Ivo Andric

born on October 9, 1892 in the village of Dolac near Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then part of Austria-Hungary. Originally named Ivan, he became known by the diminutive Ivo. When Andric was two years old, his father died. Because his mother was too poor to support him, he was raised by his mother's family in the eastern Bosnian town of Višegrad on the river Drina. There he saw the Ottoman Bridge, later made famous in the novel The Bridge on the Drina.Andric attended the Jesuit gynasium in Travnik, followed by Sarajevo's gymnasium and later at the universities in Zagreb, Vienna, Krakow and Graz. Because of his political activities, Andric was imprisoned by the Austrian government during World War I (first in Maribor and later in the Doboj detention camp) alongside civilian Serbs and pro-Yugoslavs.Under the newly-formed Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) Andric became a civil servant, first in the Ministry of Faiths and then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he pursued a successful diplomatic career, as Deputy Foreign Minister and later Ambassador to Germany. Ivo greatly opposed the movement of Stjepan Radic, the president of the Croatian Peasant Party, at occasions calling the people that support him as fools that follow the footsteps of a blind dog. His ambassadorship ended in 1941 after the German invasion of Yugoslavia. During World War II, Andric lived quietly in Belgrade, completing the three of his most famous novels which were published in 1945, including The Bridge on the Drina.After the war, Andric held a number of ceremonial posts in the new Communist government of Yugoslavia, including that of the member of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1961, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country."Following the death of his wife in 1968, he began reducing his public activities. As the time went by, he became increasingly ill and eventually died on March 13, 1975, in Belgrade (then Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and today Serbia).
he material for his works was mainly drawn from the history, folklore and culture of his native Bosnia. Andric began writing in Croatian, but, like many other Croatian writers in the period immediately after the founding of the Kingdom of Serbs,[citation needed] Croats and Slovenes, he switched to Ekavian dialect, considered exclusively Serbian. Some are of the opinion that, as a supporter of one Serbo-Croatian language, this was for him a change from the Western to the Eastern form of the same language. On the other hand, others point to the fact that, upon closer scrutiny, his drafts for novels and stories reveal Andric "purged", as far as he could, his texts of characteristically Croatian orthographic, syntactical, morphological and lexical traits-in short, he consciously switched from one dialect to another. Had he been a believer in one, Serbo-Croatian language, he would have, in all probability, "mixed" freely both languages's idioms on all levels, from phonology to semantics-something which didn't happen. After the political turmoil in the Kingdom in the late 1920s most Croats abandoned Ekavian, but Andric didn't follow suit. Many of his works have been translated into English; the best known are the following:* The Bridge Over the Drina (Na Drini cuprija, 1945; trans. 1959) * The Days of the Consuls (a.k.a. Chronicles of Travnik / Bosnian Chronicle) (Travnicka hronika, 1945) * The Woman from Sarajevo (Gospodica, 1945; trans. 1965)Those were all released in 1945 and written during World War II while Andric was living quietly in Belgrade. They are often referred to as a "trilogy" because they were released at the same time and written close together. Though they are connected only thematically—they are indeed three completely different works.Some of his other popular works include:* The Journey of Alija Ðerzelez (Put Alije Ðerzeleza, 1920) * The Vizier's Elephant (Prica o vezirovom slonu, 1948; trans. 1962) * The Damned Yard (Prokleta avlija, 1954) * Omer-Pasha Latas (Omerpaša Latas, released posthumously in 1977)
Andric belongs to those writers that are hard to classify: he was both a Serbian and Croatian writer, writing in both Serbian (predominantly) and Croatian (earlier works of poetry and novellas, ca. 30 % of his opus), although in deference to his vision we may say that he intended to write in Serbo-Croatian rather than purely Serbian or Croatian; he was a believer in Yugoslav unity and quasi-racial Slavic nationalism before World War I. His political career, combined with extraliterary factors, contributed to the controversy that still surrounds his work. However, a fair assessment of his works should not overlook the following facts and evaluations:* Andric is at his best in short stories, novellas and essayist meditative prose. Brilliant aphorisms and meditations, collected in his early poetic prose (Nemiri/"Anxieties") and, particularly, posthumously published Znakovi pored puta/"Signs near the travel-road" are great examples of a melancholic consciousness contemplating the universals in human condition - not unlike Andric's chief influence Kierkegaard. His best short stories and novellas are located in his native Bosnia and Herzegovina and frequently center on collisions between the three main Bosnian nations: Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks. Although social and denominational tensions are the scene for the majority of stories, Andric's shorter fictions cannot be reduced to a sort of regional chronicle: rooted frequently in rather prosaic and pedestrian Bosnian Franciscan chronicles, they are expressions of a vision of life, because for Andric, as for other great regionalist authors like Hardy or Hawthorne, the regional irradiates the universal.* However, with the collapse of Yugoslavia other, until then suppressed, doubts about Andric's work began to pop up. The commonest charge is as follows: Bosniaks are portrayed stereotypically in Andric's work and in a hostile and condescending manner. Some circles of Bosnian Muslim intelligentia have raised these accusations to a significant degree, detecting positions and tendencies that could have, if displayed outside of a literary opus, earned Andric the reputation of a Greater Serbian propagandist and pamphleteer. Since Andric primarily wrote fiction, such accusations remain hard to substantiate. They do, however, express legitimate reservations about Andric's stature as a writer. Shallow stereotypes of Bosnian Muslims who are depicted as borderline psychotic oversensual "Orientals" abound even in his best fiction, which has proven to be detrimental in the re-assessment of his literary stature at the end of the 20th century.* Another, more amusing post-Yugoslav literary event is Andric's posthumous placement: since the project of Yugoslav literature collapsed (just like Czechoslovak or Soviet literatures), a squabble about "who Andric belongs to?" only began. Serbian culture and tradition have the strongest cl.. The majority of his works were written in the Serbian language and he was, as far as the former Yugoslav area is concerned, influenced decisively by Serbian cultural icons such as Vuk Stefanovic Karadžic and Petar Petrovic Njegoš, who both figured in a few of Andric's essays. Accordingly to Serbian critic Borislav Mihailovic-Mihiz, Andric allowed him to be included in Mihailovic's "Anthology Of Serbian Poets Between The Two World Wars" ("?????? ??????? ?????? ??? ????"). Croatian curricula at high schools and universities have put Andric among other writers in Croatian literature departments and programs: the arguments seem to be mostly "genetic" (Andric was of Croatian origin and in young adulthood declared himself a Croat - for instance, he participated in a book Hrvatska mlada lirika/"Croatian young poetry", 1914); also, great part of his best earlier work was written in the Croatian language (as different from Serbian Ijekavian language writers such as Petar Kocic or Aleksa Šantic) and Andric didn't alter his early works in later editions; and, the role of "chorus" or moral conscience, i.e. authorial voice in the major part of his work are Bosnian Croat Franciscans. It is assumed that "Jelena, žena koje nema" is dedicated to Andric's secret love Jelena Trkulja.Ivo Andric on the Bosnian Convertible Mark 200 KM banknote. Ivo Andric on the Bosnian Convertible Mark 200 KM banknote.Be as it may, Andric's work is now in the official curricula of Croat and Serb literature programs, and, grudgingly, in that of Bosnian Muslims. Since aesthetic sensibilities have significantly altered in past decades, a traditionalist storyteller like Andric is both a politically controversial figure and literarily a somewhat marginal presence: Many Croatian historians of literature have never considered him an equal to Miroslav Krleža. Serbs, for their part, affirm the aesthetic primacy of Miloš Crnjanski and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), that of Mehmed Selimovic - a Serb writer who, like the Croat Andric, "opted" for Serbdom during a major part of his life.