compared to that of Misr and Sham (Egypt and Syria), it might well call up the pearl and emerald settings of Oriental imagery. The city is a vast garden, from amidst whose foliage swell the domes and cupolas of mosques and baths; loftier still, rises the new Serbian Cathedral; and lancing upwards, as to tourney with the sky, near a hundred minarets. The airy height to the East, sceptred with these slender spires of Islam and turret-crowned with the Turkish fortress (raised originally by the first vizier of Bosnia on the site of the older "Grad" of Bosnian princes), commands the rest of the city, and marks the domination of the infidel. Around it clusters the upper-town, populated exclusively by the ruling caste; but the bulk of the city occupies a narrow flat amidst the hills, cut in twain by the little river Miljaska, and united by three stone and four wooden bridges. Around this arena, tier above tier - at first wooded hills, then rugged limestone precipices - rises a splendid amphitheatre of mountains . . .2 It was into this atmosphere and landscape that Ivo Andric was born, and his early experience was coloured by three of the most striking

Introduction

5

aspects of Bosnian life: its mountains gazing impassively down on the passing generations; its variety of cultures; its narrow valleys where a bridge becomes not merely a means of crossing from one isolated community to another, but a symbol of the links between men regardless of their cultural differences. This experience is at the heart of Andric's work. Throughout his life he was fascinated by the detailed history of his homeland, and one of the most characteristic aspects of his work is its concern with the transmutation of historical events into legend and anecdote, into art. While he wrote a number of articles about the works of other writers, Andric never stated what his own intention was in writing a particular work, saying that it was impossible to speak about what one was going to do before one began and that afterwards the writer had said all he had to say and was exhausted, "not so much by what he had written, as by what he did not succeed in saying".3 What was said in the work, if it was good, could not be said differently, or it would become something different itself, and the writer was quite unimportant compared with the work. Nevertheless, Andric has made a number of general statements about the nature of art and the function of literature. Two of the most developed can be seen as characteristic of his outlook. One comes in an essay on the nature of art: "Conversation with Goya", published in 1935. Andric was particularly drawn to Spain and, like many writers of his generation, he felt a special affinity with the work of Goya. Here he puts into the painter's mouth words which explain the particular power of his painting, words which Goya himself would never have spoken - for his statement is implicit in his work - but which explain the close bond, the "bridge", between Goya the painter and Andric the observer. The words can be read as Andric's own personal statement: I have seen the stupidity of ignorant men of power, so-called "men of action", as well as the ineptitude, weakness and bewilderment of the world of learning. I have seen principles and systems which appeared more solid than granite disperse like mist before the indifferent or hostile eyes of the world, and what was until a moment before truly a mist solidify in front of those same eyes and form into unshakeable, holy principles, more solid than any

6

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West granite. And I asked myself what the meaning of these changes was, what plan was it all following, and what aim was it all pursuing? And however much I looked, listened, and wondered, I found neither meaning, nor plan, nor aim in any of it. But I came to one negative conclusion: that our individual ideas, for all their intensity, do not mean much and cannot achieve anything; and to one positive one: that we must listen closely to legends, those annals of collective human endeavour through the centuries, and try to make out of them, as far as possible, the meaning of our destiny. There are a few points of human activity around which legends have been gradually built up in thin layers over the years. For a long time I stood, bewildered by what was happening around me, and in the second half of my life, I came to the conclusion that it was useless and mistaken to look for sense in the meaningless but apparently so important events taking place around us, but that we should look for it in those layers which the centuries have built up around the few main legends of humanity. Those layers continue, if ever less faithfully, to reproduce the shape of that grain of truth around which they collect, and so carry it through the centuries. The true history of mankind is contained in fairystories; they make it possible to guess, if not to discover, its meaning. There are a few fundamental legends of humanity which indicate or at least cast some light on the path we have travelled, if not on the aim we are pursuing. The legend of The Fall, the legend of the Flood, the legend of the Son of Man crucified to save the world, the legend of Prometheus and the stolen fire . . .4

The other general statement forms part of Andric's speech of acceptance of the Nobel Prize, in 1961: My homeland is truly "a small country between worlds" as one of our writers has put it, and it is a country which is trying in all fields, including culture, at the price of great sacrifices and exceptional energy to compensate rapidly for all that its unusually stormy and difficult past has denied i t . . . Your recognition of one writer from that country undoubtedly means encouragement for that endeavour. We are therefore bound to be grateful, and I am happy that at this moment and in this place I can express this

Introduction

7

gratitude simply but sincerely not only in my own name, but in the name of the literature to which I belong. The other part of my task is somewhat more difficult and complicated: to say a few words in connection with the narrative work whose author you have honoured with this prize. But where a writer and his work are concerned, does it not seem a little unjust that the author of a work of art, in addition to giving us his creation, a part of himself in other words, should be expected also to say something about himself and that work? Some of us are more inclined to look on the creators of works of art either as dumb, absent contemporaries, or as celebrated ancestors, and we believe that the word of a work of art is purer and clearer if it is not confused by the living voice of its creator. Such a view is not unique or new. Montesquieu held that "writers are not good judges of their works". And I once read with wonder and understanding Goethe's rule: "The artist's task is to create, not to talk." And much later I was excited to come upon the same thought, clearly expressed in the work of the late lamented Albert Camus. For this reason I would like to lay the emphasis of this brief discussion on some observations on stories and story-telling in general. In a thousand different languages, in the most varied conditions of life, from century to century, from the ancient patriarchal tales told in peasant huts by the fireside to the works of modern storytellers emerging at this moment from publishing houses in all the great centres of the world, the tale of human destiny unfolds, told endlessly and uninterruptedly by man to man. The method and form of this narration vary with time and circumstances, but the need for stories and story-telling remains; the story flows on and there is no end to the telling. Sometimes it appears that over the centuries, from his first spark of consciousness, man has been talking about himself, telling always the same story, in a million different variants, in tune with the breathing of his lungs and the rhythm of his pulse. And that story seems, like the tales of the legendary Scheherazade, to seek to deceive the hangman, to delay the inevitability of the tragic blow that threatens us and to prolong the illusion of life. Or

8

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West perhaps the story-teller should try, through his work, to help man to find himself and his way in the world? Perhaps his vocation is to speak in the name of all those who were unable to express themselves, or prevented from doing so because they were struck down before their time, by life, the executioner? Or is it that the story-teller tells himself his tale, as a child sings in the dark, to delude his fear? Or is the aim of the story to illuminate, at least a little, the obscure paths on to which life often casts us, and to tell us something more than we, in our weakness, can discover and comprehend about the life which we live but which we do not see and do not always understand. So that frequently we learn what we have done and what we have left undone, what to do and what not to do, from the words of a good story-teller. Perhaps it is in those tales, both oral and written, that the true history of mankind is contained, and perhaps it is possible, if not to know, then at least to glimpse in them the meaning of that history.5

The basic idea of each of these passages is expressed in virtually the same words: "Perhaps it is in those tales, oral and written, that the true history of mankind is contained and perhaps it is possible, if not to know, then at least to glimpse in them that history." And: "The true history of mankind is contained in fairy-stories, they make it possible to guess, if not to discover, its meaning." The distinction Andric makes here between "knowing" and "glimpsing", "guessing" and "discovering" the meaning of man's history is crucial. The word used in Serbo-Croat ("slutiti") means "to sense", "to have an inkling", and it implies intuition as opposed to logical, reasoned knowledge. For Andric, truths about human life cannot be known, they can only be experienced, and they are crystallized in works of art, in the paintings of Goya, in stories and legends. It is to these legends, to the layers accumulating around the few main legends of humanity, in the particular form in which they were built up in the historical circumstances of his native Bosnia, that Andric was to return so fruitfully in his works of fiction. In this he was to draw heavily, although often indirectly, on the rich oral literature of the South Slav lands. There were two other important influences on Andric's childhood

Introduction

9

and youth which are also reflected in his work and which seem to contribute to the same general conception of the way in which art can convey truth. The first was his Catholic upbringing, which inclined Andric to see human experience in terms of certain abstract categories, such as evil, sin, fear, lust - and to recognize the strength of the parable as a medium. The second influence is more difficult to trace and identify, as it was the result of no specific training or individual experience. It is the "Oriental" flavour of life, which Andric absorbed from his early experience of living in Bosnia. At one or two points in his work we are given a glimpse of something of the way in which this experience was communicated to him, but it remains impossible to be specific. It seems to have something to do with that "silence" of Bosnia, which he describes in Bosnian Story - a non-Western, non-intellectual acceptance of life in its totality, without analysis, without explanation; an Eastern stoical respect for life whatever it brings and a tendency to revere its silent physical manifestations rather than abstractions. This outlook is perhaps best seen in the short story "The Bridge on the Zepa". The story emphasizes the mystery involved in the building of the bridge: the builder lives outside town like an ascetic, in a world of silent meditation over his plans and calculations, working with religious dedication until finally his idea is embodied in stone. The whole task seems to have a significance greater than anyone can explain. The vizier who commissioned the bridge wants his motto engraved on it: "In silence lies security".6 This silence is the most important aspect of the bridge: it is the silence of a complete statement which cannot be further described or explained, but which embodies a truth. The motto arises out of the vizier's fear of the fact that words can engender evil, treachery, deceit. The stone bridge represents a silent link between man's incomprehension in the face of life and his apprehension of a harmony which could give his life meaning. The strivings of the human spirit are here given form in the skilfully carved stone which represents the beauty and permanence men crave. The idea of the bridge grew out of the vizier's experience of evil, unhappiness, arbitrary persecution and imprisonment, and out of his awareness of the transience of life. In the end he decides not even to have the motto engraved - leaving the bridge to stand alone, embodying both

10

Ivo A ndric: Bridge between East and West

the vizier's idea and the creative principle, which is represented by the builder: it needs no further comment. The story of the building of the bridge ends with the words: There, in Bosnia, it gleamed in the sun and shone in the moonlight and carried people and animals across the river. Little by little, the circle of freshly-dug earth and discarded objects that surround any new building disappeared completely. People took away and the water carried off the broken stakes and pieces of scaffolding and unwanted wood, and the rains washed away the traces of the stonemasons' work. But the countryside could not merge with the bridge, nor the bridge with the landscape. Seen from the side, the bold white sweep of its arch looked always separate and alone, and took the traveller by surprise, like an unusual idea which had gone astray and been trapped among the wild limestone mountains.7 Ideas thus "trapped" form the substance of Andric's work, and the purpose of the present study will be to examine something of the process of "pursuing" and capturing them in works which are the products of a mind educated in the Western tradition, but formed also, at least in part, by those same wild limestone mountains of Bosnia. Andric the man - a biographical outline It is of course in trying to capture something of the nature of Ivo Andric the man that one is most conscious of the reluctance with which the writer allowed himself to be a public figure. The strength of his sense of the responsibility imposed on him by his vocation is clear when one considers the extent to which he did involve himself in public life, and his acceptance of his responsibilities is the more to be admired. Andric's friend, the cartoonist Zuko Dzumhur, has said that Andric frequently bemoaned the fact that he had not written under a pseudonym: "I would have been far freer, and I would, perhaps, have been a better writer. This wretched name has made many demands on me and limited me in many ways."8 Whatever can be discovered about Andric the man from his own

Introduction

11

writings, and the statements and recollections of those who knew him, can be only a fragment of the truth. For Andric had a carefully developed sense of the limits of his public personality, and would reveal only what he was prepared to reveal. He has been described by a close friend as an "iceberg" of which nine tenths were perpetually in darkness.9 "What do I remember?" wrote Andric's friend Sreten Marie, when asked to contribute to a book of recollections. "Ivo's very individual tournure d'esprit, a certain melancholic irony that was peculiar to him. Yes, and that unforgettable, slightly nasal, warm voice coming down from his wide mouth. With his gaze usually turned inwards, but suddenly directed straight into my eyes, as though he were taking me into himself as well."10 Andric was quite consistent in his desire for anonymity and his conviction that knowledge of a writer's life was simply irrelevant to an understanding of his work. There is an air of well-guarded secrecy about even some of the simplest facts of his life. The story is told, for instance, that when asked directly whether the house in Travnik which is now a museum was really the house in which he was born, Andric replied ambiguously: "A man has to be born somewhere."11 What follows is, consequently, the barest outline of his life. Andric was born in Travnik, the old centre of the Ottoman administration in Bosnia, on 9 October 1892, the only child of Catholic parents, Ivan and Katarina Andric. His father was working as a caretaker in Sarajevo, where Ivo was taken as a baby. When his father died, two years later, Katarina took her small son to her husband's sister Ana in Visegrad. Ana, and her husband Ivan Matkovic, a sergeant in the Austrian police service, took the child into their home and brought him up as their own. Andric has described the impact of his early experience in Visegrad in a short sketch, "Paths", written in 1940: At the beginning of all the paths and roads I know, at the root of the very thought of them, stands sharply and indelibly drawn the path along which I took my first steady steps. This was in Visegrad, on its hard, uneven, well-trodden roads,

12

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

where everything is dry and miserable, without beauty, without joy, without the hope of joy, without the right to hope, where a bitter mouthful you have never eaten chokes you with every step, where heat and wind and snow and rain devour the earth and the seed in the earth, and everything which nevertheless germinates and grows is scorched and bent and bowed as though the elements were trying to return it to the formlessness and darkness out of which it had escaped. These are the countless paths that decorate the hills and slopes around the town like strings and ribbons, merging with the white main road or vanishing beside the river and among the green willows. The instinct of men and animals sketched these paths and need trod them down. It is hard to set off along them, to tread along them and to return by them. By their side people sit on stones or shelter under trees, on a dry spot or in the meagre shade, to rest, to pray, or to count over the proceeds of a trip to market. It was on these paths, which the wind sweeps and the rain washes, which the sun infects and disinfects, where you meet only exhausted livestock and silent people with hard faces, it was on these paths that I founded my dream about the riches and beauty of the world. It was here that, uneducated, weak and emptyhanded, I was happy with an intoxicating happiness, happy because of all that was not here, which could not be and never would be. And on all the roads and highways I passed along in later life, I lived only from that meagre happiness, from my Visegrad thoughts about the riches and beauty of the created world. For, beneath all the roads of the world, there always ran, visible and sensible only to me, the sharp Visegrad path, from the day I left it until today. It was on it that I measured my step and adapted my stride. It never left me, all my life. At those times when I was wearied and poisoned by the world in which I found myself by some mischance, and where by some miracle I had stayed alive, whenever the horizon darkened and my purpose faltered, I would unfold before me, like a believer his prayer mat, the hard, poor, high Visegrad path which heals all pain and wipes away all suffering for it contains them all in itself, and surpasses them all. And so, many times in a day, exploiting

Introduction

13

every moment of quiet in the life around me, every pause in conversation, I would tread part of the road I never should have left. And so, by the end of my life, unseen and in secret, I shall nevertheless have trodden the appointed length of the Visegrad path. And then, with the thread of life, it too will come to an end. And it will be lost where all paths end, where all roads vanish, where there is no longer any walking or effort, where all the highways of the earth become entangled in a senseless ball and burn, like the spark of salvation, in our eyes which themselves grow dim, for they have led us to our aim and to the truth.12 In Visegrad Andric made his first friends, playing with them by the river and on the bridge. He describes some of the traditional children's games and the legends that coloured and shaped them in The Bridge on the Drina. From the age of six he attended primary school, and the four years he spent there were the happiest of his formal education, thanks particularly to one teacher, Ljubomir Popovic, of whom he always retained vivid and warm memories. In the autumn of 1902 Andric was registered at the High School in Sarajevo, the oldest secondary school in Bosnia. He lived there with his mother, who had remained in Sarajevo working after her husband's death. During Andric's secondary school days Bosnia had a population of some two million, of whom 87 per cent were illiterate. In 1905 statistics record nearly nine thousand civil servants, of whom six and a half thousand were foreigners from all parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, so that the streets and cafes of Sarajevo were full of a mixture of Slav languages, with a strong German element. The teaching staff of the school was a similar mixture of nationalities. In the first twenty years of its work, of a total of eighty-three teachers, apart from teachers of religion, only three were of local origin. The teaching programme was devoted to producing dedicated supporters of the Monarchy, and Andric describes this phase of his education as a sad contrast to his elementary school experience: "All that came later, at secondary school and university, was rough, crude, automatic, without concern, faith, humanity, warmth or love."13 This view of his formal education is necessarily coloured by the

14

Ivo A ndric: Bridge between East and West

growing resentment felt by Andric and his contemporaries towards the dominant culture. Later, Andric the writer was able to look on the fate of foreigners serving in the wilds of Bosnia with sympathy. At this stage in his life, however, Andric's lack of success at school can be at least partly explained by a sense of alienation from the majority of his teachers. There was one notable exception, Tugomir Alaupovic, who became Andric's great support and mainstay in years to come. It seems that, for the most part, Andric pursued his own interests while at secondary school, showing very early the passion for reading which he has described as dominating his schooldays. He read Don Quixote - in German - when he was twelve or thirteen, and among many other works, he had read the whole of Strindberg (without understanding all of it, as he said later) by the time he left school. And, if his school career had been far from brilliant, at least he left able to read major works of European literature in Latin, Greek, German, French and Slovene. It was at secondary school also that Andric began to write. He was always convinced that his was what he wanted to do, although he received no encouragement from home. When Andric showed his mother one of his first pieces, she responded: "Did you write this? What did you want to do that for?"14 In 1912 Andric registered at the university of Zagreb, with a scholarship from an educational foundation in Sarajevo. In 1913 he transferred to the university of Vienna. It was here that he first became acquainted with the work of Kierkegaard, whose Either . . . Or ... became his constant companion for the next few years. He became seriously ill, showing the first signs of the tuberculosis that had haunted his family, killing his father and his three uncles by the time they were thirty-two years old. It was on medical grounds that Andric asked to be allowed to leave Vienna and continue his studies, if possible, in Russia. It is likely, however, that he was motivated also by a political protest planned by fellow-Slav students in Vienna, to boycott German-speaking centres and transfer to Slav universities. Early in 1914 Andric transferred to Cracow. During the first months of 1914 Andric was particularly active, contributing reviews, poems and notices of art exhibitions to several Zagreb periodicals. His letters to friends from this period are cheerful:

Introduction

15

I can't say that my life here is dull, we have come by chance into very excellent company, where there are all kinds of things which are otherwise rare: good people, witty women and fresh sandwiches - and, were I well, all would be well. . . I have given up tobacco, but I can't do without my night walks - I think that in May I shall either recover or die . . ,15 Early in June an anthology of New Croatian Lyric Verse appeared in Zagreb, containing six poems by Andric. He was described in the notes on contributors: The most extraordinary Sarajevan: without a trace of Turkish atavism: delicate, pale, with a fragile, fragrant soul like those white flowers of his that light up the sweet sorrow of his soft, yearning dreams. Too lacking in energy to write long articles. Brief, like a transitory love affair. A prince without a court, pages or a princess. In the winter he breathes his fill of cafe air, and in the spring he heals himself with breaths of air from the luxuriant meadows. Unhappy as all artists are. Ambitious. Sensitive. In a word: he has a future.16 On 28 June a friend in Cracow told Andric the news of the assassination in Sarajevo. Leaving his few belongings with his landlady, Andric went straight to the station and took a train to Zagreb. In the middle of July he set off with his friend, the poet Vladimir Cerina, to spend the summer vacation at Cerina's home in Split. The young men were becoming increasingly uneasy about the political situation, and when they reached Rijeka Cerina suddenly left Andric, saying that he had to go urgently to Italy. He did not offer any explanation to Andric, but a few days later police came to search for him at the offices of the paper where he had worked in Zagreb. Andric arrived in Split exhausted and ill. The police took an obvious interest in his movements and by the time war was declared Andric was fully expecting to be arrested: most of his friends were already in prison. It was on 29 July that he was finally arrested and imprisoned. Andric's experience of prison was varied. From Split he was taken to Sibenik, further up the Adriatic coast, and from there, with some

16

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

350 others, to Rijeka. Many of the prisoners were then taken on to Pest, while another group, including Andric, arrived on 19 August in Maribor (Marburg) prison, in what is now Slovenia. In Maribor, the prisoners were eight to ten to a room and Andric and his fellows quickly organized their time in reading, discussion and learning foreign languages. "We've founded a proper little university", Andric wrote to his friend Evgenija Gojmerac in January 1915.17 Nevertheless, despite the artificially cheerful tones of his letters of this time, Andric's health was rapidly deteriorating, and other notes are sounded: I'm a bit weak, but I'm protecting the little health I have and I hope that I shall be able to hold out. I want to hold out in order to save my mother's only child. [November 1914]18 I can't tell you how much effort it takes to survive just one afternoon, sometimes just one hour. [January 1915]19 Sometimes I become impatient, but I force myself to be calm and sit down, God knows how often, at the table: all neuter nouns, etc. . . . Believe me, grammars are the only books I can read calmly, for everything else reminds me of the past or the present, and I don't want that. [March 1915]20 The case against Andric was eventually dropped through lack of evidence, and he left prison on 20 March 1915. He spent the following two years, until the Amnesty of 1917, interned in the small Bosnian village of Ovcarevo, near Travnik, and later in the neighbouring town of Zenica. "Mother is very happy. It has been three whole years since she saw me. And she can't grasp all that has happened to me in that time, nor the whole of my crazy, cursed existence. She cries, kisses me and laughs in turn. Like a mother."21 After the comradeship of the prison in Maribor, Andric's letters from Bosnia in this period express a deep sense of isolation and despondency. His experience of exile in the wild mountains in the heart of Bosnia certainly coloured the atmosphere of the novel Bosnian Story, set in Travnik and describing the exile and isolation of the small diplomatic community there in the early nineteenth century. Perhaps the most important aspect of Andric's internment in Bosnia was the fact that he came into close contact with the Franciscan

Introduction

17

parish priest of Ovcarevo, and with the friars of the monastery of Guca gora. Andric spent much of his time reading the monastery chronicles and listening to the friars' stories, learning from them about the history of the Franciscans in Bosnia. It was a world which was rapidly disappearing but to which Andric was to return often on his visits to Bosnia throughout his life. Towards the end of 1917 - following the Amnesty, and after a short holiday in Visegrad and a spell in hospital in Sarajevo - Andric went to Zagreb, where many young men of his generation were converging, released like him from prison and internment and anxious to avoid conscription in the greater anonymity of the city. Andric was by now seriously ill and was taken into the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy, which had become a new meeting-place for many who had been together in prison. In the company of several like-minded young men and writers, including the renowned playwright Ivo Vojnovic from Dubrovnik, Andric entered fully into the intellectual life of the time. At the end of 1917, with three others, he launched a new literary periodical, The Literary South, the first literary magazine of an expressly Yugoslav orientation. Its first number appeared on 1 January 1918. In this journal and others, Andric began to publish regularly: reviews of books and plays, verse, translations (of Walt Whitman and Strindberg), and the first fragment of a story, '4)erzelez at the Inn".22 In these first months of 1918, Andric's health was deteriorating steadily. He was described by several contemporaries as being exceptionally thin and pale, with all the signs of approaching death. The first weeks after the end of the War were intoxicating for the peoples of the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In the words of Vojnovic: "We look at one another, pale with happiness, and ask 'Is this true? - Is this really happening to us?'".23 Nevertheless, it did not take long for Andric and Vojnovic to realize that the organization of the new state had simply replaced the old one, more or less unchanged. They were deeply disappointed, but resolved to carry out their duty to their fellow-countrymen as conscientiously and seriously as they could. In November 1918 Andric published an article in the Zagreb paper The News, entitled "Let the intruders remain silent":

18

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

The idea of national unity is the legacy of our finest generations and the fruit of heavy sacrifice. This unity, the dream of our life, and the meaning of our struggles and suffering, must not, now that it is largely realized, be allowed to fall into the hands of intruders, to be tainted by the marks of their unclean fingers and treated with their toothless sophisms . . . And all of us who bore this idea of unity unsullied through fratricidal battles, and did not deny it before the slanderous Austrian judges, we shall be able to defend it also from unscrupulous journalists and sullen self-styled politicians.24 This is the tone of a young man with a sense of strong moral obligation to his country and his countrymen, and a clear, determined allegiance to the idea of national unity. His temperament could not long sustain easy enthusiasm for superficial victory, and it is possible also that the state of his health contributed to his bleak perception of the political reality of the "victory." Towards the end of the summer Andric's first book, Ex Ponto, was published. In December, Ivo Vojnovic wrote to his brother: I'm sending you Ex Ponto which has created a great sensation. The writer is a young Catholic, a perfect young man. A Serb from Bosnia, where he contracted tuberculosis. He is here now, running The Literary South, my constant companion, one of the best and most refined souls I have ever met. This work of his will become "Das Gemeingut" of all peoples when it is translated. C'est un grand poete, et une dme exquise.25 In January 1919, Andric was back in hospital. Vojnovic was now seriously anxious for his life, and wrote to Andric's friend and former teacher Tugomir Alaupovic, who was now Minister of Religious Affairs in Belgrade, asking him to use his influence with the government to finance treatment abroad. In the end Andric decided to go to Split, and he remained there and on the nearby island of Brae until mid-September, when he returned to Zagreb saying that he had been cured by the "air, sun and figs of Brae". While he was on the island, Andric had completed work on a second volume of prose poems, Anxieties, which was published the following year.

Introduction

19

With these two volumes of prose poems and the first part of the story, "The Journey of Alija -Derzelez", in print, Andric was launched on his literary career. "Andric est arrive", wrote the Serbian writer Milos Crnjanski at the end of his review of Ex Ponto.26 He was, however, dissatisfied with the circumstances of his life. On the one hand the activists had begun to leave Zagreb. Andric wrote to Alaupovic in March 1919: "We have all dispersed, and I feel lonelier than ever in my life."27 On his return from the coast the town seemed even more deserted: Vojnovic was his one real friend left and he was frequently ill. At the same time, Andric had begun to be anxious about his family responsibilities. He had written to Alaupovic before he left for the coast, asking him to look out for a suitable post for him. His uncle was growing old and responsibility for caring for his mother and aunt would soon fall on him: This is what will not permit me to go on living this impoverished, but free and fine style of life . . . I have no one whom I could consult about this matter (except Vojnovic who has persuaded me to write), so I am asking you whether you could bear my situation in mind . . , 28 Something of a more general dissatisfaction with his surroundings can be seen in another letter to Alaupovic, written in July: "I shall be glad to get to grips with some concrete work which has nothing to do with journalistic literary cliques."29 Alaupovic wrote in September 1919, offering Andric the post of secretary in his Ministry. Towards the end of October, Andric left for Belgrade. The first formative phase of Andric's life was over, coloured by poverty, illness, imprisonment and exile against a background of international tension and war. Andric set out, in generally better health, into a job about which he knew nothing but which offered a previously unknown stability. He was setting out into a town he had never seen. But he was going as an established writer, with his first book sold out after enthusiastic reviews. He entered immediately into the literary life of Belgrade, focused on the "Moscow" cafe, where he was warmly welcomed and accepted. Andric was one of the best-known and most popular young writers

20

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

in Belgrade and he seems to have been spared the barbs of the press of his day. Nevertheless, the role of a public figure did not really appeal to him. Those who knew him then describe how he withdrew increasingly into himself and gradually took less and less part in the discussions so beloved of Belgrade literary circles. In February 1920 Andric entered the Diplomatic Service. This choice of career was ideally suited to Andric's temperament. Indeed, it has been described by a friend of his as "not only a career, but a vocation". It can be seen almost as an image of Andric's involvement in the outside world: it was not Andric as an individual who appeared in public, but Andric the writer with a profound sense of obligation to this country and its culture, as the representative of that culture - just as he was his country's representative abroad. There were drawbacks: Andric complained that the consulates and embassies were understaffed, that he had to work long hours and did not have enough time for his writing. He also hated all the pomp and ceremony, enduring it, however, with dignified good grace, as he was later to accept the international attention and acclaim lavished on him as Nobel Prizewinner. Andric's career as a diplomat was outwardly uneventful. He made rapid progress through a series of postings, and was appointed Minister to Berlin on 1 April 1939, at the age of 47. This appointment shows clearly that Andric was highly regarded and trusted in government circles. If Andric's career was particularly well suited to his abilities and temperament, it no doubt also suited him well to be right outside literary circles in Belgrade. Although he maintained many close friendships among his fellow-writers, he was far removed from the intensely self-absorbed, sometimes violently polemical tradition of literary life in his homeland. Throughout this period, despite the obvious success of his diplomatic career, Andric was concerned above all with his writing, taking advantage of any free time he had and avoiding more than the essential social contacts. At the same time, he steeped himself in the atmosphere of the cities where he worked. His experiences of so many European centres were full and very fruitful, at least indirectly. Immediate impressions of his travels form an important component of Signs by the Roadside:

Introduction

21

There are paths that I have not seen and which I shall never tread - and there are many of them! - but that is because I did not find the energy or the time or the possibility of doing so. But there is not a single path or road that I have not at least stepped on to if it were possible. In doing so I did not know fear, fatigue or hesitation. And this mad and uncontrollable curiosity of mine was the cause of many of my wanderings, mistakes, senseless or misguided acts. It devoured the greater part of my strength, but it could also be called my heroism and my main justification; it could also be the real basis of my pride, if I wished to pride myself on anything and if my curiosity needed it.30 The majority of the pieces refer to specific journeys and places. The following passage is typical: In all the cafes in Madrid there are swarms of people cleaning shoes, roaming with their equipment from table to table, going close up to each customer and asking in a rough voice and with an insolent expression: "Limpiam?" ("Shall we clean them?") and as they do so they point impertinently at your shoes suggesting to the customers that their shoes are not as clean as they might be, and forcing their services on them. And they often succeed. These are for the most part young people of filthy, repulsive appearance. They are often police spies or agents, involved in secret, disreputable affairs, or both. They usually live with and from prostitutes, and on Sunday afternoons they dress in the latest fashion.31 Andric's first posting was to Rome, and the city impressed him deeply. He wrote to Alaupovic in June 1920: Even the best historians, philosophers and archaeologists can only glimpse the greatness of Antiquity and the desperate effort of the Renaissance, for their conclusions can be based only on fragments. It is as though someone would try to reconstruct from a broken skeleton the beauty of that person in his life or her lifetime. I know only one thing: that each little piece of stone exudes such beauty, such peace and strength, that I am often happy and proud that the human consciousness was able to

22

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West contain such beauty and that human hands had the strength to give it form . . . How often have I wanted to show you . . . the most beautiful places and to share my pleasure and joy with you, my closest, dearest friend.32

An interesting reflection of Andric's preoccupations at this time can be seen in a remark in another letter, written to Alaupovic from Visegrad in July: If everything here is not as I would like it to be, I am of course glad that the Bosnia which I carry with me in my thoughts through Rome is one thing, but this tough, real one is something else . . . I have already told you that I am enjoying Rome. But I cannot write about how that city enriches the soul, for it seems to me that even Goethe's words about it are superfluous. It happens in an almost mystical way. After the difficulties and effort and the problems of settling in, suddenly, unexpectedly, there begins to grow in one a deeper sense of all these centuries-long layers of religion, ideas, states and institutions. All these human endeavours, so contradictory among themselves, teach you the same thing: that the meaning of human activity on earth is: law, measure, order and denial. And everything great and beautiful that has been created has been created in blood and sweat, and in Silence . . ,33 In October 1921 Andric was posted to Bucharest. His letters from there deal mostly with literature, but in March 1922 he wrote to Alaupovic expressing his concern at the news reaching him of the political and economic situation in Yugoslavia. He was troubled particularly by the threat from all sides to the Yugoslav unity in which he so passionately believed. This letter expresses an acute sense of isolation in a foreign land and an anxiety that he was losing touch with his fellow-countrymen, growing by the end of the letter into a determination to leave his career and return to either Belgrade or Zagreb. His health was bad again, and this may have contributed to his mood, for in June he wrote again to Alaupovic in better spirits: Of course there are difficult times when one is abroad, such as I knew only during the war . . . I live quietly, observe the people and this interesting country, and I am acquiring, with the tenacity

Introduction

23

of a miser, the most various experience. And while everything around me seethes with delight in politics, money, petrol and scandal, I am writing - whenever I can - a Bosnian story, which I hope will perhaps give you some pleasure when you read it. I hope so anyway . . ,34 In November Andric was transferred to Trieste, but the damp climate did not suit him and, on his doctor's advice, he was moved to Graz the following January, as Vice-Consul. In Graz he took up his interrupted university studies again, following lecture courses in history, philology and philosophy, and beginning work on a doctoral dissertation. There was an unexpected setback to his career at this point. A new law was passed stipulating that civil servants must be university graduates. As Andric had not completed his degree, his employment was terminated at the end of December 1923. The Consul General in Graz made an eloquent plea on Andric's behalf: His bearing at work and outside is exemplary. With industrious application he has acquired a wide-ranging knowledge of the diplomatic consular profession, he^cnows the organization of state administration very well; he has been employed with great success in various tasks of an administrative, judicial and consularcommercial nature. With his rare intelligence, many-sided education, distinguished manner, his kindly dealings with the public, his serious and honest character; his knowledge of the Serbian, French, German and Italian languages, his firm will to work with the qualifications he has acquired so far, Mr Andric offers the best guarantee that he will with time become an excellent civil servant, who can only be a credit to the diplomatic profession, and benefit to the state and our people . . ,35 In June 1924 Andric was duly granted his doctorate, with a thesis entitled "Die Entwicklung des geistlichen Lebens in Bosnien unter der Einwirkung der tiirkischen Herrschaft" (The development of intellectual life in Bosnia under Turkish administration), having been absolved from completion of his first degree on the recommendation of two of his professors. In September Andric returned to the

24

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Belgrade, where he remained until late October 1926, when he was sent to Marseilles as Vice-Consul. In the meantime, his literary work was going well. His first collection of stories was published in 1924 and awarded a prize by the Serbian Royal Academy, and in February 1926 he was elected to the Academy. Andric's time in Marseilles began sadly. His uncle Ivan Matkovic had died in 1924, his mother the following year, and now he received the news that his aunt had died as well. He wrote to Alaupovic in February 1927: 1927 did not start particularly cheerfully for me. I had 'flu and angina and had just begun to recover when I heard that my aunt had died in Visegrad. I could not even go to her funeral. And she was the last member of our family. Or rather, I am the last. I have no family left now. Nowhere and no one to go to. I am completely alone here. Apart from official contacts, which are neither interesting nor pleasant, I have no company whatever. During the day I am in the office, and in the evening I read whatever comes my way 36

At the end of the year Andric was sent temporarily to Paris, where he spent much of his spare time reading the three volumes of correspondence of Pierre David, the French consul in Travnik at the beginning of the nineteenth century who was to become the main character in the novel Bosnian Story. In 1928 Andric was posted to Madrid as Vice-Consul. Spain made a particularly strong impression on him, as can be seen from several pieces in Signs by the Roadside, and from his essay "Goya", which appeared in 1929. From 1 January 1930 Andric worked as secretary to the Permanent Delegation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at the League of Nations in Geneva, becoming deputy delegate the following year. His second volume of short stories was published, and it too was awarded a prize. In 1933 he returned to the Ministry in Belgrade. In the same year he was awarded the Legion of Honour, which was followed by several distinctions, including the Order of the Red Cross in 1936. He was made Director of the Political Section of the Ministry in 1935, and with the growing tension in Europe found less

Introduction

25

and less time for regular literary work. In November 1937 he was named Assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and in April of the following year he was sent to Berlin. There is evidence that Andric did what he could to exert what small and insignificant influence he had to help Polish prisoners after the Nazi occupation of Poland. But his efforts could not of course succeed. Some insight into his state of mind can be gained from an entry in his notebook in September 1939: In the worst moments of my life I have found unusual and unexpected consolation in imagining another life, the same as mine in dates, names and events, but true, bright, pure; painful of course as every life on earth must be, but without anything dark or ugly in that pain; a life which begins with a blessing and is lost in the heights and extinguished in light. And, standing thoughtfully over the figure of that double of mine, as a tree stands over its image in still water, seeking salvation, I have forgotten for a moment my real life, while it trembled with my pain.37 As though trying to preserve this other imaginary world, a volume of Andric's stories appeared in German in 1939: the book and the translator were warmly praised. Abruptly, however, the stillness of the water was shattered and Andric was obliged to confront the reality of the political situation. Andric's comments on his experiences in Berlin in the early years of the War in Europe have not yet been published. In the outline of his biography printed by the Andric Trust in 1980, the following entry in his diary is all that is recorded for 1940: On 7 April he wrote: Whoever has glimpsed, even if only partially and for a moment, the true fate of mankind, can no longer experience untroubled joy; he can no longer look without deep sorrow on a human being stepping into the arena of the sun, on to a winding path with a known end. Composed only of priceless elements from unknown worlds, a man is born in order soon to become a handful of nameless soot, and as such, to vanish. And we do not know for whose glory he is born, nor for whose amusement he is destroyed. He glints for an instant in the clash of contradictions of which he is

26

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West made, passes alongside other people, but not even with their eyes can they tell one another all the grief of their destinies. So some disappear, and so, in cruel ignorance, others are born, and so the incomprehensible history of man runs on.38

The mood is one of hopelessness and frustration, and it is typical enough of Andric that he should take such a wide view of human history at this time. For all their drama, it was still the sheer pointlessness of the events around him that seems to have most grieved Andric in this passage. Andric's position as his country's representative in Germany at this time was, naturally, difficult. The former king, Alexander Karad"jord"jevic, who was assassinated in Marseilles in 1934, had tried to secure Yugoslavia's future through the Little Entente with Rumania and Czechoslovakia under the auspices of France. His son, Peter, was a boy of ten when his father was murdered. A Regency Council was established under Peter's uncle, Prince Paul. He reversed Alexander's policies and linked Yugoslavia's economy with that of Germany, which had become Yugoslavia's largest trading partner by 1939. Yugoslavia also had favourable trading agreements with Italy and Hungary. Meanwhile, the occupation of Czech Sudetenland and Austria confirmed the view of the Yugoslav government that the only realistic policy for Yugoslavia was to ally herself to Germany politically as well. In March 1941 Prime Minister Cvetkovic and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Cincar-Markovic, went to Vienna at Hitler's request and signed the Tripartite Pact, pledging Yugoslavia's support of Italy and Germany. Extracts from Andric's letters to CincarMarkovic in 1941 suggest that he was critical of the Yugoslav government's handling of the crisis, and in a letter of 17 March he asked to be relieved of his duties. Events, however, moved too rapidly. Ten days later a coup d'etat deposed Prince Paul, and his seventeen-year-old nephew was proclaimed king. Yugoslavia was promptly invaded by the German army. On 17 April the High Command of the Royal Yugoslav Army formally capitulated and the four long years of bitter resistance had begun. Andric was taken with the rest of the Embassy personnel to the

Introduction

27

Swiss border, where they met up with officers of the Paris Embassy and officials from other German centres and occupied lands. In June they were all sent out of German territory in a special train. Andric went straight to Belgrade. He was officially retired from the Diplomatic Service, but refused to take the pension due to him. He lived in complete isolation, refusing to co-operate in any way with the quisling government. In these circumstances of isolation and virtual immobility, Andric settled down to work on the three novels which were published in 1945. He refused to publish anything as long as the occupation lasted. In the course of the bombing of Belgrade in 1944, he wrote in his notebook: In exceptional and fateful events such as these air-raids, as in times of harsh political oppression, the behaviour of most people is similar. The cowardly and the selfish believe that everything that happens - every single incident - is directed against them personally. The dull-witted, and those who are by nature reckless and careless, do not think about these events at all, until they experience them directly. Only the sensible man will observe coolly and interpret correctly, and try to identify and evaluate their general significance, and only after that does he examine the extent to which these events can affect him personally, and then he tries to remove himself from danger and defend himself - in so far as that is possible and morally permissible.39 Andric's own behaviour during the air-raids has been recorded. He once told Zuko Dzumhur that he had been very frightened by the sudden scream of the warning sirens the first day, and had run out of the house and set off with the endless column of people fleeing out of the city. As he went he looked around him and noticed that these people were all taking their families with them, their children, their infirm parents and relatives. "I looked myself up and down," said Andric, "and saw that I was saving only myself and my overcoat . . ."40 He was ashamed and after that he never left his house, even during the fiercest bombing. On 20 October 1944 the Partisans and the Red Army entered Belgrade, and Tito was installed as the head of a Communist-

28

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

controlled government. In cultural life the years immediately following the War were marked by bustling activity and enthusiasm but, until the break with Stalin in 1948, also by the dominance of a Soviet-style Socialist Realist aesthetic. In March 1945 the newly founded Serbian State publishing house, Prosveta, brought out its first title: The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andric. The Bridge on the Drina aroused great public interest. Its first edition of five thousand copies was sold out within the year (there were to be five editions by 1949). Andric sent a copy to Alaupovic with this dedication: You are partly to blame for my thick books. You encouraged me as a boy to follow this path. But I console myself: since you loved and understood me as a sickly, ignorant child in the Sarajevo gymnasium, you will, I am sure, understand me also today, as a mature man, who has seen many countries and cities and who has still today, as once in his childhood, only one real, basic ambition: to grasp as much as possible of the spirit of the life around him and to give it on paper a form which could, more or less, be worthy of the name of art.41 In August Bosnian Story appeared, and in November The Woman from Sarajevo, as well as a collection of short stories. Andric was now set on a course of steady activity and involvement in the intellectual and cultural life of his country. Shrinking always from exposure as a private individual, he was nevertheless willing to take on the public duties of a man conscious of his responsibilities to his fellow-countrymen. He was elected Vice-President of the Society for the Cultural Co-operation of Yugoslavia with the Soviet Union in November 1946, for example, and in the same month he was made President of the Yugoslav Writers' Union. He was elected Delegate to the National Assembly of Bosnia and Hercegovina in 1947, where he concerned himself particularly with cultural and educational questions. In April 1950 he was elected delegate to the Chamber of Nationalities of the National Assembly of the Federal National Republic of Yugoslavia. He was decorated for his services to the people by the Praesidium of the National Assembly in 1952, and in December 1954 he was accepted for membership of the Communist Party. This action was no doubt prompted by a desire to serve his

Introduction

29

country as fully as possible, rather than commitment to any political party as such. Many of Andric's contemporaries have remarked on his exceptional abilities in his work on committees. In view of his well-known reticence and preference for privacy, this public activity must be seen as his own realization of the contribution he could make to the new, young society in the country to which he was deeply committed. On 27 September 1958, at the age of 66, Andric married Milica Babic, costume-designer at the National Theatre in Belgrade. Andric had been devoted to her for many years, but it was only now that her first husband died and they were free to marry. They had ten happy years of married life together before Milica died, aged fifty-nine. Andric is recorded on several occasions before this as having been asked by younger writers whether he thought a writer ought to marry. He always replied that it was probably better not to, although this would mean considerable self-denial. His close friend Maja Nizetic-Culic, however, interprets his reluctance to marry earlier differently: "He was perpetually persecuted by a kind of fear; it seemed as though he had been born afraid, and that is why he married so late. He simply did not dare enter that area of life . . . And so he lived: on the one hand fear, and on the other solitude . . . And he did not know how to shake them off."42 Meanwhile, Andric's works were being translated into numerous languages and he continued to play an active part in the cultural life of Yugoslavia, participating in delegations to many countries including China in 1956 and London in 1959, when The Bridge on theDrina was published there. On this occasion he also visited Edinburgh. On 26 October 1961, Andric was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. His reaction was reported in the Yugoslav press: All the questions I am being asked today can be reduced to three main groups: What do I feel? What do I think? and What am I going to do? The first question I can answer immediately and precisely. The main emotion that fills me at this moment is a sense of gratitude. I am grateful first of all to the Swedish Academy of Sciences; and then to the institutions and individuals in my country who

30

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

proposed me for this award, to the institutions and individuals abroad who supported this proposal. I thank all those who ever helped me in my life and work, while I often did not manage to thank them even verbally. What do I think? I think that my country, through its literature, has received international recognition. What am I going to do? I shall answer this honestly too. I am going to wait patiently until all this excitement around me, which I am not accustomed to, and all this holiday atmosphere is over, to get back once again to my ordinary, monotonous working day. And a working day is always a celebration for me . . ,43 The following year was filled with public recognition for Andric's work in various countries. In March he set out on a journey to Greece and Egypt, but he was taken ill in Cairo and returned to Belgrade for an operation. He was obliged by his health to refuse invitations to visit the United States, France and Poland, among other countries. The public recognition continued, however, and numerous translations of his works appeared all over Europe, in America, Mexico, South America, Iran, Japan and the Lebanon. It is clear from remarks in his letters at this time that this public attention was a burden to Andric. He endured it graciously, but became increasingly anxious to preserve his privacy. He wrote to Maja Nizetic-Culic in 1967: "I am reasonably well, although the life I am obliged to live is not at all healthy or agreeable . . ,"44 It was particularly hard that these years, when so much international and national attention was focused on Andric, were the years of his marriage. His wife undoubtedly helped him endure the attention, but they were granted all too little peaceful time together. Milica died on 24 March 1968. Andric was now seventy-six. He had never been strong, but now his deteriorating health obliged him to refuse all invitations to travel abroad, and he had frequently also to restrict his movements within Yugoslavia. He continued to work until 1974, when he became seriously ill. In December he went into hospital, where he died, after a long struggle, on 13 March 1975. His funeral was attended by some ten thousand citizens of Belgrade.

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31

The following general comment on Andric the man was made by a Belgrade critic and philosopher, Dragan Jeremic: Finally, a few words about the general impression Andric made on me. Andric behaved towards everyone, regardless of who he was or what work he did, with the same kindness, patience and concern. He was kind and pleasant precisely up to the point that it never became familiarity. In his presence only those who tried to cross the barrier he put up for the sake of his peace, his work and his essential concentration, could feel uncomfortable. He did not easily abandon his plans and aims. That is why only those who wanted to get too close to him out of pure curiosity or self-interest might meet with resistance. He prized, above all, qualities of the intellect, but he loved everything in life, as his work shows - open to virtually all manifestations of life. He knew how to listen as no one else, and from everything that anyone said or did he would draw out at least one thread for his rich and complex work. And only a truly wise man can do that. While ordinary people find many things boring, empty and useless, a wise man knows how to find benefit for his spirit and his work in everything. Andric knew how to do that better than anyone else I have ever known.45 The literary and historical context

The last words of the preceding section can serve as a useful starting point for an attempt to place Andric the writer in the whole context of European literature: "From everything that anyone did or said he would draw at least one thread for his rich and complex work." Tracing possible influences on any writer with a truly individual voice is a difficult task which can lead to only qualified statements. On several occasions, in short articles written for various publications, Andric has described his early thirst for books and their inaccessibility to him. There were no books at all in the poor homes of Bosnia, except possibly one or two reference works or Church calendars. Even secondary school offered little or nothing, and during his school years in Sarajevo there were only three or four shops selling school and office material which also stocked a few books. The biggest and best of these displayed several Serbo-

32

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

Croatian and quite a number of German works generally published in Vienna or Munich, light reading intended for the Austrian civil servants and officers, and some German translations of the Russian and Scandinavian works fashionable at the time. "They were all the same to me", remarks Andric, "since I knew nothing whatever about any of them."46 He describes how he used to spend hours as a schoolboy in the front of this shop window - for him the only window into the world - and at night he would go home and dream about it: "Then it was no longer an ordinary shop window, with books in it, but the light of the universe, a part of some constellation towards which I was drawn with intense longing, but also with the painful realization that it was inaccessible to me."47 He would go to this enchanting window every day, and stare into it until he knew all the names of the writers and titles by heart, wondering what was hidden behind them and making up his own meanings for them. One enterprising boy at the school used to acquire catalogues from various publishers and bookshops in the larger towns and these would sometimes contain the first instalment of an adventure story, as an advertisement. The entrepreneur would then hire out the precious pages to his eager colleagues for a small sum. In these catalogues the boys read for the first time the names of Cervantes, Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne . . . as well as the titles of novels by Slav writers. Sometimes there would be a short synopsis of the works, but more often the boys made up their own: And when we raised our eyes from the pages of our catalogues, we would gaze into the distance and read in it novels which we were unable then to reach, and some which we would never reach, for they did not exist in any publisher's list. On the summer sky and the green slopes of the mountains, above the tops of the minarets and towers, we read, in lightning quick versions, our own dream of books as the most beautiful of all the beautiful things in the rich and beautiful world which was just opening up before us.48 Andric describes this experience as the beginning of his writing not with his hand and not on paper, but in his mind, his thoughts, his imagination. Eventually Andric and some school-fellows discovered that one of the stationers had a small lending department of some three or four

Introduction

33

hundred volumes in Serbo-Croat and German, mostly from the famous Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek, which Andric describes in The Bridge on the Drina as "those cheap little booklets with yellow covers and unusually small print, which were the main spiritual food accessible to schoolboys in Sarajevo at the time".49 And Andric set about reading, avidly and quite indiscriminately, all the works of Slav, German and world literature that he could lay his hands on. While his tastes always remained wide, he gradually identified a few writers as particularly congenial, referring to them as his "best friends". The most important of these were Thomas Mann, Marcus Aurelius, whose works he had by him constantly in his later years, and Goethe, without whom he refused to leave for the hospital during his last grave illness. Another example of the importance of books to the young Andric has often been quoted. When he was first imprisoned in Split he had one book to share the dark hours of his solitary confinement. Much has been made of his apparent choice of "soulmate", but Andric himself has given a more matter-of-fact account. He was told that he could send for some warmer clothes, a blanket and books from home. Rejoicing at this news, Andric asked for all the books that were on his table. In his excitement, he forgot that he had just tidied them all away. There was just one single volume on his table, brought by the postman since his arrest: Kierkegaard's Either . . . Or . . . . This work can scarcely have contributed any real joy to Andric's situation, but, on the other hand, it would be wrong to attribute attitudes expressed in his early writings to this circumstance. The volume had greater symbolic value than direct influence: "That one single book was on my table, and that one single work was the only one to reach me! But it was a book. I had a book in my hand and I felt immediately that all that inexpressible fear had vanished somewhere, that it was no longer anywhere in me; I felt that I was continuing to live . . ."50 Because of his initial deprivation, books were always vitally important to Andric. Later in his life, when he visited schools or private houses, he could never resist examining the books on the shelves. In every small town he visited he would call in at the library. When he became a successful writer, he gave generously to schools and libraries all over Yugoslavia to ensure that children should not

34

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

suffer the starvation of his own early years. His entire Nobel Prize was dedicated to this cause. In terms of his position in Yugoslav literature, Andric began to write with its coming of age. The Serbo-Croat language had been used in a standardized form as a written literary language only since the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This is not to say that it had not been used as a means of literary expression. On the contrary, centuries of occupation by foreign powers and widespread illiteracy had fostered the growth of a rich oral literature. Without this heritage, the phenomenon of Andric would be inexplicable: the particular strength and resonance of his work springs directly from these roots, firmly planted in his native soil. From these roots a literary tradition in Serbo-Croat grew up in the course of the nineteenth century. With a few exceptions, the writers of this period can be seen on the whole as serving a rapid apprenticeship to the craft of literature, steadily increasing its range in terms of material and technique. By the beginning of the twentieth century, under pressure of various political events and circumstances, the cultural life of the Serbs and Croats had been propelled into Europe and writers had gained sufficient maturity to be able fruitfully to absorb influences from the mainstream of European literature. The European context of literary activity in the Yugoslav lands was no longer questioned. Since the end of the nineteenth century, young people from all parts of the future Kingdom of Yugoslavia had been travelling widely in Europe and studying at various universities in the Habsburg Monarchy or in Paris. It was at this time that Andric entered wholeheartedly into the cultural life of his country, eager to know and share in the whole European literary tradition. This he did with great energy and thoroughness, acquiring, as we have seen, a knowledge of several European languages as well as Latin and Greek by the time he left school. In this he was by no means exceptional among his fellow-writers and critics. The early years of his literary activity were spent very much as part of a group, working on the one hand within the world of books and on the other for the improvement of cultural and social conditions. It was not until he was living in Belgrade in the 1920s that he began to separate himself increasingly from the various literary circles there. Andric's

Introduction

35

work was well-known and widely acclaimed in Yugoslavia between the wars, but it was after the Second World War that his stature in Yugoslav literature was assured, and particularly, of course, after the international recognition of the Nobel Prize. He is now generally regarded as the outstanding Yugoslav writer of the first half of the twentieth century. The external events which affected Andric's life were of course the common experience of his generation throughout the Western world - the two World Wars, the rise of Fascism and the growth of Communism as a political force. The direct involvement of the Yugoslav lands in these events meant that their experience could no longer be regarded as in any sense peripheral: Andric himself lived through the exceptional violence of the first half of the twentieth century which had such a profound effect on his whole generation. The bonds with his contemporaries throughout Europe were consequently deep, and his central experience of the tragic and violent divisions between men was one with which his whole generation had to come to terms. In view of the highly individual flavour of Andric's imaginative world and his strength as a writer, it is more appropriate to talk in terms of experience shared with his fellow-writers, of literary and imaginative sympathies rather than influences as such. Andric's writing is of course shaped by his reading, on several different levels, of which many cannot ever be isolated. Meanwhile, various studies have been written on the influences on his work which can be most readily identified, for example: Ivo Andric and Classical Literature; Andric and German Literature; Andric and Scandinavian Literature; Andric and the French; Andric, Strindberg and Kierkegaard; Andric and Italian Literature.51 The Classical influence has been seen chiefly in his lucid economical style and in his stoical outlook. Points of contact have been noted with such writers as Pascal and Montaigne, with poets such as Heine, Rilke and Maeterlinck. Andric himself has spoken of his particularly deep affection for Goethe. Naturally enough, however, affinities with various twentieth-century European writers are the most clearly seen. Andric's most consistent contact was with German literature, and one of the first possible influences to be remarked on was that of

36

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

Kafka. Andric himself has, however, put this relationship in perspective: "We were both subjects of the same Empire, we lived in the same city, perhaps in the same street, perhaps we attended lectures by the same professors, we breathed the same air, grew up in the same atmosphere, why should we not - here and there - have thought or said the same things?"52 Points of contact have also been identified with Nietzsche, mentioned by Andric in The Bridge on the Drina as one of the writers whom the university students read avidly on the eve of the First World War: the idea of immutability personified by the bridge itself; the idea of perpetual repetition; Nietzsche's concept of "Ewige Wiederkunft"; the notion of the dynamism of the struggle between good and evil; the theme of illusion. Ideas of this kind are undoubtedly present in Andric's work, although it would probably again be inappropriate to speak of a direct influence. A more immediate sympathy can be seen in Andric's attitude to the work of Thomas Mann, a writer whom he knew particularly well, but again this affinity should not be exaggerated. Points of contact between the two writers include a concern with the legends of humanity, with history, with universals; an interest in the irrational stimuli of human behaviour. The influence of Scandinavian writers on Andric's generation has been considerable; their discovery in the first years of the twentieth century was a revelation to intellectuals in Yugoslavia. Andric's immoderate reading of Strindberg at an early age established a certain bond which can be seen most clearly in the intense irrational psychological currents beneath the surface of Andric's calm prose, particularly in the stories written between the wars concerning individual psyches thrown off balance for one reason or another. In his mature years Andric retained a great respect for Scandinavian writers of his own generation, and read them with more sympathy as he grew beyond his early infatuation with Strindberg. It is the name of Kierkegaard, however, which is most frequently linked with the early years of Andric's writing, and there is no doubt that Andric was drawn to the philosophical and spiritual world he formulated. It was the expression of a world view with which Kafka also had much in common, describing himself as "on the same side of life" as Kierkegaard. And of course it underlies the whole

Introduction

37

Existentialist approach, which affected so much European writing in the first half of the twentieth century. Obvious affinities with Kierkegaard include a fundamental anxiety, unease, as the central experience of life; a conviction that thought cannot be divorced from the immediacy of life; that understanding can be achieved only through the experience itself; the notion that conditions of life are fundamentally the same for all men at all times; the dominant tone of melancholy, arising from a strong imagination able always to see clearly the disparity between the real and the possible, and its creative potential; and, related to this, the vital role of paradox and the passion it generates; the crucial importance of isolation in the process of discovering truths about human existence. At the heart of Andric's writing there is a certain rigour, springing on the one hand from the kind of self-denial proposed by Kierkegaard, a concentration that depends on solitude and silence, and on the other from a determination to hold all the paradoxical elements of the experience of life together, to deny none in favour of a comfortable half-truth. It is this rigorous determination to confront the central paradoxes of the human condition that brings Andric's writing close to that of the Existentialist writer he most admired, Camus. One could say of Andric's positive acceptance of transience and a world dominated by arbitrary forces, as of Camus, that the mere fact of facing the absurd clear-sightedly is in itself a partial release. The presence of the German and Scandinavian literary traditions in Andric's writing is perhaps most readily traced. This connection is a result partly of his early education in the German-speaking world, and partly of the strong presence in early twentieth-century European writing as a whole of such thinkers as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Another important, if unstated, influence on Andric's generation is that of nineteenth-century French literature, and particularly Flaubert. Aspects of Andric's work, notably his concern with the perennial truths of legend in a modern form, are close to Mann, Anouilh and Camus. At the same time, his writing has been likened to the work of Conrad and Henry James. There have been studies of the "international" theme in Andric's work, the confrontation of cultures, in relation to James and Conrad. In addition to the material these

38

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

writers have in common, there are distinct similarities in the tone of their works: in the distance each stands from his material and the resulting irony and humour. For the rigour at the core of Andric's work involves also his complete control of his material, with its complex but apparently impassive texture. Andric has also drawn on his own Serbo-Croat tradition, and he has written on several occasions of those writers to whom he felt particularly close. These include a number of prose writers from the late nineteenth century, and the Montenegrin poet Njegos. Above all, however, it is to the collector of Yugoslav oral literature, Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, that Andric most readily returns; to Karadzic's extraordinary determination against great odds, his persistence, his wholehearted devotion to the life of the people, their customs and all aspects of the manifestation of their culture, his perspicacity and literary acumen which enabled him to select at once what was most specific and most universal in that culture; and his own lucid, objective but vivid style. Andric began his literary activity writing poetry and criticism within a wholly European frame of reference. It was not long, however, before he turned definitively to his own local culture, to his roots, to the "heritage of his forefathers", the oral traditional literature. The presence of this culture is not always immediately obvious in Andric's works, but where it is it accounts for their particular density and resonance. A number of studies have been written concerned with various aspects of the reflection of Yugoslav oral culture in Andric's work. Some deal with explicit references to songs and stories, giving examples of direct quotations, particularly of proverbs. Some treat the question of the influence of oral literature on Andric's style and narrative procedure. Others are concerned with the particular nature of the legends which can be traced in his work and their origin in the oral tradition. Perhaps the most vital aspect of this relationship is that in his references to the oral literature of his countrymen, Andric is above all simply acknowledging a response to the human condition universally manifested in the creation of legends, heroes, ballads and lyric songs. When Andric speaks of "the truth that is contained in legend", he is as interested in the "truth" itself as he is in the

Introduction

39

conditions in which its expression arose, as interested in the legend as in the circumstances that gave rise to it. Here, seeking with Vuk Karadzic the most universal statements which meet a profound human need, Andric vividly illustrates the fact that, for all its local colour, an individual culture can cross all national barriers. The other crucial aspect of this relationship springs from Andric's concern with history. One of the most important dimensions of the oral culture is its function as the expression of the people's interpretation of their history, their view of themselves, their values and their particular experience. In this narrower aspect of a national culture it is precisely the differences between nations which are emphasized, and here that the barriers are built. In The Bridge on the Drina a perennial human need is manifested in the Visegrad children's references to the heroes of the ballads with which they grow up. The children of both Christian and Moslem families are equally entranced by the ballads, and the heroes are equally real to them: dents in the road beside the bridge are known to have been made by the hoofprints of their hero's horse. For the Christian children, however, the horse is that of the Serbian prince Marko, while for the Moslems it is that of Alija -Derzelez. Thus Andric identifies the fact that an individual culture can both reinforce divisions between men and, at the same time, in its basic intention, can bridge them. The divisions are in the foreground and cannot be resolved, but they are rendered insignificant by a broader perspective. These roots of Andric's work bring us back to the idea that thought cannot be divorced from the immediacy of life. Understanding can be achieved only through the individual's own personal experience of a particular reality. At the same time this is only one aspect of Andric's experience, a particularly vital and creative one certainly, but one which cannot be separated from all the many other disparate influences which conditioned his work. Critics and literary historians continue to try to identify the decisive influences in Andric's work, just as potential biographers endeavour to trace the shaping forces in his personal life. The last word should be left to Andric himself: I don't believe at all in decisive influences. A man grows, develops, reads, paints, writes, composes, some things attract him more,

40

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West some less, he is receptive to some things and resists others, consciously or unconsciously . . . It has sometimes happened that I have gained immeasurably more at some concert than from a meeting with a writer I once greatly admired. And vice versa: I have sometimes gone to a concert happy to think I was going to hear a work which meant a great deal to me at one time, and returned from the concert empty, dull. It was not that the work was different, I was different, my mood was different, on one occasion I was quite tranquil and open, ready to respond, on the other I was like a closed book, inaccessible. And perhaps it was in fact that other concert, for me apparently unsuccessful, that was the more significant for what I did that day, than the other which remained as a treasured memory . . . And when you ask me who has influenced me decisively, how can I answer? That shop window with the books whose titles I did not understand? Perhaps precisely that! Or that one single book which was on my desk? Perhaps just that! . . . But, you see: it could equally well have been Jules Verne and not Kierkegaard that was on my table, and now you are imprisoned with that one single book which chance has thrust into your hands for a year, two years, you read it ten, twenty times. Can that writer and his book influence you? They must, but it is not the same if the influence is Kierkegaard's or Verne's . . . No, I really think that there cannot be a precise answer: when you embark on this adventure of writing, then everything influences you. When I was young, for instance, I particularly liked Leopardi. His poetry enchanted me. When I was starting to write I used to say to myself: what is the use of writing when no one can say what Leopardi said . . . And the way he said it. That love for Leopardi was my secret . . . I studied in Cracow and I could say a great, great deal about how much I owe Polish literature; both Polish poets and Polish novelists, that is my great, personal debt of gratitude. Or, there is in me an exceptionally strong line of connection with Scandinavian writers: Strindberg, Hamsun, Selma Lagerlof, Ibsen . . . Or, how much I could say about what it meant to me to get to know the work of some French or Russian, German, English, Spanish writers. As a student I read old Chinese poets in French and German translation. They moved

Introduction

41

me, both by their thoughtfulness and their warmth. They sounded better to me in German. I don't know why of course: did it have to do with the spirit of the two languages; or perhaps it was a question of which translator was better; or was it perhaps that I was more "at home" with German then - in any case those German translations gave me enormous pleasure. They made me want to see China and I did not miss the opportunity when it arose . . . But then, you see, when I was in Stockholm years later I spoke in French . . . All of that - the little shop window with the books, the book in prison, Leopardi, Chinese verses, Scandinavians and Poles, French, German and Russian writers - it is all just one possible aspect of the story of influences. How could it be possible to extract from all of that, and far more that has not been mentioned, something that should be called - a decisive influence? I simply do not know and am not sure that I would even know how to say it. The reason is very mundane: when you read good writers extraordinary things sometimes happen to you - you suddenly feel that the writer you are reading is talking about something that has been smouldering buried somewhere within you and that you realize in an astonishing way that you are not alone, that someone else has been troubled by what is disturbing you; that you have not been abandoned, that someone else has been hurt and tormented by what is hurting you now and over which you are tormenting yourself. That is at the same time support, hope, and solace.53 First literary allegiances

This is the broad context in which Andric's work should be viewed. As he grew as a man and developed as a writer, he tended to work in increasing isolation, with the many various influences on him acting beneath the surface. He took no part in the literary groupings in Yugoslavia between the wars: Expressionist, Surrealist, or the various shades of left-oriented writing. There was only one period in his life when he was wholly involved with a group of writers and that was as a very young man, when he was a prominent member of the Young Bosnia movement. But the experience of these formative

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Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

years was of particular importance in his emotional and intellectual development and should therefore be considered in some detail. Every generation of men has its own illusion about civilization; some believe they are helping to stir it up to a blaze, and others that they are witnessing its extinction. In fact, it is constantly flaring up and smouldering and being extinguished, depending on the position and angle from which we observe it. This generation, which was now discussing philosophical, social and political questions on the bridge, under the stars, above the water, was merely richer in illusions; otherwise it was similar in every way to others. It too had the feeling that it was both lighting the first fires of a new civilization and extinguishing the last flames of another which was burning itself out. The only thing that could be said about these young people in particular was that for a long time there had not been a generation which had dreamed and talked more about life, pleasure and freedom, and which had less of life, suffered more, was imprisoned and perished in greater numbers than this generation was about to suffer, be imprisoned and perish. But in those summer days of 1913 there were only bold but vague intimations. It all seemed like an exciting new game on the ancient bridge which glowed white in the moonlight of those July nights, clean, young and unchanging, but perfectly beautiful and strong, stronger than everything time could bring and people invent or do.54 In these words from The Bridge on the Drina Andric describes his own generation on the eve of the First World War. This was the generation that formed the "Young Bosnia" movement. It is more appropriate to talk in terms of a generation, for the movement itself was amorphous and fragmented, although spontaneous, active and widespread, involving young people from every kind of background and reflecting all shades of opinion from the vaguely liberal to the radical revolutionary. It is difficult not to view the participants in the Young Bosnia movement with hindsight, to see all their actions as leading systematically to the First World War. That has indeed been the position of much of the voluminous literature examining the causes of the War and identifying the responsibility for it. But while many of the young men concerned were increasingly impatient with

Introduction

43

words and favoured action, no one could have foreseen the repercussions of the pistol shot fired by one of the youngest members of the movement. An article written by one of the Young Bosnian leaders, Vladimir Gacinovic, in 1915, expresses their typical response. Speaking of Gavrilo Princip, he writes: "It never occurred to my young friend that his heroic bullet would provoke the present world war. And, believe me, when I read the various reports of it, my head reels with the appalling thought: did we, really, start all this?"55 In order to try to understand how Ivo Andric came to be actively involved in the Young Bosnia movement, it is necessary to consider the circumstances in which it came into being. The lands which make up present-day Yugoslavia had been divided for centuries under several foreign powers; the Turks in the east, the Venetians on the coast and the Habsburg Monarchy in the west. The Venetians had begun to settle on the coast in the eleventh century, the Turks had arrived in the Balkan peninsula in the fourteenth century, and the Habsburgs, with their acceptance of the Croatian crown, in 1527. In addition the Croatian Lands had formed part of the medieval kingdom of Hungary from 1102 to 1526, when the Turks overran Hungary. If one considers the crucial cultural divisions between the various regions - the Orthodox Christian areas in the east, now dominated by Islam, the strongly Moslem central region of Bosnia and the Catholic west - then the scale of the obstacles to unification of the South Slav lands can be clearly seen as immense. For the Serbs and Croats - divided between the eastern and western areas, and spread fairly equally through Bosnia - formed, despite all these barriers, one single linguistic community. The nineteenth century brought many changes, setting in motion processes that were eventually to lead to the formation of the new Europe after 1918. Ottoman power had been steadily waning, the Venetian Republic had ceased to exist and the Habsburg Monarchy was seriously weakened by both external and internal pressures. In 1804 and 1813 there were rebellions in Serbia which led to the foundation of a virtually independent principality in 1830. Conditions in Bosnia towards the end of the nineteenth century were wretched, and only aggravated by the Austrian occupation of 1878. In The Bridge on the Drina Andric describes the rapid changes which followed the arrival of the Austrians, and their apparently

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Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

frenzied activity which was quite incomprehensible to the local population, accustomed to the relatively uneventful years of Turkish rule. The material changes brought about by rapid industrialization not only meant a still heavier burden of taxation, but gradually also had a profound effect on the mentality of the people of Bosnia. Their poverty obliged thousands to seek work abroad, notably in Germany and America. It was said that some Bosnian villages sent half their male population to work abroad, while the other half served in the Austrian army. Many previously prosperous villages were virtually deserted. These migrant workers returned from abroad more critical, less passive, and they offered a ready response to the leadership of the young people educated in the few Bosnian schools and the universities of Zagreb, Vienna, Prague and Graz. Together, the new generation of Bosnians, both peasants and educated young people, organized groups in the villages: agricultural and commercial co-operatives, gymnastics societies and temperance groups. The students were anxious to share their learning, they organized courses in medicine, geography and political economics, opened reading rooms and ran newspapers. Andric describes the effect of these developments on the small town of Visegrad: Parallel with the rise in prices and that incomprehensible but obtrusive game of rising and falling bonds, dividends and the value of money, people began increasingly to talk about politics. Until then the people of the town had been concerned exclusively with what was close and familiar to them, with their earnings, their amusements, generally only with questions relating to their family and their parish, town or religious community, but always directly and narrowly, not looking far either ahead or back. Now, however, in the course of conversation, increasingly often questions arose which lay somewhere further off, beyond this circle. Religious and national parties - Serbian and Moslem - were founded in Sarajevo, and immediately afterwards sub-committees were set up. Reading rooms and choral societies were founded, first Serbian, then Moslem and, finally, Jewish. Boys from the secondary schools and students from university in Vienna and Prague began to arrive home for the vacations, bringing new

Introduction

45

books and pamphlets and a new way of expressing themselves. By their example they showed the young townspeople that they need not always silently conceal their true thoughts as the older people had always believed and maintained. New religious and national organizations sprang up on a broader base, with bolder amis; then workers' organizations also appeared. It was then that the word "strike" was heard for the first time in the town. The young apprentices grew serious. In the evenings, on the bridge, they held discussions among themselves which would have been incomprehensible to others and exchanged little paper-bound pamphlets, with titles like "What Is Socialism?", "Eight Hours of Work, Eight of Rest and Eight of Education", "The Aims and Direction of the World Proletariat". There were many townspeople who remained cautiously silent or repressed such innovations and daring thoughts and words. But there were still more, particularly among the younger, poorer people with time on their hands, who welcomed them all as joyful indications which corresponded to their inner needs, suppressed and kept silent until then, and which brought into their lives that grand and exciting element which had so far been lacking. As they read the speeches and articles, protests and memoranda of the religious and party organizations, each of them had the feeling that something was being disentangled within him, that his horizons were being broadened, his ideas liberated and his energies linked with other people and energies far away, about which he had never thought until now. Now people began to look at each other from a new angle. It seemed to them that life was becoming more expansive, richer, that the limits of what was inadmissible and impossible were being moved back and that new vistas and possibilities were being opened up. In fact, they did not have anything new even now, nor could they see anything better, but they were able to look beyond their immediate small-town present to have an exciting illusion of breadth and strength. Their habits did not change, their way of life and the forms of their dealings with each other remained the same; it was only that arguments, bold words and a new way of conversing entered into the ancient ritual of sitting idly over coffee, tobacco and brandy. People began to separate and gather

46

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West together, reject and attract each other according to new standards and on a new basis, with the force of old passions and ancient impulses.56

It was this atmosphere of profound general change in the mentality of the people as a whole that gave the young people directly involved in the Young Bosnia movement such a heady sense of the effectiveness of their activities. These activities, while enthusiastic, were sporadic and not sufficiently well organized to be sustained. Nevertheless, at one time or another each region had its own periodical publication, designed to cater for the needs and interests of the people, which contributed to an increasingly widespread sense of community and national responsibility. And the singleminded dedication of the leaders of the movement was certainly impressive. Apart from their endeavours to broaden the horizons of the people, the movement's activities chiefly consisted of meeting in small groups. There were at this period large numbers of young people throughout the Habsburg Monarchy who belonged to secret societies representing various shades of opinion. They gathered mainly to read, to compile their pamphlets and newspapers, to exchange ideas. Literature played a vital role in shaping the ideas and organization of the movement. Almost all the Young Bosnians tried their hand at some literary activity, in the belief that a revolution in the spiritual and intellectual life of individuals must precede all radical social and political change. These young people set to work energetically to translate all the most popular contemporary writers, notably Scandinavian, particularly Strindberg, but also many German, Belgian, Russian, French, English and Italian works. They were remarkably effective in circulating books, considering the generally low level of culture in Bosnia. Sarajevo was a natural focal point in the atmosphere following the annexation of 1908. This atmosphere of resentment was heightened by events in Croatia, where in 1910 the Governor, Cuvaj, appointed by Budapest, had initiated a period of unconstitutional rule. There was an attempt on Cuvaj's life in 1912. A comment made at the time by Ivo Andric in his diary epitomizes the growing impatience of the movement's adherents:

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Today Lukic tried to assassinate Cuvaj. How splendid it is that the secret threads of action and rebellion are being drawn together. How joyfully I foresee days of great deeds . . . My life is passing without the blessing of goodness and sacrifice. But I love the good. Long live those who die on the pavements, unconscious with anger and gunpowder, smarting from our common shame! Long live those who, withdrawn and silent in their dark rooms, prepare the rebellion and constantly think up new actions!57 Serbian and Croatian students in Vienna decided that they should form joint societies to respond effectively to the situation. In 1911 a group of radical schoolboys and students in Sarajevo founded the "Croato-Serb or Serbo-Croat or Yugoslav Progressive Youth Organization", with the nineteen-year-old Ivo Andric as its first president. Gavrilo Princip was among the first to join this new society. Andric's involvement in the progressive groups of his time was inevitable. However temperamentally unsuited he was to violent revolutionary action, it was impossible that a young man of his seriousness, with his strong moral and patriotic sense, could have avoided being caught up in the ideals and activities of his contemporaries. Above all, a common passion for books brought'the young men together, and this passion dominated Andric's life as a schoolboy. Their ideals were based to a considerable extent on the writings of the Russian Positivists, just as their programme of education for the people reflected similar activities in the Russian and other Slav lands towards the end of the nineteenth century. Some of these ideas were also reinforced by a selective reading of philosophers — both Classical and contemporary - whose views were promoted in the pages of the movement's various journals. Andric's intellectual education, in the specific, drastic circumstances of his youth, was intense and rapid. His reading, writing, and the discussions he had with his contemporaries were given a special urgency by the extremity of his situation: on the one hand there was the unsatisfactory social and political situation of Bosnia in the early twentieth century, and on the other the appalling scale of the cataclysm which appeared to the young men of Andric's generation to be, at least in part, a consequence of their efforts to remedy the circumstances around them.

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We shall probably never know the extent to which Andric's feeling of responsibility for the events of the First World War contributed to the guilt which he describes frequently in his writings as one of the essential experiences of his life. It is likely that this feeling of guilt was far deeper, an irrational reaction, a temperamental disquiet, aggravated by his experience of Catholic dogma. Nevertheless, it was probably reinforced by the consequences of his one venture into direct political activity. Similarly, Andric's sense of isolation in the world was absolute, almost mystical. We may also assume that it was intensified by his experience of imprisonment. Andric was twenty-two when he was arrested. Never particularly strong, he became ill with tuberculosis during his imprisonment and spent part of the War in a hospital for non-combatants. These circumstances all combined to reinforce the sense of isolation, the fear, disquiet and guilt which colour so many of Andric's writings. How early Andric began to suspect that he was not temperamentally suited to the life of an active revolutionary is also a matter for speculation. He has left an eloquent account of his realization, however, which is included in the collection of prose poems, Anxieties. "Story from Japan" is written in the form of a parable. After the successful coup by a group of 350 conspirators against the Empress Au-Ung (Austria-Hungary?), which included the poet Mori Ipo, when the group met for their first ceremonial assembly, Mori Ipo was not among them. A slave was sent with a sedan chair to bring him; instead the slave returned with a letter: Mori Ipo sends greetings to his comrades, the conspirators, on their parting! I thank you, comrades, for our common suffering and faith and our victory, and I ask you to forgive me that I am unable also to share with you in the victory as I shared in the struggle. But poets - unlike other beings - are loyal only in misfortune; they abandon those who are doing well. We poets are born for struggle, we are passionate hunters, but we do not partake of the booty. The barrier that divides me from you is narrow and invisible, but is not the blade of a sword also thin and yet it is deadly? I could not cross it to join you without detriment to my soul, for we can stand

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everything except power. That is why I am leaving you, comrade conspirators, and I am going to see whether there is anywhere an idea which has not been put into practice or an aspiration which has not been realized. And may you govern with reason and good fortune! But should any misfortune or trial ever beset our Empire of the Seven Islands and should there be a need for struggle and for solace in the struggle, then please call on me. Here the president of the council, who was a little deaf, stopped reading and with the impatience of an old man, said with some displeasure: "What misfortune could possibly befall the Empire under the just and enlightened rule of the 350?" All the members of the council nodded; the older ones smiled disdainfully and pityingly: What possible misfortune! The reading was not continued; they began to debate the law on import and excise duties. Only the head of the nation's scholars read the poet's message to the end, but to himself, and then he folded it up and deposited it in the archive of the former Empress.58 The sense of responsibility to his countrymen ascribed here to the Japanese poet remained with Andric all his life. It dictated his choice of profession and drove him, however reluctantly, to involve himself in certain limited ways in public life after the Second World War. "It is quite pointless to describe a writer, it distracts the reader's attention from the real things."59

The preceding endeavour to place Andric in his context, geographical, cultural and historical, can do no more than present a number of external facts. For Andric the "real" things were the life of his mind, his creative work. Consequently the experience of his diplomatic and public life is only indirectly reflected in his work. His search is for the patterns and perennial truths underlying the surface forms of human existence, for the metaphysical dimensions of experience. Nor are his characters neutral actors whose lives are confined to their public role. Andric's response to the world is essentially

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Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

emotional, for all the restraint and apparent objectivity of his prose. It is this strong lyrical element, combined with the broad perspective of his works, that gives Andric's portrayal of people in history, and his evocation of the myths and legends by which man orders his experience, that immediacy which is his hallmark. One of Andric's favoured literary forms is lyrical reflective prose. There are several essays and numerous shorter pieces which are often virtually prose poems. These fall into two very broad categories. The majority are statements which formulate a general conclusion about the nature of human behaviour and existence. The others are observations of the surface detail of human experience. At their best, they have the aphoristic quality of statements which promise to reveal essential truths. This comes on the one hand from their roots in the accumulated wisdom of the people as it is expressed in folk literature, and on the other from an affinity with the European tradition of reflective prose, in particular the work of such writers as Marcus Aurelius, Pascal and Montaigne. Passages of this kind occur also in Andric's fiction and contribute to its quality of a generalized statement. A clue to this tendency of Andric's work can be found in one of the longer pieces of reflective prose. These tend to focus on important symbols in his writing - "Bridges", "Faces", "Sun". One is devoted to "Wine", and includes the words: "Everything which I praise in these words has once passed through my senses and my consciousness, pleased me and strengthened me and left me the idea of myself as the only reality."60 This is, then, the starting point of all Andric's writing, as it is the point at which the circle of his thinking is closed. "Ever since I can remember", Andric once wrote, "I feel that I have been working on and preparing always the same work. Parts of this work are published and acquire the name of 'story', 'poem', 'essay'."61 The divisions between the various genres in Andric's work are often very slight. He is concerned with the essential features of the human condition, which he approaches from a variety of different angles and perspectives. To borrow the image on which the form of the novella Devil's Yard is based, his works construct more or less elaborate circles around a nucleus which is the individual confronting his own identity in the flux of human destiny.

2 Verse First poems, Ex Ponto, Anxieties Andric's first published works were poems and he continued to write verse intermittently all his life, although much of it was not published until after his death. His first poems appeared in the context of the Young Bosnia movement. The writing of its members is in marked contrast to their robust active personalities. For, while they were committed to violent revolutionary action and their essays reflect their belief in its effectiveness, their imaginative works are coloured by the prevailing tone of European literature. In their critical writings they called, as their contemporaries throughout Europe were doing, for revolutionary modern modes in all areas of life, from love to poetry. They found that this modernity was hard to achieve in practice, however, and surrendered to the fashionable literary mode, a Neo-Romantic melancholy which was well enough suited to their dispiriting environment. The poems Andric published before the First World War are virtually indistinguishable in tone from much of what his contemporaries were writing. Nevertheless, it is probably true to say that in his case the role of the political activist, however sincerely he played it at the time, was fundamentally unsuited to him. By contrast, however, the prevailing melancholy seemed to match his own temperamental response to the world. These early poems point in no particular direction, beyond establishing the free verse form of virtually all Andric's poetry and a tendency to a mournful self-pity which sometimes threatens his personal statements. The prose poems written during the War, however, represent a personal confession and cannot be considered merely the reflection

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of a literary vogue. Ex Ponto (the title refers to Ovid's account of his exile on the Black Sea) was published in 1918, Anxieties in 1920, when Ex Ponto was also reprinted. Thereafter Andric refused to allow them to be included in any of the collections of his works published before his death. He rejected them because they seemed to him too raw and too intimate, unprocessed reactions to the circumstances of his life in the War years and of no artistic value. Nevertheless, they are important since they contain ideas and themes which recur in his later works. The strong emotional colouring, particularly of Ex Ponto, was toned down in Andric's later prose poems and verse but their form, a combination of aphoristic statements and longer reflective passages, continued to appeal to him. Ex Ponto and Anxieties record Andric's emotional reaction to the circumstances of his early life and the development of a number of themes around the central paradox of his personality and his work. One of the last passages in Ex Ponto expresses this paradox succinctly: "Wherever I look there is poetry, whatever I touch brings pain."1 These few words could stand as an epigraph to all of Andric's work. Its abundance of stories, characters, observations, comments, is its first striking aspect, coloured by a clear-sighted acceptance of the essentially tragic nature of the human condition. In Ex Ponto despair predominates, but the work also traces the growth of remarkable strength. Andric was twenty-two when he was arrested and imprisoned. This fact alone might be enough to account for much of the tone of the volume. Andric has said that at that time, in Sarajevo, it was known exactly who could and who could not be arrested. Only criminals went to prison. To be in prison seemed to me then - the end of everything. The end of life: you wait only for the moment when they will come to take you off to the execution yard; you expected nothing else . . . We had no experience. When I found myself in my cell, I thought only of death. I remember cell No. 115 and my inexpressible fear . . . The door opens, squeaking slightly, slams, you hear the key, and you are left alone. Alone, and with you your fear. Immense.

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Whatever you start thinking about, every thought ends with - fear . . . I found myself constantly thinking about the sun. Where was it? Did it exist?2 Andric already felt isolated from his fellow-students, not quite sharing their revolutionary zeal. The little he has said about his relationship with the Catholic God of his childhood suggests that he felt equally cut off from Him. Here, then, was a young man whose experience of the world had already been intense and had forced a burden of responsibility on to his immature shoulders. In prison he was left in solitary confinement for several weeks. Some years after his experience Andric was able to give it expression in several sketches describing a young man's imprisonment and his obsession with the sunlight falling through his barred window. In the introduction to Ex Ponto written by Andric's friend Niko Bartulovic we are given a glimpse of the young writer's personality as seen from the outside, which confirms the impression conveyed by the text: As he says himself, Ivo Andric was already a little tired when he came into the world. He attributes this to atavism. The last male descendant of an old Sarajevo family, physically delicate and frail, with the thoughtful eyes of a dreamer, he seemed really to feel in his own person the weariness of many generations. Apart from that, you can see no trace of his Bosnian surroundings in him in any form, and he maintains for precisely that reason that his whole heritage has been condensed into the traditional Bosnian inclination to melancholy. The songs of the area he comes from, with all their soft minor-key intonation, are nothing but one great sorrow and unspecified longing . . .3 Melancholy, then, is the keynote of Andric's temperament. It suggests immediately isolation, introspection and, in these early poems, a Neo-Romantic exaltation of the insights granted by such a temperament: The sickly thoughts and dark forebodings of the melancholy have a terrible accuracy, however absurd and misguided they appear to the healthy.

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Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West The melancholy are like the aspen, which trembles when other trees do not even feel the breeze. Like an actor who casts a shadow on to the stage while he is still standing in the wings; thus events appear in the dreams and forebodings of the melancholy. The centre of a healthy man's thoughts is life and the questions it raises, but in the melancholy it is death and its secrets . . ,4

This response to the world, although later expressed in less hackneyed terms, was probably conditioned by a combination of physical attributes, childhood experiences - including the mournful songs of his native land - and the extreme circumstances of his experience of the War and of imprisonment. He continued to see the true reality underlying all appearances in these dark colours. In many of his later works, Andric describes characters who are for various reasons more able than their fellow-men to apprehend what he regards as the true nature of reality, because they are somehow outside surface forms and distractions. A recurring theme is the insight granted by a sudden change of perspective. Given its importance in Andric's work as a whole, it is legitimate to assume that, while his reaction to his imprisonment was conditioned by latent tendencies, the experience itself was decisive. Not only did this experience set in motion a number of emotional reactions to the world, but it also determined a symbolic vision of the world itself as a prison, a vision hinted at in various works and whose full value is expressed in Devil's Yard. This stock Romantic metaphor thus acquires substance in Andric's work. The notion of a change in perspective is described in the opening passage of Ex Ponto: Has it ever happened to you that, thrown off the rails, you bid farewell to the everyday and are swept off, borne by a terrible whirlwind, appalled, as one under whose feet the ground is slipping away? Has it happened to you that everything is taken from you - and what cannot be taken away from a man? - that a heavy, hideous hand is placed on your soul, taking from you the joy and serenity of a free spirit; and that your very courage, which remains as the last desperate gift of destiny, is taken from you and you are left a dumb, callow slave?5

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The High Romantic tone of this passage reflects at once Andric's youth and the exalted spirit in which he and his Young Bosnia contemporaries steeped themselves in literature. The experience conveyed in these dark colours to the young man in his solitary cell tended to crystallize into several specific emotions, and those remained the central categories of human experience in many of Andric's works. The dominant psychological states are isolation - from men and God - fear, guilt, sin, suffering. These states are experienced within an all-encompassing absolute silence. In the midst of this despair, there are sudden moments of clarity and "light". Nowhere in this work, or in any of Andric's later works, is there any attempt to explain or identify the precise nature of this "light". It is a recognition of the spontaneous irrational energy of the human spirit, the will to survive and to overcome all odds. The fact that these moments of light were granted to Andric does not mean that from then on he was able steadily to work his way out of his despair. Ex Ponto is above all a record of the fluctuations of human mood, the passing strengths and weaknesses of the spirit. Andric denies himself any positive system, which would remain constant despite the vagaries of transient mood. On the contrary, it is precisely in recognizing and accepting these fluctuations that Andric finds a source of hope. At the beginning of the volume the natural world is included in the cold hostility that surrounds the young man, but as the work proceeds, Nature is increasingly a source of solace. Partly for specific manifestations, sun in particular, and snow; but more because the fluctuations of the human spirit are seen as in harmony with the changes in the natural world. Andric is acutely affected by light and dark, for example, and acknowledges that his reactions to the world are quite different in the daylight and at night. Increasingly, Andric's apprehension of harmony is expressed in the notion of a constant ebb and flow: There are moments when my soul swells like a wave and breaks in me and my twenty-three years raise their voice and my wild desire beats its brow against the narrow circle of fate like a bird against glass. There are moments when, in the calm which comes automati-

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cally from misfortune, I glimpse the need for denial and suffering, when grateful for all the joys of life that once were - I see that it was necessary for them too to have an end, and that it should have been an end like this. There are moments when I burn calmly like a sacrificial torch which has just been brought into the temple.6 There is, then, no steady development in Ex Ponto. Despair alternates with moments of peace and light, lamentation on the writer's solitude fluctuates with frustration following unsatisfactory attempts at communication with his fellow-men. Out of this kaleidoscopic collection of statements a pattern does nevertheless begin to emerge. The outside world is hostile: "Remorselessly rigid and motionless, the mountains look down from the cloudy heights. The sky is high, inflexible. The earth hard, merciless . . ."7 There is a sense of unreality and falsehood about the writer's dealings with the world and his fellow-men: I have returned. I went again among people. With all the passion of a soul welling over, I celebrated my return among living people. And now look: how numb and tired I am. Loud pleasure is a violent intoxicant, a poison which starts to act in solitude. The abandoned room is reproachfully silent and lonely thoughts appear, like offended friends who pretend not to know me. I have returned, but it would have been better if I had not gone.8 Words, the common currency of human communication, can be misleading and dangerous: "We ought to be far more careful with the words we speak . . . If words were only as short-lived as the sound that expresses them! But often they live for years, like shameful wounds they hurt and sting and poison a man's life."9 "The longer you spend alone and keep silent about yourself, the more shallow and foolish your neighbour's talk becomes."10 What emerges above all from Ex Ponto is the fact that Andric had the spiritual and emotional resources not only to withstand isolation, but actually to grow and be strengthened by it: "Do not regret your solitude and the silence that is around you. Perhaps fate is on your side, perhaps it is someone's ancient prayer that envelops you with

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quietness as a protection, perhaps in your silence words lie buried that would have brought disquiet and unhappiness."11 "The last expression of all and the simplest form of all endeavours is - silence. I have fallen in love with it for my whole lifetime, and when my life passes, silence, my good mother, will place her pale hands on my eyes and this whole piteous story will sink into the darkness, as a brief incomprehensible sound dies in silence."12 The silence and isolation of Andric the writer are, however, far from blank and empty. They are peopled with ideas and memories which seem to retain their purity in the quiet concentration of solitude. For two days now they have not taken me out even for that one hour of exercise, because it has been raining incessantly. It seems to me that the damp is seeping endlessly into my cell and falling over my face and hands like a sticky sediment. My bed-cover is sharp and icy-cold, my food tastes of tin plates, and my cell has that indescribable smell of a confined space where a man breathes and lives, without change or air. But here, behind my eyelids - if I only shut my eyes - lives all the greatness of life and all the beauty of the world. Whatever has once just touched my eyes, lips and hands is all alive in my mind and bright against the dark background of this suffering. The luxury and beauty of life live indestructibly within me . . ,13 It is not only with his own thoughts and memories that the writer's head is filled. In his isolation he also has intimations of an ultimate harmony in which his life has a place. For Andric, life is always far broader than the immediate present; it is a perpetual process in which individual human lives play an infinitesimal part. It is in immediate human contact, so often warped by hatred and malice, that real fear lies. Andric's growing preference for solitude and his readiness to confront the meaninglessness of individual existence become a source of comfort and strength. His isolation from his fellow-men is in any case only superficial. He withdraws from the imperfect communication of daily discourse in order to be closer to the timeless currents of human existence. One passage in Ex Ponto suggests the level of human communication that was to be Andric's particular concern:

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Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

And look, as always in moments of the greatest trials, I see that in the depths of my soul, under the hard crust and grey sediment of empty words and distorted concepts which so soon betray, there lives the eternal, unconscious and blessed heritage of my forefathers, who laid their bodies in ancient scattered graveyards, and their simple and robust virtues in the foundations of our souls.14 Ex Ponto describes the growth of a resolute human spirit, tempered by its exposure to despair. Each statement of despair, out of which life, nevertheless, emerges and endures, is proof of his ability to withstand it. His strength comes from an identification of the individual personality with the changing and yet constant natural world, and through a merging of individual suffering, with the timeless human condition. It demands a patient, clear-eyed, broad view of existence, which can never be completely obscured by immediate pain. The conclusion of Ex Ponto expresses this view in typical form: Epilogue. You are much alone and often silent, my son, you are beset by dreams, exhausted by journeys of the spirit. Your body is bent and your face pale, your eyelids lowered and your voice like the rasp of a prison door. Go out into the summer day, my son! "What did you see in the summer day, my son?" I saw that the earth is strong and the sky eternal, but man is weak and short-lived. "What did you see, my son, in the summer day?" I saw that love is brief, and hunger eternal. "What did you see, my son, in the summer day?" I saw that this life is a painful affair which consists in an unequal exchange of sin and unhappiness, that to live means to pile illusion on illusion. "Do you wish to sleep, my son?" No, father, I am going out to live.15 While much of Anxieties is similar to Ex Ponto, there is a certain development; in part in form and in part in atmosphere. It would be misleading to say that this slim volume represents a cut-and-dried statement of Andric's thinking, but it does provide indications of its

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general direction. The greater length of the pieces - compared to those of Ex Ponto - suggests in itself a tranquillity, an impression of thoughts gradually formed. Passages from Anxieties were first published in 1919 and the full version appeared in 1920. The complete work seems to suggest a degree of adjustment to the world; the prevalent tone of despair of Ex Ponto has gone. By 1920 Andric was fully involved in the literary life of Zagreb in the newly-formed Yugoslav state. These were circumstances far removed from imprisonment in a country devastated by war. The first seven pieces, which form a separate section of the work, are an account of Andric's confrontation with the God of his childhood. Andric's early experience was intimately linked with the Catholic Church. We can assume that the simple homes in which he lived would have reflected the typical devout humble Christianity Andric portrays in many of his accounts of village and town life among the Christian community of Bosnia. We can only speculate about the particular religious atmosphere of Andric's home life. But we do know something of his important and fruitful associations with Franciscan monks while he was interned in Bosnia. There are many sympathetic portraits of Catholic monks in Andric's work, and two cycles of stories revolve around two memorable members of the Franciscan order. From these stories we can gain an impression of the respect Andric felt for their vocation, and at the same time a clear idea of his awareness that the personality of the individual monk and his effectiveness were only in part enhanced by his commitment, and not conditioned by it. On the whole the impression given is that, with rare exceptions, religious zeal of any denomination acts as a barrier between the individual and the true nature of the world, blinding him to the truth and shielding him from harsh reality. Andric's philosophy is communicated increasingly in the form of a kind of Pantheism, as illustrated by the the third passage of this first section of Anxieties, ostensibly centred on the idea of God: Everything that exists here is condemned to a battle without end. The sea and the rocks, the seed in the earth and the wind and animals as well as men.

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Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West Light and dark follow each other and winds alternate with silences, but the battle does not cease to be fought. In the shadow of a vast secret and the troubled dream that every being dreams and spreads out over himself, you can hear constantly in the heart of the earth the rhythm of life hammering between pain and joy. And, in the midst of that din, its silence is dreadful. The wind rocks the pine bough. All things shiver and freeze in the prison of laws. God is the night in which our destiny lies like something quiet and small. From the place where human thought drowns and is extinguished, the solitude of all living things spreads out in a circle in appalling waves.16

Andric's God, or, at least, his conception of eternity, comes to be seen as inherent in the natural world, in its constant changeability, the rhythm of these changes, and in its endurance, despite and beyond all apparent transience. The words which express this apprehension will recur as a basic formula at various points in Andric's works: "Around me are forests, which know only one commandment: that they should grow, and only one requirement: that they should die . . ,"17 The lesson Andric appears to be driving himself to learn in this section of Anxieties is the patience to wait until the moods of despair have passed, the storm is quiet and he can once again be receptive to the positive forces of life, the forces of light and growth - the flow, rather than the ebb. Whereas in Ex Ponto his youthful reaction was a cry of despair, in this volume the despair is often dominated by a quiet realization that it will pass. And whereas the stern and demanding God of his childhood was unable to bring him comfort, he turns now outside himself to aspects of the natural world that seem to him to embody his developing apprehension of eternity. An indication of this progression is provided by the first passage of the third section, entitled "Mountains". It is an act of devotion to the writer's new God. It is worth quoting in full as an explicit statement of faith. Mountains in the distance, crowned with snow, who take Communion with the sun, for you alone is there a song left within me.

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You are the effort of the earth - the only worthwhile effort towards the sky and height. When I think of the rosy glow of the heights, I am filled with peace. I know, fiery lilies and silence bloom there. Or the cautious track of a wild animal melts in the snow. And should a pain appear, it is carried off by changes as a fallen tree is by a river. There death is: scattered feathers, clean, whitened bones and black, fertile soil. From those mountains these mornings come. This is a morning when I, who have no gods, fall and bow down to you, high mountains, where the silence of death and life is warm and fertile like the silence of two pairs of lips in a kiss. Freed from troubled evening thoughts of stars and distances, and having trodden all the paths which smart in the memory, I fall down before you, peaks of the earth where reigns the distant and incomprehensible harmony of the elements. A white silence to which God has not descended, nor man reached. Deep snow, with the shadow of dark spruce and the full measure of time and its soundless laws! Winged snow, with the form of a star and a human eye, traveller who does not hurry and who has faith in time and forms and the possibilities that await him, you are this morning for me in the bright distance like a deity one invokes. And the peaks of this earth where I suffer are none the less dearer to me than some unknown distant sky which caused me to be born weary. High mountains, your image in my eyes which mourn transience is more faithful and enduring than everything that has come to me in the world, because everything that has passed through my hands vanishes in the disquiet to which all things and all men are condemned. I stretch out my empty hands to you; and, see, the shadow of the day which lies on them is shortened and deluded.18 Mountains, then, embody an idea of permanence which is an image of the patience a man must nurture in himself to triumph over the disquiet which is the fundamental quality of human life.

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As in Ex Ponto, the writer ends with an expression of this harmony through communication with his fellow-men. The impulse is described in typically humble terms: When I saw how bright the mists were in the distance and when I heard what the woods were saying with their face which is forever changing and the mountain peaks which had lost their greenness and beauty but stood still, bare and eternally the same. When I saw the relentless but dignified march of light and shadow over the valley below me and caught the sound of their voice in my own blood, I was afraid in the face of the mystery and astonished at the power of discovery given to man. -1 realized at once that I would be a poor speaker and an unreliable witness. - I stopped for a moment and was small and alone with the inexpressible sadness of bright, short days, which only man knows. God and the world were silent.19 While these two youthful works are of little artistic worth compared to Andric's mature writing, they are nevertheless a human document of value. They present a personal struggle, in very demanding circumstances, out of which the writer emerges triumphant. The strength so acquired enabled him to turn beyond himself, to enter into and conjure up innumerable human lives, both past and contemporary, portraying them with singular sympathy and vigour. I waged my battle with the winds and the cold alone. I found a confidential word with the sap in blades of grass. I suffered greatly while I got to know all the strengths and demands of my body and the warm self-awareness of all the lives around me. I ordered exactly my relationship with the movements, phenomena and changes of everything around me, I battled until everything had come to love me as a fearless stranger, who did not think of himself. Clouds, woods, springs, animals and rocks filled my consciousness, but I never forgot the human face, the wonderful human face, lit up by the glow of reason and the sadness only humans know because of all that they can see. Behind all my bitter words is always hidden the human face with its desire for happiness.20

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Verse, 1918-73 From time to time, in his constant exposure and response to the world, Andric would come upon a subject or an experience which he felt he could express only in the form of a poem. This happened less and less frequently; only one or two poems survive from any one year after 1920. Some of them were published in periodicals, but most were preserved in a file found among the writer's papers after his death and labelled All my verse and prose poems. These, together with all the published poems, were subsequently collected and published under the title of one of them: What I Dream and What Happens To Me. On the whole these poems show the weakest aspect of Andric's writing. They tend to be self-conscious, often prosaic, and occasionally they contain a hint of the self-pity which can threaten a writer of Andric's introspective melancholy disposition. The verse shows no abrupt changes of direction or experimentation. The first poems published in 1911 established its form: prose sketches and short poems in free verse. Although his verse always had a strong Neo-Romantic confessional character, influence of Expressionist and Futuristic verse can be traced, as can that of individual poets, such as Walt Whitman and Verhaeren. Andric the poet was not concerned with striking poetic effect or elaborate images, but rather, as in his fiction, with the greatest possible precision in conveying a scene or mood. That is usually achieved through ostensibly simple language and expression, tending towards understatement and making its impact through concentration. This dominance of the "idea" of the poem has determined its free verse form, in which the relationship between highly charged prose and verse is very close. The subject matter of the verse falls into two broad categories: themes which recur as preoccupations in the prose writings - The First World War, prison, isolation, the powerful attraction of women, a tenuous vision of joy in the form of an imaginary woman and more transient, immediate reactions to experiences. Some of these latter take the form of mood-pictures, reminiscent of passages from Ex Ponto. There is a note of personal bitterness in some of the earlier poems, but this gives way gradually to more universal comments on human experience.

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The essential quality of the poems is their combination of thoughtfulness and emotion. As might be expected, some of the more youthful pieces are dominated by an immature sentiment - of Romantic suffering, Patriotism, the cult of sacrifice. In the poems written since 1930, however, the responsive, reflective figure of the mature writer emerges. A poem written in 1922, "Thought", suggests the direction from which some consolation may come. The expression is over-explicit and somewhat prosaic, but in the last lines the essential idea is conveyed in terms which could stand almost as an account of the nature of Andric's poetry. It suggests that fleeting moments may suddenly offer a vision of salvation and that solace for all earthly affliction may be found in the world of ideas. Another early poem offers a more personal and complex reaction to the world, one which is characteristic of Andric. It evokes the fundamental unease of the human condition. The form of the poem is interesting, as it parallels that of Andric's last poem in its initial denial and following explanation. Vera salutrix No salvation, nor, any more, dream of salvation! Since I deeply, and secretly, Took my leave of all in the world, I adore now only speed and movement, For they slake desire and lessen distance, And carry each life and every thing To its end and fulfilment. A horror haunts me since the day I first caught sight of myself, Treading the hard paths of the earth, Like a pious traveller of God, Seeking and praising only Death Which is Peace, Faith, Bridge and River-mouth Of every dream of salvation.21

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The tone is youthful and contains perhaps an echo of Futurism. It demonstrates Andric's tendency to take a more extreme position in his verse, which captures a sudden mood not tempered by the process of more gradual reasoned thought. There are two characteristic ideas in this poem. First the idea of withdrawal from the world, a withdrawal which was Andric's solace and main source of strength, but at the same time a cause of anxiety and guilt. Then the idea of self-observation, accompanied by "horror". The "movement" praised here can perhaps be seen as a feature of Andric's verse in general. At its best it captures fleeting moments with great simplicity. In a way it provides a contrast to the whole effort of the prose work, which is essentially to counteract transience. The poems tend to reflect the awareness of the brevity and fragility of life which drives men to create works of art, and to build bridges. It is as though the writer relaxes in his verse, temporarily abandoning the will to resist, and accepting instead the ease of submission to inevitable fate. The nine pieces gathered under the title What I Dream and What Happens To Me, published between 1922 and 1931, give a clear idea of the kind of themes that presented themselves to Andric as needing to be expressed in the succinct, concentrated form of his verse. They are for the most part mood-pictures, with more or less emphasis on the mood, a Neo-Romantic identification of emotion and landscape. Andric's thoughts are not abstract and cerebral, but spring from an emotional response to the world around him. The cliched image of the aspen sensitive to every breeze, developed in Ex Ponto, describes suggestively enough the responsive nature of Andric the poet. He is more susceptible in certain situations, notably when travelling or staying somewhere abroad, and his melancholy nature inclines him towards autumnal landscapes, although several poems express the joy of life in the sun, usually by the sea. Two of these pieces are not mood-pictures; one is an anecdote which impressed itself on the writer's imagination as an almost fully-formed embryonic story, while the other reflects on the nature of a cry heard in the night, evoking fleeting images of its possible causes, which could again be developed at greater length, but the poet rejects the intrusion, for he wants only to sleep. The most memorable of these poems, however, are concentrated

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statements of fundamental aspects of Andric's attitude to the world, such as his praise of silence in the ninth poem of this group: An inexpressible strength to the spirit and body is brought by silence, pride never spoken. I know the warm scent of the silk of love, and I know the fixed stare of farewell, and pleasure, and the desire for death which follows after it like a shadow. But I have never known greater pleasure than the thought: that the sky, which shines above us like a promise, is merely a graveyard; and the only dignity and the one true prayer: are lowered eyes and unspeaking lips. My thought leads me like a mysterious glow as I walk alone through the night and mist.22 One poem is particularly characteristic of Andric's whole intention in his work. Its starting point is a sense of unease and guilt typical of his personality, but out of this grows a positive statement of belief in the extent to which the universal is contained in the particular: Yes, old painting, Yes, that is how it should have been, One should have kept to the first word, Not gone anywhere, and sought the heart's desires Deep in oneself, and one's native land, Instead of in distant, unattainable, fateful apparitions. One should have been patient, waited, watched over the crops, Cared for one's people, the poor, for Bosnia. And today it would not be as it is: Empty hands, uneasy conscience, a lost look, a thirsting soul. One should have known, alas, what is only now glimpsed. There is one sun everywhere, water, rock and grass. One and inaccessible. All the rest is an illusion of the frenzied mind

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About oneself, and a false perspective Of the desert we set alight in our own hearts.23 Within the context of Andric's work as a whole these few poems offer a rare glimpse of the writer's more private sensibilities, out of which he wove his numerous portraits of his fellow-human beings. Some areas were too private for Andric's verse, unless such poems were written and later destroyed. His personal experience of love and marriage, for example, is nowhere reflected in this verse except in the most indirect terms. Here, as elsewhere, Andric seeks to present only what is most profound and consequently universal, the response to the world which underlies all the incidental experience of an individual. Even without the rest of his work, the verse and prose poems would stand as the record of the deeply thoughtful response of a sensitive but robust personality. Andric's last poem, written in 1973, two years before his death, conveys his essential nature. It calls for direct confrontation with the bare facts of death, without the solace and delusion of prayer and belief in eternity. Andric's world is stark, like the barren mountains of his childhood and his essential experience of human relations. The writer drives himself constantly to face what he regards as this fundamental truth of reality. He is clear-sighted and courageous in this endeavour, which is consistent throughout his work. And yet, the very existence of this work bears witness to a contrary impulse: the almost involuntary, irrational will to survive against all the odds. Underlying the stoicism of Andric's response to the world, and warming it unexpectedly from time to time, is an indomitable optimism, a joyous acceptance of the strength of life, "which endures and stands firm, like the bridge over the Drina". No gods, no prayers! And yet it happens that I sometimes hear Something in me like a whispered prayer. That is my old and ever wakeful wish Rising from somewhere in the depths And softly asking for a little space In one of Eden's endless gardens, Where I might at long last find What I sought here always in vain.24

3 Short Stories (i) 1920^1 After the personal, confessional nature of the early prose poems, the first impression conveyed by Andric's short stories is of their objectivity. Andric as an individual, with a particular life's path and experience, is remarkably absent from his prose fiction. But this objectivity is only on the surface. The many characters and situations portrayed all tend to illustrate those fundamental facts of human existence with which Andric is concerned in his verse. The extent to which all his works are indeed part of one and the same work becomes clear as the symbolic quality of the stories emerges. The major part of his fiction consists of short stories, comprising eight volumes of the collected works if one includes the novella, Devil's Yard, as opposed to the four novels. The stories cover a range of themes, although many of them, and the majority of those published before the Second World War, are set in Bosnia at different points in its history. The subsequent course of Andric's life as a diplomat is quite removed from his central interests as a writer. Some aspects of his public life are reflected in the stories published in this period but these are only settings; the intricacies of diplomatic life and the writer's own activity in it play no part. Andric himself is also absent because of the lack of any real sense of the narrator making an objective comment on his characters and themes. It has been said that this non-analytical, suggestive quality of his writing is a product of the influence of Oriental traditions, where stories are told not in perfectly composed logical wholes by professional artists, but by "wise men, sorcerers, witches and saints". Andric's prose depends less on lengthy dialogue and elaborate, detailed description than on the evocation of atmosphere, mood, vivid pictures, the suggestion of deeply hidden secret currents, with

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no attempt at comment and analysis. This is particularly true of the stories set in Bosnia, which frequently have the density of poetry. The reaction to the world expressed in Ex Ponto and Anxieties was essentially emotional and spiritual. It was suspicious of any attempt to impose "logic" or rigid systems on to human experience suspicious, that is, of an exclusively intellectual ordering of that experience. This initial response is reflected again in Andric's fictional characters' reaction to the world, which is also essentially emotional. In the majority of his stories Andric writes from the point of view of his characters, so as to convey a sense of the quality of their existence from the inside. It is artificial to try to impose a chronological organization on to the stories. We do so here for the sake of clarity and because there is a very general tendency towards more contemporary themes in the stories published after the Second World War, although historical themes and Bosnia continue to provide material, and there is no clear dividing line. The stories do, however, arrange themselves into groups, and this is how they have been printed in the collected works, with the author's agreement. There is, for example, one volume entitled Children, which contains tales concerning children or seen through their eyes. There is a whole series of stories, set in the little town of Visegrad, which are similar to the individual and more or less selfcontained chapters of the novel The Bridge on the Drina. From these it emerges that the nature of the novel's composition - in relatively short units - was established many years before Andric came to write it. There are also stories connected with Sarajevo and with Travnik. In these stories set in Bosnia there is a strong sense of history. Some dramatic moments recur, such as the Serbian uprising of 1804 and its effect on neighbouring Bosnia and the border town of Visegrad, in 1878. There are also several characters who seem to have particularly appealed to Andric's imagination and who recur in a series or small cycle of stories: the two monks, Brother Marko and Brother Petar, the half- gypsy Corkan and the peasant Vitomir Tasovac, for example. The personalities of these various characters set the tone of the stories in which they occur, and the tone of Andric's writing is consequently varied. There are also some pieces

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of fantasy which are closer to Andric's prose poetry or reflective prose than to conventional narrative fiction. We may, then, attempt to organize the abundant variety of Andric's short stories by considering them in groups, both by theme and by tone. The initial division, however, is between those set in Bosnia, either in the vague Turkish past or in more precise historical circumstances, and those set in other parts of Europe or an unspecified, contemporary context. Of the thirty-three stories printed in the collected works and published between 1920 and 1941, twenty-five are set in Bosnia, four in specific circumstances in Europe and one in a contemporary but unspecified setting, while the remaining three are timeless personal, dreamlike discourses. In other words, Bosnia clearly dominates in the stories published between the two wars. The first striking feature of the majority of these tales is their violence. This frequently takes the form of brutality, the persecution of the vulnerable, and is present in a general impression of the low cost of human life. The options open to an individual whose experience falls outside the established social norms, for whatever reason, are strictly limited and death is frequently the only solution which appears to present itself. Such individual human tragedies, however, while they may dominate a particular story, are rarely left to speak for themselves - they are placed in an historical setting which reduces their absolute importance and suggests that they are simply part of a larger-scale process, in which all individuals are in any case doomed to oblivion. There is no strict pattern to the violence; some stories focus on the characters on whom it is inflicted and some on those who inflict it. What links them is the sense that both kinds of experience place the individual outside society. These individuals, through their isolation, are granted a special insight and their exceptional experience reflects a truth about human relations which is normally disguised and suppressed in social organization. Isolated from society, a human being is seen to be either victim or pursuer, attacker or prey. The tone of an individual story dominated by violence will then be one either of brutality or of humiliation and fear. While the narration is generally third-person, each story is told largely from the point of view of the main character.

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This can be seen in Andric's first short story, published in 1920 "The Journey of Alija -Derzelez".1 This story is also of particular interest because it is explicitly concerned with the subject of a legend. The protagonist is the hero of a large number of Moslem heroic ballads. Bearing in mind the special place accorded to "legend" and "fairy-tale" in Andric's statements about art, we should consider exactly what form "the grain of truth contained in legend" takes in a tale such as "The Journey of Alija -Derzelez". It should be said that we can trace two main categories of "legend" in Andric's works: those stories which appear to arise from a need to account for and formalize a perennial, basic human experience - lust, jealousy, shame, delusion - and those which bear witness to man's need to organize even his most trivial experience into manageable units. In the first category of story, it is not the legend itself that Andric is concerned to illustrate but the stage before it came into being: the circumstances which gave rise to it. The social conditions which produced Alija, and his Serbian equivalent Marko Kraljevic, were those prevailing in an aggressive, masculine culture. The traditional ballads concerned with Alija deal exclusively with his prowess on the battlefield. Andric refers to his fame in just one sentence: "He was renowned for many battles and his fearful strength . . ."2 and immediately takes him off his horse, setting him down in a context where he appears awkward because he is not used to being on the ground, or to normal social interaction. His stature is at once diminished: "In a few days the njagic circle around -Derzelez had quite disappeared."3 There is no clear reason why the label "hero" should have attached itself to this particular person. He is small, unprepossessing, ungainly as soon as he dismounts, awkward and uninteresting in conversation. He is slow-witted and chronically lacking in imagination. But he is also obsessive. Once he sees a beautiful woman he can think of nothing else but possessing her. Or he abandons himself wholeheartedly to the singing of a particularly fine traditional singer: "Berzelez felt that the singer was tugging at his soul and that any moment now, he would expire, from excessive strength, or excessive weakness."4 -Derzelez can flourish only in circumstances where his simpleminded strength and single-minded energy can be expressed in the immediate violent ways he understands. He is quite baffled by more

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intricate social relationships and by the whole deeply disturbing question of women. Andric here exploits the comic possibilities of exposing a renowned hero to the demands made on men by their encounters with women, in a similar way to some of the traditional ballads about Marko Kraljevic. Marko's reaction is, however, generally more subtle. -Derzelez, in Andric's portrayal, is at the mercy of his complete lack of imagination. This is probably the key to his fabled position. Failing to understand why he should be denied possession of any beautiful woman who catches his eye simply because of a discrepancy in their social position,-Derzelez is prepared to ignore all social convention and ride roughshod over taboos and boundaries respected by others as sacred and unchallengeable. Such an awareness may well result in apparently heroic actions; indeed many heroic actions probably stem from just such a lack of imagination. In Andric's story, however, because he is taken out of his usual context, •Derzelez's attitude simply makes him a figure of fun. This is the case at least as far as the outside world is concerned. For the reader there is a further level of response, since the story is told in such a way as clearly to evoke the impact of -Derzelez on others and yet to allow the reader to a large extent to enter into his experience and to look at the world, with its arbitrary rules, through his uncomprehending eyes: He seethed with fury. Not to be able to reach that Serbian girl. Ever! And not to be able to kill anyone or destroy anything! A new wave of blood broke within him. - Or was this perhaps a trick? Were they making fun of him? Was this another of their jokes? But at the same time he felt clearly that these threads were too fine for his fingers and - who knows how often he had felt this in his life - he could not begin to understand people and their simplest acts, and he would have to give up and retreat, and be left alone with his absurd anger and superfluous strength.5 •Derzelez is, then, the first of Andric's outsiders, the social misfit who pursues an unattainable illusion. This illusion comes in several forms in Andric's work. It can be beauty (as here), power, happiness or escape. The sense of helpless constraint which overcomes ©erzelez is one to which every individual is ultimately condemned. This story establishes the pattern for many of the later ones: an

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individual experience of the world which embodies a perennial human situation, sufficient objectivity in the third-person narrative for the individual to be seen in his or her more general context; but the whole story is told, at least at key moments, from the point of view of the protagonist. It is therefore the personality, or the particular experience of the protagonist, which sets the tone. One other dimension of this story requires brief mention. It is composed in three self-contained sections, clearly reflecting the organization of the traditional ballads, following one "adventure" in each individual song, but together forming a small "cycle". This linear development in short units was to remain the basic form of Andric's narrative procedure. In addition to its strictly formal nature, this cyclical pattern can be seen to reinforce the sense of the hero's helplessness, his constraint within his nature and his times. In a large number of stories the experience of the main character is marked, as is that ofDerzelez, by bewilderment. This can spring from a general incomprehension in the face of human behaviour, as with the Moslem hero, or it can be the result of the particular circumstances in which the character is placed. Such bewilderment can mark equally the "victims" and the "aggressors" in Andric's stories. In the tales which focus on an aggressor the degree of his responsibility is open to question; his behaviour is explained by the combination of his own personality and his particular experience. He is not thereby absolved from guilt, but it seems as though Andric sees the world as containing a certain weight of evil, with particular individuals as its necessary instruments. One example is the case of "Mustafa the Hungarian".6 He is a soldier who has achieved a hero's reputation because of his brave exploits in Hungary. His return to his native Bosnia is anticipated eagerly, like that of -Derzelez, and the people's disappointment when confronted with the reality is similar. Mustafa is profoundly changed by his experience. The change is manifested outwardly in the fact that he can no longer play his flute, and in his inability to sleep. When he does fall into a fitful sleep he is tormented by dreams of the brutality he has been forced to witness in the course of his life as a soldier. The life he chose and the brutality it entails take complete control of his body and its demands now govern his behaviour absolutely. The story illustrates the clear distinction Andric makes between the

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body, whose realm is the night, and the spirit, which can flourish only by day. The tenuous survival of Mustafa's spirit is expressed through his flute-playing, but his experience as a soldier comes to dominate his life entirely. It appears that such uncontrolled and unbalanced physical violence brutalizes the whole personality and .leads ultimately to self-destruction. The coherence of Mustafa's personality is fractured by his experience. This fragmentation, and the restlessness that will take him relentlessly on an increasingly destructive course, are expressed in his outward behaviour: He did not dare stand still. He had to keep moving, because he was equally afraid of sleeplessness as of his dreams, if he fell asleep . . . He could no longer endure it, but saddled his horse and left the village, in the dark, and silently as a criminal.7 To the extent that Mustafa does not understand his actions and cannot control them, he can be included among the "bewildered". A mark of his incomprehension in the face of his experience is his repetition of a formula: "The world is full of swine". Several characters in Andric's works use a similar formula simply to register their essential experience of the world. It enables them to formalize this experience in a way which cannot make it more acceptable, but at least establishes a pattern in their response which is in itself a kind of solace. This technique can be seen as an example of that vivid recording of experience, rather than any attempt to analyse it, which contributes to the Oriental flavour of Andric's writing. The majority of the other aggressors are, like Mustafa, variations on the theme of an individual who inflicts suffering in the context of the systematic violence of an army. Mustafa is brutalized and deranged by the experience of war. Another possibility is that a particular type of person will be drawn to join the army and flourish because it gives him an opportunity to express the violence already in his nature. That is the case with Mula Jusuf in the story "In Camp",8 a man with an obscure history of implication in uninvestigated acts of violence. He does not dominate the story in which he appears but remains a sinister presence in the background until the end, when he is given the task of taking a young Turkish woman, dispossessed by the war, back to her father. The pattern of his vicious behaviour

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then reasserts itself. Alone with the woman, he forces her to strip and eventually stabs her to death. The idea illustrated in "Mustafa the Hungarian", of individuals functioning as vehicles for evil, is reinforced by Andric's depiction elsewhere of armies as organic forces that sweep across the land. Military institutions have evolved as socially acceptable instruments of aggression and destruction, their elaborate machinery providing a channel for the same forces which are considered irrational in an individual. Mula Jusuf's solitary assault on the girl is horrifying, but similar actions by groups of soldiers are seen by the outside world as a regrettable but inevitable aspect of war. The confusion which such a double standard causes works to absolve Jusuf to a certain extent, and he too appears as the victim of a world dominated by evil too powerful for any human institution to control effectively. The haunting story "Torso",9 with its striking central image, also portrays a man who thrives in a violent situation. It requires closer examination. The structure of this story is one to which Andric was to return in Devil's Yard. There is an outer frame of omniscient narration which describes the monk Brother Petar in his cell, recounting a story told to him by a servant in Asia Minor, where Petar was exiled for some years. The focal point is the figure Brother Petar sees framed in the window of the clock tower of a huge fortified mansion where he has been summoned to mend the clock. It is the figure of a man who once ruled Syria as a ruthless tyrant, having been sent there to quell a rebellion. Eventually, after years of systematic brutality, a terrible revenge is wrought on him, and he is left - his limbs crushed and the features burned from his face - a grotesque torso, who is carried by his servants out into the garden to sit in the sun. His obvious harmlessness is emphasized before Petar realizes what he is seeing: "Something like a child, like an old woman was sitting there . . ."10 This story is particularly concentrated, with each frame contributing a dimension to the meaning. Petar is a skilled mechanic who loves to mend the things of the world which inevitably wear out and break; he is particularly interested in clocks, of which he has a large collection in his cell. He is therefore seen to be on the side of time, in harmony with it and not trying to resist its passing. The servant who tells the story of Celebi-Hafiz represents a pattern of survival

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regardless of the fluctuations of the fortunes of his masters. By contrast with these two passive vehicles of his story, Celebi-Hafiz himself offers an extreme example of a pattern of rise and fall, power and ruin, abrupt change, interpreted by the people either as Divine Retribution or the workings of an Oriental Fate. No distinction is made between these two possible accounts of the tyrant's downfall, respectively "Western" and "Eastern": God is simply another name for Fate. At one point, for instance, the people are described as praying to God, "not because they expected any help, for God was at that time still on the side of the Hafiz, but because there was no point in praying to the Hafiz".11 Like all Andric's monks who play a prominent role, at this level Petar makes no attempt to interpret the workings of fortune in terms of his own faith. On the contrary, the first association which springs to his mind when he sees the "torso" nodding its head in the sun is with one of his fellow-monks nodding as the censer is swung beside him in church. The association does not strike him as in any way irreverent. And yet, Petar is conscious of the differences between East and West and makes an ironical comment when he comes to examine the clock: As soon as I opened it I could see the situation. It was Venetian and well-made, but it had been badly set up so that its workings were exposed to the rain. It must have been done by a Greek or an Armenian, and they are just not suited to this kind or work, because you cannot cheat and lying is no use.12 There is no real attempt to explain the tyrant's fall, simply a recognition that time and fortune inevitably bring change. Various themes are touched on which could be enlisted as an explanation. Petar is introduced as reflecting about the preponderance of evil in the world; the servant introduces his account of the revenge of the tyrant's prisoners with the words: "there is a cure for every ill, and that is that at every moment of a man's life there is a possibility that he will make a mistake, just one slight slip, but that is enough to cause his death and his absolute ruin."13 In addition, the instrument of the tyrant's downfall is a woman; the only creature for whom he ever felt real compassion or affection. But none of these possible human rationalizations is developed; Celebi-Hafiz simply falls from

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power, just as cities and whole civilizations have flourished and perished throughout time. As can be seen from this brief sketch, the basic theme of the story is obvious enough. But the image of the mutilated figure in his garden is powerful and haunting. It conveys at once a sense that nothing has changed. He can make no other physical movement than raise his head, but he does this with such pride that he is clearly unrepentant, and this gives him a curious dignity. And at the same time the grotesque reduction of his physical being brings a sense of resignation and peace. The enigmatic quality of this figure, which settles in Brother Petar's imagination, is emphasized by a series of questions about the circumstances in which he heard the story: Who was the servant? Where did he come from? How did he know so much about the Hafiz? And was it all true? Petar concludes ambiguously: It happened in Asia, in a country where everything is possible and where everyone asks how and why things are the way they are his whole life long, and where no one can ever answer or explain anything, where questions are not resolved but forgotten.14 The existence of these aggressors implies victims. These are often, although not exclusively, women. One whole story is devoted to different aspects of the victimization of women. Translated into English as "The Pasha's Concubine",15 it is the story of a young girl who catches the eye of a Turkish army officer and is summoned to his house. She appeals to him because of her extreme youth - she is not quite sixteen and the reason he gives for finding this stage attractive establishes one of the themes of the story: "This is the right moment in her life. She was separated from her family, frightened, alone, dependent entirely on him. From time to time she seemed to him like a little animal, which, driven against a cliff, stared at him wide-eyed and trembling."16 The image of a helpless terrified animal is used also of Mula Jusuf s victim. In each case the woman's vulnerability acts as a provocation, a magnet drawing the stronger element by a logic of its own. Into the story of Mara the concubine herself are woven two further tales of the victimization of women, so that together they form a complete statement of the

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consciousness. It is this aspect of his madness that seems to disturb the villagers and urge them to give it form in their recollection of the legend of Anika. Within the framework of the story "Anika's Times", this introduction appears as a kind of meditation on man's perennial need to control and account for his powerful response to woman, the need which led to the creation of the legend of Adam and Eve. Here we can see clearly the nature of the "legends" that concern Andric. As in the case of Alija €)erzelez the writer returns to the stage before the legend evolved, to depict the circumstances out of which it arose. In the case of Alija he portrays a hero whom one might describe as the ideal of an aggressive masculine culture. From Andric's account it is clear that his attributes, as they are glorified in the ballads about him, have more to do with the needs of the audience and the singer than with the true nature of the man who has been singled out almost at random. The story "Death in Sinan's Tekke"19 can be seen as a further elaboration of the theme of man's powerful, irrational response to woman. It is told in a gently ironic tone and offers an example of Andric's subtle humour. It is the tale of a wise old dervish, widely respected and admired. As he lies dying in the monastery, people come from miles around to hear his last words of wisdom. Finally the time comes for him to part from the world and he stops speaking in a moment of silent meditation. Those with him watch reverently as the great man evidently offers up his soul to God, and then ceases to be without a further word. What they cannot know is that Alidede, in his final moments, is preoccupied not by a serene prayer but by two memories, the only two incidents from his long life that come to him at that moment of exceptional significance. Each incident involves a disturbing experience with a woman. The first is his discovery, as a child, of the body of a drowned woman. He was so upset that he found himself unable ever to speak of it. The second is his hearing, as a young monk, the running footsteps of a young woman and her pursuer. In her desperation the woman beat on the monastery gate - her only hope of escape - but Alidede, who witnessed the scene from his cell window, could not bring himself to go down and open the gate which would have brought him into direct contact with her. His

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last, unspoken words do indeed take the form of a prayer, but one that is very different in content from what those watching imagine: "Almighty, Great and Only One, I am so much with You and so firmly in Your hands that I know that nothing can befall me. This realization, this peace which You give to those who, relinquishing all, have given themselves entirely to You, that is, in fact, paradise. I have lived without hardship, floating like a tiny grain of dust that hovers in the sun's rays: without weight, as it drifts towards the heights, it is imbued with sun, and is itself like a small sun. I did not know that such bitterness as I feel now could fill a man's soul. I had forgotten that woman stands, like a gate, at the exit as at the entrance to this world. And now, this bitterness has come into me, and it sears my heart in two, reminding me of what I had forgotten, as I gazed into the sky: that the bread we eat is actually stolen; that for the life we have been given we are indebted to misfortune - sin, mischance; that you cannot cross from this world into that better one until you are plucked off like a ripe fruit, falling in a painful, headlong flight and thudding on to the hard earth. You probably bear the bruise of that fall even in paradise. This is my thought, Merciful One, and You see it, whether I speak it or not: it is harder and more bitter than I believed to be enslaved by the laws of Your earth."20 It may be seen that there is a certain pattern in the stories discussed so far. Alidede's insight into the fundamental forces of life is made possible by the single-minded devotional life he leads. His experience is very limited and his mind uncluttered; he is able to see the world more clearly than others who may be too involved in their own complex affairs. The Franciscan monk Brother Petar is similarly clear-sighted because of his distance from the world. For the most part, however, individuals who are preoccupied with living their lives in society cannot see the world for what it is. As soon as they step outside the norms of society they are granted a similar insight to that of Alidede. Anika's experience is the mildest of those we have been considering. Her distance from society leads her to realize the extent of her power over men and the fact that her life has become a channel for these basic instincts. The priest Vujadin has to

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step over the border of sanity before he can realize the strength of these currents. Vujadin's case suggests that in Andric's writing madness can be a kind of "privileged" state, granting individuals an insight into the fundamental currents of life. Mara the concubine and Mustafa are driven similarly beyond the bounds of sanity by their experience, and they are able to recognize the full extent of the power of evil. The strength of evil is generally disguised in society, where elaborate structures are built up to channel and control it. Once these structures are destroyed, for whatever reason, the individuals are confronted by the full force of the currents underlying human life. In the case of Alidede, Vujadin and Anika it is not evil that is revealed by their experience, simply a recognition of forces which are also normally channelled and controlled by society. The impact of this realization is disturbing and alarming because the forces are irrational. Andric's depiction of children is similar. Their experience of the world, like that of the characters we have been discussing, is essentially of things which are upsetting or frightening because they are not understood. As long as the children's experience is not too extreme this phase of bewilderment will pass with their maturity, their achieving a role and position in the world which disguise the stark facts of existence, and they will grow into balanced adults. We can perhaps now see that all these characters suffer from something of the same kind of bewilderment in the face of life as -Derzelez. The most engaging of the characters beset by this bewilderment, in a far more light-hearted tone, is the monk Brother Marko. He is the protagonist of four stories, of which two in particular illustrate his outlook. The first of these, "In the Guest House",21 describes Marko's position in the monastery. He is a peasant of limited intellect, given to expressive language quite inappropriate to his calling. He is profoundly confused by the complexities of the vocation thrust upon him by his relatives. He does, however, find himself a niche in the life of the monastery which suits his temperament. He is

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given charge of of overseeing work on the monastery lands, of the animals and wines, and of attending to the needs of the travellers who stay in the monastery guest house. Athough he is confused by the dogma of his religion, Marko finds that he is sometimes granted moments when he feels in perfect communion with his God. These moments occur most frequently when he is working on the land, digging or planting out cabbages: So, after some heavy work, he sits down on a log, wipes the sweat from his face and breathes hard, then suddenly feels the blood roaring in his shoulders, his neck and his head, louder and louder, until his head spins and the noise fills him completely and carries him away. He sits with his head in his hands, his eyes open, but it seems as though he is flying swiftly away somewhere. And then he, who does not know how to write nicely or to speak cleverly, is somehow able to understand everything and to speak clearly and freely with God Himself.22 Marko's faith is subjected to a severe test when a Turkish visitor is brought into the guest house fatally ill. His companions leave him in Marko's care, ostensibly to seek help, but they do not return. As he tends the sick man, Marko is overcome by a desire to save the soul of the dying infidel. His eagerness gives him a new eloquence and he surprises himself with the fluency with which he half remembers phrases from his studies and invents his own arguments. The Turk suffers this onslaught silently, but when at last he is about to die and incapable of speech Marko brings a crucifix for him to kiss. Summoning his last strength, the Turk spits at it. Marko is appalled; he seizes the cross and rushes out into the summer night, his head throbbing with fury. Gradually, however, his anger subsides: He began to lose himself in the quiet night, in the gaze of innumerable stars. He slowly forgot himself. Waves from his trembling body carried over on to everything around him and he felt as though he were sailing swiftly over an ocean in the dark. The sky above him rocked noticeably. There were sounds all around. He clasped the railing tightly. Everything was on this great moving ship of God's: the village and the fields and the monastery and the guest house.

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"I knew that You did not forget anyone, not even stuttering Marko or that sinful Osmo Mameledzija. If someone does spit on Your cross, it is only like a bad dream. There is still room for everyone on Your ship . . . " In his delirium, he did not know whether he was speaking out loud or only thinking to himself. But he could see: there was room on God's ship for everything and everyone, for He did not measure with rulers or scales. Now he understood how He could be The Terrible Lord, how He could move worlds, he understood everything, although he had no words for it, only he could not understand how it was that he, Brother Marko Krneta, a clumsy and disobedient monk, was standing here holding the tiller of that ship of the Lord's. - And then he forgot himself again. He knew only that everything that existed was moving and travelling, and that it was all going towards Salvation.23 This image of a Christian God willing to accept all sinners, whatever their professed religion, is echoed in a story published after the Second World War in which Allah is similarly described as advising a Franciscan monk not to change his faith as "this question of faiths isn't as important to us up here, in this world, as it is to you there, particularly in Bosnia."24 It is characteristic that Andric should use his expressly religious characters to convey a philosophical outlook which transcends any specific dogma. In Bosnian Story the Franciscan monk Brother Luka is one of the spokesmen for Andric's view of life as a perpetual ebb and flow. Petar and Alidede are also monks. Such men are confronted daily by the fundamental questions of existence, and, except on rare occasions, the coherence of their lives is not threatened by direct experience of evil. It is clear, however, that the outlook of the individual monks is conditioned primarily by their personalities, which may be enhanced by their way of life but not determined by it. In other cases, the religious dogma of any faith is seen as excluding the individual. Marko's failure to grasp the intricacies of Christianity in fact leaves him free for a genuine spiritual experience. But he is made to feel guilty and inadequate by his fellow-monks, who have access to a kind of secret society, the rules of which he cannot understand and which is therefore denied him. Characters in

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Andric's works may evolve their own ritual to order their experience, but they will feel excluded from any organized communal pattern of behaviour. "The Pasha's Concubine" offers an illustration of this. Mara's experience of the world is reduced to her essential fear, but this fear is expressed in a particular way. She feels cut off from other human beings by seeing them at crucial moments engaged in a ritual which excludes her. She is excluded from society by what she has become, and when she turns to the Church she finds that although its ritual is more familiar to her, it is still outside her, passing judgement on her. There is always a discrepancy in Andric's works between the appearance of religious fervour as seen from the outside and the individual experience of it. The example of Alidede, whose fellow-monks interpret his last prayer so differently from what it is in reality, is typical. Marko is granted another moment of insight in the story which recounts his death. There is a darker tone to this experience, however, and the implications for Andric's own outlook are of particular importance. This story, "Beside the Brandy Still"25, revolves around the image of a medallion - a "coin with two sides" showing the head of a Christian saint, which Marko once saw during his studies in Rome. Various experiences disturb him deeply and his experience crystallizes in one idea: "Undoubtedly, there was a great deal of evil in the world, and it was stronger than he could guess. Perhaps it was as strong as the power of good, perhaps even stronger."26 Eventually, as he works by a fire in the monastery, distilling plum brandy, Marko watches the face of a Turkish visitor, who is taunting him and the Christian religion: Brother Marko would raise his eyes involuntarily from his task and glance at the Turk. That head thrown back, that pale face with its green shadows, blazing eyes, everything reminded him of something remote and exalted: of the head of a saint whom he had seen on a picture in a Roman Church. However hard he resisted this sinful comparison which disturbed him, it came back and imposed itself irresistibly like a tempter. This was the head of the unknown saint and martyr: the same exaltation, the same shining eyes and expression of sublime pain . . ,27

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The question of the balance of good and evil has important implications in Andric's work and in the philosophy of life that emerges from it. His earliest prose poems, and many of the stories published between the wars, show a preoccupation with the weight of evil in the world. It seems from Ex Ponto and Anxieties that only a courageous will to survive persuades Andric sometimes to glimpse a balance in the forces of destruction and creation. This belief is rather the product of an intuitive faith than a conclusion based on experience, still less on the unquestioning acceptance of any set of religious views. In the stories published between the wars there is only one character who seems to express a preponderance of good. This is Corkan, the illegitimate half-gypsy, a figure right outside the norms of society, who has many of the qualities of a typical "fool of God". He is a character who appealed to Andric, recurring as the central figure of one story, "Corkan and the German Girl"28, in the story "Mila and Prelac"29 and in the novel The Bridge on the Drina. Corkan is a general scapegoat in Visegrad, a figure of fun who himself joins in the mockery. In the story "Corkan and the German Girl" he is shown obsessively pursuing an obviously unattainable ideal, in much the same way as Alija -Derzelez. The light and humorous tone of the story reflects Corkan's personality. The object of his obsession is physically inaccessible: a tight-rope walker in an Austrian circus company visiting Visegrad. The chaos caused by the circus eventually results in Corkan's receiving a beating which seems to be a regular occurrence, having more to do with relieving the feelings of the official inflicting the punishment than the extent of the crime. When his wounds have healed Corkan emerges from the hayloft where he crawled to recover, laughing at the way he climbs down the ladder. Corkan's resilience, good humour and spontaneity are always associated with the sun, the central symbol of positive forces in Andric's work. Indeed, the character can be seen to have grown out of the role played by the sun in Andric's writing. When, in his old age, Corkan is reduced by the circumstances of his daily existence to a worn-out scarecrow, he simply shrinks and decays while his life steadily ebbs away. He has sight in only one eye: "But the whole sun still fits into that one eye."30 Corkan's death is a rare example in Andric's work of a peaceful, entirely dignified end. He sits in the sun, singing softly over and over

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again the first two words of a long-forgotten song, and slowly passes out of life: " . . .[he] was bathed in sunlight and quite filled with a sense of a strange relationship and perfect harmony between everything that is lost and all that is found, between what is and what ceases to be."31 Corkan provides a counterpoint to the weight of evil in Andric's work. For all its difficulties, his life is successful - gratuitously so, because of the gift of his temperament rather than any effort of his own. He is born a channel for good as others are the instruments of evil. It emerges that the components of Andric's world are constant. The distribution of good and evil, aggression and suffering, positive and destructive forces varies from one individual to another depending in part on innate characteristics and in part on the circumstances of their lives. One more story from this period should perhaps be discussed, as it exemplifies several of the ideas touched on so far. "The Miracle at Olovo"32 concerns a young crippled girl taken by her mother to a holy spring believed to have miraculous healing powers. What takes place is seen by the other women in the shrine as a miracle, and will be recounted as such by them and through subsequent generations. As in the case of Alidede's prayer, however, the "miracle" is another example of the discrepancy between an individual's experience and other people's perception of it. This experience too is one which gives rise to legend and the legend then acquires a reality of its own. In the case of -Derzelez, the stories of his heroism are seen to be the norm and -Derzelez himself as falling short of it, as being in some way less real than they are. Similarly, the crippled girl herself will be forgotten once her experience has served its purpose of fulfilling a human need for miracles. What happens to the girl is simply that her exhilaration with all the circumstances of her journey to Olovo combine with the sunlight pouring down into the water to create a moment of exceptional elation. As in the case of Mara the concubine and Mustafa the Hungarian, who found a formula to express their awareness of fear and disgust respectively, the girl's experience is so intense that it demands formal expression. Such a form exists in the idea of a divine vision. This idea is no more rational than the experience itself but it is familiar, sanctioned by time and institu-

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tionalized by established religions. It therefore acquires the superior "reality" that characterizes legend. The discussion so far does not account for the whole range of stories published between the wars, several of which have no significance beyond themselves, but are simply "good stories". Often throughout his work, where this is the case, Andric will pay more attention to the manner in which the story is told than to its content. In his continuing reflection on the nature of narrative art, his interest extended beyond the experience which demanded to be recorded to the circumstances which made the telling of the tale possible and to the way in which it was told. Some individuals are described as having a special gift which makes even the most familiar and ordinary tales worth listening to. One character with such a gift is the old Franciscan monk Brother Petar, to whom the younger monks listen eagerly as he lies in his monastery bed recounting incidents from his long life. His personality imbues his tales with a calm reflective tone, an objectivity which is very different from the atmosphere of the stories we have been considering, where the central character and his experience dominate. The other important stories published between the wars are not written from the point of view of a particular character, indeed they are not about people at all. One is concerned with mountains, one with bridges, and the third relates a persistent dream. "Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not"33 expresses a theme which persists in Andric's work from Ex Ponto to some of the last notes recorded in Signs by the Roadside. The woman Jelena is the symbol of an ideal of happiness which always escapes the writer. He is aware of her stepping silently through a snowy wood, and walking towards his door along a dark corridor holding a flickering candle. She never reaches the end of the corridor or the poet's door. In another mood, however, he wakes before dawn and stands by the window as though waiting for her: My thoughts hide the beauty of the whole world within them. The content of my life has become an unrealizable dream. And so my life passes, but at the hour of my death I can point to my longing as to the only great, true and beautiful thing in my life.34

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In the full-length story of Jelena she is described as appearing to the writer without warning, often when he is travelling, and generally associated with sunlight. She comes, then, to stand for the kind of joy that comes from the (illusory) sense of freedom and exhilaration of travelling and the triumph of the spirit associated by Andric with the sun. The theme of Jelena is clearly a personal one, and there is no attempt to make it objective through a third-person narrator. The other two stories are generalized statements, important for an understanding of Andric's whole outlook. The themes they treat are developed at greater length in the two historical novels, The Bridge on the Drina and Bosnian Story. "The Rzav Hills"35 describes the frenzied activities of the Austrians in the years following their occupation of Bosnia, and the way in which the hills are able to throw off all trace of them and their ugly buildings after their departure, returning to their ancient, enduring outlines. The story contains much of Andric's view of the differences between Eastern and Western culture, as these were vividly displayed in Bosnia when the European ways of AustriaHungary were imposed on the more-or-less Oriental atmosphere of Ottoman Bosnia. "The Bridge on the Zepa"36 is one of the stories richest in ideas which recur elsewhere in Andric's work. It provides a preliminary sketch for The Bridge on the Drina, in a concentrated form. A Bosnian-born Grand Vizier in Constantinople whose experience is similar to that of the great Mehmed Pasha, builder of the bridge on the Drina - he was taken, like Mehmed, from his native village at the age of nine - wishes to endow his native village with a building that will be of enduring use. He is told of the regular destruction of the wooden bridges built over the Zepa and resolves to have a stone bridge built. The bulk of the story consists of the description of the dedication of the master-builder, planning and building the bridge. Having made his initial plans and despatched them to Constantinople, he builds himself a cabin and settles there, buying simple foods from the neighbouring peasants and preparing them himself, spending the whole day investigating the river and its currents, examining the stone he intends to use, carving and sketching. When work begins, it is at first interrupted by a sudden storm that fills the

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river and sweeps away the preliminary structure. As in The Bridge on theDrina, the villagers interpret this as the will of the river, rejecting all human innovation. But the building starts again, the work stopping with the onset of winter when the master-builder remains in his hut, scarcely emerging, poring in solitude over his plans and calculations. Eventually, halfway through the following summer, the building is completed and the bridge emerges at last from the scaffolding. The portrait given here of the master-builder suggests a devotion to an ideal conventionally associated with religious fervour. This gives his work a mysterious, almost supernatural quality. He works with single-minded, self-denying dedication to create something which will transcend the vagaries of the natural world and the ravages of a human time-scale. The ideas and the creative genius of the master-builder will long outlive him in his works. In addition to the main theme - that the bridge embodies a complete statement requiring no further comment - there is another important idea. The Vizier's initial desire to build something enduring in his native village is prompted by his experience of imprisonment following a political upheaval in Constantinople. The winter months he spent in prison brought a new thoughtfulness, a new awareness of the narrow dividing line between life and death, and a new gratitude for being alive and at liberty. In prison, he remembered his native land and thought of the villagers' houses where his glory was frequently spoken of, without any realization of the price of that glory or the other side of success. His decision to build the bridge was an expression of this new perspective. The hills in "The Rzav Hills" stand for the endurance and immutability of the natural world in contrast to the transience of human life. The bridge has a similar quality of permanence, at least to the human mind, but it has the additional quality of being manmade. The bridge stands, then, for the creative principle, the explicit striving of man to resist and conquer transience. It is a bridge, in fact, between man's life on earth, his aspiration to eternity, and the life of the imagination. It is a particularly fruitful symbol in Andric's work, as can be seen in The Bridge on the Drina. It stands also for the guiding principle of his work, which is that ideas which can be abstracted from experience, like the Vizier's

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motto, cannot communicate the truth of experience itself. The ageold need of mankind for stories is based on this fundamental apprehension that fairy-stories and legends say more about human life and history than any abstraction can. Hence the whole movement in Andric's work away from analysis, in favour of complete entities, stories which communicate through their various components - the central image, recurrent vocabulary and emotional colouring - an experience which is more than the sum of these parts and which cannot, ultimately, be described or paraphrased. (ii) 1945-60 In Andric's work as a whole there is no abrupt break or change of direction corresponding to the various upheavals of the troubled times he lived in. There is, rather, a steady evolution and development of themes and ideas, in which his personal experience is only indirectly reflected. Nevertheless, a number of short stories published after the Second World War either deal directly with it or reflect attitudes prevailing after it in various ways. As was to be expected, the Yugoslav Communist Party which came to power after the Second World War was closely allied to the Soviet Party and the presence of Soviet advisers was felt in all aspects of public life. Cultural life was dominated by the new Communist "establishment", whose influence restricted the range of subject matter considered "suitable" for literature. After 1948, and Yugoslavia's break with Stalin, the atmosphere in cultural life became more relaxed, and from the early 1950s the scope of acceptable literary material was steadily extended. Andric, who made a major contribution to the literary life of the new Yugoslavia with the publication of his three novels in 1945, reflected something of the prevailing atmosphere in a number of his short stories from this period. Examples are "The Tale of the Peasant Siman",37 a complex story of the relationship between a Moslem landowner and his Christian serf as it is altered by the Austrian annexation of Bosnia, and a number of pieces more or less directly concerned with the War. The first postwar years cannot, however, be seen as a homogeneous phase. Andric published some eighteen stories between 1945 and 1948, covering a range of themes and styles; from the tales set in Bosnia under

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Turkish or Austrian rule to themes from his childhood, and timeless reflections set in a contemporary context. Only three stories deal directly and exclusively with the War itself, and of these one is in fact a sketch for a passage from the longest of the three, "Zeko".38 Describing the experience that led the inadequate Zeko, dominated by an aggressive wife and collaborator son, to become involved in illegal activities in the Resistance in occupied Belgrade, it has something of the uneven quality of The Woman from Sarajevo in that there is an imbalance between the treatment of the different characters. In the novel the protagonist becomes almost a caricature among characters whose treatment is realistic. In "Zeko", the situation is reversed. The main character's credibility is undermined initially by the almost grotesque figures of his wife and son, and his later development lacks conviction. Nevertheless, the story contains some vivid passages, particularly those describing life by the Sava River and the bombing of Belgrade. The other two short pieces exclusively concerned with the War are more consistent in tone. "The Titanic Bar",39 published in 1950, portrays the agonized fear of the Jewish owner of a little bar in Sarajevo on the one hand and the development of the brutal, inadequate personality of a young Fascist, or "Ustasha", on the other. The material is superficially as directly a product of the specific circumstances of the Second World War as "Zeko", and yet the quality is different. This difference lies in the fact that the two main characters in "The Titanic Bar" fall into archetypal categories, while Zeko's political "awakening" is not quite satisfactorily accounted for by either his innate qualities or his experience. "The Titanic Bar" describes the situation in Sarajevo in the early stages of the War before the systematic removal of the Jewish population to work camps or extermination, when individual members of the Ustasha movement took advantage of the times to rob and persecute individual Jews. Some of these "Ustashe" acquired large sums of money or jewellery through blackmail or in return for helping some Jews and their families to leave the country. Others, however, had to be content with small-scale activities of various kinds. "And it was often here that the ugliest and most senseless scenes of unimaginable misery and horror took place."40 Andric describes the dingy, squalid little bar owned by Mento Papo, so

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small that only half-a-dozen customers can stand in it at one time; and the character of Papo himself, the black sheep of the Sephardic community of Sarajevo, who took up with petty gamblers and drinkers at an early age and is generally regarded as having disgraced the Jews. The situation is thus essentially ironic: Mento Papo is Jewish only by birth; he has none of the attributes of wealth and success which are generally associated with his race and provide some kind of provocation, in the form of envy or jealousy, for antiSemitism. The crude emotion is here exposed for what it is: senseless hatred of what is different and easily identified as such. The portrait of Mento Papo then becomes an illustration of the growth of fear. The fear common to his whole people is exaggerated in Papo's case by complete isolation. There is no possible way out of the sickening blind alley of terror to which Papo is doomed. He is abandoned by all his former customers and ignored by the Jews with whom he has sometimes to do a day's hard labour. The process of his destruction is already well under way when the long-awaited knock on the door finally comes. The story of the young man in Ustasha uniform who thrusts his way into the bar is then given in detail. His family is described as having begun to decline with the Austrian occupation of Bosnia, and his father as having had a lifelong ambition to exercise power as a prison guard. There is also some doubt as to whether the child is actually his, which leads to violent quarrels between husband and wife. The child, Stjepan Kovic, is physically large, but slowwitted and innately dishonest, always a figure of fun in his native town. This background offers the typical combination of historical circumstances, innate characteristics and personal experience which determines the environment in which an individual develops. Just as Mento Papo's fear and isolation are archetypal, so Kovic's character is also generalized in the manner typical of Andric. He is described as "one of those barren and slovenly people who neither wither nor ripen, who cannot reconcile themselves to an insignificant or average style of life, but have not the strength or ability to alter it by hard work or perseverance. From his childhood, a difficult and tormented man".41 The description of Kovic is developed into the portrait of an inadequate, dissatisfied and consequently potentially dangerous personality. He is a man who needs some outward sign of import-

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ance: he has to carry something as he walks through the town "and the more unusual the article, the better he felt and the more easily and assuredly he stepped".42 Kovic suffers from a painful, obsessive desire to be something other than he is, above all to be seen to be important. The opportunity offered by membership of the Ustasha movement seems therefore to answer his need, although he is taken no more seriously within its ranks than he was outside it, and he soon begins to realize that he has still not achieved the importance to which he feels entitled. When Kovic finally acquires his "own" Jew to persecute, he is once again maddened by the contrast between his expectations and the pathetic, squalid reality he encounters. The account of the "interrogation" is vivid, with Kovic's frustration and bitterness mounting to the point where he shoots his victim, repeatedly and frenziedly. This story is a satisfactory coincidence of universal, generalized themes of fear and persecution with the specific circumstances of the Second World War in Bosnia, with both aspects of the whole developed. As in the case of the victims in earlier stories, Papo's vulnerability acts as a magnet, a provocation to Kovic's aggression, which in turn functions as compensation for his own sense of uneasy dissatisfaction. It is at first sight perhaps surprising that Andric did not write more directly about the War's effect on Bosnia, given the emphasis in his work on the propensity of the mixed population of the area to intercultural strife. But in fact, in view of the particular circumstances of the War in Yugoslavia, it is quite understandable that Andric's statements should have been on the whole indirect. Apart from the struggle with the occupying forces, the victory of the Communist-led Partisan Army involved the defeat of elements hostile to it, including other local Resistance forces; the War saw also the emergence in Croatia of an "independent" Fascist state which contributed not only to the extermination of Jews, but also to the elimination of Serbs living in Croatian territory. The result was that of the one-and-three-quarter million who died during the War, over 600,000 were murdered by their fellow-Yugoslavs. If these circumstances are not treated directly, however, much of Andric's work since the War can be seen as an investigation of the state of mind and

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the kind of breakdown of accepted norms of behaviour which can be seen to have contributed to conflict on such an appalling scale. A reflection on the nature of intercultural relations in Bosnia is given in a piece published in 1946, under the title "Letter from the Year 1920".43 Throughout his work Andric uses Bosnia, with its potential for intercultural conflict, as an image of the human world where the basic conditions of existence can be seen in an extreme, raw form. His frequent reference to the widespread and deep-seated hatred which he describes as characterizing the atmosphere of Bosnian life should be seen in these terms. Whether or not the story was written, or at least drafted, earlier, it is certainly no coincidence that it was published when it was, when the strife which Andric had witnessed in the First World War was exaggerated systematically in the circumstances of open anti-Semitism and civil war. This story is similar in flavour and manner to several published after the Second World War, in which the first-person narrator examines incidents from his own childhood and youth, usually expanding them into more general statements. The degree to which these sketches and stories are actually autobiographical is in many cases uncertain, but together they add up to something approaching an account of the development of the writer's imaginative life. In "Letter from the Year 1920", the references to the response of the narrator to the world of books are familiar. And it is likely that the character of Maks Levenfeld is based on someone known to Andric as a young man. The substance of the piece, and letter itself, however, need have existed only in Andric's imagination, stimulated by his understanding of Bosnia and his knowledge of the repercussions there of both world wars. It is a lengthy reflection of the nature of hatred, seen as an organic force, the "correlative" of fear. In the context of Andric's experience of war the irrational fear characterizing human existence can be seen to have been channelled in a particular direction. The Fascist Kovic's dissatisfaction is expressed as aggression as soon as the opportunity presents itself. In war, the same fundamental unease is given universal expression in the form of legitimized hatred: Hatred which like a cancer in an organism wastes and consumes everything around it, to perish itself in the end, for such

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hatred, like a flame, has no constant form of life of its own; it is simply the instrument of the instinct for destruction and selfdestruction . . . ** The extent to which this hatred is an inescapable facet of the human condition is seen in the fact that although Levenfeld leaves Bosnia in order to escape from its pervasive influence, he is killed as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. Typically, Andric undermines his character's brave attempt to break out of the pattern in this briefly stated ironic final note. As always in Andric's work, however, even such statements as these are relative. In this story, in the context of war, the existence of hatred - properly channelled - is seen as potentially also a positive force. The story raises some other, general, issues. The fear which is the essential condition of human existence engenders the idea of the opposite, the ideal of perfect beauty, justice and happiness. Similarly the hatred which is the manifestation of fear also implies its opposite, love. Acts of hatred may be carried out in its name, but the ideal endures pure and untainted because it is entirely abstract, remote from daily experience. It is no coincidence, Andric seems to say, that man has chosen to place his several gods in the distant heavens. You are, for the most part, accustomed to keep the full force of your hatred for what is close to you. The holy objects you love are generally beyond three hundred rivers and mountains, and the objects of your revulsion and hatred are here beside you, in the same town, often the other side of your courtyard wall. So your love does not seek many deeds, but your hatred is very easily transformed into action. You love your native land, love it deeply, but in three or four different ways which exclude and mortally abhor one another and often come into conflict . . . This impoverished, backward land in which four different faiths live crowded together, would need four times as much love, mutual understanding and tolerance as other countries. And in Bosnia, on the contrary, lack of understanding, which occasionally turns to open hatred, is virtually the common characteristic of the population.45 Andric's comments on intercultural and interreligious conflict can be read on the level of the absurdity of human strife throughout the

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world and throughout history. A memorable passage in this story describes the different chimes of the bells in Sarajevo ringing out the time differently for each of the four faiths. It is clear from this passage that the divisions are man-made, as is the arbitrary choice of method to express the passing of time. But just as the development of the calendar and clocks can appear to offer man control over time, and his religion can appear to give his life meaning, so can his hatred of alien cultures appear to absolve him from his own fear: Whoever spends a night in Sarajevo awake in his bed, can hear the voices of the Sarajevo night. The clock on the Catholic cathedral chimes heavily and assuredly: two in the morning. More than a minute passes (75 seconds to be exact, I counted) and only then does the clock from the Orthodox church strike with a somewhat weaker but penetrating sound, chiming out its two in the morning. A little later the clock tower at the Bey's Mosque sounds, with a muffled, distant voice, and it strikes eleven o'clock, eleven ghostly Turkish hours, according to the calculations of remote, alien ends of the earth! The Jews do not have their own bell to chime, but God alone knows what time it is for them, according to both Sephardic and Ashkenazy reckoning. So, even at night, while everything sleeps, in the chiming of the empty hours in the dead of night, that difference keeps vigil which divides these sleeping people who, when they are awake, rejoice and grieve, receive guests and fast according to four different hostile calendars, and send all their desires and prayers towards one sky in four different liturgical languages. And this difference is always, sometimes visibly and openly, sometimes imperceptibly and covertly, similar to hatred, often completely identical to it.46 Despite Andric's experience of the Second World War, in the stories published between 1945 and 1960 the extreme violence and the brutality of the inter-war stories has generally gone; or at least, in those stories in which violence is depicted it has gone inward and become subtler, even if its destructive power is almost as great. For Andric an essential feature of human relationships remains attack and defence, and he examines this now in his depiction of

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family life, where one partner in the marriage is seen as the aggressor. This aggression can take several forms. It reflects on the one hand Andric's concern with the reality underlying social convention, and on the other his interest in the moments at which these conventions break down completely and the reality is suddenly violently disclosed, as in the extreme case of war. One situation is developed in several stories as a symbol of such covert aggression. "Persecution"47 is a typical instance. In the earlier tales of violence the persecution of individuals was generally public. Now the surface of the lives described is apparently unremarkable, normal and quite satisfactory. "Persecution" opens with a statement of general hostility towards Anica, the wife in one of these ostensibly unexceptionable marriages, and criticism of her having left her husband: "No one could understand why Anica, the wife of Andrija Zerekovic, one day left her home and husband. There was no obvious reason or reasonable justification for such an action."48 This story offers an example of the balance between individual experience and generalization that typifies Andric's technique of characterization. The descriptions of both wife and husband consist very largely of generalization: "One of those strong, shapely girls who are afraid of growing and showing their beauty . . .";49 "It is not a rare occurrence . . . for the eldest sister to stay at home . . . Such a girl is left without any personal life . . .";50 "That is one of those all-powerful laws in our social relations . . .";51 "It was one of those marriages . . .".52 The generalization is deliberately intensified in this story to heighten the contrast between the familiarity of the pattern, the expectations of outsiders and the reality of the marriage itself. "Everything went as God commands and as people imagine and expect."53 The nature of the harassment to which Anica is exposed is then described. The first hints lie in the way her husband looks on her arrival in his household as a new acquisition, the crowning touch to a perfectly successful life. He likes to refer to "[his] wife" as often as possible in conversation with others, implying that he is more concerned with the sound of the word as a boost to his public image than with the woman herself. As he lies beside her at night he falls

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sweetly asleep in the knowledge that she belongs entirely to him, is his property just as his house is. The narrator comments, hi an aphoristic general observation typical of Andric: But great dangers are hidden in so complete a realization of a desire, and the greatest lies in the new desire which appears in the place of the old one . . . Who knows what the existence of the first one was protecting us from, as long as it was within us, tormenting us, alive and unrealized?54 In his new, perfect life, Andrija discovers an entirely new dimension: for the first time he, who has always adapted himself to the expectations of the outside world, is able to speak quite openly with no thought or regard for his audience. A pattern of behaviour then establishes itself between the couple, in which she listens silently to all he has to say while he holds forth, no longer aware of her except as a silent presence, a necessary stimulus. In this torrent of words, then, Andrija builds up an increasingly exaggerated and grotesque sense of his own importance. At first Anica listens, without reacting, but gradually she comes to feel increasingly offended by his onslaught of self-congratulatory fabrication. The terms in which she experiences this form of persecution are similar to those used to describe more blatant forms of degradation in some of the earlier stories: It seemed degrading . . . she felt insulted that he thought he could give his imagination free rein before her, as though before a lifeless object or mindless creature . . . She felt like someone who was being ill-treated, and ill-treated in a heartless, underhand, but ostensibly innocent and permissible manner. She was ashamed because of it all ... This profound feeling of humiliation and shame hurt and stung her insupportably, more and more with every day . . .55 Anica's breaking point is described poignantly: "The years would have passed; if she did not succumb, she would survive them, silently; she would survive the years, but she could not survive the hours and minutes."56 What is at stake here is more than the portrayal of the idiosyncratic behaviour of one individual. It is a reflection of a common aspect

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of human relationships in which one individual dominates another, exploiting the other's passivity and denying his or her right to develop a distinct personality. This type of aggression exists everywhere, but the institution of marriage offers a unique opportunity for its expression. Like physical violence, psychological violence to the dignity of another human being can be provoked equally by the weaker party's vulnerability, a sense of inadequacy in the aggressor or by a destructive urge with no apparent cause. Marriage also offers a situation in which an individual's fantasies can be played out and his need for illusion to a certain extent satisfied. A ritualized pattern of behaviour is established which the partner accepts, although his or her own individuality may from time to time flare up and make its own demands. As in so many other forms of human contact, each actor is locked in his own solitude and "communication" is possible only within accepted, stylized bounds, which always threaten to break down. Marriage in these stories can be seen as a nucleus of society. The rules governing human behaviour are no different, except in scale. It may be seen that there is a general development from the stories published between the wars. The central characters in them were portrayed as having placed themselves "outside" society by what was regarded as their "derangement". Now, the portraits are of people who appear to be playing a "normal" part in society but who are subject in their private lives to the same kind of aggressive or defensive drives, the same need for illusion, the same kind of unease and fear. The existence of a norm outside them from which they are felt to deviate in one way or another is similarly implied. The needs of these characters are expressed in terms of "sickness" which humiliates and shames their partners. Another example of socially acceptable violence is that done to an individual personality by his having to conform to the requirements of his public life, of having to subordinate his own interests and desires to those of his superiors. Alternatively, a man's public position may offer him the opportunity of malicious, covert and socially acceptable violence to others. In these cases, any violence inflicted on others carries with it the fear of retribution. This increases the individual's tyranny in his moments of confidence but

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is a source of constant anxiety, particularly when he is no longer protected by his public role, when he is alone at night. Whether the distortion of the protagonist's personality results from his capacity to inflict misery or is compensation for his own subordination, the effect is the same. The distortion of the personality through the circumstances of his public life will at some point seek to regain a balance which may well be seen by the outside world as madness. The implication is that the organization of social life is itself a form of madness which cannot correspond to or control the true facts of human existence. The striking common feature of all the stories portraying these various kinds of violence is that its vehicle is speech. It is through words that Andrija persecutes his wife; another character compensates for the humiliation of his working life as a civil servant; a consul exerts power over his clients. A supervisor on a state farm tyrannizes an employee through words which alternate with unpredictable periods of silence. There are references throughout Andric's works to the power of words for good or evil, one of the earliest examples being the "Bridge on the Zepa". One story, published in 1954, is entitled simply "Words".57 This time the focal point is not the power of words but their communicative value, their capacity to establish contact between human beings. The story gives two contrasting examples of the use of words: the narrator describes his meeting on a train with an old school-friend who greets him with a torrent of meaningless words describing the surface events of his life since they last met. The narrator soon ceases to hear the words and pursues his own thoughts, reminded by this onslaught of a quite different approach to speech. At one time he had lived in a small hotel in Paris, in a room next to an old Austrian Jewish refugee couple. When the old man eventually died, his wife told the narrator the strange tale of how her thirty years of contented married life had been completely silent. She did not remember her husband saying anything beyond what was strictly necessary in their day-to-day affairs. The result was that they both quite lost the habit of conversation. And then, on his death-bed, the old man had suddenly called on her for comfort and implored her to speak to him, to say anything, just to talk. But she was by now incapable of finding a single word for him. Their life

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together had been an example of real communication and understanding, more profound than may be expressed in words. Yet the need of some proof of this communication was felt at the end in order to give it a different kind of reality, identifiable and in some way enduring by being given form. One important story, "The People of Osatica",58 explores a related idea: the extent to which actions are seen to be "real" and "true" only in so far as they are recorded in words. Andric will often begin a work with an account of its geographical setting, which has a symbolic dimension. In this story, the village of Osatica is described as being situated both on a hill and in a hollow, because of the mountains which rise up above it. Everything depends on the point of view of the observer. The villagers also have a long tradition of telling stories in order to bolster their sense of their own importance. This is typified by the tale of a certain "Hassim": . . . that story is not only more beautiful than ugly reality, it will last longer than Hassim would have lasted had he stayed in the village, and it is worth far more than he was ever worth to the villagers while he was alive.59 These ideas, of relativity and the superiority of the work of art over ordinary experience, colour the story. It portrays a villager who performs a daring feat when he climbs to the top of the church tower, but his achievement is unreal as long as it is not recognized and confirmed by others. Eventually he himself begins to doubt its reality. A counterpoint to the relativity and anxiety which mark the villagers' lives is provided by the craftsman who comes to install a cross on the church tower. While the villagers need public, spoken confirmation of their exploits, the craftsman works silently in a dark room. His craft is its own justification, requiring no words to give it either significance or, indeed, reality. The craftsman's occupation is privileged, on the side of the positive forces of life. He is at one with his task in which confusion and chance are eliminated: "Everything around you works with you and helps you . . . [your work] is strengthened and grows out of itself like a plant from a seed carefully sown, for which everything has been foreseen."60 In all these cases, the words do not themselves carry meaning. They fulfil a function,

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which may be to give "reality" equally to an actual occurrence or to an illusion or to give a form, not in itself "true" or "false", to an underlying "grain of truth" about human experience. Another aspect of the power of words is the subject of one of the stories from this period examining children's insights into the adult world. The child Lazar, in "On Bad Terms with the World",61 likes to listen to adults talking "not because of what they said, as he did not understand much of that, but because of their behaviour and way of speaking".62 One word he overhears captures his imagination particularly because of the mysterious meaning it evidently has for the people who use it: in speaking of someone they know they describe him as "suspect". Lazar becomes obsessed with the word and tries in every way he can think of to discover exactly what the concept entails. The explanation he is given fascinates him without really explaining. He is told that a suspect person is someone who has spoken some forbidden word. The boy is intrigued by the notion of a person to all appearances like everyone else, but cut off, isolated from the rest of the world. He decides to try to cross the frontier of suspicion himself, and thereby gain access to the other, mysterious, sinister side of life. One day, after lengthy preparation, Lazar shuts himself in a room alone, to utter the word that will place him irrevocably the other side of the dividing line, that will put him "on bad terms with the world". There is something irresistibly compelling about the darker forces from which everyone around the child tries to protect him, but of which he is nevertheless aware. The child feels excluded from the adult world by the existence of forces and ideas he cannot understand. It emerges from this story that his sense of exclusion would be more tolerable if there were some good reason for it, and so the child deliberately chooses to cut himself off, thus providing himself with a clear, logical and comprehensible pattern of cause and effect. His situation is of course no different from that of any adult who searches all his life for some explanation of his confusion and sense of isolation, in the same way as he seeks rational explanations for the vagaries of chance. The craftsman in Osatica is able to escape from anxiety and chance in the clarity and logic of his concrete task. This opportunity is not available to most people. What is accessible, however, is the world of fantasy, a world controlled by the workings of the imagination.

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Where words are shown to be often an instrument of destruction, the silent, private escape into a world of ideas is presented as salvation. Children in particular, the major part of whose lives is devoted to playing games, are shown to accept the illusory world of the imagination wholeheartedly. It is not always a source of joy, often activated as it is by an uneasy awareness of incomprehensible forces. There are two somewhat similar stories from this period in which children are taken out of their ordinary, everyday context on an outing: in both cases to a ruined fortress, one of which is in Belgrade and contains the mausoleum of a Turkish Grand Vizier. The substance of each story is a dream involving characters associated with the places visited. The dreams are vivid and demonstrate on the one hand the potent associations carried by ancient buildings, and on the other the fertility of a child's imagination. The temperament of the children through whose eyes have been seen all the stories mentioned so far is strikingly similar, and its particular predilections are developed in the story called "Panorama",63 which contains the least equivocal statement of the positive power of the imagination. This tale describes a source of great excitement in the childhood of the first-person narrator. For about a year during the boy's schooldays in Sarajevo there was a permanent "Panorama of the world": a series of still photographs which could be seen enlarged and brilliantly vivid through a series of special binoculars arranged in a circle. The photographs would be rotated at intervals so that each spectator could look at each one in turn. For the child the world seen through these binoculars - Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, Ceylon - became the only reality - "real, glorious, bright life" - and the life of his little Bosnian town seemed "like a bad dream". The pictures extended and incorporated all that the boy read in books and dreamed and constructed in his imagination. This game of joy and enthusiasm was worth gold to me, and not merely a nickel coin. For, in fact, I gave all that was required for the game from myself and I brought it all out of myself. For many boys of my age anything, even less significant than this primitive panorama, could provide the starting point for such a game, every means, even the poorest, is welcome to them as a way of spreading

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out before them all that makes them happy or uneasy, and which fills them, completely, for it grows with them, through all the years of their growing.64 The style of this story conveys its mood of excitement through short sentences and exclamations. The child's reactions are evoked by his constantly relating what he sees to his own childish experience. The magic of the panorama - and of the world of the imagination altogether - lies in the fact that it can be endlessly expanded. The child comments on some of the people in one of the photographs: People who had all they needed. I had always thought about this kind of life, this kind of people, and as I thought about myself and my family, always regretted that we were not like that, and I used to wonder how we could become like them. And now, here were people like that standing before me - a father, mother and daughter - as though they would at any moment start to walk and talk. The expression on their faces and their gestures captured on the picture made it easy for me to imagine them walking and speaking, although they were silent and motionless. And I did imagine them! And it was better like that, for if they had really had the ability to walk and the gift of speech, they would quickly have said what they had to say and crossed the sunny avenue and the whole spell would have been broken . . . As it was, they walked when I wanted them to and said that I wanted when I wanted. And it had no end, no bitter hint of an end!65 The child's reactions to the pictures and the leaps and bounds of his imagination convey a great deal about a general attitude to life and art which is Andric's own. In connection with the picture of a fortress in Rio, for example, the child's attention is caught particularly by a cannon: A cannon! In the joy of existence which these pictures meant to me, this was the tragic note without which, it seemed, there was neither joy nor existence. This note suggested that every joy and each existence could at any moment be transformed into its opposite, and that was what made them so elusive and - so wonderful and precious.66

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The child participates to the maximum in the pictures which pass before his eyes. He stays on in the darkened room until he is discovered by the manager, but not until he has seen all the pictures several times. The experience is not, however, limited to the time spent watching the panorama itself: That square with its flowers, water, dignified stone buildings, with its beautiful, carefree people, provoked the greatest disquiet in me, particularly at night, when it came to life in my dreams or half-dreams. For you should know that the real life of these pictures began only later, when I returned home and lay down in my bed.67 It is, then, at home in his bed that the child's imagination brings to life the characters and scenes he has observed with such excited concentration. And they not only acquire a life of their own, but act as a stimulus to thoughts about many other different aspects of life. As far as the outside world is concerned, the child's absorption in his imaginary world is often a source of resentment: seeing that he does not belong completely to their world, people tend to try to drag him back into it. And the narrator himself sees that there is another side to his involvement in the vivid life of the pictures: "Because of this passion for the world and life of the pictures, which dominated me completely, I became the debtor of this real world and guilty in the life which I had to live."68 These words are reminiscent of statements about the life of the artist elsewhere in Andric's work. Eventually the panorama leaves: It went, and left me disappointed and alone, with a question which cannot be answered and will not be put aside. - Which is the world, the real world, with living people and their mutual relations expressed in possessions and force and power, in money and calculation, and which is the image of the world, with its riches, joy and beauty? - There is no explanation or answer. The years pass; with new experiences and new journeys the question acquires hundreds of different aspects, but still remains without an answer.69 The question remains unanswered, but the vivid world of the pictures stays brilliantly alive; more durable, often, than the real

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world of everyday experience: "Forgetfulness, which erased so many living faces and places, so many real delights and upsets, had no power over this world."70 The narrator describes how he used to imagine the progress of the characters from the pictures, and from time to time himself, in the towns and landscapes from the panorama. His musings have different forms and a range of tones. The conclusion of the story offers an apt description of Andric's attitude to story, legend, the life of the imagination and art in general: So these pictures from the world of my panorama appeared and disappeared in a flash. And they will perhaps appear again, either these same or different ones. You should not expect anything too confidently in these matters, but you may hope for everything. This was the nature of the love that flared up in me once, as I watched in that closed and half-lit room pictures of towns and landscapes, and it was never extinguished or diminished, but grew with me, not losing its energy or brilliance over the years. That passion was costly and difficult, but I paid for it gladly, without sparing myself, no longer with nickel coins, but with the best part of myself. And yet, I am its debtor, and shall always remain so, for the pictures of the world which I saw or glimpsed cannot ever be adequately paid for. They carry me with them and raise me up, and link me to life, and show me constantly that, as I wandered through the world over the years, I did not waste my strength in vain.71 These passages have been quoted at length as they are an explicit account of the role of art and the imagination in Andric's life. They have the quality of his reflective prose, essays and incidental jottings. In general, in many of the stories published since the Second World War, the philosophical dimension is closer to the surface. The archetypal characters and situations of the earlier ones emphasized the form given to human experience in legend and the fundamental needs from which it arose. Now the emphasis has shifted to an awareness of such stories explicitly as products of the imagination. With the slight change of perspective, Andric seems also to have

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acquired a new capacity to enjoy games, the creation of zany characters and the elaboration of pure fantasies. An example of this tendency is the fantasy "Summer Holiday in the South".72 In fact it is an elaboration of a recurrent idea of Andric's found in Anxieties and Signs by the Roadside. Sometimes by the sea, which he loved, Andric found himself thinking of the perfect salvation of simply dissolving into its salty, iodine evaporation. "Summer Holiday in the South" describes a staid and apparently very ordinary Austrian teacher on holiday on the Southern Adriatic coast. The sensation of renewal and refreshment from the sea, sun and salt air is described in physical terms: "Refreshed by swimming, the sun and the sea-water, he felt as though he were dressed in light, festive, flower-white and scented clothes, and that he was himself blossoming and growing together with them and with everything around him."73 Increasingly, the teacher becomes susceptible to tricks of the air, and the smoke of the cigarette that seems intoxicating in these surroundings: he begins to feel himself part of the heady atmosphere itself. An echo of the exhilaration of the child in "The Miracle" can be felt here. One day the attraction of these visions becomes irresistible and he steps into the brilliance of the light. The process is described with Andric's favourite image of a bridge: The tops of the thick green trees, which were already beneath him, carried in themselves reflections of the brilliance that linked and equalized everything on the earth, on the sea and in the sky. That brilliance was a marvellous, steep, swaying bridge along which a man could climb without gravity and without limit . . ,74 And so the teacher disappears without trace, mystifying not only his wife and the local police but the whole population of the little town, who find the uncertainty surrounding the whole curious affair disconcerting and uncomfortable. This piece is similar to "Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not" and "The Ivory Woman"75 of the inter-war period. It is the expression of an abstract idea in concrete terms, suggesting the force with which quite abstract notions and vague impressions can impose themselves on the imagination, demanding to be recognized as no less real than

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"reality". Increasingly, in the post-War years, Andric seems to explore such ideas and develop them to their full potential. The conscious self-observation of the writer at work and the increased detachment of these stories give rise to an increasingly ironic, often gently humorous, tone and to a tendency towards allegory. In many stories published since the Second World War there is a clear allegorical dimension, an obvious example being "Panorama". It is true to say that Andric had shown a predilection for allegory early in his writing, and a tendency to present his stories frequently almost in the form of a parable, an enigma, with a meaning to be deduced from the material. In the post-War period several works are clearly allegorical. The most obvious is a little piece reminiscent of a fable by Aesop, "Aska and the Wolf'.76 It tells the story of a lamb with an exceptional talent for ballet, whose passionate instinctive dance so astonishes and delights the wolf poised to pounce on her that he watches enraptured until he is himself shot by shepherds searching for the lamb. The tale includes several general observations: We do not even know how much strength and how much potential are hidden inside every living being. And we cannot guess how much we are capable of. We exist and pass on, without ever realizing all that we could have been and done.77 The main concern of the story, however, is with the power of art over death and the almost superhuman strength of the artistic impulse if the artist is prepared to risk all in his commitment. Another plainly allegorical tale from this period is "The Tale of the Vizier's Elephant".78 The introduction to the story makes its figurative quality explicit in a general statement about the particular nature of Bosnian stories: Bosnian villages and towns are full of stories. In these tales, for the most part imaginary, beneath the incredible events and often invented names, the real and unrecognized history of that region, its living people and long-dead generations, is hidden. Those are those Oriental lies of which the Turkish proverb states that they are "truer than any truth".79

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This general statement is then illustrated by a reference to a particularly elusive and strange breed of Bosnian trout. The reader is now prepared to accept the strangeness of the ensuing story and to look beneath its unreal surface for the "grain of truth" around which it has been built. The story is woven through with references to the telling of tales and blatant lies, the discrepancy between an event and its later elaboration, the need to invent what cannot be known. One of the subsidiary variations on the main theme is quite incidental, but carries wide implications. In the same way that Cerzelez had grown larger in the stories of his heroism, so that the people were disappointed when they actually saw him* so the Vizier's young elephant in this tale seems larger than he really is because he reflects the people's fear of the Vizier himself. Indeed, the fact that the awesome ruler's pet is actually an elephant is an illustration of this process. What is suggested by these various references is the familiar truth that the words people use are not the substance of their communication; they are not themselves the meaning, but only a pointer to that meaning. The main line of this story is, then, the tale of a particularly ruthless vizier whose arrival in Travnik is preceded by terrible accounts of his cruelty, but who is himself never seen in the town at all. This fact simply increases the townspeople's anxiety, so that when the Vizier acquires an elephant (the fashionable way of demonstrating one's position in Turkey at this time is to own an exotic wild beast), their resentment of the innocent creature is the more intense. There are several elements of importance in the development of the story such as the obvious innocence of the animal, which causes havoc in the narrow streets of Travnik because of its size and youthful exuberance, its need of play and exercise. It has much of the quality of the various young girls in Andric's works, from Mara the Pasha's concubine on. Fresh and innocent, on the threshold of life, they are caught up in events over which they have no control and which eventually destroy them. For all its size, the elephant is invested here with a kind of primeval grace which gives the story a humorous dimension and at the same time a special poignancy, and eliminates the danger of sentimentality which often accompanies allegory. What the story chiefly concentrates on is

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building up the atmosphere of an occupied land, the fear and bitterness, the hatred and helplessness of the population caught in a complete impasse. The townspeople react in different ways to the oppression, depending on their personal power and position. The most powerless are the most vociferous in their resentment, the wealthy are cautious and cunning, while the youngest are able to see not only that the elephant is innocent, but that the Vizier himself is vulnerable. The central point of the story is made in a manner typical of Andric. The narrative focuses on one character, Aljo, who sits on a hillside above the town, and from this new perspective is able clearly to see the nature of the»impasse in which he and his fellow-citizens are trapped: This was not a head accustomed to thinking sharply and clearly, but today, here, a small ray reached even his brain, a weak and brief ray of consciousness about the kind of town and country and empire it was in which he, Aljo, and thousands like him, a few more foolish and a few cleverer, some richer and many poorer, were living; the kind of life they were living, a meagre and unworthy life which was passionately loved and dearly paid for, and, if you thought about it, it was not worth it, it really was not worth it.80 As Aljo sees it, there are two possible ways a man can react to this situation. He expresses the dilemma simply: Whoever is brave and proud, quickly and easily loses his livelihood and his freedom, his property and his life, but whoever bows his head and succumbs to fear, he loses so much of himself, fear consumes him to such an extent that his life is worth nothing.81 Once Aljo has clearly and definitively observed the dilemma, he resolves it instinctively. He goes back down the hill to become once more the old Aljo, who loves a good joke. In its limited way, with the scope for action at its disposal, Aljo's spirit triumphs. He has shown more courage than his fellow-citizens in his willingness to complain to the Vizier about the elephant and, when this mission proves impossible, after his initial reaction his old zest for life returns. In his moment of vision, however, Aljo has identified the essential dilemma

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of defeat and occupation which is expressed in the Yugoslav oral epic tradition: tragic and noble death - epitomized by the self-sacrifice of the hero Milos Obilic, who died killing the Turkish Sultan - or survival, in itself ignoble but redeemed by humour, symbolized by the figure of Prince Marko. This story is a particularly apt illustration of its introductory remarks. The wry humour with which it treats the surface content, the elephant and the townspeople's inept reactions, cannot relieve the underlying account of the price of life under occupation which is vividly evokes. We can perhaps, then, identify in this period an increased tendency to allegory. There has been an allegorical dimension present in many earlier works as well, through the principle of stories gathering around a few essential myths or legends, and through the generalized character of many individual incidents and figures. Characters and situations tend to stand for something beyond themselves. This trend is allied to the other that dominates in this period: an increased interest, explicit and self-conscious, in exploring the world of the imagination, a sense of the writer watching himself at work. It is possible to see the particularly complex texture of Devil's Yard as arising out of a combination of these two tendencies of Andric's mature years. (iii) The House On Its Own*2 In 1960 Andric published a short piece entitled "Faces",83 which lent its name to the collection of stories published in the same year. It introduces the altered perspective which seems generally to mark the writer's attitude to short-story writing in this period. It also provides a preliminary sketch for the collection of stories published posthumously as The House On Its Own. "Faces" begins with an introductory passage, which can be seen as the starting point for the longer collection: . . . Ever since I can remember, the human face has been for me the most brightly lit and most attractive fragment of the world that surrounds me. I remember landscapes and cities, and I can conjure them up in my memory when I want and keep them

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before me for as long as I want, but human faces which I have seen, both waking and in my sleep, come to me of their own accord and remain under my gaze for an uncomfortably long or painfully short time; they live beside me or vanish capriciously and completely, so that no effort of the memory can ever summon them again . . . And while I look at towns and landscapes through my own experiences and as a part of myself, there is no end to my debate and coming to terms with human faces . . . Singly, or in procession, human faces appear before me. Some spring up silently, of their own accord or through some cause which is unknown to me, or some come, as though in response to an agreed signal, on hearing a word or phrase that always accompanies them.84 This introduction is followed by four examples of the kind of faces that appear to the writer and the kind of response they arouse in him. In order to enter imaginatively into the experience of other human beings, the artist must remove himself - create in himself a nameless silent space. The essential elements of this piece provide the basis for the more developed reflection on the process of artistic creation which The House On Its Own represents. The work is perhaps more interesting in its overall significance than for its individual stories, which vary in substance and quality. Together they offer a comprehensive account of the way Andric selected his material, or rather, in keeping with the image that governs this work, his material selected him. The idea of "characters in search of an author" has, of course, interested a number of writers from Sterne to Pirandello and Unamuno. In his treatment of it Andric does not enter into any theoretical discussion of "truth" and "reality" but develops the theme on a literal level; his characters are all "remembered". The first idea to emerge from the introduction to The House On Its Own is that creation is possible only under certain conditions. The first of these necessary conditions is isolation. As we know from elsewhere in Andric's work, solitude was a state he chose and sought. The description of the house in Sarajevo where the work is set suggests the ideal environment in which the process of artistic creation can take place. The house is described with Andric's typical

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care for precise detail. Its character is significant in view of the writer's long-standing rejection of the arbitrary division of the world into East and West: it was built in 1887, when Central European modes were being mixed with the older Turkish style of building. The furnishings express a similar mixture of styles and periods, suggesting that the inhabitants were people who "did not care much about the external appearance of things, or their names, but knew how to make use of all that these things could offer for a modest, peaceful and comfortable life to those who cared more for life than for what could be thought, spoken or written about it."85 Such an environment does not intrude into the life and thoughts of those living in it; it offers an ideally peaceful background. "Here that peace reigns which we desire constantly, but achieve in our lives only with difficulty, and which we equally frequently seek to escape, without real need and to our own detriment."86 The next condition Andric postulates is the need for the artist to create in himself a state as near as possible to the tranquil neutrality of his physical environment, to make of himself a perfectly passive vacuum into which ideas can flow. This neutrality is an idea that recurs in Andric's reflections. Two passages in Signs by the Roadside use the image of the photographic plate, and suggest that the artist has to create in himself the negative of what he wishes to convey in order to project it in positive form on to the imagination of his readers. Here, the idea is developed: An ordinary looking day is beginning for everyone, including myself. Only, while others sit down to a regular activity, with a more or less clear aim in front of them, I gaze absent-mindedly at the pictures and objects around me as though they were strange and new, and feigning awkwardness, I wait for my idea to begin in me. With naive cunning (whom am I deceiving, and why?) I seek the thread of my story, broken off the previous day, endeavouring to look like a man who is not seeking anything, I listen to hear whether the voice of the story can be heard within me, ready to turn myself completely into the story or part of the story, into a scene or one of its characters. And less than that: into an instant in a scene, into one single thought or movement of that character. In this endeavour, I circle round my target, indifferent and

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apparently innocent, like a hunter who turns his head away from the bird he is hunting but without in fact letting it out of his sight for an instant. I have to proceed like this; it has become second nature to me. For the moment that a fragment of my everyday consciousness intrudes and I acknowledge my intention and call my aim by its true name, I know what will happen. Thinner than the least substantial mist, all this atmosphere of nameless dream will disperse and I shall find myself in this familiar room, just as I am in my identity card or in the list of occupants of the flats where I live, a man with recognized features, without any connection whatever with the characters and scenes in the story I was thinking about until a moment before . . . And then . . . my day which has barely begun will suddenly turn grey and, instead of my story and my work, there will be opened up before me the intolerable triviality of an existence which bears my name but is not mine, and the deadly desert of time which suddenly extinguishes all the joy of life, and steadily kills each one of us.87 In his receptive state, however, the artist may also be pursued by ideas and characters which demand his attention regardless of what he had planned to write that day: But it can happen that my day starts differently as well, that I do not lie in wait or anticipate my stories, but they seek me out, and many of them at the same time. In a half-sleep, before I have opened my eyes, like the yellow and pink stripes on the closed blind of my window, there begin to tremble in me of their own accord the broken threads of unfinished stories. They offer themselves, waken me and disturb me. And later, when I am dressed and sit down to work, characters from these stories and fragments of their conversations, reflections and actions do not cease to beset me, with a mass of clearly delineated detail. Now I have to defend myself from them and hide, grasping as many details as I can and throwing whatever I can down on to the waiting paper.88 We have seen elsewhere in Andric's works that his introductions serve to create a certain frame of mind in the reader, which will

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determine his reading of the work to follow. This account of the passivity of the creative artist raises the question of what kind of character and scene particularly imposes itself on the artist's mind? The work thus offers an explicit expression of the question running through all Andric's writings: what kind of stories capture the imagination and demand to be handed down through the generations, because they seem to reflect some general truth about the condition of mankind? For the most part the stories that follow this introduction are portraits, while a minority place more emphasis on the situation they describe. Because of the introduction, we are bound to read the stories with their general significance in mind, so that on the whole Andric's familiar techniques for conveying generalization are not so obtrusive here as in some other works. There is a reminder at the beginning of each piece of the central image of the work; the way in which each character "visits" the writer is described. All possible variations on this theme are used, so that the device does not become overworked but is exploited with the lightness of touch and gentle irony which pervade the whole volume, despite the tragic nature of some of the individual tales. Such a procedure is typical of Andric's later short-story writing in its self-conscious observation of the artist at work. The effect of this introduction is, then, to concentrate the attention of the reader not solely on the anecdote or character described, but on its function in the writer's imagination. In this light, the eleven pieces in the collection all offer examples of a "type" of subject matter which presents itself to the artist as suitable for some specific reason. A further dimension is added by the fact that some of the characters portrayed suggest their own reasons. These are functions which have been at one time or another ascribed to literature, but which Andric dismisses with characteristic irony and scepticism. Two of the portraits describe the type of ostensibly "unbalanced" character who always particularly interested Andric. One is a compulsive liar and the other an hereditary alcoholic with suicidal tendencies. The portrait of the liar, Baron Dorn, typifies the irony which colours most of this collection. His compulsion is described in the

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terms Andric uses elsewhere of more serious psychological derangement. The Baron can thus stand for any of Andric's characters regarded by society as "abnormal". He is described as a passive vehicle for deceit, which gives him the innocence associated with many of Andric's characters who are to an extent absolved from responsibility even when they are the instrument of evil. The Baron's "defect" is in any case harmless. He is resented because he exaggerates a universal human tendency to deceit. This is unacceptable because it reminds others of their own fault and their hypocrisy in condemning the Baron, and because it undermines their tenacious hold on what they choose to regard as the "truth". Their condemnation of the Baron presupposes the existence of an objective reality known to everyone except him, a supposition which is absurd on anything but the crudest level, particularly in the work of Andric with its recurrent theme of a lie, an illusion, being more real than any truth. Andric conveys this absurdity by stressing the arbitrary dividing line between "truth" and "falsehood". The "truth" as seen by others becomes increasingly "improbable" to the Baron. Like that of most individuals, his life is characterized by an endless, vain search. In his case the search is for someone who would believe him, for the alchemy which would transform "the miserable, heavy lead of his lie ... into the pure gold of the one real truth".89 This image ironically reverses the conventional terms in which truth and falsehood are usually defined. The more conventional idea is expressed earlier in the story in a lively account of the working of the Baron's imagination, reminiscent of Andric's description of the pure fantasy represented by the circus: "words begin to spark and set fire to each other and to light up vistas which he had not even imagined existed until that moment".90 The Baron is one of the characters who suggests a reason why the narrator should take him seriously: Among the traces which have been left on the cobblestones of Sarajevo, and which now often come to life and knock on my doors and window, the story of Baron Dorn is not one of the most significant, it is not glorious or important, nor particularly tragic, but it is pathetic. A hopeless case. And that is precisely why he likes to call on me, because in me, he says, he has sensed

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a man who does not accept hopelessness, one who will listen to him patiently and with understanding.91 The narrator dismisses this trust as illusory: such a character is no more "credible" in fiction than in "reality"; the writer cannot "help" him, beyond understanding that his "hopeless case" is universal. The reason suggested by the alcoholic in the other portrait of this kind is still less plausible. He maintains that the narrator ought to encourage writers to bring a problem like his to the attention of their reading public; in other words, that literature should be a vehicle for social comment and reform. Andric's scepticism is clear: We talked. The conversation lasted a long time, and went the only way it could have gone. Roughly as though we had raised an immense stone block for a fraction of a second into the air, and let it go again to return to its original position. Many words and rapid or interrupted sentences, and all in all: nothing.92 The portrait of the alcoholic is coloured by a similar kind of innocence to that of the Baron. The central character has inherited the family tendency just as a man inherits an illness, or indeed any physical or mental malfunction. The individual is, then, seen as the victim of arbitrary forces which destroy his life. The theme of drinking as a means of escape plays a prominent part in many of Andric's later works, as one aspect of the broader theme of illusion. Here the theme is used to suggest three different sets of ideas: the desire of the individual to escape from his sense of isolation and absurdity; inherent derangement; and the more general symbolic sense in which alcoholism can stand for all the self-imposed evils or delusions of human life. It is easy enough to see the ideas that underlie the portraits of these two individuals. Two of the other pieces which are essentially portraits describe individuals. But in their case it is their situation, rather than their personalities, which can be seen in general terms. One portrays a relationship of love and violence which is at once oppressive and vital, and the other the plight of a peasant girl taken from her devastated village by the Turks, to be sold as a slave. This story is an extreme statement of the theme of captivity which runs all through Andric's works:

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People are born to be enslaved by the enslavement of life, and to die as the slaves of illness and death. Everyone is a slave enslaved to something, for he who is sold in chains in the market-place is not the only slave; whoever sells him and whoever buys him is also a slave.93 Another portrait in the collection is ostensibly simply that of an individual and is described without any anecdote which might place the character in a generalized situation. And yet it gradually emerges that he does have a function in relation to others. His features are so unusual that he makes an immediate impression. He lives every aspect of his life with verve and gusto. He is unpredictable, awkward and yet appealing, looking boldly and mockingly on ordinary people, their orderliness and laws "as though he had been created and existed simply in order to surprise and confuse people around him".94 The reader's answer to the tacit question behind this whole collection - why do some characters particularly demand attention would in this case have to be in terms such as Andric himself suggests; that he is one of those people who are remembered as larger than life and more attractive than they are in reality. The two most developed portraits in the collection are equally characteristic of Andric. One concerns an historical figure - the Vizier of Mostar, Alipasha Rizvanbegovic - drawn with typical abundance of historical detail. His story focuses on one moment of his life: not the height of his power, but his disgrace and subsequent death during the campaign of Omer Pasha Latas. The suggestion is that success and power cannot tell us much about the true nature of human destiny. When the Vizier passes by the narrator's window with his full retinue as Lord of Hercegovina he merely waves, without stopping, but when he comes as a defeated prisoner he stops for a moment to exchange "a few ordinary words". Alipasha's story, which has points of contact with the earlier "Torso", is introduced in general terms. One of the preconditions of human power is that it must be at the expense of others. Alipasha achieves his ambition to be the highest authority in Hercegovina only after playing his role in the age-old pattern of fraternal conflict, resulting in the murder of the most determined of his brothers. In his own eyes he is a "firm and just" ruler, but to those he rules he is

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"arbitrary and cruel". The ironic tone in which the brief account of Alipasha's life is given increases its generalized quality by reinforcing the sense of an inevitable pattern. The point of Alipasha's story is the insight granted by the altered perspective, when "he came to understand what remains of a man who has suddenly lost everything, and, stripped of all, stands on his own feet, naked and alone, against all the forces of the surrounding world, helpless and invincible".95 The change which is described as coming over Alipasha's physical appearance following his humiliation reflects the inner change. As the trappings of power fall away, so do the man's pretensions to it. His face, when it shows any trace of life, comes increasingly to express "the mild disorientation and devotion of a mendicant dervish".96 Stripped like this to his human essence, with no further pretensions to position or power, the man gradually acquires real stature. Denied the possibility of resistance, he is forced into himself and finds peace, so that he feels an urge to try to comfort and encourage the anxious villagers and townspeople as they watch him pass instead of being himself consoled by them. From the pedestal of his suffering, as from the highest mountain, he says that he made out and understood some truths about human beings and human relationships more clearly than ever before in his life. Andric leaves the image of the fallen Vizier, forced to parade through Bosnia on a mangy mule, to speak for itself. Alipasha is prevented from "explaining" his new understanding when he is shot by a Turkish soldier. For Andric, a truth that could be directly told in words would not be worth telling. Fundamental truths can be embodied only in images. The other story of particular density, "The Circus",97 centres on a child's excitement on his first visit to a circus. The tone is similar to that of "Panorama" and other stories presented as childhood memories. The circus performance and the child's breathless concentration are described in detail. The terms in which the child expresses the illusion of perfection conjured up for him by the circus are those which characterize the search of every individual for a "better" life and happiness: They knew what they wanted, and whatever they wanted they could do. They did not need words or explanations. They did not

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hesitate, they did not make mistakes . . . They moved and lived in confidence. They knew nothing of misunderstanding or doubt. . . They had turned their backs on all that was called "life", but only for the sake of a more perfect and more beautiful life. They were happy.98 This story offers a vivid illustration of Andric's recurrent idea that illusion is more compelling, more "real", than reality. It conveys the intoxicating power of the fleeting belief that the object of our search is attainable. The inevitable disillusion when the performance comes to an end "Could these things have an end? Why then it was as if they did not exist! Could beauty lie?"99 - is paralleled by the main part of the story, which describes the fate of the circus director - a tale of illness, misery, blackmail and violence belying the apparent glamour and excitement of circus life. The circus manager apologizes for his intrusion into the narrator's life, but explains that he has come to "complete the narrator's childhood memories".100 Andric, as always, balances one image with its opposite, because everything in life must be illuminated from all sides. Other stories in this collection suggest another reason for the artist's choice of material. It may be that the secret lives of insignificant and rejected individuals should also be illuminated through the artist's intuition. There is a suggestion here that each individual's life is equally worthy of attention, if only because of a sense of guilt: "Because, if out of selfishness and for the sake of our own comfort we avoid hearing a person out, we shall probably have to do it later, ashamed, in an involuntary memory or a dream . . ."101 These words touch on the recurrent idea that one "must always let a man tell his story as he wants, in his own way, for every story is true at one time or another". This theme is developed in Devil's Yard. It occurs twice in The House On Its Own: in connection with Alipasha and in a piece entitled "The Story".102 This tale is of particular importance in this collection, itself a reflection on the nature of story-telling. It deals not with the material of art, but with narrative sjyle and technique. It describes a character renowned for his ability as a teller of tales. He is essentially selfeffacing:

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He never talks about himself, never defends or justifies himself; he does not exaggerate or intrude. While others regularly seek to enter into my story and sometimes try to do so inappropriately and importunately, he would, on the contrary, like me not to mention him at all, and if I do relate one of his jokes, he would like me not to tell anyone where it came from.103 The ideal narrator's task is difficult. He must efface himself so that his material can speak for itself and make its full impact directly on the reader, but at the same time his craft can add a new dimension to the story told. One is reminded here of the description of Brother Petar as a story-teller, and the indefinable atmosphere associated with the way he spoke. The craftsman and the artist can create this atmosphere, which is engendered because what they create is npt life itself but something consciously apart from life; something salvaged, at least temporarily, from the flux. When the unobtrusive story-teller has left the room, the narrator returns to where he had been sitting, listening to the tale: It seemed as though he had not actually left the room, as though something of his, invisible, but alive and real, had remained behind him here and was continuing to talk, not in words, but directly, through the living sense itself of what Ibrahim-Effendi had been relating. I listen to the silence of my room speaking on, and from time to time I acknowledge with a nod the truth of what I hear. If anyone were to see me, they would think I had gone mad. But I am listening to the very source, usually inaudible, of all Ibrahim's stories.104 The narrator then recalls the tale his visitor had been telling him. It is a story of intense emotion and drama, conveyed through vivid visual detail without further comment. Ibrahim has features in common with other characters from this collection and stands for a set of ideas familiar in Andric's work. To others, he seems like a man who does not really live, who cuts himself off from society just as Dorn the compulsive liar and Jakov the drunkard had done:

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Instead of so-called "real" life, whose blows he had felt while still in his mother's womb, he built himself another reality, composed of stories. With these stories of what might have been but never was, which is often more truthful and more beautiful than everything that did happen, he shielded himself from what "really" happened around him every day. So he escaped life and cheated fate. He has been lying for nearly fifty years here in the cemetery on Alifakovac. But he lives on here and there, from time to time, as a story.105 These last words touch on three related reasons for the telling of stories which we have met in Andric's work: the notion that "what might have been" can be more "truthful" than what really occurs; the idea of "cheating fate" - like "the legendary Scheherezade"; and the idea of the "immortality" of characters in a work of fiction. The range of stories in this collection, and the reflections which emerge from its setting, make it an account of Andric's short-story telling in miniature.

4 The Novels The bulk of Andric's fiction consists of stories and, while some of these are quite long, it seems that the shorter, more concentrated form attracted him most. Nevertheless, it is for the three novels published immediately after the Second World War that Andric is chiefly known, certainly abroad and probably also at home. During the War Andric declined to publish anything as long as the occupation lasted, so that it was at least partly chance which drove him to evolve the longer form, arranging the shorter units into more complex wholes. Two of the novels, The Bridge on the Drina1 and Omer Pasha Latas2 (published after Andric's death), have the same basic structure. They are a collection of individual unilinear entities linked together around a central theme. They reflect Andric's characteristic tendency to work in cycles of interlinked but independent units. The model for his approach is clearly that of the traditional ballads. The effect of these songs is cumulative, and their meaning lies not so much in the individual ballads as in their embodiment of a broad set of ideas and values. Andric's first published story, "Alija-Derzelez", is an example on a small scale of the exploitation of his model. On the broadest scale, the whole body of Andric's works can be seen to work to the same end. . . . everything that exists is one single reality, and it is only our instincts and the irregular reactions of our senses that lead us to see in the variety of phenomena in which this one reality is manifested separate, distinct worlds, different in both their characteristics and their essence. Those worlds do not exist. There is only one reality, with its eternal ebb and flow of laws which are known to us only in part but which are always the same.3

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These words from "Conversation with Goya" may serve as a definition of Andric's works, which all approach the same core of fundamental issues of existence from different angles and perspectives. What this means can be seen clearly in the case of the three novels published in 1945. For all their varied subject matter they are concerned with the same issues, but the angle of vision is very different in each one. The Bridge on the Drina presents a broad timescale and portrays the history of a town over four centuries. In Bosnian Story4 the focus is narrowed to a small group of people over a seven-year period, while in The Woman from Sarajevo5 Andric concentrates on the fate of one individual. The course of the protagonist's life in this last work is determined by a fundamental anxiety. A similar kind of anxiety underlies each of the other novels and colours all their various components. Their significance does not, then, lie in the abundance of detail that forms their surface, but in the cumulative effect of the ideas behind them and the whole philosophical frame of reference, in which all the details are of only provisional and partial importance. The Bridge on the Drina The novel was written quickly, between July 1942 and December 1943. An outline of some fifty pages has been preserved, as well as jottings treating various aspects of the subject matter. As we have seen, "The Rzav Hills" and "The Bridge on the Zepa" form part of this preliminary process. The Bridge on the Drina is the chronicle not of a family but of a small town, and in particular of the focal point of that town: the bridge over the River Drina. The town is Visegrad on the eastern edge of Bosnia, near the border with Serbia. The chronicle traces its history from the sixteenth century to the First World War, and uses the bridge to bind the individual chapters and stories together. The emphasis is on the evolution of a common mentality in the town, deriving from common experience and a common heritage of legend and anecdote. The population of the town is mixed, but Andric chooses in this case to stress the coherence of the whole. This is achieved partly by the time-scale, but also by Andric's basic

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intention in the work. This is to contrast the transience and insignificance of individual human life with the broader perspective of life as itself enduring, a constant ebb and flow. On this level the bridge provides not only a structural but also a symbolic link. Each chapter or anecdote is in some way connected with the bridge. It is the focal point of the town, and most important events occur on or near it. Such an apparently simple structural function contributes also to the main direction of the work, which depicts the growth, from a series of disparate events, of a common heritage. The movement of the chronicle through the four centuries it describes is not steady. The first event of major importance to the people of Visegrad, the building of the bridge in the mid-sixteenth century, is described in detail over three chapters; the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when no important historical events affected the town, pass by in a single chapter; the nineteenth century covers ten chapters, and the years from 1900 to 1914, the remainder of the work, a further nine chapters. Such a scheme allows the author to describe the main events affecting the life of the town in detail and also to suggest an awareness of history as never uniformly well-known or related. In his account of the building of the bridge he is able vividly to present the discrepancy between the accounts which remain in the popular consciousness and the events themselves. The static nature of the centuries of Ottoman rule is then highlighted by the changes which take place during the nineteenth century and increase in speed and scope with the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina at the end of that century. The impression created in this way is that in the life of a community, as in the life of an individual, the passing of time cannot be measured strictly chronologically. Some periods of time pass more slowly or more rapidly than others; some appear longer because they are more filled with important events and changes; others count as nothing, for they contain no events by which to measure their passing. But the clearest implication of the broad time-scale is the predictable one in Andric's work: that, for all these events and changes, nothing of significance alters. The Bridge on the Drina begins with a description of the town of Visegrad at an unspecified moment in its history, complete with all its legends, its traditional children's games and its established

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customs. This is the "personality" of the town, not radically altered by historical changes, and inherited by the passing generations. The geographical setting is described as the first factor to influence the mentality of the population. Visegrad has grown up in a wide fertile valley surrounded on three sides by gentle hills and rich farming land. The townspeople have a reputation for being carefree, quick to spend their money and enjoy life. The life of the town, despite the major historical upheavals which affect it, is steady and on the whole harmonious. Such a description is arbitrary and offers no objective information about the real nature of the town of Visegrad. It reflects only Andric's intention to emphasize a harmony which is suggested to be also a consequence of the presence of the bridge. The bridge is taken for granted in the life of the town. But it is taken for granted in a positive way. It links the town with its suburbs: "In fact, when one says 'links' it is as accurate as saying: the sun rises in the morning so that we are able to see around us and complete our necessary business, and sets in the evening so that we may sleep and rest from our daily toil."6 For the bridge is the only permanent and safe crossing-point on the whole central and upper Drina, and the vital link in the road connecting Bosnia with Serbia and, through Serbia, with the rest of the Ottoman Empire. For the townspeople the bridge is as vital a part of life as the sun, while it is the raison d'etre of the town itself, which has grown up around the bridge "as from its root". The importance of the bridge on the Drina is further highlighted by the fact that there is another bridge in Visegrad - over the Rzav, a small river which joins the Drina at the edge of the town. But any mention of "the bridge" always means the carved stone bridge over the Drina and never the simple wooden one over the Rzav, "without beauty, without history, with no other meaning than that it serves the locals and their livestock as a crossing-point".7 From the beginning, therefore, we are given some idea of the importance of the bridge on the Drina in the life of the town, and in the course of the chronicle we gradually discover what exactly its "meaning" is. The role of the bridge in the townspeople's mentality, as Andric describes it, typifies the way in which his characters in general experience their lives. The symbols Andric uses to convey their

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essential experience grow out of that experience, and are not imposed on it from outside. This can perhaps be most clearly seen in The Bridge on the Drina where the bridge is experienced as a symbol, even though its significance is never articulated. The townspeople would always give a more rational account of its importance. In this way we can say that the symbolic level of Andric's writing does not in fact lie "under" the surface of his characters' experience. It is an integral but unspoken part of that experience. Every important moment in an individual life is in some way connected with the bridge. The Christian children born on the left bank of the river cross it in the first days of their life to be baptized; and all children, Moslem and Christian, spend the majority of their childhood around it. They know all the carefully carved forms of the bridge, and all the stories and legends associated with it. These children, for whom the legends are most alive - since they form a part of their games - contribute most to their preservation. They play and fish under the bridge; with adolescence they move up on to the bridge itself, and particularly on to its central part, where stone benches and a coffee-maker encourage the townspeople of all ages to linger. Wedding and funeral processions pass over the bridge and generally stop at the central point, where the wedding guests frequently dance the traditional round dance, the "kolo", while the coffin-bearers lower their burden where their charge spent so much of his life, to rest for a while. The legends with which the townspeople grow up are described as tales in which "imagination and reality, dream and waking, are strangely and inextricably fused and interwoven".8 The townspeople have always known them "unconsciously, as though they had brought them with them into the world, just as prayers are known and no one remembers from whom he learned them nor when he heard them for the first time".9 To convey the archetypal quality of these legends and their timelessness, Andric uses two themes from the traditional South Slav heroic ballads. One is simply the name of the builder reputed to have built the bridge. "Rade Neimar" (Rade the Builder) is associated with all the fine white palaces and towns mentioned in the ballads. He is the archetype of "the builder" in the popular imagination. Frequently in the South Slav ballads, and in the

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European tradition in general, building enterprises are beset by difficulties created by a "spirit" which demands that a human sacrifice be built into the foundations before the building can be completed unhampered. In the case of the bridge on the Drina the traditional pattern is observed. The story goes that all that was achieved during the day was destroyed at night, and somehow the builders came to feel that they must find newborn twins called by the traditional names Stoja and Ostoja, and build them into the foundations before the building could continue. The Visegrad legend describes how two such children were found and built into the central pillars of the bridge, but Rade the Builder took pity on the despairing mother and left openings through which she could continue to feed her babies. This traditional outcome explains the two finely carved apertures on the bridge, now used as nesting-places by doves, and the two thin white marks on the columns that seem like milk trickling from the holes at certain times of year. So strong is the legend in the town that enterprising merchants scrape the white powder from the bridge and sell it as a remedy to nursing mothers with insufficient milk. This legend seems to have grown out of the notion that nature demands a price for human interference in the name of progress, and that any human undertaking of real beauty and significance requires a sacrifice of appropriate magnitude. Andric explains the "real" events which made it possible for this idea to be expressed in this particular form. The immediate reaction of the population to every innovation introduced into Visegrad is to reject it. This is true also of the bridge. The apparently senseless chaos of all the equipment required for its building; the unjustifiable untidiness and inconvenience this causes; above all the tyrannical methods of the Turkish foreman who forces the whole male population to work without pay - all contribute to the resistance of the townspeople to the idea of the bridge and eventually drive a handful of men to sabotage. Since the notion of human sacrifice in enterprises of this kind is widespread, it is easy enough for the saboteurs to spread the story of a hostile spirit and to supply proof in the form of the systematic destruction overnight of the work carried out during the day. And by a strange coincidence their scheme is given credence by the fact that a simpleminded girl from a neighbouring village gives birth at about the

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same time to still-born twins. The babies are taken from her immediately and buried, but for days she searches for them, wandering around the site of the bridge and asking the workmen whether they have seen her children. The coincidence is so strange, and the sight of the unfortunate woman wandering distraught by the bridge, unable to understand the straightforward explanation of the villagers, so captures the imagination of the townspeople that although not many actually believe the story that the children were built into the bridge, everyone repeats it and passes it on. The story satisfies their real need to acknowledge the significance of the building. Another legend associated with the bridge survives similarly through the strength of the emotions it arouses, and particularly among the children through its ability to give shape to some of their irrational fears. During the construction of the bridge an Arab workman was crushed to death by falling rock and his body could never be completely extracted. Such an accident is an inevitable part of much human endeavour, which may itself account for the persistence of the notion of human sacrifice associated with building ventures of importance, since bones actually are found in the walls and foundations. The horror of this accident stays in the popular consciousness and the story is carried down among the children that "the Black Arab" lives in a large dark hole in the central part of the bridge. Any child who sees him will die. His figure haunts their dreams and during the day the children taunt their fears and test their nerve by approaching the Arab's cave, for the most part disbelieving, but unable to resist the powerful fascination of terror. The pattern of their behaviour is timeless, corresponding to a profound human need. Only the form of its expression alters from one culture to another. Then there is the series of unexplained marks on each side of the river beside the bridge, round and equally spaced, two by two, as though they were the hoofprints of a giant horse. The children know them to be traces of distant heroic times, when the rock was still soft and the warriors and their horses of enormous size. For the Christian children they are the hoofprints of the famous skewbald horse Sarac, belonging to Prince Marko, while for the Moslem children they are those of the winged mare of their Alija-Derzelez. The children do not argue about their different interpretations, since each is quite

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convinced of his or her own version, and no one has ever persuaded his counterpart to change his mind. Their respective ideologies do not prevent the children from playing happily together, keeping the tiny fish they catch in the "hoofprint" hollows when they fill up with rain water. Irregularities and strange features of the local landscape are thus given colourful explanations and woven into the sum of legend with which the local people grow up. The last feature of the bridge to be given such shape is the mound above the road on the left bank of the river. This is the grave of Radisav, the man who led the opposition to the building and was impaled by the Turkish foreman. The details of what he actually did and the way in which he was executed have long since been forgotten by the townspeople, but once again his grave serves to satisfy the need of each community for heroes. The Christians speak of him as a great hero of superhuman strength, who defied the Turks over the building of the bridge, but who could not be confined by any mere mortal bonds until he was betrayed and strangled in his sleep with strands of silk, against which alone he had no power. For the Moslems, again, it is the grave of a heroic dervish, who defended the crossing of the river against an infidel army and did not want the grave marked in any way because he would rise again to defend the river should the infidel ever try to cross it once more. Both communities believe that at certain times of the year a strange supernatural light can be seen over the grave, and both believe in the second coming of their ideal hero. Through these stories, Andric conveys the perennial human need to give scope to the imagination; to colour natural phenomena with supernatural dimensions; to give shape to emotions of excitement, wonder, admiration and fear. "People remember and relate what they can grasp and what they succeed in turning into legend. Everything else passes them by without deeper trace, with the dumb indifference of nameless natural phenomena, not touching their imagination or remaining in their memory."10 This whole introduction, with its emphasis on stability and harmony, reinforced regularly throughout the novel by reference to the special properties of the bridge, acts as a counterweight to the tales of individual human destinies. The lives of the individuals described are characterized often by violence, tragedy and a painful

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awareness of transience expressed in terms of a search for enduring meaning beyond themselves. The contrasting broad perspective of the novel conveys a balance in which awareness of suffering is matched by a positive acceptance of life. This is more than a passive instinct for survival. It is determined by the example of the silent, enduring triumph of the human spirit embodied in the bridge. Andric describes the building of the bridge as the direct result of one individual tragedy. As in the story "The Bridge on the Zepa", it was commissioned from Istanbul by an Ottoman dignatory who originated from Bosnia. In Andric's account, which differs considerably from the facts, Mehmed Pasha Sokolovic was taken as a tenyear-old child, with other children from his neighbourhood, to serve in the Janissary Corps as payment of the "head tax", part of the oppressive Ottoman taxation system. When the procession reached the banks of the Drina and crossed, by means of an unwieldy raft, the children's mothers and other relatives, who had followed at a distance, had finally to part from the boys. To the child who was to become Mehmed Pasha, this crossing-place on the Drina represented defeat and impotence, a complex of emotions and ideas which he never fully articulated, but more or less rationalized in his later life: Like a sense of physical discomfort somewhere within him - a black line which from time to time, for a second or two, seared his breast in half - the child carried within him the memory of this place. There the road is severed, the hopelessness and tedium of poverty are concentrated on the rocky banks of the river, whose crossing is difficult, costly and uncertain. It was a painful place in that poor mountainous region where misfortune became public and obvious, where a man was brought to a halt by the overpowering element and, ashamed at his impotence, was obliged to recognize and see clearly both his own and others' poverty and backwardness.11 The "black line" of the river marked an absolute gulf between the two parts of the boys' lives. Because it was in addition a gulf separating the Christian West from the Moslem East, it could stand for all the deep and apparently insurmountable divisions between men, based on ideology and power. With time Mehmed Pasha forgot the origin of his pain, but the

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discomfort remained and drove him eventually to try to relieve it by building a bridge across the gulf. This project was uniquely successful in that the bridge became a crucial link between Europe and the East, fulfilling a clear need. More importantly, however, it stood for future generations as an example of the possibility of overcoming not only physical obstacles, but also individual misfortune and transience. In addition to the expression of the townspeople's resistance to change and the notion of sacrifice, after the details of the building have been long forgotten there remains also the memory of the atmosphere surrounding the personalities involved in it. People speakt)f the ruthless foreman, his terrified and finally demented subordinate, and the heroic Radisav who led the resistance and was put to a slow death for all the townspeople to see. The whole process of building the bridge is thus felt to have been carried out in anatmosphere of fear. The initial reaction of the townspeople to the arrival of the workmen with all their equipment is one of alarm and confusion in the face of the new, the inexplicable. Such anxious apprehension will accompany the changes described later in the work, particularly such major developments as the introduction of the railway, but none of them is carried out by the terrorist methods of a man like the original foreman. The memory of the building of the bridge also vividly illustrates the fact that fear breeds fear. The subordinate, Plevljak, is driven mad because he could have been the one to die slowly on the pale, had he failed to catch Radisav. The foreman's own ruthlessness stems in part from the fact that he is constantly aware of the possibility of losing his power because of the spies and informers who inevitably surround figures of authority. Such episodes are kept alive in the popular consciousness, because in them an individual is seen to embody a significant aspect of the human condition. It is Andric's intention that the positive qualities of the bridge, once it is built, should be seen completely to outweigh the suffering entailed by its building and the individual tragedies played out on it over the generations. In order that the full significance of the bridge should emerge, Andric concentrates, in the body of the novel, on these individual destinies. He describes in relentless detail the scene of the impaling of the leader of the saboteurs. It is a passage which

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cannot easily be read and which Andric thought from time to time of removing or toning down. But he left it, and it serves as a reminder not only of the brutality of the Ottoman regime but of man's timeless capacity for cruelty, inflicted particularly systematically as it was during the Second World War, when the novel was written. Radisav's fate is connected with the bridge only in so far as its building was the initial stimulus for his action. He represents qualities of resistance and courage, as timeless as the cruelty they oppose. The bridge sees its share of violence over the centuries. During the nineteenth century in particular, and the rebellions which led to the emergence of the independent kingdom of Serbia, the heads of rebels impaled on the bridge became a common sight. The fate of a young Russian soldier who inadvertently allowed a Serbian rebel to cross the bridge, and his suicide, are recounted in detail. And the novel ends with war. In the first days of the First World War the bridge is mined by the Austrians and the central section blown out. This violence to the bridge itself signifies the end of an age, symbolized in the death of one of the leading Moslem figures in the town, Alihodza. The experience of violence, and the fear of it, are the factors which compel people to find compensation in legend, in stories of noble, beautiful and strange characters and occurrences. Two such stories are related. The first is the tale of a Moslem girl, such a dramatic and exceptional tale that, as with floods and wars, the year in which it took place is long afterwards remembered. The girl, Fata, was exceptionally beautiful: It has always been the case with us that one girl in each generation becomes the subject of stories and songs through her beauty, her diligence and nobility. For a few years she would be the object of all desires and an unattainable model; imaginations would be fired by her name, rousing the enthusiasm of men and the envy of women. These are exceptional beings whom nature sets aside and raises to dangerous heights.12 When a young Moslem announces in public that he will see her in his home as his bride one day she categorically denies it, unaware

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that her father is to promise her hand to that same young man. She cannot make her father break his promise but neither can she go back on her word, so she goes through the marriage ceremony; but as the wedding procession makes its way across the bridge to her new home, she stops her horse in the middle and leaps to her death in the river below. "The townspeople related the event for some time afterwards, and then began to forget. There remained only the song about the girl whose beauty and wisdom made her shine above everything, as though she were immortal."13 As with nursery rhymes and many traditional songs whose originating circumstances are forgotten but which remain, and continue to feed the imagination of later generations, Fata's story is told for its own sake, without comment. Like so many of Andric's stories, however, it implies a cluster of ideas: the absolute power of authority; the common need to admire, to identify an individual as embodying exceptional qualities; and at the same time pleasure at seeing such an individual humiliated, the idea that such a degree of pride, admirable and pure as it is, should inevitably bring destruction on itself; the natural justice of uncompromising arrogance ending in such a dramatic and definitive leap. Above all it suggests the strength of an individual will, refusing to be broken even to the point of death. The other story tells the tale of a mysterious gambler and the dissipation of a man's entire fortune. On the morning after the game a young Jewish boy finds a gold coin left on the bridge. It is the Sabbath, but the boy defies the sacred laws of that day and picks it up, and with it he embarks on the life of a vagabond gambler. The townspeople predictably believe that the stranger responsible for this destruction of two lives was none other than the Devil. Legends, and the tales of individuals and events which fire the popular imagination, are the common stock the people of Visegrad carry with them through the generations. Such tales contribute to their sense of identity and give the townspeople a coherence with which to face the vagaries of the natural elements and the upheavals of history. Natural disasters are an inevitable part of a community's common heritage. In Visegrad the most frequent elemental force to be contended with is the River Drina. Flooding is a frequent hazard and thus marks the passing of time:

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. . . at irregular intervals of twenty or thirty years, there are bad floods which are afterwards remembered as are uprisings or wars and are long taken as the date according to which time, the age of the townspeople and the length of human life are measured.14 Such a disaster forms the focal point of a whole generation's life; those who experienced it will always be ready to talk about it at family gatherings or public festivals: at a distance of fifteen or twenty years, in which the household was restored and began to prosper again, "the flood" came to be seen as something terrible and enormous, but familiar and cherished; it was a close bond between the ever fewer survivors of that generation, for nothing so binds people together as a shared disaster, safely survived. And they felt themselves firmly linked by the memory of that past misfortune.15 The parallels with the bonds formed in time of war and other crises in any culture are clear. The young people, of course, cannot understand what comfort and pleasure their elders can possibly find in the memory of the worst setback of their lives. During such natural disasters the leading men of the town gather together in one house, and here there is no discrimination of faith: "The force of the elements and the burden of common misfortune had brought all these people together and bridged, at least for the evening, the abyss which divided one faith from another, and particularly the Rayah from the Turks."16 A unique atmosphere is created as these men sit over coffee and brandy, waiting for the night to pass and the water to subside. To avoid speaking of the current disaster, they turn the conversation to other areas of their common experience: memories of old times, stories of the town's eccentrics and notable events from the distant past. So their common heritage helps them to feel united in the face of a real threat, conscious of the endurance of the town and its life, despite all upheavals. When the water subsides and they set about repairing the damage, they gradually come to realize the importance of the bridge, which is always untouched by the ravages of the flood: "Everyone knew that in that life of theirs there was something which resisted all the elements and which through the incomprehensible harmony of its forms, and the invisible wise

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strength of its foundations, emerged from every trial indestructible and unchanged."17 In times of crisis, the people themselves are able to express timeless qualities of humanity which the arbitrary divisions of religion and culture otherwise obscure or distort. The reaction of the townspeople to natural disasters is similar to their behaviour in the face of the man-made conflicts of the nineteenth century, and the Balkan Wars in the early twentieth century. There is the major difference, however, that it is impossible for the representatives of different faiths to mix freely while the conflict lasts. Each community then draws together for comfort and mutual support in the greater security of its own kind. While the immutability of the bridge is continually stressed, the way of life of the townspeople is altered by external events. This fact becomes increasingly clear with the rapid changes brought by the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. In the static years of Ottoman rule there were few modifications to the life of Visegrad. The most radical was the building of the bridge itself and the increased importance it gave the town as a vital communications link. The next noticeable change came with the waning of Ottoman power, during the nineteenth century. The boundary between Bosnia and Serbia became more firmly established as Serbia acquired increasing independence, taking on all the characteristics of a state frontier. This fact necessarily affected trade, traffic and the general mood and mutual relations between Moslems and Serbs, subtly altering the long-standing relationship of occupier and occupied. The first hint of change on such a scale that it marks the end of an era comes with the arrival of the Austrian army in Visegrad at the end of the nineteenth century. The extent of the change is realized by the Moslem shopkeeper Alihodza, who serves as a symbol of the old Ottoman order. Alihodza refuses to take part in the futile resistance to the Austrian army, and as a punishment is nailed by the ear to the centre of the bridge as the army approaches. He is thus obliged to experience the moment with exceptional force. As he reads the declaration which the Austrians stick to the wall of the bridge, it is suddenly clear that it was all over with him, with all his family and all that was theirs, over at once and for ever, but in a strange way: your eyes

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still see, your lips speak, you go on living, but life, real life has gone . . . He goes slowly from the bridge and feels that he will never again cross to the other bank, that this bridge which is the pride of the town and from the beginning closely connected with his family, the bridge on which he has grown up and beside which he has spent his whole life, this bridge has been suddenly broken in the middle . . . that broad sheet of white paper inscribed with the Austrian declaration had cut it in half, like a silent explosion.18 On this level historical events do not only affect the lives of individuals, they virtually become their lives. It is possible for Alihodza to feel that his life has ended simply because an epoch of human history has ended. History demands the complete commitment of the individual, and there is no limit to the way in which the individual will be willingly manipulated by its requirements. The immediate changes brought by the Austrian administration are obvious enough to everyone in Visegrad. New buildings are put up, trees are cut down for new roads to be made, drains are constructed, street lighting introduced. These innovations are gradually accepted by the majority of the population, although there are always those who refuse. The identity of such people is then expressed entirely in their resistance. They represent the assertion of a human dignity which has accepted one set of standards but will not now submit arbitrarily to new ones. The older people in general, accustomed as they are to absolute stability in their way of life, are unable to understand the perpetual activity of the foreigners. To them it seems that the Austrians are merely playing with all their weighing and measuring. Alihodza, who has accepted none of the changes, feels that the Austrian frenzy is not only unhealthy but also evil - here the basic conflict between a static community and a "progressive" outsider is intensified by the conflict between Eastern and Western cultures. Alihodza quotes religious authorities to show that it is wrong to divert the course of running water for however short a time, as was necessitated by the repairs to the bridge. And for the bridge itself, he gives an account of the origin of bridges to prove that the foreigners' meddling with it will lead only to its destruction: My late father once heard from Sheikh Dedija and told me as a child the story of how there came to be bridges in this world and

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how the first bridge came into being. When Allah made this world, the earth was flat and smooth as the finest engraved copper platter. That did not suit the Devil, who envied man this divine gift. And while the earth was still as it had emerged from the hand of the Lord, wet and soft as unbaked dough, he crept up and scratched the face of God's earth with his nails as hard and as deeply as he could. That is how, so the story says, there came to be the deep rivers and ravines which divide one area from another and separate people from each other and prevent them from travelling over the earth which God gave them as a garden for their food and sustenance. Allah was sorry when he saw what the Evil One was doing, but as he was unable to go back to the work that the Devil had desecrated with his touch, he sent his angels to help mankind. When the angels saw that the poor people could not cross those gorges and depths, nor complete their work, but that they were troubled and looked and called in vain from one side to the other, they spread their wings over those places and people began to cross over their wings. So people learned from God's angels how to build bridges. And that is why, after fountains, the greatest good is to build bridges, and the greatest sin is to meddle with them, for every bridge, from the log over the mountain stream to this work of Mehmed Pasha's, has its own angel which protects and watches over it, as long as God has granted that it should stand.19 The majority of the population, however, after their initial reluctance, gradually accept the changes, as for them life is more important and urgent than the forms in which it is lived. And for some time it is only the external forms which change. Within their homes the people continue to live as they have always done, cooking and washing as they always did, celebrating their holy days and preserving all their old customs: "Old beliefs and values conflicted with new ones, merged with them or endured alongside them, as though waiting to see which would survive."20 Eventually the new values, new tastes and fashions do penetrate further into the way of life of the people. Particularly in peacetime cultural differences become less marked and the foreigners begin to take on local characteristics, at first mainly through their children playing

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together but then in their own speech and habits, while the locals particularly the Christians and Jews - adopt aspects of the foreigners' dress and behaviour. Nevertheless, from the broadest perspective these changes are perceived as insignificant. Despite the modifications to the traditional life of the town, despite the permanent lighting on the bridge and hitherto unknown presence of women on it, the bridge itself is seen to be still unchanged. As after floods and wars, it emerges from all the upheavals, just as it always was: One could say that all these changes on the bridge were insignificant, superficial and short-lived. The numerous and extensive changes in the thinking and customs of the people and the external appearance of the town seemed to have passed by the bridge without touching it. It seemed as though the ancient white bridge, which had lived through three centuries without trace or scar, would remain unchanged "under the new emperor" as well, that it would resist this flood of innovations and changes just as it had always resisted the biggest inundations and had always arisen out of the seething mass of turbulent water that covered it, untouched and white, as though reborn.21 The last chapters of the chronicle describe the first years of the twentieth century in detail, with particular attention to the optimism of the generation who were students at the outbreak of the First World War - the generation to which Andric himself belonged. These chapters describe lives in progress and the characters' hopes, plans and fears. They cannot have the completeness and sense of perspective of the earlier passages. On the contrary, they open the novel out towards an unknown future. Nevertheless, the lives of these young people are intricately linked to their town and its past, through common memories and because they are the descendants of people who played out their role in the town in earlier times. The continuity symbolized by the bridge is therefore also embodied in them. They are at once seen to live in history as they live in time and space, and at the same time to carry history in themselves. The Bridge on the Drina can be seen as a portrait of history itself. History is made as much by individual personalities as by mass movements and the upheavals created by the rise and fall of empires.

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In The Bridge on the Drina there is a constant balance between the impact of external events, of natural vicissitudes, and the particular flavour imparted by individual personalities who capture the imagination of the local people and determine the temper of an age. The stories of the drowned girl, the gambler and the Russian soldier stay in the memory of the townspeople. Other individuals play their part, not through any particularly memorable anecdotes like these but simply through the force of their personalities which attract wide attention in the town: such are Alihodza, the innkeeper Lotika and the gypsy Corkan. Such characters impose themselves on their age and contribute to its history, to a lesser degree, but in the same way as natural phenomena and man-made upheavals. In the last chapters of the chronicle, where the passage of time is slower and Andric's focal point different, he no longer identifies the individuals or crises that determine the history of the town. They can be selected only by future generations and their significance felt only with the passing of time. Similarly, the "meaning" of the bridge can be seen only in the broader time-scale where generations come and go, facing the vagaries of fortune and carrying with them their common heritage, their sense of identity. The Bridge on the Drina is about the passing of time, the presence in the world of individual human beings for a brief moment, filled for them with drama and urgency but forgotten except in rare instances, and then only in greatly modified form, by the generations which replace them. In the chronicle the changes that come are neutral. It is only to individuals that they seem either "good" or "bad". In themselves they are only different, requiring that infinitely adaptable humanity eventually accept them. On this broad scale the people are not allowed the luxury of an apparent meaning to their lives through heroic action, love or dedication to any ideal. These are attributed to them, where they exist, only by later generations. Their lives simply pass. The overwhelming impression left by the work is not, however, this bleak statement but a silent acceptance of the fact that, while lives pass, life continues. The flow of life continues, carried forward by each generation, unchanged by natural or man-made upheavals, unaffected by the destinies of individuals. And that is the significance of the expressive symbol of the bridge, communicated to the population of Visegrad without the need for more explicit statement.

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The bridge represents a special harmony between man and Nature. The importance of buildings, conditioned as they are by human need, is frequently stated in the work - the need can be transient and the result ugly, as in the case of the military observation post erected on the bridge; or it can represent a long-term adjustment of man to his environment. If the result is not a taming of Nature but a meaningful response to man's surroundings, as in the case of the bridge, it can be beautiful, a source of peace and harmony: The strange and exceptional beauty of the bridge can never be better felt than on these summer days, at this hour. Sitting here, a man feels that he is on a magic swing: he is crossing the earth, sailing on the water, flying through space and yet firmly and securely fixed to the town and his white house over there, with its garden and its plum orchard round it. Here at such times, over coffee and tobacco, many of these humble citizens, who have little else but that house and a little shop in town, feel the full richness of the world and the boundlessness of God's gifts. All this can be offered to people, and offered over the centuries, by a building, when it is fine and strong, conceived at the right moment, erected in the right place, and successfully realized.22 The idea of a bridge is rich in association and open to wide interpretation. Alihodza's account of its origin illustrates the strength of the symbol on an unspoken level. To the townspeople in their daily lives, however, it stands above all for permanence. The permanence of the bridge in the face of change is a source of comfort to the people who live near it, just as the stability of mountains and the constant renewal of the seasons have always been. It acts as an enduring counterweight to all the changes and upheavals and the divisions between communities, so that a sense of balance and harmony is always restored. There is an explicit statement of its influence at the end of the chapter describing the floods: So on the bridge, between the sky, the river and the mountains, generation after generation learned not to regret inordinately all that the turbulent water carried away. Here they absorbed the unconscious philosophy to the town: that life is an incomprehensi-

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ble wonder, for it spends itself and runs out perpetually, and yet it endures and stands firm "like the bridge on the Drina".23 It is characteristic of Andric that such a statement should not be placed at the end of the novel. The belief it describes is unconscious, a point of reference which does not itself alter the basic facts of an individual's life and mortality. The last words of the novel return us from the metaphysical to man and the earth: "On the slope leading to Mejdan lay Alihodza breathing his last short painful breaths".24 Bosnian Story From the broad time-scale of The Bridge on the Drina Andric moves in this novel to close consideration of a brief period of Bosnian history, known as "the age of the consuls". Andric began work on this, his first novel, in 1924, seeing it as a study of contacts between East and West. In the course of his diplomatic career, he was able to study documents concerned with the period, the reports of the French and Austrian consuls, and the published works of the main characters Daville (Davide) and des Fosses.25 After Napoleon's occupation of the Dalmatian coast in 1806 a consul was sent to represent French interests in Travnik, the administrative centre of Bosnia. The Austrian government rapidly followed suit. Bosnian Story opens and closes with the reaction of the local Moslems to the idea of the coming of the Western consuls, and to their departure seven years later. The body of the work studies these seven years in detail. They are traced mainly through the eyes of the French consul, Daville, and his young colleague, des Fosses. The other main characters are the two Ottoman viziers governing Travnik during the period and the two Austrian consuls, von Mitterer and his successor von Paulich. The work is very carefully documented, often quoting the actual reports and journals of the two Frenchmen. While there is a certain progression in the response of the two Frenchmen to their surroundings, the development of the novel is typical of Andric's work in that it is linear. There is no action that is dependent on interaction between the characters, and no relationships develop in any depth. Instead, individual events, characters or

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anecdotes become the focal point of each chapter. This structure conforms to the basic pattern of Andric's writing, but as in The Bridge on the Drina the individual chapters are connected; underlying themes, developed in the separate chapters, contribute to the dominant tone of each novel. While The Bridge on the Drina emphasizes the coherence and harmony of the life of Visegrad, the common experience that bound the mixed community together, in Bosnian Story what is stressed is the hostility between the various groups living in Travnik. All the various components of the novel reinforce ideas of mistrust, misunderstanding, isolation and exile. The novel opens with a prologue, describing the reactions of the local Beys to the news of the coming of the French consul. The immediate response of the man to whom the news is first given is the bald statement that they do not want any visitors. Such an attitude is common to both the Moslem and Christian communities in Travnik. Each group fears any new arrivals or changes to the established way of life. As far as the native Moslem population is concerned - and particularly the Beys, with their status and property - even visitors from Istanbul are unwelcome as representatives of arbitrary and often tyrannical rule, while Westerners pose the possibility of change on a vertiginous scale. For the Christian population the situation is bad but familiar; they have adapted to the requirements of their meagre existence as far as possible and they are sceptical and apprehensive of any change. This general attitude is reflected in the state of the roads in and around Travnik. Their poor quality is one of the aspects of Bosnian life that Daville takes as a sign of the backwardness of the population. For him good roads mean, simply, progress and prosperity, and their neglect is another example of the innate malevolence which he sees as characterizing all his observations of Bosnian life. Daville's young colleague des Fosses, who is always more openminded and receptive in his approach to the circumstances in which he finds himself, as usual makes an effort to understand the local people's attitude. He realizes that the bad roads are welcomed by the Christians, who even actively destroy them, as they put a barrier between themselves and Turkish visitors. For the Turks every link with Christian countries means opening the door to enemy influence, and consequently represents a threat to Turkish power.

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There is an immediate contrast with The Bridge on the Drina here. The bridge is a symbol of contact and communication between men, regardless of ideology, while the bad roads of Travnik suggest defensiveness and aloofness, a narrow self-absorption and mutual distrust. These ideas are expressed in the description of the surroundings of Travnik, a description which is as arbitrary as that of the situation of Visegrad. On the surface, "realistic" level of the narration the implication is that human responses are often at least in part determined by natural circumstances and forces beyond the individual's control. More importantly, for the author it is one of a series of devices designed to evoke a particular atmosphere. The way Andric has chosen to describe the position of Travnik contributes to the dominant themes of hostility and isolation. The steep hills descending to the narrow river make it impossible for any roads through the town to be straight, and consequently for movement to be "easy and carefree". The inhabitants are restrained and cautious; they never laugh aloud, they speak little, but like to gossip under their breath. The other aspect of this description, which offers a complete contrast to The Bridge on the Drina, is the emphasis on transience. The bridge in Visegrad stands for permanence, but Travnik is described as "a fortified pass in which people have stayed to live for good".26 The foreign visitors on whom the work is focused are simply passing through, and this transience is reinforced at other points in the novel. The population of Travnik, in its uniform opposition to the idea of visitors, is presented as a coherent entity. This is necessary in order to emphasize the isolation of the outsiders. Little distinction is made in this respect between the Moslem and Christian communities. However, the reactions of the various communities to the particular issue of the coming of the consuls differ, and the population is shown to be far from a homogeneous group. The Moslem population is mistrustful of anything coming from abroad and ill-disposed to any innovation. Their mistrust of the French consul is expressed in open hostility. Daville remains a conspicuous outsider, a potential target should any violence erupt in the town. There are two instances of such spontaneous riots, and they

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suggest that these are not simply an expression of cultural and religious hostility. The reaction of the Moslem community to the French consul is not substantially different from their sentiments towards the Vizier himself. It is largely a "mob" response to the representatives of any authority. The way in which Andric describes this process gives it an "organic" quality. He states that it is impossible to perceive the logic of these blind, furious, regularly fruitless risings, but that they do have a logic of their own just as they have an unseen "technique", based on tradition and instinct. The impression conveyed is of a natural phenomenon, like the inexplicable gathering of storm clouds which suddenly clash without apparent reason and then again disperse, leaving the sky clear for days or weeks before accumulating again according to some hidden logic of their own. This account of the riots as a recurrent communal madness reduces their significance as a direct expression of hostility to the consuls specifically; the foreigners become merely arbitrary but conspicuous targets. In the seven years of the consuls' stay in Travnik, they are never accepted. The epilogue describes the Beys again, assessing the "age of the consuls". They greet the news of their departure as a kind of victory for, although they had to a certain extent become accustomed to their presence, nevertheless they are pleased to see the departure of these foreigners with their strange, different way of life and their "brazen meddling in Bosnian affairs".27 The French consul does succeed in becoming accepted through his family life. The whole community takes an interest in the pregnancies of Madame Daville and in the death of one of her children. All are favourably impressed by the Frenchwoman's quiet industry and the example offered by the consulate of harmonious family life. Cultural divisions cease at this basic human level. The population of Travnik is, then, shown on the one hand to react spontaneously as a coherent entity in certain circumstances, but on the other to be made up of clearly differentiated cultural and religious groups, each with its own characteristics. In Andric's works the inhabitants of Bosnian towns regularly have this dual quality, with the emphasis generally falling on differentiation. Each group has a specific role in the life of the town, with the gypsies

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forming the bottom layer of the stratification - with all the most distasteful tasks left to them. Travnik's population is made up of different groups, but it is to the town as a whole that the European visitors react, classing the population all together as "Oriental". The main spokesmen of the Western reaction are Daville himself, who is consistently negative in his attitude to the conditions around him, and des Fosses, who, by contrast, is ready to look further and with greater understanding. In this way, the Western response is seen to be relative and conditioned by the nature of the observer himself. Daville is presented as a weak, indecisive personality who is bound to react defensively to any situation which is difficult and demanding. Des Fosses, on the other hand, is young, strong, imaginative and eager to learn as much as possible from his experience of Bosnia. For a man of Daville's disposition, many aspects of the alien way of life are "distasteful". His impression on leaving the Vizier's palace is regularly a nauseating memory of the smell of mutton fat pervading the entire place, the clothes of its inhabitants and the very furniture and walls. He is similarly disturbed by the singing of one of his Moslem neighbours, who returns home each evening, usually drunk, singing the same mournful melody. The extent of Daville's inability to enter into the spirit of this alien music, because of his own personal dissatisfaction, is seen in a passage where he records his reaction to the singing in writing, instead of continuing with the epic poem on which he works in his spare time. We are driven by these circumstances not to take his analysis seriously, but to see it as an expression of frustration with himself and his own poetic pretensions: "I have listened to these people singing and seen that they bring to their songs that same barbarity and unhealthy rage that colours all the other functions of their minds and bodies."28 Daville discusses this music with his Austrian counterpart, who also dismisses it as "ein urjammer",29 but does not feel threatened by it. Von Mitterer is a military man who, in spite of family troubles, is selfcontained and not emotionally affected by his alien surroundings. The reactions of the Westerners to "Oriental" phenomena are, then, to some degree conditioned by their own personalities. There are also vivid moments when the cultural gap between West and East

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is seen to be more objective. Daville succeeds in establishing a degree of sympathetic contact with the Vizier Mehmed Pasha, largely thanks to the latter's dignity and his personal admiration of Napoleon. But the degree of contact possible between them is limited. On one occasion the Vizier, who takes great interest in Daville's account of life in France, asks him to tell him about the French theatre, of which he has heard so much. Daville, who is interested in literature, is delighted and decides to read some scenes from Racine's Bajazet, on the mistaken assumption that the Turk will enjoy the familiar subject matter. The Vizier's inevitable reaction, however, is to dismiss the scene described as out of the question in Turkish terms: "Why, he doesn't know what he's talking about, since the beginning of time it simply could never happen that a Grand Vizier should burst into the Harem and talk with the Sultan's wives!"30 and to laugh long and heartily, making no attempt to disguise his disappointment, despite all Daville's endeavours to explain the art and function of tragic drama in France. The other striking example of the cultural gulf is the scene in which both consuls are summoned to the Vizier's palace to share his triumph in his recent victory over the rebellion among the neighbouring Serbs. The highlight of the audience is the moment when sacks of war trophies are brought in and scattered on to rugs for the foreigners to admire. Among the predictable weapons and armour, to the consuls' consternation, are piles of noses and ears cut from the defeated rebels, and presented triumphantly in a hideous mass of preserving salt and dried blood. This experience of something so very far from the criteria of Western civilization brings the two consuls closer together, but causes Daville to doubt the whole purpose of his sojourn in Bosnia. The theme of cultural differentiation is further developed by Andric himself in his function as narrator. In his account of Daville's first ride through Travnik he suggests that "only Orientals are capable of feeling and showing such hatred and contempt".31 He makes several incidental comments in the course of the narrative: for example, on the degree of sincerity to be expected in the formal statements of Turks. As Mehmed Pasha takes his leave of Daville he asks him to send his regards to the French general Marmont, speaking "with that distinctive warmth, which resembles sincerity as

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one drop of water another and leaves a convincing, reassuring impression on even the most sceptical interlocutor".32 And similarly when the second Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, leaves: "Daville well knew that it was one of those Oriental lies or half-truths that circulate among genuine relations and kindnesses like false coins among real ones."33 There are also several brief asides, for example: "For an Oriental, the Vizier was unusually lively, pleasant and open."34 All these incidental remarks contribute to the account of the Western reaction to the ways of the East. Most of the experience of cultural conflict is that of the Westerners looking at the East from the outside. Nowhere is the life of the ordinary local Moslem or Christian population described, except in the most general terms. Andric is concerned with the situation of people removed from their familiar surroundings. The viziers are equally far from Istanbul as the consuls from Paris and Vienna. On several occasions the viziers remark on their experience of Bosnia: "The climate is harsh, the people impossible. What can be expected of women and children, creatures whom God has not endowed with reason, in a country where even the men are so immoderate and uncouth?".35 "Ibrahim Pasha could not find enough harsh words and grim images whenever they began to talk about Bosnia and the Bosnians, and Daville listened to him now with genuine sympathy and real understanding."36 The Catholic monks also find conditions in Bosnia unusually difficult and the population of all faiths backward in all respects. In an interesting conversation with des Fosses, the Franciscan monk Brother Julian puts this all down to Turkish rule, but des Fosses is not satisfied - he feels that the Christians have also taken on certain Oriental characteristics, such as "deceitfulness, stubbornness, distrust, mental laziness, fear of anything new or of all work, or movement".37 He explains this as being the result of need, through centuries of unequal struggle and constant defence, which has now become a habit and a great obstacle to all progress. There is, then, a sufficient consensus in the novel, reinforced by the narrator's interventions, about the difficult working conditions in Bosnia for the reader to feel that there is some objective truth in these statements, but the way in which the individuals choose to react to the problems posed is of course more revealing of their own

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personalities than of the true nature of Bosnia. The most consistently hostile, as we have seen, is Daville, for whom nothing he experiences, from the strange sounds of Bairam when he first arrives to the end, has any charm. Early on he coins a formula to explain all the difficulties of his situation and the life around him, which he makes no effort to understand: "Oriental poison". This "poison" is manifested in the unfriendliness, deviousness and backwardness of the population, as well as in their singing. It seeps into everything, explaining des Fosses's perverse insistence on trying to understand and thereby excuse what is for Daville simply innate "malevolence". It affects the young Fresine, who tries to establish a commercial network from Sarajevo and becomes disillusioned with the difficulties he encounters, and finally Daville feels that he himself has become tainted by it. From the first day "all his work and efforts in connection with Bosnia and the Turks had dragged him down, hampered and weakened him. Year by year the effect of the 'Oriental poison', which dulls the eye and undermines the will, had grown in him and corroded him".38 Even for des Fosses, who is fascinated by all he can see and discover of Bosnia, the experience is difficult: Like the tightening of an invisible hoop: everything required a greater effort and at the same time one became less capable of making it; each step was more difficult, each decision slower and its execution uncertain, while behind it all lurked distrust, scarcity and trouble of all kinds. This was the East.39 The image of constraint is used of the whole historical situation of Bosnia in the early nineteenth century: These clashes of such opposing interests, beliefs, aims and hopes, formed a tight knot which the long Turkish wars with Venice, Austria and Russia entangled and tied still tighter . . . [with] the uprising in Serbia . . . the knot tightened and became still more intricate.4fl The image applies to intercultural relations in Travnik, but equally to the inner confusions of the characters themselves. For all the foreigners, Bosnia represents a complex of problems to be tackled. But their ability to tackle them depends on their own inner

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resources. The young and energetic des Fosses cuts straight through the tangled knot. His personality is positive and outgoing; he does not resist the demands of the world. Another character, the Austrian consul von Paulich, survives by treating the difficulties of his situation as a logical, formal game. It is Daville above all who experiences Bosnia as a defeat. Objectively, his professional success is considerable and he is regarded by others as decisive and effective. To himself, however, he is inadequate and it is his perception of himself that corrodes and undermines his actions, rather than any qualities inherent in Bosnia. It is through the character of Daville that Andric suggests that exile the theme which runs through the work - is also an inner state of being. Bosnia, then, represents a microcosm, where the obstacles confronting an individual anywhere are thrown more clearly and starkly into relief against the bleak landscape and the extreme barriers to communication. Against this background, and inextricably interwoven with it, the other main themes of the novel are developed. The coming of the consuls is conditioned by historical events, as are the duration of their stay and their relations with each other while they are in Travnik. Always cool, these relations are ruptured completely with the outbreak of war between France and Austria; re-established with peace; only to be interrupted again. Such behaviour - in conditions which are so difficult for both men and where they could have so much common ground - is objectively absurd, but equally clearly it is demanded by the conventions of international relations. Not only is the behaviour of the consuls determined by events far from them: because of the heterogeneous nature of the local population, relations between the various groups that compose it are likewise dependent on distant events. Events in Istanbul are described as having an immediate effect on the population of Travnik - as can be seen in their reaction to the replacement of Mehmed Pasha following the deposition of Selim, regarded as a triumph for forces hostile to Napoleon. With the news of Selim's murder in Istanbul, and the subsequent killing of the man who led the revolt against him, the mood of the population becomes so troubled that it is ready once more to erupt in a riot, as soon as a scapegoat and immediate motive can be found.

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Like the consuls, the viziers are sent to Travnik as part of a chosen career - beyond that they have no control over their destiny, and the length of their stay depends on the fluctuations of power groups in the Ottoman capital. Their situation is markedly worse than that of the European consuls in that the Ottoman system is so much more violent. Not only are the rulers responsible for their appointment liable to be deposed and murdered, but their own fate following such an event is likely at best to be exile to some distant outpost of the Empire. Since we see the viziers solely in their professional capacity and never as family men (they leave their harems behind when they take up their appointments), they are seen to be completely isolated. There are three viziers in Travnik in the course of the novel and their lives are shaped entirely by events far from them. An air of intrigue and informing surrounds them. Their power rests entirely on an ability to anticipate and avoid violent turns of fortune by being the first to take violent action. Something of this intrigue surrounds the consuls' dealings with each other, although on quite a different scale. Their position requires them wherever possible to make difficulties for each other Daville manages to delay von Mitterer's arrival, with the co-operation of local administrators in holding up his papers. Von Mitterer in his turn works at exacerbating Daville's bad relations with the Catholic community. Each throughout the novel continues to take every opportunity of hampering the other's work, despite their regular, if never warm, contact and despite the fact that, in the difficult conditions in which they find themselves, each could offer the other genuine sympathy and support: Their unhappy fate and the difficulties it brought drove them towards each other. And if ever there existed in the world two men who could have understood, sympathized with and even helped one another, it was these consuls who spent all their energy, their days and often their nights putting obstacles in each other's way and making each other's life as troublesome as possible.41 Such a situation, conditioned by the rules of power politics, stunts the degree of communication possible between the consuls and between the consuls and the viziers. The viziers are indeed able to make a degree of sympathetic contact with Daville only because of

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the friendly disposition of the ruling sultan to Napoleon. Their relations with the Austrian consuls are correspondingly cold and formal. When the situation between France and Austria improves the two consuls take advantage of the lull to communicate more freely and warmly, but as tension increases once more between Napoleon and the Habsburgs they mete out their comradeship in carefully measured doses until a complete break between their governments, or the outbreak of war, obliges them to interrupt their own contact completely. Andric describes their situation with a characteristic image: Then both tired men would start their battle again, imitating, like two obedient puppets on long strings, the movements of the great distant battle, whose long-term aims were unknown to them and whose scale and intensity filled them both, in the depths of their hearts, with similar feelings of fear and uncertainty.42 It is not only in his public relations, however, that an individual is affected by historical events. The shape of a man's personal life and career is similarly conditioned by the times into which he is born. Once again, that process is most closely examined in the character of Daville. His experience - the confusing upheavals of his formative years, when he was caught up at one moment in emotional enthusiasm for Louis XVI and, ten years later, in a similar welcome for the Revolution, only to have to readjust to the idea of Napoleon as Emperor - provides a vivid illustration of the kind of forces which mould a man's loyalties. Daville is shown to be particularly vulnerable, given his weak nature which always seeks absolute answers outside himself, but the pressures on him are certainly intense: In short, he was one of those people who are the special victims of major historical events, for they are not capable either of withstanding those events, in the way exceptional and energetic individuals do, nor of coming completely to terms with them, as the masses of average people do.43 Historical circumstances also affect relations between individuals: when des Fosses arrives in Travnik he is twenty-four, and Daville is

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approaching forty. Such a gap need not be significant, but the discrepancy between their experiences is such as to exaggerate the gap in their ages, indeed their generations, to the point where real communication is all but impossible. They are in fact as foreign to one another as any representatives of alien cultures. Des Fosses, who provides such a contrast to his countryman, had the good fortune to be born later, under a stable regime. By the time of Napoleon's downfall the stability of his own robust personality is so well established that he is able to take such a major reversal in his stride. For Daville, however, it means a renewed questioning of the whole of his life and its meaning: But it was difficult not to think, to remember, to see. He had spent twenty-five years searching for "the middle way", which would bring solace, and give a person the dignity without which he cannot live. For twenty-five years he had moved, seeking and finding, losing and gaining, from one "enthusiasm" to another, and now, exhausted, broken and worn down, he had reached the point he had started from when he was eighteen. In other words, all the roads had been only apparently leading somewhere; in fact they merely went round in a circle, like the deceptive labyrinths of Oriental tales; and so they had brought him, tired and fainthearted, to this place, among these crumpled papers; to the point where the circle starts again, like any other point in its circumference. In other words, there is no middle way; no true path leading forward into stability, peace and dignity, but we all move in a circle, following always the same deceptive path, and only the people and the generations who follow it change, perpetually deceived. In other words, this was the conclusion of the weary man's weary and fallacious thoughts, there are no paths at a l l . . . One only travels. The meaning and dignity of the journey exist only in so far as we are able to find them in ourselves. Neither path nor purpose. One only travels. Travels, spends and exhausts oneself.44 Bosnian Story concentrates on the relations of individual men in a specific context. Relations between the consuls and their wives provide only incidental background information, and there are no significant friendships or other personal relationships in the work

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which are important in their own right. The work is, then, focused on a picture of a group of men working side by side in similar circumstances, but without any real contact. We have seen something of the way in which their relations are determined for the most part by forces outside their control. The other aspect of their lives to be examined in some detail is the relationship, and generally the discrepancy, between their public and private personalities. The necessity of presenting a public image which differs from the private self is common, but exaggerated in a diplomatic career by the fact that the individual has to represent a government whose interests are at times at variance with his own. Daville and von Mitterer are unable to indulge in the natural sympathy each feels for the other; Daville is unable to make contact with the Catholic community; the Austrian consul is kept at a strict distance by the viziers. The consuls are obliged always to act according to the demands of their public position. Daville's main anxiety at difficult moments is how a representative of the great Napoleon should react. His indecision always humiliates and angers him. One of the extreme tests of this kind occurs when Daville and von Mitterer are confronted with the Turkish war trophies. Daville is barely able to overcome his personal revulsion but is spurred on by von Mitterer's strength of mind, determined not to be seen to be less zealous in his congratulations than his Austrian rival. When Daville and von Mitterer first meet, both endeavour gallantly to pronounce as naturally as possible the speeches they have carefully prepared in advance: Both consuls were completely filled with the dignity of their calling and the initial zeal of the beginner. That prevented them from seeing the absurdity of the exalted solemnity of this meeting, but it did not prevent them from observing and assessing each other.45 Towards the end of the meeting neither can quite stifle his natural sympathy for the other's predicament. That same evening, however, they each write a report of their meeting for their superiors, in which each describes his conclusive verbal and moral victory over the other. Thus the lives of these men have several dimensions: the public encounters, their private reactions to them and their confidential

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accounts of them in which they go some way towards redeeming the humiliation and indignity of the initial discrepancy. The following passage illustrates this predicament: During the nights, when Travnik had already sunk deep into the darkness, one could see only one or two lighted windows in each of the two consulates. These were the two consuls, poring over their papers, reading information from their agents, writing reports. And then it would often happen that either Daville or von Mitterer, leaving his work for a moment, would go to the window and stare out at the solitary light on the hill opposite, where his neighbour and opponent was forging unknown traps and tricks, determined to undermine his colleague from across the Lasva and to spoil his plans. The crowded little town between them had disappeared; they were separated only by emptiness, silence and darkness. Their windows looked at each other, glistening, like the eyes of men fighting a duel. But, hidden behind the curtains, one or other of the consuls, or both at the same time, would be staring into the darkness and into the pale beam of his opponent's light and thinking of him with emotion, profound understanding and genuine sympathy. Then they would rouse themselves and return to their work by their flickering candles and continue to write their reports, in which there was no trace of their feelings of a moment before and in which they attacked and debased each other, from the false official height from which civil servants think that they look down on the whole world when they are addressing their Minister in a confidential report, knowing that it will never be read by the people they refer to in it/6 It is when they are left alone in their studies with their papers that each of the consuls can be most himself. Family life offers neither of them real communication. Madame Daville is completely absorbed in the efficient and harmonious running of her household, while Frau von Mitterer is a capricious, hysterical woman, given to obsessive enthusiasm and disillusion - she can only hamper her husband, upsetting his life and to a certain extent his career. So the two consuls are most relaxed when alone in their studies after the rest of the household has retired. Des Fosses also writes when he is

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alone in his room, but his writing of his Bosnian diary is a smooth extension of his daily explorations, which are always rewarding, rather than a compensation for his public frustration, as is the case with the older men. Indeed, it is only when des Fosses is left alone that he is really conscious of his own inevitable frustrations - those of a vigorous young man unable to make contact with people around him, and particularly with women. His predominant experience of Bosnia is of silence, an overwhelming silence manifested in all aspects of life, which he can ignore during the day, in his work, his excursions and conversations, but which oppresses him at night. Von Mitterer, a professional soldier who thrives on order, is contented only when sitting at night in his study, however cold, filling reams of paper with his orderly handwriting, describing the surroundings of Travnik from a military point of view, with sketches and statistics and other firm, useful facts. "By his candle, over the pages he had already filled, surrounded by silence, he felt alone, as in a secure fortress, sheltered and protected."47 Such a sense of security is an illusion whereby the consul saves himself from all the absurdities and difficulties of his position. There are, then, three dimensions to the men's solitary writing: a sense of relief at no longer having to pretend to be what they are not in order to satisfy the demands of their position; a deliberate salving of their self-respect, shattered by the frustrations of the day in writing - military reports for the one, epic verse for the other - but also an unavoidable confrontation with their private being. Daville is oppressed by the discrepancy between his public and private life: During the day . . . he was a calm and resolute man, with a definite name, profession and rank, a clear goal and precise duties which had brought him to this God-forsaken Turkish province, as they might have taken him to any other part of the world. But at night he was all he had once been, was now and was to be. And that man, lying in the darkness of the long February nights, seemed, even to himself, strange, complex and at times completely unknown.48 The discrepancy between their public and private lives, and the fact that the individuals act as puppets, result in a strong sense throughout Bosnian Story that a man's public life is a kind of game,

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with clearly defined rules. As long as he is absorbed in playing that game a man is prevented in some measure from realizing the extent of his solitude in a world where most human communication is governed and measured out according to these same rules. That fundamental solitude is closely related to the whole idea of exile which emerges as the dominant theme of the novel. Each of the foreign visitors is exiled in an alien culture to which he cannot satisfactorily relate, in which he is condemned to solitude and forced always back on his own resources. There are, apart from the main characters, several other exiles: the Levantines, Christians in an Eastern environment; and the archetypal exiles, the Jews. From the first, Daville is made to feel uneasy by his "Levantine" interpreter, d'Avenant (known locally as Davna) - a man of mixed Mediterranean background, who studied at Montpellier and Istanbul and opted for French nationality, but spent all his working life as a doctor in Ottoman service. Daville's immediate dislike of him springs from the sheer incongruity of his being a Westerner who has for ever linked his life with the East. The concept "Levantine" has a specific meaning for the narrator: The Levantine is a man without illusions or scruples, faceless, or rather with several masks, obliged to act condescension one moment, courage the next, or despondency, followed by enthusiasm. For these are nothing but the necessary weapons of his life's struggle, which is harder and more complicated in the Levant than in any other part of the world. A foreigner, thrown into this unequal struggle, becomes completely submerged in it and loses his true identity. He spends his life in the East, but gets to know it only imperfectly and from only one side, from the point of view of winning and losing in the struggle to which he is condemned. Those foreigners who, like Davna, remain in the East, in the majority of cases take from the Turks only the baser sides of their character, and are incapable of observing and adopting any of their higher qualities and customs.49 There are three characters in the novel who are described as belonging to this category, but they are isolated even from each other. The two doctors, Davna and Cologna, are rivals: "But the basis of their rivalry was not so much the books or the knowledge

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that they had, as their Levantine need for quarrelling and competition, their professional jealousy, Travnik boredom and personal vanity and intolerance."50 Cologna is the main spokesman for the Levantine position and, at the same time, the focal point of a cluster of ideas about the encounter of East and West. His ideas are of particular importance in the novel: "You don't need to explain anything to me; I understand the position of the consuls, as I do that of every educated man from the West whose destiny drives him to these parts. For such a man, to live in Turkey means to walk on a knife-edge and to burn over a low flame. I know this, for we are born on that knife-edge; we live and die on it, we grow and burn ourselves out in that fire . . . No one knows what it means to be born and to live on the edge of two worlds, to know and understand both and not to be able to do anything to explain them and bring them closer to each other, to love and to hate both of them, to hesitate and stumble all one's days, to have two homelands and none, to be everywhere at home and to remain for ever a stranger; in short, to live stretched on the rack, at once victim and torturer . . . Yes, those are the torments suffered by Christians from the Levant, which you, who belong to the Christian West, can never completely understand, and which the Turks can understand even less. That is the fate of the Levantine, for he is the 'poussiere humaine', the dust of humanity, which shifts uncomfortably between East and West, belonging to neither and beaten by both. They are people who know many languages, but none is their own, who know two faiths, but are steadfast in neither. They are the victims of the fatal division of mankind into Christians and non-Christians; eternal interpreters and go-betweens; but they carry within themselves so much that is unclear and unspoken; well acquainted with both East and West, their customs and beliefs, but equally despised and suspected by both . . . They are the people from the frontier, spiritual and physical, from the black and bloodstained line drawn after a great and absurd misunderstanding between people, God's creatures, between whom there should be no frontiers. It is that border between the sea and the

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land, condemned to eternal movement and unrest. It is the third world in which all the malediction of the universe settled after the division of the world into two. It is . . ." Des Fosses, enthralled, his eyes burning, watched the changed old man, who kept searching in vain for words, his arms stretched out as on a cross, and who came suddenly to an abrupt end, saying in a broken voice: "It is heroism without glory, martyrdom without reward. And you at least, our fellow-believers and our kin, you people from the West, Christians with the same blessing as ourselves, should understand us, accept us and ease our destiny."51 This speech develops two of the main themes of the novel, the extent of the division between East and West, and the absurdity of this arbitrary but insurmountable division. People are cut off from one another by accident of time and birthplace. They are isolated by the natural sympathies and antipathies of their personalities, and where their instincts could bring them together, they are divided by their public position or their religious allegiance. In the midst of other human beings, all individuals are irrevocably "exiled". The importance of this theme is reinforced by the figure of the Jew, Salomon Atijas, who comes to Daville at the end, knowing that the consul's salary has not been paid for several months, to offer him a loan to cover the costs of his journey home. On this solemn occasion, Atijas feels an overwhelming need to explain himself and his people to the foreigner who is about to leave Travnik for ever, "For once to say something which would not be dictated by caution and shrewdness, which would have nothing to do with acquiring and saving, but would be an expression of generous pride and sincerity."52 In the event he is unable to say all he would like, but the narrator provides an account of what he would have said, had he been able. He describes the history of the Sephardic Jews, how they were swept away from their native Andalusia by a whirlwind which scattered them over the earth: It cast us here, into the East, and life in the East is for us neither easy nor blessed, and the further a man goes and the closer he moves towards the birthplace of the sun, the worse it is, for the earth is increasingly young and raw, and man is of the earth. And

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our trouble lies in the fact that were unable either completely to come to love this land to which we owe gratitude that it accepted us and gave us refuge, or to come to hate the one which drove us unjustly out and persecuted us like unworthy sons. We do not know whether it is harder to be here or not to be there . . . We left a long time ago and we travelled with difficulty, stumbling constantly, and we stopped in this place, and that is why we are no longer even a shadow of what we were. Like the bloom from a fruit that is passed from hand to hand, a man loses first what is finest in him. That is why we are as we are.53 In this speech we have an example, unique in Bosnian Story, of a sense of community. Elsewhere in the novel the individual has always been contrasted to the community to which he cannot fully belong. And it is not necessary to be a foreigner to be an outsider. One of the several anecdotes des Fosses records about the inhabitants of Travnik describes the life of the singer Musa, whose dirge so upsets Daville - he is a social outcast, a nonconformist, and des Fosses is made to quote from Marcus Aurelius in this connection: "He who avoids the responsibilities of the social order is the same as an exile." Musa, then, represents the outcast within society, while the Jews exemplify the outcast community opposed to an alien society and the Levantines individuals whose situation is similar to that of the Jews but exacerbated, for they have neither community hi their exile nor homeland, however distant. All these varying degrees of isolation contribute to the bleak texture of Bosnian Story, dominated as it is by the silence first commented on by des Fosses. Silence because there is no real communication between cultural groups, or between individuals, and ultimately, in the case of Atijas, because of the sheer weight of what he has to say. The silence of this sombre landscape is broken twice, by the Catholic monk Brother Luka, and by the Levantine Cologna. Both men are doctors, both close to the fundamental movements of life: Watching from day to day, from year to year, the plants, minerals, and living creatures around him and their changes and movements, Brother Luka had discovered increasingly clearly that in the world as we see it there exist only two things, growth and

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decay, and that they are closely and inextricably connected, eternally and everywhere in movement. All the phenomena around us are only separate phases of that endless, complex and eternal ebb and flow, only fictions, transient instants which we arbitrarily separate, identify and name with fixed names, such as health, sickness and dying. And none of this, of course, exists. Only growth and decay exist in various stages and various forms. The whole skill of the doctor lies in recognizing, capturing and exploiting the forces moving in the direction of growth, "like a sailor the winds", and in avoiding and removing all those which serve decay. Where a man succeeds in capturing that force, he recovers and sails on; where he does not succeed, he sinks simply and irresistibly . . ,54 Brother Luka has all his life been filled with enthusiasm for his vision of the world and the perfect harmony which can only be guessed at, which man succeeds at times in using, but is never able to control. Cologna, who belongs nowhere and has no public function which could offer him illusory security and an objective identity, balances the preoccupations of the "public men". He is at home in conversation with Moslem, Catholic, Orthodox and Jew and free to move among them all. His face is described as a succession of masks; he changes language as easily as his expression and does not even have a name which would be fixed and permanent. He embodies in one being the ebb and flow described by Brother Luka, a constant succession of shifting moods. His character is summed up in the formula "consistent instability". It comes as no shock, then, that this basically sceptical philosopher, for all his occasional attacks of Catholic piety, should declare himself a convert to Islam in order to avoid death at the hands of a mob. In his case there is no serious dishonour: from his perspective all beliefs are relative and, in his detachment from the world, he offers an expression of the great that constancy and the one real hope. Cologna's declaration of his fundamental belief, the statement of an intellectual rather than a profoundly religious mind, comes at the end of his description of the isolation of the Levantine, and acts as an antidote to the emphasis on isolation which colours the whole novel:

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At the end, at the real final end, everything is good and everything is resolved harmoniously. Although here everything really does look discordant and hopelessly entangled. "Unjour tout sera bien, voila noire esperance", as your philosopher put it. And one cannot even imagine it any other way. For why should my thought, good and true, be worth less than the same thought conceived in Rome or Paris? Because it was born in this backwater called Travnik? And is it possible that this thought should not be recorded in any way and nowhere written down? No, it is not. Despite the apparent fragmentation and disorder, everything is connected and harmonious. No single human thought or effort of the spirit is lost. We are all on the right path and we shall be surprised when we meet. But we shall all meet and understand one another, no matter where we go and however much we lose our way. It will be a joyful vision, a glorious and redeeming surprise.55 This message represents a kind of revolt in the whole stark landscape of the novel. Andric deliberately uses the Levantine to express the message, for he is the character uniquely shaped by East and West, and yet belonging to neither. It is an expression of Andric's own philosophy, the philosophy which permeates his work - a blend of the daily experiences of his early years, Oriental acceptance of life in all its forms, with his experience of Christianity and knowledge of the development of Western thought. From his very different perspective, Daville is ultimately driven on by a similar belief. Aware that he himself will never find the "right path" for which he has searched all his life, he nevertheless packs his belongings to leave Travnik soothed by the thought that maybe his children, or their children, will reach it. The dominant idea of transience and exile is balanced here by the image of the "right path". The essential experience of living is thus felt to be dissatisfaction and restlessness, governed by a constant search for roots, for communication, for meaning. The Woman from Sarajevo In Bosnian Story we are given an account of the way in which several individuals react to the essential conditions of human existence, and

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of the extent to which each is able to find a way of accepting these conditions. The broader perspective of The Bridge on the Drina places individual lives in the arbitrary flux of history, emphasizing that "meaning" can be found only outside them, in legend and a symbol of continuity such as the bridge. The Woman from Sarajevo presents the portrait of an individual who appears "mad" because she refuses to accept the basic conditions of existence. We have seen that other characters in Andric's fiction react to their own fear and insecurity with hatred and aggression towards others. The protagonist of The Woman from Sarajevo directs her "unnatural" behaviour above all against herself. Rajka Radakovic refuses to be cast adrift in an uncontrollable ebb and flow, at the mercy of arbitrary forces. She attempts to do the impossible by making of herself a bulwark against the tide of change and decay, by forcing her vulnerable human flesh into a structure as inviolable as the bridge on the Drina. This endeavour, expressed in obsessive miserliness, is difficult material for the novelist. Andric's characters are, for the most part, seen to react - more or less robustly or aggressively - to circumstances imposed on them by the nature of their existence. Rajka, on the other hand, is herself responsible for her isolation and for all the hardship that is the result of her obsession with money. It is a complex passion, as it acquires all the characteristics of an irrational force common to those of Andric's stories concerned with ungovernable impulses of fear, guilt, power, and so on. Yet it is based on and developed through a series of quite rational decisions and actions. This paradox is to an extent resolved by a study of Rajka's psychology, but the texture of the novel is thinner than that of the other two works published at the same time. It suggests an "unnatural" task that the author has set himself, rather than material evolved from his experience. The Woman from Sarajevo begins with an introduction announcing the death of Rajka Radakovic, as it is reported in the Belgrade newspapers. The first chapter then focuses gradually on her dilapidated house in Belgrade, her neighbours' impressions of her, her external appearance and details of her way of life. The body of the work is a lengthy reminiscence as Rajka looks back over her whole life; it shifts back and forth from the past to the present and ends

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with Rajka's sudden death from a heart attack as, in her anxiety about the safety of her money and in the gloom of her unlit flat, she comes upon the wet coat she had hung up in the hall and mistakes it for the thief she had for so long feared. In view of the work's concentration on the figure of Rajka, and the fact that the novel looks largely at the world as she sees and experiences it, the role of the narrator is not altogether clear. Rajka dominates the narrative from beginning to end and the narrator's own descriptive comments jar slightly, since he makes no attempt to attribute these observations to the main character herself. These external comments do set Rajka's story in a specific context and endeavour to link her life with her age and environment. Sarajevo in the first decade of the twentieth century is described as abounding in contrasts and conflicting views and ways of life, varied social classes and groups, religions and nationalities, bound together in their common desire for money. The tone of the town is described as the product of Oriental habits of idleness and a Slavonic need for excess, combined now with Austrian formalistic concepts of society and social obligations, basing a man's social standing on his ability to spend: It is hard to imagine a town with less money and poorer sources of income but a greater thirst for wealth, with less will to work and skill in making money, but with more appetites and desires. The combination of Oriental customs and Central European civilization here creates a particular form of social life in which the local people compete with the new arrivals in creating new needs and opportunities for spending. The former habits of restraint among the poor and thrift among the wealthier classes had now paled utterly. In so far as there still were people who had preserved the town's old ways of modest and strict principles of small earnings but great thrift, they stood to one side of all social life, like the comic remnants of times long past.56 In this context, Rajka's financial ventures flourish. As we have seen in the case of Travnik in Bosnian Story, the degree of harmony between the various nationalities and faiths depends on the stability of the whole society. A measure of hatred between cultural groups is always latent, ready to be sparked by some upset

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in the established order. Such an upset in The Woman from Sarajevo is the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. It is only in the aftermath of such an event that the true nature of the population of a town like Sarajevo can be seen. As in Bosnian Story, the impulse governing the outbreak of violence is treated as something organic, irrational. Andric is speaking here of the lower strata of society whose dissatisfaction is always ready to be channelled in the direction of violence, under any stimulus. Adherents of the three main faiths, they hate each other, from birth to death, senselessly and profoundly, carrying that hatred even into the afterlife, which they imagine as glory and triumph for themselves, and shame and defeat for their infidel neighbour. They are born, grow and die in this hatred, this truly physical revulsion for their neighbour of different faith, frequently their whole life passes without their having an opportunity to express their hatred in its full force and horror; but whenever the established order of things is shaken by some important event, and reason and the law are suspended for a few hours or days, then this mob, or rather a section of it, finding at last an adequate motive, overflows into the town, which is otherwise known for the polished cordiality of its social life and its polite speech. Then all this long-restrained hatred and hidden desire for destruction and violence, which have governed their feelings and thoughts until now, break out on to the surface and, like a flame which has long sought and at last found fuel, these emotions take over the streets and spit, bite, break until some force stronger than themselves suppresses them or until they burn themselves out and tire of their own fury. Then they retreat, like jackals, their tails between their legs, into people's souls, the houses, and streets, where they continue to exist for years, concealed, breaking out only in malicious glances, foul language and obscene gestures. This Sarajevo frenzy of hatred, nurtured for centuries by various religious institutions, favoured by climatic and social circumstances and reinforced by historical developments, broke out now and spilled into the streets of the modern part of the town, built with quite different assumptions, for quite a different order and quite a different kind of behaviour.57

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The last general description of social movements is an account of Belgrade society around 1920 - an unformed society, open to all comers; an uneasy mixture of disparate people loosely linked by their common interests; people from various parts of the Balkans and Central Europe, uprooted by the War and assembled by chance, out of the context of the traditions and customs with which they grew up. In such an environment fraud and deception are rife, since standards of behaviour are no longer clear-cut; a prevailing optimistic enthusiasm, after the misery of the War years, makes the path of the social climber and confidence trickster smoother than it would be in different historical circumstances. This general picture of Belgrade society is used to describe the atmosphere of the gatherings that take place at the house of Rajka's relatives, where she and her mother stay on their arrival in Belgrade, and to explain the phenomenon of the trickster Ratko Ratkovic, who succeeds in persuading Rajka to lend him money, something previously quite unthinkable for her. These more general statements about contemporary life include some comments on the effect of the First World War on the ordinary people of Bosnia and the writing of young poets immediately after it - quoting directly one of Andric's first poems. All this background material serves to illustrate the circumstances in which Rajka's story takes place and some of the social phenomena particularly associated with the period. Rajka's own story, however, is not dependent on the historical moment except in so far as it determines the precise forms in which her financial dealings develop. The story of her obsession is itself timeless, but in Andric's work all aspects of life - the individual, the moment in time, the geographical and cultural setting - are inextricably linked. Rajka is introduced at a stage when her obsession is fully developed. Her house is dilapidated, with signs of neglect everywhere, as though it were inhabited by somebody blind or totally indifferent to worldly things, making use of them only when essential. She is mending, and her delight in this activity is described in lyrical terms. She has two sources of pleasure at this time mending and saving. So absolutely is her world expressed in these two verbs that she cannot bear even the concept of "spending" time

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on cooking and housework, since the very verb "to spend" in any connection or form is a source of pain for her. Her obsession with saving shows an extraordinary degree of detachment from the world, to the extent that she is prepared to neglect her health and ruin her eyesight, sitting in the cold and dark. Health and eyesight cost nothing and seem to come in abundant supply, unlike the things of the world which wear out and decay. From her perspective her own physical being is infinite, or at least expendable in the cause of her ideal. This ideal is described in terms of a young girl's indulgence in thoughts of love. As she might sing love songs over her work, so Rajka finds herself repeating the magic words "mend", "forbear" under her breath as she darns her already well-stitched stocking. The process of mending is then exalted in heroic terms of struggle against a powerful, invisible enemy: "In this struggle there are dull, difficult, apparently hopeless moments, there are defeats and moments of weakness, but there are, and many more of them, bright moments of dedicated, devout service and triumphant exaltation."58 The language of this long passage and of the following one, a meditation on the notion of "forbearance", is such as might accompany an act of religious worship rather than the homely task of darning, but for Rajka self-denial and suffering for the sake of her ideal of thrift are akin to the zeal of religious devotion. These ideas emerge here from the fact that her dedication is to the abstract notion of preservation rather than to the physical manifestation of her ideal - money itself. The broad outline of Rajka's career is an initial obsession with acquiring wealth. The goal of her early life is the almost mystical notion of "the first million", a dream which fills her waking and sleeping life. She develops a ruthless business ability and succeeds rapidly in making large sums of money. She continues this activity all through the War years, exploiting every aspect of the War for her own ends, quite unable to understand the outrage of her fellow-countrymen over this behaviour and their desire for revenge and retribution. When the War is over she is obliged to move to Belgrade, where no one knows her. Her activity here is more subdued, and she has lost her ambition to acquire much more. Instead she concentrates her energies on preserving what she has and deriving satisfaction from speculating as to what she might have made from various transactions. The two main events in Rajka's life - her decision to embark on a

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life of money-making, and her aberration over young Ratko Ratkovic, which is so apparently out of keeping with her cold, solitary character - are given a psychological explanation, which establishes an uneasy balance between the rational and irrational aspects of her behaviour. It is essential to Rajka's psychology that she be capable of great devotion. Two characters in her early life command her allegiance. These are her father and her mother's younger brother, a man some four years older than Rajka herself, of exceptional charm and zest for life. In her long reminiscence she reveals nothing of her earliest years. Her real life began when she was fourteen and the father she admired suffered the ignominy of bankruptcy and died. Her father had been the epitome of all that was strong and dignified, and she regarded him almost with reverence. Consequently she takes his dying message to heart: that her guiding principle through life should be to save, that she should never be a victim of her own weakness or the greed of others. The solemnity of this moment stays with Rajka throughout her life in Sarajevo, where she visits her father's grave each Sunday, forbidding her mother to accompany her. Her first reaction on each visit is a rush of tenderness unknown to her in any other circumstances. But after this initial lack of restraint the tenderness turns to cold resentment of those who destroyed him, and she dedicates herself anew to carrying out his last command as faithfully and literally as she is able. The grave is gradually forgotten as Rajka's vow becomes increasingly her own inspiration and, once she leaves Sarajevo, she scarcely thinks of her father. Her devotion becomes detached from his memory. She is incapable of any warmth of feeling towards anyone else around her at any stage in her life, with the single exception of Uncle Vlado, her mother's younger brother. Her response to Vlado is as unquestioning as her devotion to her father. He is a young man of great charm and an insatiable desire to give - of his strength, health and wealth. Rajka is drawn to him by overwhelming tenderness of an almost maternal nature, wanting desperately to save him from himself but obliged helplessly to watch his inevitable downfall and death, penniless, of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two. He remains for Rajka throughout her life "her tenderest

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and most terrible memory, a perpetually unresolved question . . . The man who was dearest to her in the world had in unnatural degree that vice which was for her worse than any sin and blacker than death. Profligacy!"59 Her readiness, after she has refused so many, to help young Ratko Ratkovic when he comes to her in Belgrade, appealing for assistance as he embarks on his business career, stems from the single fact of his strong physical resemblance to Uncle Vlado. Soothed by his gentle smile, so exactly like Vlado's, Rajka lends him increasingly large sums over a period of some months until she discovers that he is simply a weak-willed, selfindulgent squanderer. The shock of this discovery reminds Rajka forcibly of that grave in Sarajevo, and as she stumbles home through the winter wind, she silently addresses her father: I know and remember everything that you advised me and left me as a pledge, but what is the use if the world is such that in it lies and deception are more powerful than anything else? I did everything to insure myself. But what is the good, when the attack comes from where you least expect it? And if no one deceives us, we deceive ourselves. Forgive me for being so lost and helpless after so many years and so much effort, but I did not betray my vow; the world betrayed me. You know how I worked, long and hard. I thought that your word, together with my will and effort, would be sufficient protection against everything. But it isn't like that. In this world there is no protection nor adequate defence.60 After some days of illness, Rajka revives with one thought in her mind: to save. She can never recover her loss but she can preserve what she has through her own effort and self-denial. There is something of a vow of penance in this decision, and in the ruthless way in which Rajka carries it out for the remaining decade of her life. This is in keeping with the exalted tone we have already seen as a feature of her obsession in its fully developed form. And this is the most interesting aspect of the novel. The psychological explanation of Rajka's actions is not entirely satisfactory as it gives her irrational behaviour a rational origin, and because it is undermined to a certain extent by the description of her habits of economy, which verges on caricature. The other aspect of the novel which interferes with our reading of

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it as a psychological study lies in the writing. The tone is too varied to read quite smoothly. There are the passages of objective description of the historical and cultural background of Rajka's activities and the neutral narrative itself; but the texture of the writing is richest in the passages which reproduce the movements of Rajka's mind, such as the lyrical meditations on the joys of mending and forbearance mentioned above. The major part of the novel is written from Rajka's point of view. She is seen first carrying out her pledge, then reviewing the course of her conscious life. Where the narrator takes over there is a break in the tone of the writing, for what is described is not seen by Rajka herself, or at least not in the same terms. She is oblivious to everything that does not concern herself and her narrow ambition. The discrepancy comes when the writer allows a certain measure of irony into passages seen through the eyes of his heroine. An example of this irony can be seen in the exalted tone of much of Rajka's reflection and in individual passages, for example the one in which she considers the concept of beauty: She had never really understood why people made such a distinction between what was beautiful and what was not, and what it was that carried them away and intoxicated them to the extent that for the sake of what they called beauty they would waste their health and spend their money, great, holy, powerful money, which was superior to everything else and with which no kind of beauty could be even closely compared.61 Or again, when she has delayed putting more coal on her meagre fire: "She was warmed by the shovel-full of coal she had not used."62 The devout nature of Rajka's fervour in her darning becomes explicit when she describes the true meaning of the act: "To mend means to struggle against decay, it means to assist eternity."63 And again, of saving: It supports life and the existence of things around us, enriches us constantly and makes what we have eternal, so to speak; it saves us from spending, loss and disorder, from growing poor, from the misery that comes at the end and which is blacker and grimmer than death, true hell, while one is still alive and still on earth. And when one thinks that all of this around us is perpetually fading and

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vanishing, breaking, wearing out and slipping away, and how little and insignificant is all that we are capable of undertaking and doing in the struggle against this process, then one would accept any suffering and any renunciation, simply to resist this evil, then one must be ashamed of every moment of rest, as a waste of time, and every mouthful as dissipation and luxury. One must endure everything in this hopeless struggle, with the fanatical courage of the martyr.64 With each darned hole, Rajka is filled with a warm glow of realization that she has added one more positive mark to the universal account of gain and loss, "that another hidden crack in the great galleon of the universe has been sealed".65 Decay is relentless and loss inevitable, nevertheless it is impossible to give up the struggle and submit meekly to destruction. The struggle is sufficient reward in itself. Now she really could not see any more. But before she switched on the light, she remained for a few moments, her hands crossed on her work, with the painful but exalted feeling that the ultimate limits of saving were after all unattainable. This only saddened her, but it did not discourage her. However far, even unattainable, those limits were none the less more worthy of effort, renunciation and sacrifice than any other aim which a man could set himself.66 All her life Rajka strives to cut herself off from the world, its demands and obligations, to concentrate fully on her goal. Politics, the War, demonstrations - none of this has any reality for her; it is intolerable for her to think that her life and affairs can be in any way dependent on such meaningless occurrences. For Rajka the real world is somewhere else: For a long time there had been two worlds for her, completely different, if not completely separate. One was this world of ours, the one everyone calls the world, this whole noisy and immense earth with its people and their life, their instincts, desires, thoughts and beliefs, with their eternal need for building and destroying, with their incomprehensible game of mutual attraction and repulsion. And the other one, the other one is the world

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of money, the empire of acquisition and saving, known to only a few, the secret and silent, boundless area of wordless struggle and perpetual planning, in which calculation and measure reign like two dumb deities. Unheard and invisible, this other world is no smaller and no less varied nor less rich than the first one. It also has its sun and constellations, its sunrises and eclipses, its rises and falls, its blessings and barrenness; it also has the great, obscure force of its inner meaning, of its life principle on which everything rests and around which everything moves and which weak mortal man can only guess at and glimpse.67 Rajka's attitude to the temporal, chaotic world in which she is obliged to live her daily life resembles that of an ascetic, dedicated entirely to the divine, moving among his fellow-human beings as one enlightened among children. It is only after her mother's death in Belgrade that Rajka is able to live her life entirely as she wishes. While her mother's life was bleak enough, she had still managed to retain some vestiges of those small pleasures which brighten ordinary lives - a cat and some potted plants, for example. These - living things with their own demands - Rajka summarily removes and feels at last quite free: "In the whole house there were no longer any of those superfluous trivialities which distract and dissipate our attention."68 Complete freedom comes only with complete solitude, the solitude demanded by any genuine great passion. And so Rajka is able to live out her life entirely in terms of her deity, "saving", through her solitary small triumphs of self-sacrifice, sitting in the half-light by a fire that hardly exudes any warmth, darning her often-mended stocking although she can barely see. For all the obvious irony of Andric's selection of his material and its treatment, there is a kind of misguided nobility in Rajka's singlemindedness. The initial impulse for her chosen way of life was, after all, indignation against the world's destruction of her father. Such a refusal to allow the world and the process of decay to shape her life is a gesture which is dignified in its very futility. We have seen Rajka state that the struggle itself is her reward, however unavoidable the ultimate defeat. She rebels against senseless chance which threatens to upset her plans - the fact that this chance occurrence is the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince and entails universal

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suffering on an appalling scale reinforces the ironic tone of the work, but her revolt is none the less noble in that it is doomed. Rajka's harsh self-denial is, then, ultimately meaningless; but more than this it springs from an initial fear in the face of decay and entails daily experience of that fear. In this way Rajka becomes a distorted symbol of the human condition. She has deliberately refused any endeavour to understand the workings of the world, other than that one chosen rational world of finance. Consequently, she has no means of interpreting the chaotic events around her, or of beginning to comprehend that her self-interest during the War years would entail in its turn hatred and revenge. With the outbreak of war she is simply afraid of the losses she will make, but when it ends she does not know precisely what to be afraid of, nor from which direction to expect an attack. The fear which then governs her life, and which is ultimately the cause of her death, is thus similar to the fear which affects the lives of so many of Andric's characters. In essence, her obsessive stand against weakness and decay is not unlike the acceptable self-denial of the dervish Alidede, whose life is in its own way as "unnatural" as Rajka's. Nevertheless, because her portrait entails the denial of so many basic human qualities, and because it is extended over the greater length of a novel, such points of contact with other characters in Andric's work become theoretical. The Woman from Sarajevo remains an exercise, which continues to puzzle critics. Omer Pasha Latas69 No consideration of Omer Pasha Latas can be complete, since the novel itself is incomplete; some chapters are fully worked out, but others remain fragments. Sections of the work were published as separate pieces in various periodicals between 1950 and 1973, while others remained in manuscript. They have now all been assembled in a coherent volume which follows the years of Omer Pasha Latas's campaign in Bosnia. The novel can now be read in what is basically the form Andric had envisaged. The novel not only has a coherent outline but is coloured consistently by a set of ideas which reveal some familiar and some new aspects of Andric's thinking in his mature years. Some of the pages of the completed sections are among the finest of his works.

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Andric wished to write a chronicle of Sarajevo, as he had done of Visegrad and Travnik. The subject which presented itself to him was not the indigenous population of Sarajevo but, once again, a group of outsiders. This time the character who is the focal point of the work represents an irony that was the common fate of many converts to Islam, whether taken by force to make up the Janissary Corps - as in Andric's account of the story of Mehmed Pasha, the builder of the bridge on the Drina - or whether, like Omer Pasha, they left their native land voluntarily. Many of these men, in one way or another, found their way back to the place of their origin. Their situation is potent in its associations of arbitrary exclusion from a static community, constraint on action of all kinds, isolation and exile. These themes were all woven into Bosnian Story, and it is inevitable from the similarity of the subject matter of the two novels that they should share common features. Nevertheless, it is possible to see a general progression in Andric's interests between the two novels. It is clear from some of the fragments scattered in periodicals, manuscript and in the pages of Signs by the Roadside that ideas for Andric's fictional works would come to the writer sometimes in the form of a bare sketch for a story, sometimes as a complete scene, and sometimes as a snatch of dialogue. These ideas can be of several kinds: often they are presented visually, in vivid, more-or-less static scenes which mark a crucial moment in the story or life of the character described. Sometimes, again, they follow the whole span of a character's history. Almost all of them, however, are imbued with strong emotional and psychological colouring. As we have seen from the earliest pieces, Andric's writings tend to cluster round a few essential emotional states; they do not work out a purely intellectual ordering of experience, so that when we speak of Andric's "ideas" we should always bear this tendency in mind. We can see this process particularly clearly in the case of the unfinished novel. In its published form, it consists of a number of chapters which build up a general impression of the arrival of Omer Pasha's army in Sarajevo and its effect on the local population; a number of chapters which examine Omer's household, his own story and those of some of the figures around him; and three brief fragments centred on the reactions to his rule of the Austrian consul in Travnik at the time. All these pieces are connected with the

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historical figure of Omer and they are organized chronologically around the years of his Bosnian campaign, 1850-52. This connection is, however, fairly loose, and the extent to which they do form a coherent whole depends on the recurrent emotions and ideas that give the work its particular flavour. Andric tends to examine events from the point of view of the effect they have on the ordinary people who witness them. Here, as in Bosnian Story, there is a clear division between the townspeople and their response to the presence of Omer's army, and the army itself: the townspeople form a unit, separate from the local landowners as well as from the agents of Ottoman authority. In this case, the division of the local population into three faiths is not stressed; its function is to provide a sense of stable continuity against which the visitors will stand out as strangers in a hostile land. The familiar theme of isolation and exile is, then, one of the main components in the atmosphere of the novel. The basic form of Omer Pasha Latas, as well as this dominant theme, is similar to that of Bosnian Story. The arrival of Omer's army in Sarajevo is preceded by gossip, anticipation and apprehension. The pattern of arrival and departure against a static background was most fully developed in Bosnian Story. The opening chapter of Omer Pasha Latas is complete. It was published in 1954 under the title "The Young Man In The Procession",70 and presents some of the main ideas of the novel. The scene of the arrival of a stranger in a town where he is wellknown by reputation, with all its inherent drama, has been exploited by many writers and is also common in oral literature: it is one of the "set-pieces" of the South Slav tradition. This echo is clearly prominent in Andric's mind in the first chapter. Omer's task is unique. He has not come to quell a rebellion by the "rayah" or to defeat any external enemy, but to discipline the Beys and bring them into line with the new ideas of the Constantinople government for strengthening and preserving their declining Empire. The terms in which the townspeople have been summoned to greet the army contribute to the atmosphere of hostility, threat and potential violence. The atmosphere of awe and apprehension is sustained and firmly established so that it endures after the army has moved on, and permeates the subsequent chapters. There is a

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digression in this opening chapter typical of Andric's narrative method in the way it is developed for its own sake, dominating the chapter in which it appears for several pages. The digression begins with an introductory paragraph: . . . In this whole parade, despite all its glitter and solemnity and the genuine threat and danger it represented, there was something unnatural and mad. And a crazy incident involving a pathetic madman almost upset it at the very outset.71 This incident, and the emotional disturbance of several of the individuals described in the course of the novel, serve a symbolic purpose in suggesting the decay and degeneration underlying all the pomp of the Imperial army. Its function here is to counteract the external impression made on the townspeople by Omer's arrival and to suggest that public display, and indeed all public behaviour, is to an extent a lie and an illusion. The incident itself centres on a character who might have formed the subject for a separate story; he is another of those "pathetic, disturbed creatures" common in Andric's works. When Omer arrives in Sarajevo this character, Osman, breaks through the police cordon and upsets the leading horses in the procession. The constable who seizes the harmless madman is instructed by one of the officers to take him off and beat him mercilessly, reinforcing the theme of random violence represented by the army. Osman's story is then told, creating a quite separate episode in the chapter. It introduces two related ideas of special importance in the novel: the pursuit of beauty and the human propensity for illusion. The first chapters of the novel describe the arrival of the army and its establishment in Sarajevo, with a few examples of the behaviour of the soldiers and the fate of their prisoners given to illustrate the nature of the army and the atmosphere it engenders. One of the features of this army which is dwelt on, and which contributes to the meaning of the novel, is the existence within it of a large number of foreigners. They are mostly Poles and Hungarians who fled to Turkey after being involved in unsuccessful uprisings in their native lands. Since Omer is himself a convert, bom a Catholic in Croatia, these foreign officers dominate the novel. They form the aspect of Omer's army which is most frequently spoken of and which

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gives rise to the alarm, uncertainty, fear and hatred with which the army is viewed. They raise a series of familiar issues, such as the power of rumour and gossip to evoke fear and hatred, as well as people's natural tendency to fear what is unfamiliar and somewhat outside the normal pattern they are accustomed to. These foreign officers cannot be seen for what they really are - even how many they actually are - because of the rumours surrounding them. These rumours spring from the needs of the people and have no actual connection with the officers. In endless anecdotes and whispering everyone wove into [the story] something of their own torment and hatred, and, condemning and railing against people they did not know, they took their revenge on life for all the evils it had brought them and all the good it was never going to bring.72 The hostility of all sections of the local population is emphasized, as is Omer's own contempt and distrust of the majority of them, so that they are left entirely isolated. Omer's distrust of the "foreigners" springs from his intimate understanding of their background and of the kind of people they are, as well as from his sense of his own superiority. He knows that he might have been like them, and yet that he could never have been. They continue to make him uneasy, however, because of a residual sense of identity with them and still more because of his fear that others will identify him with them. The absurdity and hopelessness of the situation of these men, including Omer, is stressed: Victims of despotism and violence in their own land, they had become the Sultan's weapon for quelling all unrest and disturbance in Turkey, regardless of its aims, intentions or causes; and they served and perished in campaigns which actually only speeded up the inexorable process of decay of this condemned, outworn Empire, for which there was no cure, for the cure and the sickness would have been equally fatal.73 There is no escape from this impasse and none of the characters rises above it through any belief or ideology which could counteract it. Where characters in Andric's other works have sought escape

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through many different forms of illusion, in this case the only source of solace seems to be alcohol. The result is an increased impression of hopelessness, despair and the impossibility of escape, umitigated now because of the essentially transitory effects of this solace. One whole chapter of this novel is devoted to one of the foreign officers' drinking sessions, and takes the form of a hymn of praise to the famous "Zilavka" wine from Hercegovina: The wine had overthrown all the barriers within them, released all the brakes, stirred up their imaginations, shrouded reality, and thrown new, miraculous bridges between their imagination and reality. All their instincts were freed, and all logic buried. And each of them was strolling, as in his own private garden, through the endless garden made up of all that is, that is not, that once was and would never return, what never was and never would be. And each of them spoke of what he could see and feel there. And in order to say what he wanted, what he had to say, none of them any longer needed any justification or set form. It all came from somewhere within them. Each of them felt that the others were asking him questions, and each knew the answer to everything. Their conversations flowed side by side, crossed one another or collided, they had no connection with each other or coherence in themselves. But those who were speaking felt, on the contrary, that all was following wonderfully logically, linked like question and answer, and that these unusual conversations, smooth, intelligent, truthful, rich in meaning and full of delight, sprang out of everything. In them these serious, unhappy people, like children in a game, carried out great exploits, became all they desired, realized all they had ever dreamed. But in the midst of this turbulent sea of wonders and fairy-tales, there appeared momentarily, like rocky islands, sharp and clear observations from the suspended, rejected reality of their everyday life of exile.74 The unit of "foreigners" is the section of Omer's army which arouses the most specific hostility. It is given prominence because of Andric's wish to convey a strong sense of one aspect of his theme of isolation and exile. It is echoed again in the description of prisoners

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being taken from Bosnia in chains, steadily losing their identity and becoming nothing but the present moment of pain and anguish. Another pronounced feature of the novel can be seen in the army as a whole. It is described in terms which suggest something of an organic nature, like a cloud of locusts or a wave of lava moving over the land, spreading fear and a sense of danger in the face of an uncontrollable natural force. The soldiers cease to exist as individuals; they become part of a vast body whose limits cannot be envisaged, or movements anticipated. Like a living body, the army has needs which it satisfies indiscriminately. Two instances of such needs are illustrated: the need for food, which is met by requisitioning livestock and supplies, and the need for women. This last is illustrated in a scene describing the rape of a feeble-minded gypsy girl, in terms which are of general relevance to the novel as a whole. In several of his works, and most notably in Ex Ponto, Andric has written of the powerful attraction of women as a living force existing in its own right, outside the individuals - male and female - whom it affects. Like the idea of violence and threat spread by the army - but more abstract - it is a natural force, identified here in the soldiers' imagination with the fierce heat of the Bosnian summer: High above them, on the glinting waves of the shimmering heat, parallel with the tread of the troops as they marched, a vast, indefinite female body spread and rose up, with ample forms, uncertain limitations and innumerable curves and hollows; it lay over the bends in the roads of the sunny hillsides and over the cool shaded valleys; you could feel it everywhere but nowhere could you grasp it.75 Elsewhere in the novel pain and fear are evoked in similar terms to this account of lust: as forces from which there can be no escape since they are everywhere and yet cannot be directly confronted. The concomitant of such forms of pervasive oppression is the desire to escape, already hinted at in the drinking which characterizes the life of Omer's officers. The theme of escape also forms an important thread in the lives of all the main characters, including Omer himself. In this connection, the symbolic role of Bosnia as a place of exile is explicit. In Bosnian Story we saw that evening released a man from the

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clearly defined role and obvious duties of his professional commitments, and brought him face to face with the essence of his situation. In the chapter entitled "In the Evening Hours" in Omer Pasha Latas, we see the common preoccupations of the foreign officers in Omer's army. Their conversation over cards and brandy always concerns the misery of their situation and their persistent dream of escape from it. For them Bosnia symbolizes exile and isolation, as it did for the European consuls in Travnik. For Omer Pasha himself the inhospitable land is similarly oppressive, although his initial journey into Bosnia from his native Croatia was itself an escape. He is cut off from that distant former life, however, and his freedom of movement and action is thus felt to be severely circumscribed. His situation is similar to that of the two Viziers - Mehmed Pasha and Jusuf - who built the bridges over the Drina and the Zepa, because of a similar feeling of disquiet: a sense of the complete gulf between the two parts of their lives. The description of what drove the young Mico Latas to seek exile of his own free will comes in one of the most elaborate chapters of the novel. Omer's story is interwoven with the description of the work of a portrait-painter, who provides a counterpoint to the other characters in that for him Bosnia represents a kind of release and stimulus after the atmosphere of Central Europe and Italy, which he had found stultifying. In Andric's account of his life Omer was driven out of his immediate environment by his superior intellect and lively imagination, which made the constraints of life in an impoverished community and his particular childhood duty of grazing the family cow intolerable. When a career in the Austrian navy was closed to him because of a scandal involving his father, Mico took the one line of escape offered to him and those in a similar situation throughout the history of Turkish rule: At such moments, when we feel that the ground is slipping away from under our feet, and our hands stretch upwards in vain, we instinctively seize what we did not previously realize we knew or had. Before us rise up the buried experience and customs of our forebears, which we had not guessed were living in us. At such

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moments, when it was necessary to escape from death and dishonour, and there was no way out anywhere, his ancestors had found a solution: Turkey.76 Andric points out that the solution was uneasy, traditionally both inadmissible and yet the only one available. "It was in a way both death and dishonour, and more bitter than either."77 His presence in Bosnia, so close to his native land, obliges Omer to confront the bleak character of his initial choice, and increases his restlessness. Bosnia therefore represents for him, as for the European soldiers in his army, the essence of their situation, from which by definition there is no escape and yet which is fundamentally oppressive. The need for escape is also at the heart of the story of Omer's Hungarian wife Saida, whom he met in Romania. Like him she had no illusion that her flight into Turkey would bring her happiness. Her view is similar to that of the young Mico Latas and the European soldiers. They chose to set off into a situation of complete uncertainty, because remaining where they were would have meant certain disgrace, and probably death. The situation of all these characters is, then, one of severely circumscribed opportunity; more severe in their case than that of individuals who have not chosen to move out of their original context, but not different in kind. In this way, as in Bosnian Story, Bosnia emerges as a metaphor, a symbol of the constraints imposed on the individual by a variety of factors - social, historical, political and temperamental. The closing chapters of the novel in its published form are written from the point of view of the Austrian consul at the time, Atanackovic. These three short chapters are no more than sketches, which had all been published separately as self-contained pieces. The atmosphere that pervades them is similar to that of Bosnian Story. The situation of the foreign consuls is essentially that of outsiders, temporarily exiled in an alien land, among people with whom they have to deal only officially, with no obligation for closer understanding and communication, and very little possibility of such contact. The first of these chapters is the most important from a general point of view, as it contains a further account of Bosnia, one which

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offers an example of the careful balance in Andric's work between precise detail and generalization. It takes the form of the Austrian consul's reflection at the end of the first year of Omer's presence in Bosnia, and a letter he writes to Vienna describing its effect on the local population. The underlying theme of the letter - that the town of Travnik and the whole of Bosnia resemble a prison - is taken from an authentic letter from the Austrian consul to Prince Schwarzenberg, dated 5 June 1851. The letter describes the presence throughout Bosnia of prisoners. When there was no longer room for them in the fortress, the captured Beys, agas and the ulema were imprisoned in the barracks, and the army began increasingly to squeeze the local population out of their houses, so that ordinary citizens were barely noticeable. People were reduced to three categories of unequal size: "prisoners, those who pursued or guarded them, and silent, helpless onlookers". During the day the prisoners poured out into the streets, to work on various heavy municipal projects. These working parties are vividly described, again with details taken from documents of the period. Many of the landowners, when they were arrested, put on their best clothes in order to save them; and they were often the heaviest they had because they did not know where they were to be taken and feared a cold climate. Now, in the fierce heat of this Bosnian summer, they were obliged to carry out these heavy tasks, to which they were not in any case accustomed, wearing their thickest and finest winter clothing - for if they once let the garments out of their sight they would certainly be stolen. This pitiful sight of the "mighty fallen" attracted many onlookers, who were moved by what they saw; wondering, if these unimaginable things were happening, what else might occur. Their reaction is expressed in terms which reflect the leitmotiv of the novel: "It was a disgrace which could not be supported and against which nothing could be done."78 The chapter describes the exceptional nature of this first summer of Omer's campaign, stressing the astonishment of both Atanackovic and the local population at events around them. The details refer specifically to Omer's activities and open threats. And yet, because the campaign has been selected as typifying the decline of the Ottoman Empire, it stands also for the collapse of the rule of force at any time, anywhere. This emerges from the whole text, but

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explicitly in the observations of the anxious onlookers: "They think: nobody's head can be safe when such an ancient and substantial building collapses like this. They whisper: 'and it is always hard on the donkey over whose back the horses are beaten',"79 Throughout Andric's work a sense of patterns repeating themselves shifts the balance of his writing, despite the abundance of precise and specific detail, away from the particular towards the universal. In Omer Pasha Latas this sense is a result of the all- pervading notion of sickness and oppression, the emphasis on constraint and escape, the theme of the pursuit of beauty, and illusion. The remaining chapters describe the lives of Omer, his wife and several figures in his household and they all contribute in different ways to the main themes of the work. There is another idea in the novel, which is not fully elaborated but is familiar enough from some of Andric's other works. The Croatian painter Karas, commissioned to paint Omer's portrait, provides the technical motivation for an account of the life of both Omer and his wife Saida, but his presence represents more than that. In all the movement towards decay which characterizes the work, Karas's activity is intended to fix a moment in static and enduring form. The painter himself plays a role similar to that of the Vizier's elephant. He is an outsider looked on with suspicion and hatred by the people of Sarajevo as "one of Omer's many sins". His presence gives rise to the narrator's general observation: Whenever people are oppressed, afraid, anxious about circumstances and events, the idea of sin and the need for such an idea arises in them. Sin, what is called sin, has to explain the sufferings for which people cannot find a real explanation . . . For this reason, naturally, no one could begin to imagine that this foreigner, a painter from Croatia, was himself an unhappy man, a shipwreck victim who had come, through the complicated laws of an artist's fate, here, to this rebellious, exhausted and devastated land, to find an escape for himself - he did not himself know of what kind - and salvation which did not exist.80 The brief reflection on the creative process that forms the chapter entitled "The Picture" suggests that this contrasting theme might

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have been further developed in the final version of the novel. It is a reflection on the need for struggle in the creative process. Any idea which comes fully formed to the artist is equally easily lost, and left unrecorded, to exist only in his mind. To endure it must involve the artist and require his active participation. The painter goes on to reflect that this kind of person was common in positions of authority in the Ottoman administration. Centuries of fighting and governing had created them, developed in them "simplified thinking, swift judgment, lightning-quick decisions, unquestioned and irreversible".81 The painter sees all this, and the picture is already virtually complete in his mind. The artist finds this experience of rapid and complete identification with his subject both exciting and alarming. The theme is not here developed to the extreme point of the potential imbalance of the artist, which the identification of Kamil with Gem in Devil's Yard can be seen to illustrate. It is here presented as a more commonplace artist's experience: Whenever it happened to him that after looking for only a short time, the picture of the object, figure or landscape came to him "ready-made", apparently perfect, complete and fully expressed, eloquent and vivid so that he felt no further need to work on it, it meant that he had been mistaken and gone astray, and that every attempt to transfer that painting on to canvas was doomed in advance as futile, and that it would never be realized. On the contrary, when a subject left in him a deep but vague impression, incomplete and unfinished, a "dumb" picture which required a great deal more work in order to come to life on the canvas, then there was some hope that something would come of it and that, perhaps, a work of art would come into being, visible and comprehensible to others as well.82 We may perhaps detect in this passage a personal note, reflecting Andric's own feelings about his work at this time. As he was by now a skilled and experienced writer, certain aspects of his ideas must have virtually written themselves; and yet the complete working out of his whole plan for the novel demanded a struggle for which he no longer really had the physical energy. What remains is a series of pieces loosely strung together, informed by a group of related ideas,

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offering a tantalizing suggestion of what the complete novel might have been. Of the various themes in the novel, which occur in Andric's other works with more or less emphasis, the idea of illusion dominates. It is first introduced in the opening chapter of the work, in two different ways. It is found first in the reaction of the townspeople to the pomp and splendour of Omer's army, the effect of which is described as "intoxicating", and from which they only gradually sober as they walk home to their simple houses and meagre evening meals. The other instance is the digression which forms an important part of this chapter: the story of Osman, who is obsessed and driven mad by an illusion. Afraid all his life of women, Osman one day comes upon a young girl washing herself at a pump on the outskirts of Sarajevo. The shock - for one accustomed to the decorum with which Moslem girls traditionally veil themselves - of suddenly seeing the uncovered face of the beautiful girl, shining with the water, the bright sun and her joyous smile, is such that Osman never recovers. At first he is as frightened as the girl and they both run away from the scene. But as time goes on the vision of the smiling girl by the pump becomes a part of Osman's life, at first in the form of a "mild, imperceptible intoxication", but later as an obsession which undermines his whole existence. He soon stops working to spend his days running through the streets in the vain hope of coming once again on the vision of perfect beauty he saw for that brief instant. Osman's situation is an extreme form of that of many of the characters in the novel. He never imagines that the girl of his obsession is real; he thinks of her only as a vision, and yet he is driven irresistibly to seek her, to spend his whole life in pursuit of an illusion. Another story of a similar vein pursuit lingers on in the popular imagination in Sarajevo: It was strange how everyone in Bosnia loved a terrible story, the more so the less joy and amusement his real life offered. It was like that with the story of the foreigner who, like so many others, had wanted in any way and at any price to capture that cursed, unattainable and incomprehensible female beauty, to fix it in one place, to penetrate it and retain it for himself.83

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The story of "Kostac" becomes the subject of a song, living in the minds of the people "like the trace of a fossilized shell in the rocky shore of long-vanished seas".84 The theme of illusion is developed, as we have seen, in relation to the foreign officers in Omer's army, particularly in their search for what is obviously temporary escape through alcohol. It colours also the stories of several other characters, including Omer and his wife. Omer's whole life is the projection of an illusion. He is described as the type of person who from the first moments of his conscious life strives towards an image of himself- "Of such an exceptional person one could say that he does not really live, for his life and work are at the service of that future being."85 The work of the painter is also described as illusory: As soon as he was alone with his model for any length of time, the same game always began. First of all a feeling of terrible, cold distance and loneliness which froze his fingers and clouded his eyes. That did not last long. Then slowly and gradually the atmosphere began to change, and he in it. Each stroke of the brush created and reinforced an invisibly thin but strong, strange and close bond between him and his model, and with it his illusion grew, transported and deranged him. As though under the influence of a drug, the firm, established relations which divided people from one another vanished. The painter forgot everything that existed, and began to see and feel more and more clearly what was not and could never be as the only, intoxicating reality . . .86 The theme is connected on the one hand with the idea of unattainable beauty and on the other with the idea of escape. This theme of a constant search for an escape which is recognized as impossible is one which is implicit in much of Andric's work in the recurrent image of the prison, and developed thoroughly in Devil's Yard. The conclusion that suggests itself, then, is that prison can be seen as a metaphor for life in Andric's work as long as one accepts that death is final and therefore no solution. Human beings are condemned to a sentence from which there can be no escape and yet human life tends to be a perpetual search for an escape, for beauty, for permanence. It emerges, then, that illusion can be a positive force. This idea is touched on in relation to the character of Omer's

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brother Nikola, who is an incurable alcoholic, corroded by tuberculosis. He lives constantly on the verge of suicide. From time to time he is visited by Muhsin-Effendi, a man whose function in Omer's household is always to approve all the commanding officer's suggestions. His nickname is Evet-Effendi, from the Turkish word meaning "yes". Guaranteed to see everything in the best possible light, he always greets Nikola by remarking that he is clearly well on the way to recovery and then builds up impossible pictures of the sick man's future life: Nikola listens, increasingly attentively. And wonders, could that really be? It's true that this Evet-Effendi is a senile and cunning fool, but must everything he says be a lie? ... Both lies and flattery can, while remaining what they are, unwittingly cast light on some things . . .87 Muhsin-Effendi's words give Nikola a momentary illusion of the possibility of escape from his hopeless situation, and a reason for living. The final chapter concerning the consul Atanackovic, "Deceit", is devoted to his account of his dealings with Omer, which he sees as an exchange based entirely on lies. Omer is described as lying "with the inevitability of natural phenomena, he lies as the wind blows, as a dog barks, as a cock crows; he lies because he cannot do anything else . . ."88 Atanackovic is described before his first meeting with Omer, practising his conversation with him, and then his reaction afterwards is given: In amazement he wondered why he had spent a whole hour without saying anything, listening to the seraskier weaving and spreading out his banal half-truths and raw lies, and how he could have allowed his lies to get the better of his own half-truth. How? Why?89 Reflecting helplessly on his situation, the consul is overcome by anger "like drunkenness, or temporary poisoning" - in these moods the consul would take up his pen and write "to a friend to whom he could say everything and who . . . did not exist".90 Atanackovic's only means of escape from his humiliating position is, in other

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words, again through the illusion of confiding in another human being. It is a similar kind of escape and illusion to those sought and found by the consuls in Bosnian Story, writing alone in their rooms each evening. Atanackovic ends his bitter reflection on Omer's deceit with the words: "But, after all, we all tell lies, and we are not much better than he is."91 We can therefore perhaps draw the conclusion that, while he was well aware of the potentially destructive effects of illusion, Andric had come to believe that some degree of illusion is not only healthy, but essential in the lives of most human beings. It is an idea that recurs in various forms, including some of the later pages of Signs by the Roadside.

5 Devil's Yard1 More than is the case with many of Andric's other works, the sense of Devil's Yard depends closely on its intricate structure. The composition is one that Andric had used earlier for another story in the Brother Petar group: "Torso". It is a system of concentric circles forming successive frames, focusing increasingly on the central point of the tale. The Petar stories in any case all have a similar outer frame, since each of them is explicitly the "story of a story". Petar is a man with a particular gift for story-telling: In everything he said there was something cheerful and wise at the same time. But, besides, there hovered around each of his words a special kind of tone, like a halo of sound, which you do not find in the speech of others and which remained quivering in the air even after the spoken word had faded. Because of this each of his words conveyed more than it meant in ordinary speech.2 This description comes from the beginning of "Torso". In Devil's Yard there is a reminder of the particular quality of Petar's speech, although here it is much less distinct: And now, as he looked at his grave in the snow, the young man was actually thinking of Petar's story-telling. And he would have liked for a third and fourth time to say how well he could tell stories. But it cannot be said.3 In the context of Andric's work as a whole these hints and suggestions form part of a continuing discussion on the nature of art, and the particular quality of the statements of individual artists which impose themselves on the minds of their readers or audience. More particularly, they contribute to Andric's reflections on the nature of story-telling, the varying situations in which stories are

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told, the varying needs they fulfil and the varying manner in which they are related. In Devil's Yard this theme is developed in some detail since the story is told by four separate narrators, and is set in a prison where the recounting of anecdotes is virtually the sole occupation of the inmates. In this work Andric gives quite a detailed account of the narrative style of Petar and the other main narrator, Haim. They are different, but Andric's point, as elsewhere in his work, is that "it is best to let a man tell his story as he will", without interference, interruption or question. Petar lends his tales particular emotional and psychological colouring by virtue of his standing as a monk and his great age - his stories are all told from his cell bed where - old, ill, but full of wisdom and experience - he selects episodes from his long life which acquire an added dimension of seriousness because of the context in which they are told. The qualities Petar then brings to his tales are balance, tranquillity, sympathy and a quiet optimism. Sensitive to the feelings and situation of others and with no personal axe to grind, Petar is a wholly reliable observer. But in Devil's Yard Andric also gives an example of a quite different kind of story-teller: one who will always invent where he does not know the facts, but whose talents should not therefore be dismissed. In a long parenthesis, which forms an introduction to the core of the work, Andric makes a direct comment on the need for variety and open-mindedness in assessing works of art: We are always more or less inclined to condemn those who talk a lot, particularly about things which do not concern them directly, even to speak with contempt of them, as chatterboxes and tedious gossips. And we tend not to remember that this human, so human and so common, failing has its good sides as well. For what would we know about the minds and hearts of others, about other people and consequently about ourselves, about other places and sights, which we have never seen and shall never have the opportunity of seeing, if it were not for people like this who have a need to communicate in speech or writing what they have seen and heard, and what they felt or thought in that connection? Little, very little. And, if their accounts are imperfect, coloured by personal passions and needs, or even inaccurate, we are ourselves possessed

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of reason and experience and we can assess them and compare them one with another, accept or reject them, in part or wholly. In this way, something of human truth is always left for those who listen or read patiently.4 As in the other tales told by Brother Petar, the outer framework of his cell is established before the story itself is told. We have seen already that it is Andric's intention always to remove the story as far as possible from himself, to leave it on its own to communicate its full significance without his personal intervention. The various devices used to this end in Andric's works serve to increase the objectivity of his tone. They also contribute to one of the recurrent themes of his work: that no episode or individual is of intrinsic significance; individual stories tend to be placed in a context wider than themselves, making their own significance relative. In Devil's Yard this relativity is most explicitly developed. The outer frame is used to establish just that relative insignificance of individual lives vividly. Petar has died, and a young monk watches from the old man's cell window as the grave is covered in snow. The snow deprives everything of its true shape, giving it one colour and one form: All that could be seen was the trace of a narrow path through the fresh snow; the path had been trodden out the day before during Brother Petar's funeral. At the end of the path a thin line of trodden snow widened out into a uneven circle, and the snow around it was coloured pink with softened clay, and it all looked like a fresh wound in the general whiteness which stretched as far as the eye could see and merged imperceptibly with the grey desert of the sky still full of snow.5 The snow blurs the features of individuals and events and causes them to merge into a more or less amorphous, monochrome generality. This is the broadest scale, the immediate process of obliteration in the uninterrupted succession of events which buries the past in a mass of accumulated moments as surely as the snow. The image of the all-enveloping snow is not therefore left on its own. The immediate reality is illustrated by the activity of the monks who are making an inventory of all Petar has left behind him. Life goes

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on, declaring that whatever we regarded as our own in the material world was simply borrowed, as was the brief span of our life. The consistency of Andric's message and method can be seen in the closing paragraphs of Devil's Yard., where he returns to the outer frame. The first paragraph of this closing page consists of a wholly negative statement: And this is the end. There is nothing any more. Only the grave among the invisible graves of the other monks, lost like a snowflake in the deep snow which spreads like an ocean and transforms everything into a cold desert without name or sign. There is no more story nor story-telling . . . There is nothing. Only the snow and the simple fact that we die and go under the earth.6 But then the finality of this statement is characteristically reduced, because even at this stage Andric removes himself: "So it seemed to the young man by the window . . ."7 It is reduced still further because the final words of the work describe the gradual fading of the story the young monk has been recalling, and the steady impingement on his consciousness of the sounds of the monks' counting and the clattering of Petar's tools. The second frame is formed by the young monk's recollection of Petar's stories about his time in the Constantinople prison known as Devil's Yard. These memories have a special quality because Petar spoke more, and more compellingly, about these two months than any other episode in his life. Petar then takes over the narrative directly, to describe the prison and its inmates, and the circumstances in which he met the young Turk whose story forms the core of Devil's Yard. Petar's role here is similar to that of Andric's ideal narrator: that of an observer and listener who acts as a passive vehicle for stories which are then seen as self-contained entities, not as part of Petar's own experience. This is not the case in all the stories that concern him but it is true of "Torso", whose composition also falls into separate frames and in which, again, Petar is simply the audience of a strange tale which he later relates to others. This structure clarifies the outline of the central tale. In "Torso" there are three frames: the cell, the circumstances of Petar's life in which the

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episode occurred, and the focal point - Petar's observation, through a window, of the strange figure whose story is then told him by a third party. This basic structure is more complex in Devil's Yard: Petar meets the young Turk, Kamil, and hears much of his tale directly. There is a further narrator, however, the character Haim, whose verbose story-telling technique was described above. From the point of view of the story itself Haim's function is to inform Petar of the details of Kamil's past (known to him because they are both from Smyrna) and of his last days in prison - information to which Petar could not have access. More important, however, is his function in the structure of the whole work: the texture is deliberately fragmented, broken up into eight distinct chapters, an introduction and an epilogue. Each chapter is related by a separate narrator: the first is Petar's necessary account of the prison, which has no place in the central scheme of seven chapters in which the fourth acquires its full force as the focal point by virtue of its position. The six chapters surrounding this central chapter are related alternately by the two main narrators: Petar, Haim, Petar - Kamil - Petar, Haim, Petar. The effect of this fragmentation is to slow down the pace of the work and ensure the prominence of the central chapter, and also to reinforce the nature of the work as the "story of a story". We have seen that in many of Andric's works the setting of a particular tale is designed to establish a state of mind in the reader, which then determines his response to the story itself. The settings thus tend to have a significance beyond themselves: to be more or less allegorical. In Devil's Yard this pattern is clear and the allegorical setting is involved in the central theme. The image of the "prison" had a special resonance for Andric as a result of his prison experience during the First World War. We have some evidence as to how freshly this experience remained in his mind in the fact that, of the four published sketches which describe it, three were published only long after the War, in 1952 and I960.8 These sketches are concerned largely with an external description of incidents affecting the young prisoner who is the protagonist, and there is a recurrent theme of the contrast between the brilliant sun outside and the small patch on the cell floor that alters its shape according to the angle of the sun through the bars on the little

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window. For a clearer understanding of the way in which Andric's prison experience became internalized, we have to return to Ex Ponto and Anxieties. From these prose poems we gain some insight into the degree to which Andric's immediate experience of imprisonment affected his response to the world beyond the physical walls of the gaol as well. Bosnian Story is also distinctly coloured by the theme of confinement: within a determined space, a role, official and private obligations, and a culture. In Devil's Yard this theme is explored both as an external setting and as a more general expression of the kinds of restrictions placed on human lives which informs not only Bosnian Story but so many of Andric's shorter works. The Turkish prison in Constantinople - a detention centre in which criminals and suspects are held before being sent to trial or exile or before they are released - is described in terms that lend the whole work its special flavour. The first striking feature of the prison, which is very large - a whole town of prisoners and guards"9 - is the haphazard nature of its population. People are arrested on the merest suspicion on the principle that it is easier to release an innocent person than to search through Constantinople for the guilty. We know already that Petar is there fortuitously: "All because of a misfortune that befell Brother Petar, through no fault of his own, by a crazy conjunction of circumstances, in that troubled period when authority ceases to distinguish the innocent from the guilty."10 Some of the terms in which the prison is described are familiar from elsewhere in Andric's work. These are the terms in which Andric describes the natural world in general: "So the Yard ceaselessly sifts the variegated crowd of its population and, always full, it is constantly being filled and emptied anew."11 These words are reminiscent of the account of life itself given in The Bridge on the Drina: "Life constantly spends itself, and yet endures . . ." It is implicitly suggested that we should read the description of the prison as an account of the world itself, but it is a world which has specific qualities. In making their arrests, and thereby determining the population of the prison, the police work according to some logic of their own. This idea is again familiar from Andric's description of the natural world elsewhere. The existence of some "logic" inacces-

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sible to human reason is tantamount to denying the reality of such "logic". When the wind blows "the whole of that Devil's Yard reverberates and roars like a vast child's rattle in a giant's palm and the people in it dance, writhe, collide with one another and knock into the walls like grain in that rattle".12 The key figure in the prison is its governor, Latifaga, known as "Karagoz" after the grotesque character in the Turkish shadow theatre. Karagoz has a dual role. Most clearly he represents that arbitrary logic that governs the natural world and human destiny. He has evolved a system of behaviour towards the prisoners which is entirely unpredictable. He can appear in the Yard at any moment and start his idiosyncratic "interrogation". His manner is always different. At one moment he will suddenly announce to one prisoner that he is free without explanation, and at the next he will tell another protesting his innocence that it is precisely "innocent" prisoners whom the authorities now require, and he has therefore just condemned himself. At another level, however, Karagoz's role is apparently almost reversed: he represents authority This strange, endless game of his was incomprehensible but it seemed that in fact he never believed anyone; not only the accused or witnesses, he did not even believe himself, and for this reason he needed a confession as the only point which was at all fixed and from which one could in this world, in which everyone was guilty and worthy of condemnation, maintain at least the appearance of some kind of justice and something resembling order. And he sought this confession, hunted it, squeezed it out of a man with a desperate effort, as though he were fighting for his own life and disentangling his hopelessly confused accounts with vice and crime and cunning and disorder.13 In other words, the purpose of authority is to impose a semblance of order on chaos, and its endeavour is not seriously undermined by its awareness of its own arbitrariness. The population of the prison accepts the prevailing method of government: "They were all accustomed to Karagoz; they had grown used to him in their own way. They grumbled about him, but in the way one grumbles about one's fate and the life one loves."14

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Like the vast majority of peoples everywhere, the prison inmates accept the particular style of government imposed on them, regardless of its strength or justice. The allegorical setting of this work is thus complex: it involves external, arbitrary restrictions on all aspects of individuals' lives, from the most general to the most concrete; and authority, its ultimate illogicality and the consequent blindness of its power. The setting is established in detail in the first chapter and referred to frequently throughout the narrative, reinforcing the other main strands of the work, and giving Andric the chance to make general comments of various kinds. An instance is the statement that Petar talked "a great deal about the life of the Yard as a whole and about the interesting, comic, pathetic, disturbed people in it; they were closer to him and better known than the thieves, murderers and sinister criminals whom he tried to avoid as far as possible".15 These words provide an adequate description of the kind of characters to which Andric is frequently attracted in his writing. One of these "interesting, pathetic, disturbed" people is the young Turk Kamil, who beds down next to Petar one night. There is a certain air of mystery about the young man: as he thinks about him Petar is never able to remember the exact moment when he arrived, just as he is unable to recall certain other facts about him. The first thing Petar remembers noticing about him is a small leather-bound book. From his first glance at his face, Petar realizes that the young man is in some way ill, not physically, but Petar recognizes his eyes: "He had seen similar eyes. There are people like this who are afraid or ashamed of something, or who wish to hide something."16 As we know from Andric's work as a whole, characters who are more or less disturbed mentally have a privileged position in his world. They are more susceptible than those who are fully balanced, and adjusted to currents underlying the surface of life. Their angle of vision is distorted, but it allows them an insight into an aspect of the forces governing human life which are usually not directly acknowledged. So we may suspect from the first that Kamil's "illness", which isolates him from his fellow-human beings, also colours his experience of the world is a particular way

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to the exclusion of any others. A bond of sympathy is immediately established between the two men, enabling Petar to enter into Kamil's world with a special warmth. Since the work is the "story of a story", reference is made throughout to the process of story-telling; the initial frame in Petar's cell sets the tone. After this, in the Yard itself, one of the prisoners' chief occupations is the relating of anecdotes. These are generally stories whose purpose is to illustrate the prowess or virility of the teller rather than to entertain his audience. The prisoners do not really listen to one another, dismissing the idle boasts of their fellows as a temporary distraction, not worthy of their full attention. The second main narrator, Haim, stands out from this background as a man with a particular gift for story-telling, and a particular need to talk. In fact, Petar considers that his talkativeness has brought him to the prison. The undisciplined nature of his speech makes him an unreliable witness, but his account is not coloured by any particular passion: he is a Jew and shares the privileged position of Jews generally in Andric's work, that of being freer than other individuals whose allegiance is usually either Christian and Western or Moslem and "Oriental". Petar virtually shares this non-sectarian objectivity, since he refuses to be affected by artificial barriers between men. Haim is described by a generalization typical of Andric: One of those who are involved their whole life in a hopeless quarrel lost in advance, with the people and society they spring from. In his passion to say and explain everything, to disclose all people's mistakes and wrong-doings, to unmask the evil and acknowledge the righteous, he went far beyond what an ordinary healthy person can see and discover . . . And he did not simply describe the people he talked about, but entered into their thoughts and desires, of which they were often not themselves aware, and which he revealed to them . . .17 Andric's own direct comment in parenthesis suggests that we should not dismiss such an exaggerated interest in others as unreliable, since we can always learn from it something about our fellowmen and consequently about ourselves. What seems to be implied here is that we should not refuse to pay attention to stories, and by extension to works of art, with which we do not feel complete

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sympathy: Petar becomes irritated by Haim's perpetual suspicion of others and by his manner, and yet acknowledges that he is a vital source of information. What Kamil communicates to Petar, through their mutual sympathy, is quite different in kind from Haim's information. Kamil's own story is superficially unremarkable: born in Smyrna, the son of a beautiful Greek girl and a Turkish pasha, he showed an early predilection for books and learning. When prevented by the Greek community from marrying the Greek girl of his choice he turned entirely to his studies, associating only with scholars like himself. Several issues are involved even in this brief outline: first the familiar fact that the circumstances of an individual's birth determine the course of his life in a way which is beyond his control. The fact that Kamil's mother, when a young and beautiful widow, had refused many Greek suitors and chosen instead a sixty-year-old Turk explains the hostility of the Greek community towards young Kamil and their refusal to let the old Turk take a second Greek girl from them now, through his son. To Kamil their behaviour is quite incomprehensible. Through his parents, then, Kamil is caught up not merely in a local quarrel between families, but in the whole universal quarrel between Islam and Christianity, between East and West. Kamil is a solitary figure, cut off from his fellow-men by ideas he cannot accept through no choice of his own, drawn instead to the world of scholarship. The future course of his life is determined by this innocent predilection and the fact that it is intellectuals like himself whom people in authority suspect and resent, because the outlook of these people tends to be limited by their own self-interest, and their insistence on "law and order" cuts them off completely from the world of the imagination. We have been prepared already by the description of Karagoz, the prison governor, for the notion that "law and order" are ultimately an arbitrary fabrication, imposed on the chaotic forces of life to give them an artificial semblance of logic. The extraordinary narrow-mindedness of the mistaken "cause" is also illustrated in the fanaticism of the father of the girl Kamil wishes to marry: "I am a small man in reputation and possessions, but I am not small in my faith and my fear of God. And I prefer to lose my life and to despatch my daughter, who is my only child, into the sea, rather than give her to an infidel."18 A similar

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narrow-mindedness characterizes the attitude of all the representatives of authority with whom Kamil comes into contact. For Kamil is arrested and sent to the prison in Constantinople because his preoccupation with books eventually arouses suspicion. That comes about through a combination of the natural antipathy of those in authority towards a man such as Kamil, and malicious gossip, to which any individual whose behaviour deviates from the accepted norm is everywhere exposed. The rumour is spread that Kamil has become obsessed with one particular theme of his research to the point where he believes himself actually to be the historical figure who has become the object of his special interest: the Turkish prince Cem, younger brother of Sultan Bayazid. To the ears of those in authority, men of strictly limited imagination and intelligence, the mere mention of an interest in the Ottoman throne, albeit of a fifteenth-century monarch, is enough to condemn a man as potentially dangerous. It so happens that the relevant official in Smyrna is hard and zealous, "an obtuse and pathologically distrustful man, who trembled even in his sleep lest any political malpractice, plot or the like should escape him".19 He has the most dangerous attribute of a man of power. He is himself insecure and fearful, interpreting all government directives as a direct criticism of his personal inadequacy. Eventually Kamil is interrogated, while held in Devil's Yard. Like their superior, Karagoz, the two officials are interested only in eliciting a confession from their prisoner, regardless of its basis in any facts. Their requirements and expectations are totally at variance with Kamil's experience and understanding of the world. Any meaningful discussion between them is a priori impossible. "Nothing you say has any connection whatsoever with me or with my ideas",20 Kamil states in despair, knowing that nothing he says can alter his situation. But the situation in which the three men find themselves has its own inexorable pattern: the interrogators goad Kamil until he gives them what they require, a "confession" that he is identical with Sultan Cem, "that is with a man who, more unfortunate than any man, has entered an impasse, with no possible escape, and who does not want, and is not able, to deny himself, not to be what he is". And Kamil suffers the common fate of intellectuals who arouse

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the suspicion and hostility of the machinery of power in an absolutist regime: he disappears without trace. Kamil's story, suggestive and moving as it is, is not in itself particularly unusual except in the degree to which he does indeed identify himself with Gem, the Turkish prince. In the scheme of Devil's Yard the central chapter, the fifth, is Kamil's own account of the life of Gem. Just as Kamil's story gains clarity of outline by being divided between the two narrators, Petar and Haim, so Gem's story too stands out here as a separate entity, a story complete in itself, a story which can be transmitted down the generations. Gem's story is powerful, archetypal in the extremity of the situation it describes. This quality is explicit in the words with which it opens: It is, in a new and solemn form, the ancient story of two brothers. From time immemorial, there have always been and are constantly reborn and renewed in the world - two rival brothers. One of them is older, wiser, stronger, closer to the world and real life . . . The other is his absolute opposite. A man of short life, ill fortune and a false first step, a man whose aspirations always go far beyond what is necessary and above what is possible . . .21 Briefly, Gem, the younger son of Mehmed the Conqueror and favoured by the old sultan to succeed him, claims half the empire from his brother Bayazid. After his inevitable defeat, Gem takes refuge on the island of Rhodes under the protection of Pierre d'Aubusson and his Knights of St John. He thus unwittingly places himself at the centre of a complex web of international intrigue and Great Power politics, involving the kings of France and Hungary, the Sultan of Egypt and the Pope, in which he remains caught up until the end of his life. He is used as a bargaining point by Bayazid and the Western powers in their negotations with and campaigns against one another. The restrictions placed on him are thus absolute: his initial misfortune seems to have been conditioned in part by the qualities of his own character, and in part by the role imposed on him by the circumstances of his birth and the primordial pattern of strife between brothers. As he endeavours to escape the restrictions of this pattern he becomes entrammelled in the strife

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between countries and ideologies which makes him physically a prisoner for the rest of his life: The whole of the known and inhabited world, divided into two camps, Turkish and Christian, contains no refuge for him. For here or there, he can be one thing only: a sultan. Victorious or defeated, alive or dead. That is why he is a slave for whom there is no longer any escape, even in his thoughts or dreams . . ,22 The scale of his ambition is echoed in the scale of his fall: "I wanted to make an instrument of all that the world is and contains, with which to conquer and subdue the world, but now this world has made an instrument of me."23 Gem's story finds a ready response in Kamil not because he has any worldly ambitions whatever, or for any superficial similarity of their situations, but because it describes a concentrated and extreme form of the kind of limitations to his choices and actions which Kamil himself has experienced in his own modest way. Kamil was, like Cem, born with certain characteristics into a world divided according to ideologies and interests which have no meaning for him. When faced with the absolute barrier dividing him from the woman of his choice, Kamil suddenly sees clearly "just how much there was that could divide a man from the woman he loved, and in general people from each other".24 The extent to which the archetypal "legend" of Sultan Cem, with its additional dimension of itself repeating a timeless pattern, arouses such a strong feeling of recognition in Kamil contributes towards a clearer understanding of the place of "legend" in Andric's works. The implication appears to be that in our day-to-day lives we should not expect to come upon situations which are strikingly reminiscent of those "few main legends of mankind" to which Andric refers in "Conversation with Goya". Indeed, if we read through all Andric's works with this explicit intention of his in mind, we might not be able to discover obvious examples of situations repeating themselves with any exact correspondence. It is the central, emotional parallel to which Andric refers. Kamil's sense of identification with Gem's story is, however, particularly intense by virtue of a further dimension, notably the whole question of identity. Kamil is arrested and imprisoned simply

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because of what he is: a man drawn to the world of books and learning, in which scholars can communicate freely regardless of their beliefs and origins. The malicious gossip which leads to Kamil's arrest is founded not on any action of his but on the charge that he purports actually to be a pretender, claimant to a fifteenthcentury throne. To a degree that is almost the case, since Kamil feels such profound sympathy for the prince that it virtually amounts to imagining himself fully in his situation. To this extent Kamil is prepared to make the statement that his interrogators demand of him: that he is in fact Gem. Kamil's perspective is entirely different from that of his interrogators; to him the statement means an expression of emotional and intellectual affinity, while to the officials it is an admission of guilt. Two main issues are involved here: the irrevocable, binding nature of the spoken word and its consequent power for good or ill, and the degree to which the identity of an individual is determined in the eyes of others by their interpretation of his words. One of the author's parentheses expresses this central idea of Devil's Yard'. (I! - Weighty word, which in the eyes of those before whom it is spoken determines our place, fatefully and unalterably, often goes far beyond or lags far behind what we know about ourselves, beyond our will and above our strength. A terrible word, which, once spoken, binds and identifies us for ever with all that we have imagined and said and with which we never thought of identifying ourselves, but with which we have in fact long been one.)25 Kamil's whole crisis depends on this issue. In Petar's sympathetic eyes Kamil has endangered himself, not for the same reason that the authorities pursue him, but because he feels that the young man's obsession with Cem is unbalanced. Petar does not remember exactly when, but at some point in his account of the prince's life Kamil begins to speak in the first person. To the rational outside world Kamil's direct, unequivocal statement "I am he" seems to suggest insanity. In fact it is the expression of a fundamental attitude which has made the development and function of myth and legend so vital in human culture. Andric is no doubt here making a direct reference to Thomas Mann's "formula of myth" - "Ich bin's". The essential

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feature of categorical statements such as "I am the son of God", "This is my flesh and blood", is their mystery. Kamil is quite clearly not Cem, and his statement is consequently disturbing. His identification should not, however, be thought of as "real", but mythical. It is through a masterly, understated suggestion along these lines that Devil's Yard is transformed from a bleak indictment of authority, and an account of the strict limitations on an individual's freedom of action, into a sober statement of faith, albeit ambiguous, in the power of the imagination. Petar is fascinated by Kamil's obsession, to the point that he is unable to act as reason dictates he should and try to deflect the young man from the brink of "madness": "What is not, what cannot and ought not to be was stronger than all that is, that exists, obvious and real, as the only possibility."26 Andric is always concerned with the truth underlying apparent reality. Kamil's obsession is expressed in terms of his having allied himself with that underlying truth to the extent of cutting himself off from superficial reality. Petar's sympathy for Kamil enables him to respond to him in a way that Haim cannot, and the existence of the two narrators now contributes to the theme of the function of the imagination. Haim's role is to convey information, which does not involve him emotionally, and then to pass on. Petar's is in a way, and to a lesser degree, to parallel Kamil's obsession with Cem, and so to give his story continuity. For Kamil settles in Petar's imagination, as Cem has in Kamil's. In this way the work can be seen as, among other things, a meditation on the nature of the artistic process; on the different ways of telling stories, the varying degrees of involvement of the artist with his material, the various human needs to which different works of art correspond. One of the essential characteristics of Petar's meetings with Kamil is their mysterious quality. Kamil arrives in the half-light, at dusk, and Brother Petar cannot remember any details of his arrival: When he thought about him, later, often, Brother Petar could never remember exactly when he had come, or how he had come, looking for a little space, nor what he had said. With people who become close to us, we usually forget all those details of our first

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contact with them; it seems as though we had always known them and they had always been with us.27 Later, as they talk, Kamil appears vague, absent-minded: "He did not complete a single thought, even the most trivial. He would often stop in the middle of a sentence. His glance kept straying into the distance."28 Kamil is portrayed as not quite of this world: he makes no movement or sound when he arrives, he scarcely even breathes. He barely touches his food. As their friendship grows Kamil talks to Petar about Gem, but, again, Petar can never remember when or how he began. Petar's last sight of Kamil is of the young man disappearing round a corner in the yard. Once again it is dusk. Kamil's physical presence has been reduced to a minimum, emphasizing the extent to which he no longer belongs to the "real" world. His reality is his identification with Cem. The same essentially mysterious quality surrounds the way in which Petar later remembers Kamil: in the half-light of dawn, Petar seems to see Kamil in the cloud of smoke from his cigarette. The two men talk. Petar addresses him as he used to speak "to the young monks in the monastery when they were overcome by taedium vitae".29 He tries gently to persuade Kamil not to despair: it is dawn and there will be a dawn after every darkness; Kamil will recover. Protesting that "one cannot recover from oneself'30, Kamil is irrevocably imprisoned in his darkness; he simply cannot see the beauties of God's sunlit morning which Petar points out to him. The monk's last thoughts in connection with Kamil can perhaps be seen as a statement of his religious faith: I repeat to myself that there is another, different world besides this Yard, that this is not all, nor for ever. And I endeavour not to forget this and to hold on-to this idea. But I feel that the Yard drags a man, like a whirlpool, down towards some dark depths.31 Perhaps, however, in the context of the whole allegory of the Yard, it would be legitimate to see this other world as being the world of the imagination, the world of books and stories, which gives human life continuity, despite the apparent finality of the disappearance of Petar's grave under the snow.

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Such a brief account of this complex work cannot do it justice. Its intricate writing touches on a number of different issues and raises questions which are never answered. Apparent conclusions are always questioned or countered, so that they become as elusive and tenuous as the whole question of an individual's identity touched on in the central parenthesis.

6 Essays and Reflective Prose Essays and critical writings

Andric 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 Andric'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 Andric'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 Andric'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 Andric's own particular interests. Andric 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 Andric'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 Andric's growing confidence and stature as a writer.

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The first of his articles to receive attention was a portrait of the Croatian writer and critic A. G. Matos, on the occasion of his death in 1914.1 Matos 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 Andric's article offers an insight into the personality of Matos and his influence on others. Andric's style in this piece conveys much of the energy and rapid impressionistic quality of Matos'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 Andric tends to consider each artist in his historical context. Here the atmosphere of the Croatia of Matos's day is evoked in an impressionistic style typical of the Young Bosnians. As this was the atmosphere in which Andric 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 Andric'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

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passage quoted on Mates 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 Andric'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 Andric'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 Andric's approach is selecting historical figures: "The Legend of St Francis of Assisi",6 "The Legend of Laura and Petrarch",7 "Simon Bolivar Liberator".8 Each of these figures appeals to Andric's imagination for a different reason. Simon Bolivar, 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 Andric maintains is not understood, let alone practised, in the twentieth century.10 Petrarch is discussed on the 600th anniversary of his first seeing Laura. Andric 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 Andric explores the circumstances

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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, Andric 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 Andric demonstrates the warm sympathy of Petar, the ideal, self-effacing story-teller who allows his characters to speak for themselves. Andric 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 Stefanovic Karadzic (1787-1864) and the Montenegrin poet P. P. Njegos (1813-51). Vuk Karadzic is admired for his personal qualities and for his instinctive literary gift. In his essays, Andric 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 Andric's fictional characters, while Vuk is on the stage he dominates it and Andric looks out at his opponents largely from Vuk's point of view. The reader is himself involved and convinced by Andric's presentation of the case. Andric 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 ce dati!" It is impossible to render its terseness exactly but it could be clumsily translated: "It's hard. But it will be done!" Andric 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 hard-

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ship, 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. Andric 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 Andric 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 Andric pursues in his own writing. Another general point which could equally well apply to Andric'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 Karadzic for Andric, 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. Andric 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 Njegos, Andric 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, Njegos was a thinker, embodying courage on a philosophical as well as a practical level. Njegos 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 Njegos's life. He had to face the backwardness of which Vuk was aware daily in his

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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. Andric describes Njegos 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 Andric as "not only the conflict of two faiths, nations and races, but of two elements".16 For Njegos 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 Njegos 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 Njegos'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. Andric 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 Njegos embodies for Andric, 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. Njegos expresses this principle with particular intensity: In this, Njegos 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 Karad"jord"je (1805) to the present day.19

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The essays concerned with Njegos evoke the essential drama of his situation. Andric 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 Andric's personal admiration of the poet and his acknowledgement of the extent to which Njegos remained a vivid presence in his mind - from his youth, when most people in Visegrad would quote lines from The Mountain Wreath in the course of conversation, to the Second World War, when Njegos'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 Andric's fictional works and with the character sketches and reflections of Signs by the Roadside. The work - included in the various published volumes of Andric'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 Andric's own reflections on the nature of art, provoked by an affinity with the painter's work. Had Andric 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 Andric's works, is set in a frame. The frame itself has two dimensions; the timelessness of a small French cafe, and the reference to a circus being set up outside it. The fact that the cafe is near Bordeaux rather than in Spain suggests the insignificance of man-made geographical divisions. The circus carries associations of Andric's exploitation elsewhere of the image of a different, manmade, 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

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"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 Zepa" 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. Andric maintains that all human movements are either aggressive or defensive. He recognizes that there can be rare

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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 fairytale 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 Andric'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.

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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 Andric'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 Andric, 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 Andric's later prose works, then this volume offers a virtually inexhaustible wellspring, only a fraction of whose material was worked into Andric'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

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his private life and thoughts, Andric 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 Andric'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 Andric's statements about the irrelevance of biographical information to an assessment of a writer's work, that the material Andric 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 Andric'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 Andric; 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:

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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 Andric'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 Andric 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

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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 Fosses: "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 Andric'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" Andric speaks of are no more than that. The bridge which dominates the life of Visegrad 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

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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 Andric's work. In the following passage, Andric 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

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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

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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 Andric'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:

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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'etat 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

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surprise, at the large, clear tear shot through with light on the printed paper. The tear slowly slipped down the tilted 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

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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

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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 Andric'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 Andric'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.

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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 Andric puts it, "from life - mine and yours". In the section of the volume entitled "For the Writer", Andric 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

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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 Andric'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 Andric 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.

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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 Andric 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 Andric'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 Andric's own life and on the human condition. Many of these fragments are similar in tone to the early prose poems and to Andric'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

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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 Andric'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

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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 Andric'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

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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 Andric's own succinct statements is still more so. As Andric 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 Andric'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, Andric 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

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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 Andric'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 Andric 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

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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

7 Conclusion Andric is a complex writer, and his works have generated a mass of critical writing both in Yugoslavia and internationally. Some of his allegiances to other twentieth-century European writers have been touched on here, and the main concern of this account of his works has been to stress the universal nature of their subject matter and treatment, despite the remote, "exotic" setting of many of them. Nevertheless, in attempting to identify some of the major features of Andric's fiction it seems appropriate to start from what was one of the most fruitful areas of his own cultural heritage, notably the oral tradition. Ivo Andric was born into a milieu in which the oral epic tradition was still a vital force. He was therefore from the outset aware firstly of the function of this kind of artistic expression, and secondly of the discrepancy between the worlds of epic and daily life. These two aspects of the process of human creativity remained a source of inspiration throughout Andric's work. The South Slav epic tradition offers a clear example of the raw function of the artistic process. Many of the heroic songs, and among them some of the finest, are above all a means of coming to terms with history. They look back over the period of Turkish rule, to the great battle of Kosovo which marked its beginning, and to the independence lost in 1389. From the scant facts known about the medieval states, from defeat and the centuries of compromise and survival which followed it, the songs have created a pattern which not only provides a sense of order, but gives it meaning. The years before Kosovo are seen as containing seeds of downfall in the greed and self-interest of medieval rulers, so that the defeat is not altogether imposed from outside but becomes also a lesson in

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humility and patriarchal values. The account of the battle itself is transformed into a story of heroism and self-sacrifice based on a conscious choice of death for the sake of the eternal values of the "kingdom of Heaven" which continues to have resonance today, and which has been an unquestioned source of inspiration in times of war. In the process of transforming historical events into a story with form and meaning several kinds of stylization are employed. One of these is the liberty of the singer to move freely in time and space, to take historical figures from different centuries and put them together regardless of the facts of history. Another is the use of stock phrases, formulae and whole set pieces which can grant the songs the formal dignity of ritual. An extension of these is the archetype. We have seen that in the various songs concerned with building projects, for example, the master-builder is always called "Rade". It is as though there were only one immortal embodiment of the principle of dedicated craftsmanship, capable of being summoned freely through time and space in the manner of the pagan gods with their specific functions. This is a feature of the heroic age, of the people's refusal to be dependent on many benefactors. More than this, however, the universal craftsman - the builder, the painter, the writer - becomes one of the central characters in his fiction. This figure is just one of many ideas which the writer absorbed from his heritage, and which affected his whole understanding of the function of art and several important aspects of his procedure. Andric's early stories tend to focus on single characters who function as archetypes because of either their personality or the situation they are in. These are characters about whom it would be possible for a group of tales or songs to grow up because they are felt to embody some fundamental aspect of the human condition. Examples would be Mustafa the Hungarian, representing a man brutalized by his experience of war, or Mara the concubine, whose story gives an account of the stoic acceptance by women of the fact that they will be used and abused by men. Several of Andric's characters do indeed recur in a small cycle of stories, bringing a particular flavour to the tales in which they appear. One could perhaps even see Andric's tendency to formulate general observations: "He was one of those people who . . .", "It was one of those marriages which . . .", as being related to the epic poetry's

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concern with widespread patterns of behaviour and recurrent insights. In addition, the technique of oral composition has affected Andric's narrative procedure. Such devices as the use of repetition and symbol are among the major features of his craft. As well as the heroic songs, the South Slav oral tradition contains folk stories notable for their humour and their unselfconscious introduction of supernatural elements into mundane situations. All this affected the anecdotes and stories which were so marked a feature of the Bosnian life of Andric's youth. In "The Tale of the Vizier's Elephant" Andric describes the "most unbelievable" of these stories as being the ones "which tell you most about the place and the people". In other words, Andric grew up with the idea that to be successful, indeed to be "true" in the sense of containing meaning, a story need not necessarily be "believable" in any accepted sense. In the same passage, Andric describes the tales of Bosnia as "Oriental lies which the Turkish proverb maintains are 'truer than any truth'". The notion of "truthfulness" in art is, then, one which engaged Andric's attention from the first. It is involved in considerations both of content and of the nature of the artistic process. For any human experience, whether factual or purely imaginative, once it has been given form, acquires a "reality" apart from material existence and "superior" to it in so far as it continues to have relevance in many different circumstances. From one perspective, experience becomes "real" only when it is given shape and significance by being recorded in some form. This idea is implicit in much of Andric's work. One form it takes is the need for characters to give the experience they cannot otherwise control a formula which will not explain it, but will at least give it shape, some reality outside themselves. The story "The People of Osatica" is based on the need for public recognition of an act before it may be seen as real. Because of general denial, the main character comes to doubt whether his one moment of courage, the most intense experience of his life, ever actually occurred. The setting of the story reinforces its atmosphere of ambiguity. "Facts", "truth", "reality" are then highly questionable but powerful imaginative concepts in the work of Andric. A passage in Signs by the Roadside expresses his attitude clearly:

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A fact. What is that? The furthest point we can see, the limit of our human understanding. And nothing more. What we call a fact is merely an imaginary point on the edge of our field of vision, with which we seek to affirm and confine reality and our existence.1 Facts and surface reality may be misleading or simply devoid of meaning. Andric's work is dedicated to a search, not for any truth which could be expressed in ordinary speech, but for an understanding of the ways in which perceptions may be seen as "true" or the circumstances in which a "meaning" may be felt to be revealed. We may then perhaps identify four related areas inherited from Andric's cultural background. The first would be a fascination with the discrepancy between material existence and the life of the mind, the imagination. The oral tradition, and particularly the heroic songs, are clearly not concerned with the facts of day-to-day life, but with the human need for order and meaning. In The Bridge on the Drina the hero Alija -Derzelez is worshiped by the Moslem boys in Visegrad and is a source of wonder and inspiration for the adults who believe in his return to earth in time of need. This belief, expressing a deeply-rooted need for heroes and leadership, can take on a literal reality, as can be seen in an incident in the First World War in which Serbian soldiers defied their officer's order not to attack a town and justified their action by maintaining that they had been led on by the great folk hero Prince Marko on his piebald horse. There is of course little connection between the historical figure of Marko and his resonance in the popular mind. In Andric's story of Alija -Derzelez, this discrepancy is brought vividly alive. He himself is incapable of inspiring the legends about him; they have become attached to him, more or less arbitrarily, from outside. Similarly, in The Bridge on the Drina the character of Radisav, who sabotages the building of the bridge, becomes a complex study of a man engaged in blind but sublime subversive activities. He is entirely dedicated and prepared to sacrifice his life for his cause. His protest is misguided in that nothing can prevent the building of the bridge, which will bring prosperity and many benefits to his native town. The exact nature of Radisav's cause is forgotten by later generations, but he is remem-

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bered and revered as a hero because of his defiance. His example will be recalled whenever the community requires exceptional courage, and his memory contributes to the townspeople's own sense of self-respect. In both these cases, then, there is an obvious discrepancy between what these men were in their historical circumstances and the way they survive in the minds of the people. The second area is closely related to this, and concerns Andric's interest in points of contact between historical events and the way they are received and interpreted. For example, the French and Austrian consuls and the Turkish Vizier in Travnik are seen in Bosnian Story to react in different ways to the same events. More particularly, the consuls are seen actively "processing" these events in their conversations with others, their official reports and private writings. It is clear that Andric himself lived through a period of comprehensive official mythologization of recent history, and his age abounds in examples of the "processing" of history on both a public and an individual level. This is perhaps why many instances of the exploitation of myth and legend in history are of such significance in Andric's work. One of the clearest is the way Radisav in The Bridge on the Drina is able to make use of the existence of a theme from South Slav traditional oral poetry to account for his sabotage of the building of the bridge. The usefulness of such a legend to a man engaged in subversion can be clearly seen from the fact that his explanation is readily accepted by the townspeople, who need not believe it to be literally true. A similar level of irrational belief must have been responsible for the Serbian soldiers' vision of Prince Marko and their defiance of orders in his name. The existence of this kind of belief is impossible for the authorities to counteract, as it cannot be argued or explained away. By the same token, of course, the "reality" of generally accepted myths may be exploited by those in authority, just as new "myths" may be invented. The third area of interest is the stylization of the world of art, which marks it off clearly from the material world. In his essay on art, "Conversation with Goya", Andric writes: We create forms, like a second order of nature, we arrest youth, we retain a glance which in "nature" would have changed or

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vanished a moment later, we seize and separate lightning movements which no one would ever have seen and we leave them with their mysterious meaning to the eyes of future generations. Not only that - we reinforce each of these movements and glances by a line or a tone. This is not exaggerated or deceitful and it does not alter fundamentally what we show, but lives alongside it like an imperceptible but constant proof that this object has been recreated to a more enduring, more significant life, and that this miracle has occurred within us, ourselves.2 The world of art is, then, a separate order of reality, and any discussion of the "truth" of art must first clearly acknowledge its artificiality. Andric pursues this idea in the story "Panorama". The image of the world of art used here, a crude mechanical device, contains no mystery. There is no question of illusion, the photographs do not evoke mysterious worlds of make-believe; on the contrary: they are real places. And yet, seated in front of them, the child lives fully in the world of his imagination. When he emerges, the real streets of Sarajevo seem to him like a "bad dream". Nor does the child people these pictures with wild and impossible adventures; he relates them closely to his own experience, so that his delight is firmly rooted in his own control of the stories he creates and his involvement in them. The nature of the image used for this reflection on the world of the imagination is suggestive. Although the events and experiences the narrator describes as occurring to the characters in his mind are not radically different from those of people in life, on the one hand they are contained within the framework of the photograph and thereby lent a formal completion, and on the other the artificiality is never lost from view; there is never any confusion between the two worlds. The framework of the photographs and the Panorama, then, maintains the observer's awareness that this is a world not radically different from the one we live in, not superior or inferior, but separate, distinguishable by the fact that it exists in the mind. It is, in other words an image which suggests awareness of its own artificiality, which does in fact give it a kind of mystery, inviting one to think not only of the story's content, but also of the reason for a man's wishing to tell it. Closely connected with this idea is the sense of excitement a work

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of art may arouse. Andric has described his own excitement as a child at the mere sight of a book, regardless of what its content might be. This emotion occurs again in Devil's Yard, when Brother Petar awakes to see a book beside him: "A strong, warm feeling of joy ran through his whole body." This excitement stems partly from the fact that the work of art is outside time, fixed in an enduring frame, and partly from the idea that a work of art may contain some of the meaning men seek in vain in their daily lives. To return to the heroic songs, which have influenced Andric both directly and unconsciously: they contain a sense of their endurance through time, their many separate performances, the layers of meaning they have acquired. This gives them a density which communicates, apart from the sense of the individual song, a suggestion of the importance they have for the singers and audience alike. There is a sense of magic about the ritual performance of the heroic songs. If they have survived their reception by numerous different audiences, this must be because in all their various transformations, they retain a hint of that "truth", found in legend and fairy-tale, which communciates most about the nature of human existence. The ritualized form of the performance, like the physical presence of the book, creates a sense of anticipation that the song may contain a message of importance within its clear confines and stylized form. These are features of Andric's work inherited from his cultural background, and they are reflected in his enduring interest in the points of contact and divergence between the material world and that of the imagination. We can look at some of these ideas in their collective manifestation in myth and legend, and in individual obsessions and illusions. Andric does not make a clear distinction between the concepts of "legend" and "myth". In "Conversation with Goya" he refers to the "few fundamental legends of humanity". In Devil's Yard he speaks of the ancient "story" of the rivalry of two brothers. It is at the level of irrational recognition of a familiar and valid pattern, and the capacity of the individual to experience the truth they contain as part of himself, that these stories acquire the value of myth. This can perhaps be seen as the remotest stage, when the communicative validity of the story has been assured by time. Andric is concerned

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with the starting point of the legend, its point of contact with day-to-day reality. While legends are in the main attached to individuals from the outside, as we have seen, the character of Omer Pasha Latas offers an example of a man who deliberately sets out to create a legend about himself. Omer is described as someone who never "really" lived, because his life and behaviour were all in the service of an image of himself. The child Mico Latas, like many other children, is acutely aware of the discrepancy between the mundane demands of his everyday life and the great life of adventure which he feels it "ought" to be. For him the life he is forced to live is unreal, meaningless; he feels compelled to escape from it, in search of that other "true" life elsewhere. As a young child, he is already prepared to deny his surroundings in favour of a fiction. By simply giving his cows different, grander names, he makes them into something more than they are. His dream of heroic action is embodied in a song whose outcome depends on treason. Unlike most other children Mico Latas is able, at least apparently, to realize his dream. He changes his destined way of life absolutely, changing his nationality and his religion and taking a name which has no connection with his former life, but which comes to spread fear throughout the Ottoman world. From one point of view, Omer Pasha's life can be seen as being lived in terms of an illusion of a superior "reality" which he pursues to the exclusion of all contact with actuality. He requires constant confirmation of the impression he makes on others, for he has lost touch with any sense of himself apart from that impression. He adapts his facial expression and tone of voice to the needs of each situation as he perceives them, making himself quite unpredictable and untrustworthy, and at the same time insecure if the reaction he provokes in others is not what he expects or intends. The elusiveness of the "real" Omer Pasha is, however, of consequence only in encounters between him and another individual. The power he wields over others publicly is real enough. This power is in the nature of things transient, and his endeavour to have it immortalized in a painting which would continue to inspire future generations with awe is seen even by Omer himself to be illusory. The "reality" of his power is further undermined in the scene in which he is described as entering Sarajevo with his magnficent retinue. The awe

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the townspeople experience soon wears off in the manner of the image which dominates this novel, that of alcoholic intoxication. Nevertheless, within these limits and with the connivance of the people, Omer's power has "reality" and he is able to build a legend about himself in his lifetime. There is a crucial distinction in Andric's work, however, between this "negative" legend, which inspires fear, and a "positive" legend such as the stories told about the naive, blustering Alija, which may inspire real heroism on many levels. There are numerous examples in Andric's work of individuals who are subject to obsessions and illusions of various kinds. Omer Pasha's invention of an identity for himself and projection of it on to others is an extreme example, but his endeavour is echoed in milder form in many other characters. In fact, virtually all Andric's characters who are given to introspection are beset by a sense of the elusive quality of their own identity and the discrepancy between their idea of themselves and the world around them, or the way they are perceived by others. The only characters who avoid this sense of insecurity and unease are those who are wholeheartedly involved in activities outside themselves. These may be characters with a clearly defined role which seems fully to express their personality, such as Madame Daville in Bosnian Story, absorbed in domestic life, or the Franciscan doctor Brother Luka, similarly absorbed in identifying and tapping the positive forces of health and recovery. The existence of these fully "positive" characters, in fact, distinguishes Andric's fiction from much twentieth-century writing. In the early stories, an obsession which dominates a character's life is seen to be the result of circumstances, of experiences too shocking or painful to be assimilated. In many stories Andric explores the impact of such experience on children, showing them to be particularly vulnerable to the strong irrational currents of human existence. The child has not matured emotionally to the point where he can make sense of these currents by accepting patterns laid down by adults. The balanced adult will simply ignore information which does not fit into the patterns he expects, while the child is susceptible to all the conflicting aspects of reality, and cannot reconcile them. As long as the child's experiences are not too extreme, he will grow into such a balanced adult. However, if an adult is subjected to experi-

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ences too extreme to be assimilated, the balance of his or her mind will be upset, dominated by one aspect of reality which blocks out all else. It is typical of the ambiguity of Andric's artistic world that these characters - such as Mustafa the Hungarian, Mara the concubine, the Priest Vujadin, Anika, and others - should represent at once a distorted view of reality and at the same time a "privileged" clarity of vision which allows them insight into some fundamental "truth". Andric is particularly interested in the arbitrary but rigid line drawn by society between "sanity" and "madness". One character's behaviour may be inexplicable to the outside world because of a failure to acknowledge the reality of psychological pressures which cannot be externally observed but which can be more devastating in their effect than any material circumstances. This is the theme of several of Andric's later stories. One of the main impulses behind his investigation of this theme must have been his experience of the sudden eruption of irrational behaviour through the "civilized" exterior of social life in both the world wars. For such behaviour to be possible, it must be assumed that the rational basis of social life is highly questionable. The one developed image of social organization in Andric's work is the world of the prison in Devil's Yard, ordered by the arbitrary rule of the governor, Karagoz. There is no identifiable pattern to his behaviour, and yet it is dictated by his own desperate search for some kind of order. Andric, then, explores the tenuous hold of individuals on notions of rationality and sanity in order to account for private experience of the human condition and, by extension, to explore the irrational basis of all forms of social organization. The writer emphasizes the elusive and arbitrary nature of the dividing line people feel they must place between notions of "fact" and "fantasy", "reality" and "illusion" by refusing to make such distinctions. The world of the mind, fluctuations of mood, are as "real" as any other aspect of human experience. Thus in "Summer Holiday in the South" the "evaporation" of the main character is described in matter-of-fact terms. A more elaborate symbol is to be found in the story "Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not". Jelena stands for a complex of ideas of beauty, joy, companionship, tenderness and perfect peace of mind. She appears to the narrator

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only on sun-filled days and is often associated with the anticipation, excitement and sense of altered perspective of travel: Above all the vision is connected with the sun and its progress. (I call it a "vision" because of you to whom I am relating this, for myself it would be both comic and insulting to call what is my greatest reality by that name, which, in fact, means nothing.)3 Jelena's appearances in the story that bears her name in no way interrupt the narrative; they are as "real" as the suitcases in the narrator's hotel room or the shop filled with people in which he sees her paying the cashier. She is, then, more real than reality, a symbol of the state of elation - "zanos" - which is a marked feature of many of Andric's characters. This "zanos" is a complex concept. It may be either positive, as in "Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not", or negative, as in the amoral illusory world of Omer Pasha Latas. In its negative form, this "elation" or "state of being carried away" is often a collective emotion. It is seen, for instance, to overwhelm the people of Travnik like an irresistible organic force. This is the kind of collective madness manifested in riot and war. In Omer Pasha Latas the state is described in terms of "intoxication". Negative "zanos" is narcissistic, barren, destructive, while its positive manifestation is creative. The concept conveys at the same time an absolutely unattainable illusion - such as the capacity to become a part of the sea air, or a vision of perfect beauty - and an instant of vivid perception. It is the moment when a character may perceive with absolute clarity the nature of his relationship with the Almighty, or the "true" nature of human existence. But what is crucial and characteristic of the ambiguous quality of Andric's work is that this moment of perception, which plays such a central role in his writing, should be seen as either essentially illusory or fundamentally true according to the perspective of the observer. The conclusion must be that it is both., simultaneously. That is, any perception of "truth" is illusory, and at the same time it is "true" if it contains meaning. It is just such provisional truth, an irrational recognition of meaning, which may be conveyed by art. The notion of a coincidence of ideas in the moment of elation is

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crucial. At such a moment there is no attempt at analysis or understanding. The moment is one of intuition, harmony and the reconciliation of opposites. These are the elements involved also in moments of artistic truth. For a work of art to communicate, as in the case of myth, there must be an act of recognition, a leap of the imagination which involves both the identification of the artist with his material and that of the audience with both. A vivid image of this temporary identity of creator, material and audience in the moment of creation is provided, of course, by the performance of traditional oral literature with which Andric was so familiar. The absolute involvement of the artist in his material is an idea which runs through several of Andric's works. The House On Its Own is an illustration of the activity of story-telling in a reflective framework in which the narrator describes the necessity of creating in himself a vacuum into which characters and situations will come unbidden. The terms in which the right state of mind are described are reminiscent of the passive concentration which characterizes the practice of meditation. The problem of the relationship between "fact" and "fantasy" is unequivocally solved in this introduction in the artist's acknowledgement of the superiority of the world of the imagination. Devil's Yard can similarly be read as a reflection on the artistic process, exploring the extent to which "I" can and should be "another", and particularly the circumstances in which artist and audience become identical with "another" in mythic recognition and in art. The identification of the audience with the material must, ultimately, remain an act of faith, but Andric has written at length not about his own work, but about the process of writing in general. He makes much of the ultimate mystery of the process, the idea that one can never really know what makes a sentence or a detail ring true and affect all the writing around it, lifting it out of the everyday and into a different order of conviction. He employs similar language in his description of the craftsman, who carries, as we have seen, associations with Rade, the Master-Builder of the heroic songs. The craftsman is not subject to any doubt about the definition of "truth" and "illusion", "fact" and "fantasy". He is completely involved in his activity as he works.

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The craftsman and the artist are, however, rarely privileged beings. Their sense of harmonious involvement in their work, and their consequent creative elation, are a gift. The positive form of elation is bestowed on those committed to creative action outside themselves. As Andric's work progresses, his characters are seen as not content to be the passive subjects of sudden visitations of elation. Increasingly, they are driven to seek such moments consciously. Inevitably, since this search springs from a self-centred, narcissistic need, it is doomed. The House On Its Own is peopled with characters whose lives are framed more or less entirely in illusion. The illusion these characters pursue in one way or another - and frequently, as in Omer Pasha Latas, through recourse to alcohol - is perceived as escape. By definition it implies a sense of constraint which drives them to seek a "way out": The first sips of alcohol and the first notes of music tell them that these hills around the city are not so insurmountable or so impenetrable as they appear even on the most beautiful sunny day, and particularly in the evening when the shadows lengthen and the mists descend. You are surprised that you never noticed it before. You see clearly: flower-lined roads lead out of Sarajevo in all directions, and every step on them is a new source of joy because it is all leading you out of this land and this town. Where to? Anywhere, only somewhere into a land of order and light, intelligible actions and open, human words. And where is that? Where is there such a land? If you think for a moment and stop to remember, you realize that there is no such land, there cannot be. And yet, it exists. It is created by this life among these mountains, under these conditions. It is that land which - is not this one.4 The striving expressed in this passage is self-centred and essentially short-lived. It is barren, leading nowhere other than to individual disappointment and resentment when the moment passes. Yet it is superficially similar to its mirror-image of positive release. What is crucial is the motivation behind the striving, whether it is selfish or contains the idea of the insignificance of the individual, his absorption into something beyond himself. One of the images which has been particularly fruitful in Andric's work is that of the prison. This is the image, of course, which shapes

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his most concentrated work, Devil's Yard. It is a simplification to suggest that Andric sees the world as a prison from which the individual must yearn to escape. Such Neo-Romantic notions were indeed present in his earliest works. The idea of captivity and constraint elaborated in Devil's Yard and elsewhere is more complex. At its centre, it implies the notion of escape which is embodied in Andric's opposing image of the bridge. A passage from the "essay" entitled "Bridges" expresses the idea with characteristic force: Finally, everything which expresses this life of ours - thoughts, endeavours, glances, smiles, words, sighs - all of it is striving towards another shore, to which it is directed as to its aim. All of it has something to overcome and to bridge: disorder, death or meaninglessness. For, everything is a transition, a bridge, the ends of which are lost in nothingness, beside which all earthly bridges are merely children's toys, pale symbols. And all our hope lies on the other side.5 This "other side" should not be thought of as another "world", but simply as "what is not this". That is to say, what is not fear, pain, anxiety, guilt, unanswered and unanswerable questions, a sense of incompleteness which seeks constantly to be resolved. Art may temporarily convey the satisfaction of a sense of completeness, and offer existence a "meaning" which cannot otherwise be found in human experience. Such an apparent resolution is of course illusory. But it can communicate a sense of excitement and hope, and can appear to hold a mysterious power. In his work Andric never loses sight of this sense of excitement and he strives to evoke a similar kind of excitement in his reader, not by any external comment but by containing the mystery within the material of the work itself, and by reminding the reader always of the artificiality of the medium. Apart from the central image of the bridge, the passage quoted above contains the idea that all the various manifestations of life embody and express something more comprehensive than themselves. Andric's works are precisely documented, detailed and concrete. He avoids analysis and abstraction at all costs. He makes full use of his native Bosnia and the details of its history to convey a

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wealth of ideas which derive their strength from the complexity of their context. Thus, for example, Andric writes most extensively of the period of the decline of the Ottoman Empire. This enables him to convey ideas about the vanity of earthly power, arbitrary rule and oppression, without having to make any direct statement. The clash of cultures at the centre of his work is similarly fruitful of ideas without external comment. The psychological and emotional states of Andric's characters are described in terms of their experience of the material world. Their fears are not abstract, they spring from the situations in which they find themselves and become an integral part of their perception of the behaviour of others. Similarly, in all Andric's accounts of confrontation of various kinds, the power and vulnerability of the respective characters are conveyed in terms of their physical attributes, their movements and gestures. Andric's narrative procedure suggests that the universal implications of a scene or a portrait are "trapped", "imprisoned" within the concrete details of the material world, but that they may be released through art. The theme of the exile or imprisonment of ideas recurs in Andric's work, and is most explicitly treated in "Conversation with Goya" and "The Bridge on the Zepa". No one can escape the immutable laws of the world in which we are irrevocably confined, and yet this world itself creates the idea of its opposite, to which we strive constantly, seeking to bridge the gulf between them. It is clear from the passage quoted above that the idea of freedom is conditioned by the constraints imposed by human existence and produced by the imagination. This provides an adequate image of the creative freedom of the artist whose ideas are bound within the material world and conditioned by it. Devil's Yard is an embodiment of this idea: creative story-telling in a prison. The form builds up an impression of taut, controlled response to deliberate pressure which finds its release at its physical centre, a release which is highly ambiguous. The central character in this work "becomes" the historical figure of Gem, the younger son of Sultan Bayazid, whose life he has been studying. He begins to tell Gem's story in the first person. This identification illustrates the vital and mysterious "leap of the imagination" involved in the creation of works of art and the response of their audience. It is that recognition of a familiar or meaningful pattern that

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characterizes legend, and it offers an illustration of "mythic identification". The central idea is not in fact a statement but a question in the form of an exclamation about the nature of the concept "I". Kamil is asked by his interrogators to account for his use of the word "I" in speaking of the suspect character of the sixteenth-century pretender. But identity is essentially elusive, depending to a great extent on other people's interpretation of an individual's words. No man can give a full and entirely truthful account of himself. He lives in a world of formlessness, flux and illusion. The only way he may begin to understand his own situation and haltingly express it to others is by recognizing similarities with the situation of other human beings through time and space. Throughout his work, Andric undermines anything that appears to be an unequivocal statement by emphasizing the relativity of all things, the vital importance of perspective. The same town may be seen to be both on a hill and in a hollow. Facts are an illusion, and the illusions by which men live their lives are no less "real" than socalled "facts". Devil's Yard makes its central observation in parenthesis at the core of an intricately structured work. This may and does appear to give it strength. But Andric is careful to avoid giving the work any appearance of being an absolute statement. In many of his works he will have the story told through a second narrator, reducing the emphasis on the tale itself by focusing also on its teller. Or he will end a story not with the death of the protagonist but with the new individual who comes to take his or her place in the community. In Devil's Yard the central story of the pretender Gem is placed in a series of interlocking frames, each representing a different narrator. The outermost frame is the clearly defined, formal one of the window of a monastery cell through which a young monk is looking at the grave of Brother Petar, who told such wonderful tales of his imprisonment in Devil's Yard in Istanbul. Snow is falling steadily and covering the freshly-dug earth and the path made by the funeral party. In the endless white and shapeless emptiness which represents the passing of time in this outer frame, all that has survived is the story of a story in the mind of a man. In its categorical statement - "And this is the end. There is nothing else" - the epilogue conveys to us the importance, as well as the fragility, of that survival.

Notes Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Robert Munro, Rambles and Studies in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia (Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1895), p. 14. 2 Arthur Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegovina on Foot (Longman, London, 1876), pp. 240-1. 3 Quoted by Vasko Ivanovic, Pitanja nece biti (Politika 14.iii.1975). 4 Razgovor sa Gojom (Sabrana dela, Belgrade 1981, vol. 12; Istorija i legenda, pp. 24-5). All references are to this edition of the collected works. 5 "O prici i pricanju" (vol.12; Istorija i legenda, pp. 68-70). 6 "U cutanju je sigurnost". 7 "Most na Zepi" (vol.6; Zdf, pp. 192-3). 8 Kazivanja o Andricu, ed. Radovan Popovic (Sloboda, Belgrade, 1976), p. 171. 9 "Ledenjak, kojem su devet desetina stalno u mraku." 10 Kazivanja o Andricu, p. 76. 11 Quoted by Stevan Stanic, Borba, 7.x. 1972. 12 Staze, volume 10 of collected works, pp. 17-19. 13 Quoted by Radovan Popovic, "Zivotopis", Delatnost i dokumenti (Zaduzbina Ive Andrica u Beogradu, 1980), pp. 67-8. 14 "To si ti napisao? Sta ti to treba?". Quoted by Gvozden Jovanic, Kazivanja o Andricu, p. 61. 15 Popovic, op. cit., p. 71. 16 Hrvatska mlada lirika (ed. Ljubo Wiesner, Zagreb, 1914), p. 147. 17 Quoted by Miroslav Karaulac, Rani Andric (Prosveta & Svjetlost, Belgrade and Sarajevo, 1980), p. 72. 18 Karaulac, op. cit., p. 75.

Notes 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

251

Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 75. Popovic, op. tit., p. 73. -Derzelez u hanu (Knjizevni jug, Zagreb, no.3, 1918, pp. 83-7). Karaulac, op. cit., p. 94. Popovic, op. a'f., p. 74. Ibid., p. 74. Knjizevni jug, no. 8, 1919, p. 367. Karaulac, op. cit., pp. 98-9.; Popovic, op. cit., p. 76. Popovic, op. cit., p. 76. Karaulac, op. cit., p. 99. Znakovi pored puta, p. 103. Ibid., p. 547. Popovic, op. cit., p. 79. Ibid. 7hW., p. 83. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p.94. Znakovi pored puta, p. 111. Popovic, o/>. cir., pp. 97-8. "Pogledao sam se od glave do pete i video da spasavam samo sebe i svoj 'iberziger' . . . " Popovic, op. cit., pp. 98-9. Kazivanja o Andricu, p. 112. Popovic, op. cit., p. 112. Ibid., p. 118. Kazivanja o Andricu, p. 59. "Kako sam ulazio u svet knjige i knjizevnosti", vol. 10, p. 36. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., pp. 42-3. Na Drini cuprija (vol. 1), p. 284. Quoted by Adamovic, Kazivanja o Andricu, p. 15. Milan Budmir, Ivo Andric i antika, Ivo Andric, special publications vol. 1 (Institut za teoriju knjizevnosti i umetnosti, Belgrade, 1962), pp. 235-41; Branimir Zivojinovic: Ivo Andric i nemacka knjizevnost, (ibid.), pp. 243-65; Olga Moskovljevic:

252

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West Andric i skandinavske knjizevnosti (ibid.}, pp. 301-5; Radoslav Josimovic: Andric i Francuska (ibid.}, pp. 307-16; Eros Sekvi: Andric, Italija i Italijani (ibid.}, pp. 287-300. Quoted by D. Adamovic, "Nenapravljeni intervju sa Andricem", NIN, 29.X.1961, p. 3. Quoted by D. Adamovic, Kazivanja o Andricu, pp. 12-16. Na Drini cuprija, pp. 290-1. Pijemont, 1915, in Predrag Palavestra, Knjizevnost mlade Bosne (Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1965), vol. II, p. 249. Na Drini cuprija, pp. 266-8. Popovic, op. cit., p. 69. 'TricaizJapana",Afcm*n(vol.ll), pp. 104-6. Quoted by Vasko Ivanovic, op. cit. "Vino", Staze, lica, predeli (vol. 10), p. 20. "Pesnik Ivo Andric govori nasim citaocima", Ideje, 17.xi. 1934, p. 2.

Chapter 2 Verse 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Ex Ponto (vol. 11), p. 78. Adamovic, op. cit. Ex Ponto, published by Knjizevni jug (Zagreb, 1918), p. 9. Ex Ponto (vol. 11), p. 32. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., pp. 13-14. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 79. Nemiri(vol 11), p. 88. Ibid., p.U2. Ibid., pp. 109-10. Ibid., p. 111.

Notes 20 21 22 23 24

253

Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., p. 221. Ibid., p. 241. /iw/., p. 257.

ChapterS Short Stories 1 "Put AlijeDerzeleza", Znakovi (vol. 8), pp. 9-34. The first part of the trilogy, "Derzelez u harm" (Derzelez at the Inn) appeared first in Knjizevnijug, Zagreb, no. 3, 1918, pp. 83-7; "Derzelez na putu" (Derzelez on the Road) the following year. The compete story was first published in Belgrade, in 1920. 2 "Put AlijeDerzeleza", p. 10. 3 Ibid., p. 11. 4 Ibid., pp. 10-11. 5 Ibid., p.W. 5 Ibid., p. 30. 6 "Mustafa Madzar" (first published 1923), Nemirna godina (vol.5), pp. 23-40. 7 Ibid., pp. 28-9. 8 "Za logoravanja" (1922). Nemirna godina, pp. 9-22. 9 "Trup" (1937), Zed (vol. 6), pp. 105-17. 10 Ibid., p. 108. 11 /&«/., p. 111. 12 Ibid., p. 107. 13 Ibid., p. 112. 14 7ta*.,p. 116. 15 "Mara milosnica" (1926), Jelena, zena -koje nema (vol. 7), pp. 91-176. 16 Ibid., p. 97. 17 "Anikina vremena" (1931), Jelena, zena koje nema, pp. 9-90. 18 Ibid., p. 73. 19 "Smrt u Sinanovoj tekiji" (1924), Zed (vol. 6), pp. 199-211. 20 Ibid., p. 206. 21 "U musafirhani" (1923), ZeS, pp. 9-20. 22 Ibid., p. 11. 23 Ibid., p. 19.

254 24 25 26 27 28

Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

"Proba" (1954), 2e&, pp. 73-104; p. 93. "Rod kazana" (1930), ZeS, pp. 53-94. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 58.v "Corkan i Svabica" (1921), Jelena, zena koje nema (vol. 7), pp. 185-201. "Mila i Prelac" (1924), Deca (vol. 9), pp. 25-119. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 32. "Cudo u Olovu" (1926). Zed~ (vol. 6), pp. 165-73). "Jelena, zena koje nema" (1934) (vol. 7), pp. 245-79. Ex Ponto (vol. 11), p. 63. "Rzavski bregovi" (1924), Zet (vol. 6), pp. 153-66. "Most na Zepi" (1925), Zed, pp. 185-94. "Prica o kmetu Simanu" (1948), Znakovi (vol. 8), pp. 143-70. "Zeko" (1948), Nemirna godina (vol. 5), pp. 225-344. "Bife Titanik"' (1950), Nemirna godina, pp. 189-224. Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. 205. Ibid., p. 205. "Pismo iz 1920. godine" (1946), Deca (vol. 9), pp. 171-86. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., pp. 182-3. Ibid., pp. 184-5. "Zlostavljanje" (1946), Znakovi (vol. 8), pp. 111-42. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., p. 114. Ibid., pp. 115-16. Ibid., p. 119.

56 57 58 59 60

Ibid., p. 140. "Red" (1954), Znakovi (vol. 8), pp. 81-8. "Osaticani" (1958), Znakovi, pp. 289-328. Ibid., pp. 290-1. Ibid., p. 298

55 Ibid., p. 130.

Notes 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

255

"U zavadi sa svetom" (1958), Deca (vol. 9), pp. 17-24. Ibid., p. 17. "Panorama" (1958), Deca, pp. 119-49. 7foW.,p. 122. /ftu/. p. 123. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 133. /too1., p. 137. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 149. "Letovanje na jugu" (1959) Zed" (vol. 6), pp. 247-256. Ibid., p. 248. Ibid., p. 253. "Zena od slonove kosti" (1922), Jelena, zena koje nema (vol. 7), pp. 233-8. "Aska i vuk" (1953), Deca (vol. 9), pp. 187-96. Ibid., p. 193. "Prica o vezirovom slonu" (1947), Nemirna godina (vol. 5), pp. 41-90. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 72. Kuca na osami (1976), (vol. 14). "Lica" (1960), Kuca na osami, pp. 226-33. Ibid., p. 226. Kuca na osami, p. 10. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., pp. 10-11. Ibid., pp. 11-12. "Baron", /Cwca na osami, p. 39. Ibid., p. 38. 7foW., p. 43. Kuca na osami, p. 80. "Robinja", Kuca na osami, p. 92. "Bonvalpasa", Kuca na osami, p. 17. "Alipasa", Kuca na osami, p. 23. Ibid., p. 32. "Cirkus", Kuca na osami, p. 23.

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96 Ibid., p. 32. 97 "Cirkus", Kuca na osami, pp. 55-76. 98 Ibid., p. 59. 99 Ibid., p. 61. 100 Ibid., p. 69. 101 "Geometar i Julka", Kuca na osami, p. 47. 102 "Prica", Kuca na osami, pp. 81-90. 103 Ibid., p. 81. 104 Ibid., p. 82. 105 Ibid., p. 86. Chapter 4 The Novels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Na Drini cuprija (Belgrade, 1945). Collected works, vol. 1. Omerpasa Latas (Belgrade, 1976). Vol. 15. "Razgovor sa Gojom", Istorija i legenda (vol. 12), p. 17. Travnicka hronika (Belgrade, 1945). Vol. 2. Gospofaca (Belgrade, 1945). Vol. 3. Na Drini cuprija, p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid. Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 86. /taf.,p. 89. Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., pp. 146-7. 7hW., pp. 257-8. Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 173. Ibid., pp. 113-14. /fcu/., p. 94. Ibid., p. 396. For details of the documents used see Ante Kadic, "The French

Notes

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in 'The Chronicle of Travnik' ('Bosnian Story')" in From Croatian Renaissance to Yugoslav Socialism (Mouton, The Hague, 1969), pp. 154-91. 26 Travnicka hronika, p. 13. 27 Ibid., p. 516. 28 Ibid., p. 152.

29 "An ancient primeval lament". 30 Ibid., p. 173. 31 Ibid., p. 31. 32 Ibid., p. 169. 33 Ibid., p. 446. 34 Ibid., p. 37. 35 Ibid., p. 37. 36 Ibid., pp. 225-6. 37 Ibid., p. 285. 38 Ibid., p. 512. 39 Ibid., p. 96. 40 Ibid., p. 17. 41 7foW.,p. 113. 42 Ibid., p. 114. 43 7Wd., p. 78. 44 Ibid., p. 496. 45 Ibid., p. 109. 46 Ibid., pp. 114-15. 47 7te/.,p. 159. 48 Ibid., p. 26. 49 Ibid., pp. 43-4. 50 7WJ., pp. 279-80. 51 Ibid., pp. 314-17. 52 Ibid., p. 503. 53 Ibid., p. 505. 54 Ibid., pp. 261-2. 55 Ibid., pp. 317-18. 56 57 58 59 60

Gospoitica, p. 62. Ibid., pp. 99-100. 7hW.,p. 17. 7hW., p. 33. 7fcu/., p. 229.

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61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 18. 7ta?.,p. 19. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 35. 7fod.,pp. 79-80. Ibid., p. 241. Omerpasa Latas, vol. 15 (Belgrade, 1977). "Mladic u povorci" (Zivot, Sarajevo, no. 17, 1954). Omerpasa Latas, p. 16.

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., pp. 50-1. Ibid., pp. 152-3. Ibid., p. 153. 7Zm*.,p. 278. Ibid., p. 279. 7fcuf.,p. 103. Ibid., p. 164. Ibid., pp. 164-5. Ibid., p. 253. 76u/., p. 253. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., p. 170. 7Wd.,p. 273. Ibid., p. 290. 76u/.,p. 289. Ibid., p. 290. Ibid., p. 296.

Chapter 5 Devil's Yard 1 2 3 4

Prokleta avlija (Novi Sad, 1954). Collected works, vol. 4. "Trup", Zetf (vol. 6), p. 105. Prokleta avlija, p. 11. Ibid., p. 54.

Notes 5 6 7 8 9

259

Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 121. /*trf. "Sunce" (1952); "U celiji broj 115" (1960). Prokleta avlija, p. 15.

10 7taf.,p. 12.

11 Ibid., p. 15. 12 Ibid., p. 24. 13 /tod., p. 35. 14 Ibid., p. 36. 15 Ibid., p. 41. 16 Ibid., p. 46. 17 /tod., p. 53. 18 Ibid., pp. 58-9. 19 Ibid., p. 62. 20 /tod., p. 100. 21 Ibid., p. 77. 22 Ibid., pp. 95-6. 23 Ibid., p. 95. 24 Ibid., p. 59. 25 Ibid., p. 92. 26 /tod., p. 93. 27 Ibid., pp. 44-5. 28 Ibid., p. 47. 29 Ibid., p. 115. 30 Ibid. 31 /tod., p. 116.

Chapter 6 Essays and Reflective Prose 1 "A. G. Matos" (Wfor, 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)" Knjizevni jug, Zagreb, no. 2-3, 1914). Collected works, vol. 12, Istorija i legenda, pp. 75-83. 5 Istorija i legenda, p. 75.

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Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West

6 "Legenda o Sv. Francisku iz Asizija" (Srpski knjizevni glasnik, no. 4, 1926). Istorija i legenda, pp. 84-93. 7 "Legenda o Lauri i Petrarki" (Srpski knjizevni glasnik, no. 5, 1927). Istorija i legenda, pp. 96-105. 8 "Simon Bolivar Oslobodilac" (Srpski knjizevni 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" (Nasa knjizevnos.t, 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 "Njegos kao tragicni junak kosovske misli" (Kolarcev narodni univerzitet, Belgrade, 1935, 22pp). Umetnik i njegovo delo, p. 16. 17 "Neka bude sto biti ne moze!", Gorski vijenac. 18 Umetnik i njegovo delo, p. 16. 19 Ibid., p. 16. 20 "Razgovor sa Gojom" (Srpski knjizevni 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 rijec, 25.vi. 1914). Istorija i legenda, pp. 159-64. See p. 159. 25 "Nesanica" (Znakovi pored puta, pp. 581-592). 26 "Veciti kalendar maternjeg jezika" (Znakovi pored puta, pp. 599-602). 27 Znakovi pored puta, p. 11. 28 Prokleta avlija, p. 45. 29 Travnicka hronika, pp. 141-2. 30 Znakovi pored puta,, p. 199. 31 Ibid., p. 224. 32 Ibid., pp. 342-3. 33 Ibid., p. 509.

Notes 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Ibid., pp. 286-7. Ibid., p. 383. Ibid., p. 578. 76u/., p. 388. Ibid., p. 354. 7fctt/.,p. 290. /Wrf., p. 200. Ibid., p. 351. Ibid., p. 353. Ibid., p. 494. 7&tW., p. 226.

46 47 48 49 50 51

Ibid., p. 293. 7Wtf., p. 247. Ibid., p. 294. Ibid., pp. 174-5. Ibid., pp. 161-2. 7Wtf., p. 72.

55 56 57 58 59

7Wtf.,p. 41. Ibid., p. 288. 7Wtf., p. 296. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 217.

45 Ibid., pp. 292-3.

52 Ibid., p. 64. 53 Ibid., p. 282. 54 Ibid., p. 21.

Chapter? Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5

Znakovi pored puta, p. 162. "Razgovor sa Gojom", Istorija i legenda, pp. 15-16. "Jelena, zena koje nema" (vol. 7), p. 246. Omerpasa Latas, pp. 63-4. "Mostovi", Staze, lica, predeli (vol. 10), pp. 15-16.

261

Select Bibliography Collected works There have been several editions since the first in ten volumes in 1963, all largely following the pattern agreed with Andric himself. All references in this study are to the 1981 edition, and the contents of each of its sixteen volumes are listed here. There was a further edition published in 1982 by Svjetlost, Sarajevo and Mladost, Zagreb, edited, like the 1981 edition, by Vera Stojic, Petar Dzadzic, Muharem Pervic and Radovan Vuckovic. This edition includes some new material and an additional volume (17): Sveske (Notebooks), consisting of selections from Andric's notebooks and Radovan Popovic's Biography of Andric. At the time of publication of the present study, a new Critical Edition of Andric's works was in preparation by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol. Vol.

1: 2: 3: 4: 5:

Na Drini cuprija (The Bridge on the Drina) Travnicka hronika (Bosnian Story) Gospoltica (The Woman from Sarajevo) Prokkta avlija (Devil's Yard) Nemirna godina (Uneasy Year) (stories) (Za logoravanja, Mustafa Madzar, Prica o verzirovom slonu, Nemirna godina, San Bega Karcica, Veletovci, Cilim, Svadba, Strajk u tkaonici cilima, Razaranja, Bife "Titanik", Zeko) Vol. 6: Zef (Thirst) (Stories) (U musafirhani, U zindanu, Ispovijed, Kod kazana, Napast, Proba, U vodenici, Sala u Samsarinom hanu, Casa, Trup, Rzavski bregovi, Cudo u Olovu, Zed", Most na Zepi, Smrt u Sinanovoj tekiji, Olujaci, Na drugi dan Bozica, Na stadionu, Na drzavnom imanju, Letovanje na jugu)

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263

Vol. 7: Jelena, zena koje nema (Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not) (stories) (Anikina vremena, Mara milosnica, Ljubav u kasabi, Corkan i Svabica, Zena na kamenu, Igra, Zena od slonove kosti, Bajron u Sintri, Jelena, zena koje nema) Vol. 8 Znakovi (Signs) (stories) (Put Alije -Derzeleza, Dan u Rimu, Znakovi, Svecanost, •Dorde -Dortfevic, Reci, Autobiografija, Na ladl, Zlostavljanja, Prica o kmetu Simanu, Snopici, San i Java pod Grabicem, Prica o soli, Kosa, Noc u Alhambri, Lov na tetreba, Razgovori, Susedi, Setnja, Zatvorena vrata, Porodicna slika, Osaticani, Praznicno jutro) Vol. 9: Deca (Children) (stories) (Kula, U zavadi sa svetom, Mila i Prelac, Panorama, Deca, Prozor, Knjiga, Na obali, Zmija, Izlet, Ekskurzija, Pismo iz 1920. godine, Aska i vuk) Vol. 10 Staze, lica, predeli (Paths, Faces, Lancscapes) (sketches) (Staze, Pisma iz Krakova, Zanos i stradanja Tome Galusa, Prvi dan u splitskoj tamnici, Isukusenje u celiji broj 38, U celiji 115, Sunce, Na suncanoj strani, San o gradu, Vino, Moj prvi susret sa delom Maksima Gorkog, Kako sam ulazio u svet knjige i knjizevnosti, Jedan pogled na Sarajevo, Na jevrejskom groblju u Sarajevu, Biblioteka nasa nasusna, Na vest da je Brusa pogorela, U ulici Danila Ilica, Ucitelj Ljubomir, Likovi, U Sopenovoj rodnoj kuci, Lica, Susret u Kini, Kroz Austriju, Prvi dan u radosnom gradu, Portugal, zelena zemlja, Leteci nad morem, Mostovi, Spanska stvarnost i prvi koraci u njoj, Na Nevskom prospektu, Utisci iz Staljingrada, Predeli, Na kamenu, u Pocitelju, Kraj svetlog ohridskog jezera, Napomena) Vol. 11: Ex Ponto, Nemiri, Lirika (Verse) Vol. 12: Istorija i legenda (History and Legend) (essays) Vol. 13: Umetnik i njegovo delo (The Artist and his Work) (essays) Vol. 14: Znakovi pored puta (Signs by the Roadside) Vol. 15: Kuca na osami (The House On Its Own) Vol. 16: Omerpasa Latas (Omer Pasha Latas)

264

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Selected critical works Bandic, Milos, Ivo Andric: zagonetka vedrihe (Matica srpska, Novi Sad, 1963). Dzadzic, Petar, Ivo Andric (Nolit, Belgrade, 1957). O Prokletoj avliji (Prosveta, Belgrade, 1975). Karaulac, Miroslav, Rani Andric (Prosveta, Belgrade, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1980). Korac, Stanko, Andricevi romani Hi svijet bez boga (Prosvjeta, Zagreb, 1970). Leovac, Slavko, Pripovedac Ivo Andric (Matica srpska, Novi Sad, 1979). Milosevic, Nikola, Andric i Krleza kao antipodi (Slovo ljubve, Belgrade, 1975). Palavestra, Predrag, Skriveni pesnik (Slovo ljubve, Belgrade, 1981). Stanojcic, Zivojin, Jezik i stil Iva Andrica (Filoloski fakultet beogradskog univerziteta, Belgrade, 1967). Tartalja, Ivo, Pripovedaceva estetika (Nolit, Belgrade, 1979). Vuckovic, Radovan, Velika sinteza o Ivi Andricu (Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1974). OTHER LANGUAGES Marabini, Claudio, "La Narrativa di Ivo Andric" (Nuova antologia di lettere, arti e scienze, vol. 499, 1967, pp. 474-90). Minde, Regina, Ivo Andric. Studien uber seine Erzdhlkunst (Verlag Otto Sagner, Munich, 1962). Petrovic Njegos, M., Ivo Andric, L'homme et I'oeuvre (Les Editions Lemeac Inc., Ottawa, 1969). Collections of critical articles Delo Ive Andrica u kontekstu evropske knjizevnosti i kulture (Zaduzbina Ive Andrica, Belgrade, 1981). Ivo Andric, ed. Vojislav -Duric (Institut za teoriju knjizevnosti i umetnosti, Belgrade, 1962). Ivo Andric u svjetlu kritike, ed. Branko Milanovic (Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1977).

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265

Kriticari o Andricu, ed. Petar Dzadzic (Nolit, Belgrade, 1962). Svecani skup u cast Akademika Ive Andrica (Srpska akademija nauka i umjetnosti Belgrade, 1962). Zbornik radova o Ivi Andricu, ed. Antonije Isakovic (SANU, Belgrade. English-language works TRANSLATIONS The Bridge on the Drina, translated by Lovett Edwards (George Allen and Unwin, London, 2nd edn 1961) (New American Library, NY, 1960). Bosnian Story, translated by Kenneth Johnstone (Lincolns Prager, London, 2nd edn, 1961). Devil's Yard, translated by Kenneth Johnstone (John Calder, London, 1964) (Grove Press, New York, 1962). Bosnian Chronicle, translated by Joseph Hitrec (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1963). The Woman from Sarajevo, translated by Joseph Hitrec (Calder and Boyars, London, 1965). (Knopf, NY, 1965). "The Zepa Bridge", translated by L. Vidakovic (Slavonic Review, 5, 14, 1926, pp. 398-405). "Gjerzelez at the Inn", translated by N. P. Jopson, (Slavonic and East European Review, London, XVIII, 40, 1935, pp. 13-19). "Gjerzelez at the Gypsy Fair", translated by N. P. Jopson (SEER, XIV, 42, 1936, pp. 556-63). "Thirst" (Kenyan Review, Gambier, 28, 1966). The Vizier's Elephant. Three Novellas. (The Vizier's Elephant, Anika's Times, Zeko), translated by Drenka Willen (Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., New York, 1962). "Death of a Simple Giant" and other Modern Yugoslav Stories (Includes The Story of a Bridge (Most na Zepi), Miracle at Olovo, Neighbors, translated by Michael Scammell) (The Vanguard Press, Inc., New York, 1965). Yugoslav Short Stories, translated by Svetozar Koljevic (Includes The Climbers (Osaticani) and The Bridge on the Zepa) (OUP, The World's Classics, London, New York, Toronto, 1966).

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The Pasha's Concubine and other tales, translated by Joseph Hitrec (Alfred Knopf, NY, 1968). (The Bridge on the Zepa, The Journey of All -Derzelez, Confession, By the brandy still, Mustapha Magyar, In the camp, The pasha's concubine, Thirst, The snake, The scythe, Woman on the rock, Bar Titanic, A summer hi the south).

CRITICAL ARTICLES Eekman, Thomas, "The later stories of Ivo Andric" (The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. XLVIII, 112, pp. 341-56). Goy, E.D., "The work of Ivo Andric" (The Slavonic and East European Review, London, 1963, vol. XLI, 97, pp. 301-26). Hawkesworth, E.G., "Ivo Andric's unobtrusive narrative technique with special reference to 'Kuca na osami'" (Annali Istitutio Orientale di Napoli, 1979, 20-1, pp. 131-53). Kadic, Ante, "The French in 'The Chronicle of Travnik'" (California Slavic Studies, University of California Press, vol. 1, 1960, pp. 134-69). Lord, Albert, "Ivo Andric in English Translation" (American Slavic and East European Review, Philadelphia, 1964, vol. 23, 3, pp. 563-73). Mihailovich, Vasa, "The Basic World View in the Short Stories of Ivo Andric" (The Slavic and East European Journal., 1966, X, pp. 173-7). "The reception of the works of Andric in the English-speaking world" (Southeastern Europe, 9, pp. 19-25). Pribic, Nikola, "Ivo Andric and his Historical Novel The Bridge on the Drina'" (The Florida State University Papers, 1969, vol. 3, pp. 77-80). Taranovski-Johnson, V., "Bosnia demythologized. Character and motivation in Ivo Andric's stories 'Mara milosnica' and 'O starim i mladim Pamukovicima'" (Die Welt der Slaven, 1981, 25, pp. 98-108); "Ivo Andric's 'Kuca na osami': Memories and Ghosts of the writer's past" (Fiction and Drama in Eastern Europe, Slavica, Columbus, Ohio 1980, pp. 239-50).

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267

Bibliography Ivo Andric. Bibliografija dela, prevoda i literature, 1911-1970 (Srpska Akademija Nauka i Umetnosti, Belgrade, 1974). Coote, M.P., "Narrative and narrative structure in Ivo Andric's 'Devil's Yard'" (Slavic and East European Journal, Madison, 21, 1977). Djilas, M., "Remembering Ivo Andric" (Encounter 50, February 1978, pp. 48-51). Drazic, M., "Ivo Andric, the bard of Bosnia" (Books Abroad, 36, 1962). Fazia, A., "Nobel Prize, 1962, and The Bridge on the Drina' revisited" (Books Abroad, 37, 1963). Ferguson, A., "Public and private worlds in Travnik chronicle'" (Modern Language Review, Cambridge, 70, 1975). Gaster, B., "Nobel prizeman: Ivo Andric" (Contemporary Review, London 1962). Juricic, Z.B., "Andric's vision of women in 'Ex Ponto'" (Slavic and East European Journal, Madison, 23, 1979). Kragalott, J., "Turkish loanwords as an element of Ivo Andric's literary style in 'Na Drini cuprija'" (Balkanistica, Cambridge, Mass., 2, 1975). Loud, J., "Between two worlds: Andric the storyteller" (Review of National Literatures, New York, 5, 1, 1974).

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Index Alaupovic, Tugomir, 14,18,19,21, 22,28 'Anika's Times', 79-91 Anxieties, 18, 52, 58-62, 85,194; 'Story from Japan', 48-9 'Aska and the Wolf, 108

'Death in Sinan's Tekke', 79-80 Devil's Yard, 50, 54, 111, 120,184, 189-205,217,240,243,245, 247-9 Diplomatic Service, 20ff., 27 doctoral thesis, 23

Babic, Milica, 29, 30 'Beside the Brandy Still', 84 Bosnia, 1-10,13,16, 31,44, 59,69, 70,94-6,108-9,145-6,156,164, 173,180-2,225; as microcosm, 148-50 Bosnian Story, 9,24,28, 83,124, 142-62,174-5,188,194,218-19, 238,242 The Bridge on theDrina, 13,28, 36, 39,42,43-6, 85, 88, 89,123, 124-42,143,144,194,226, 237, 238 'The Bridge on the Zepa', 9-10, 88-90,100,213,248 bridges, as symbol, 1,9-10, 50,64, 89,125,126-7,132,139-42, 218-19; origin of, 137-8

East/West, 1, 3-4, 76, 82-3,88, 113,131,136-7,197-8,211, 225-6; in Bosnian Story, 142ff., 164,176-9 ExPonto, 18, 51-8,194

Camus, Albert, 7, 37 Conrad, Joseph, 37 'Corkan and the German Girl', 85-6 Crnjanski, Milos,19

'Faces', 111 First World War, prison, 15ff., 52-3, 54,63,193-4; internment in Ovcarevo, 16-17; and 'Young Bosnia', 42ff.; Sarajevo, 1914, 165,166 Franciscans in Bosnia, 17, 59,148; Brother Julian, 148; Brother Luka, 160-1,242; Brother Marko, 69, 81-4; Brother Petar, 75-7,80,87,121,189ff., 240 Goethe, 7, 33 Goya, 8,24; 'Conversation with Goya', 5-6, 212-15,238,240,248 The House On Its Own, 111-22,220, 245,246; 'Alipasha', 118-19;

270

Index

'Baron Dorn', 115-17; The Circus', 119-20; The Slave Girl', 117-18; The Story', 120-2 'In the Guest House', 81-4 James, Henry, 37 'Jelena, the Woman Who Was Not', 87-8 107 243-4 The Journey of AlijaBerzelez', 17, 19 70-3 237 Kafka, 36 Karadzic, Vuk, 38,209-10 Kierkegaard, 14,33,36-7,40 legend, 8,13, 36, 37, 38-9,71,79, 90,106,208-9,240-1; mDevil's Yard, 201-3; in The Bridge on the Drina, 125-30 'Letter from the Year 1920', 94-6 Literary South, 17 lyricism, verse, 63-7; in prose works, 68-9,106,107,108, 207-8,243-4; in Signs by the Roadside, 215-33 Mann, Thomas, 33, 36, 37 'Mara the Concubine', 77-8, 81,235 Marcus Aurelius, 33, 50 MatoS, Antun Gustav, 207-8 'Miracle at Olovo', 86-7 'Mustafa the Hungarian', 73-5,81, 209,235 New Croatian Lyric Verse, 15 Nietzsche, 36,37 Njegos, 38,209-12

Nobel Prize, 20,29-30, 34; speech, 6-8 Omer Pasha Latas, 173-88,241-2, 244,246 oral traditional literature, 8, 34, 38, 39,111,127-30,234-8 'Panorama, 103-6,108,239 'Paths'> 1 !-13 The People of Osauca, 101-2,236 'Persecution', 97-9 The Rzav Hills', 88 Second World War, 25-8,90-4,96 Signs by the Roadside, 20-1,24,174, 188,215-33,236-7 strindberg, 14, 36,46