Ivo Andric Revisited: the Bridge Still Stands

Ivo Andric Revisited: The Bridge Still Stands Edited by Wayne S. Vucinich Description: Ivo Andric won the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature for an extraordinary body of fiction and poetry rooted in the politics and cultural history of the Balkans. Andric drew on his formal studies, political activism, diplomatic career, and extended residence in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia to explore the human links that have united the region, to argue that conflict is not inevitable, and to lay the basis for a unified Yugoslavia. Today, Andric is claimed by all Yugoslavs as their greatest literary figure, but tragically missing the point of his work, often criticized by each group for not championing its own particular cause. This volume explores many facets of Andric: the artist immersed in both the written and oral South Slavic literary traditions developing his own unique narrative style; the humanist examining the relationships of victimization, grief, shame, and art; the anthropologist analyzing the role of women and the dynamics of gender relations; and the historian peeling through the layers of local traditions and historical experience. Research Series / Number 92 Ivo Andric‘ Revisited: The Bridge Still Stands Wayne S. Vucinich, Editor UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ivo AndriŒ revisited : the bridge still stands / Wayne S. Vucinich, editor. p. cm. — (Research series ; no. 92) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-87725-192-4 1. AndriŒ, Ivo, 1892–1975—Criticism and interpretation. I. Vucinich, Wayne S. II. Series: Research series (University of California, Berkeley. International and Area Studies) ; no. 92. PG1418.A6Z7113 1995 891.8’235—dc20 95-25086 CIP ã1995 by the Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America Cover illustration: Lisa M. Bryant Cover font: Ex Ponto, designed by Jovica VeljoviŒ for Adobe Systems. CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Notes on Contributors xiii Introduction: Ivo AndriŒ and His Times Wayne S. Vucinich 1 Ivo AndriŒ’s Short Stories in the Context of the South Slavic Prose Tradition Thomas Eekman 47 Ex Ponto and Unrest: Victimization and “Eternal Art” Gordana P. Crnkovic 63 Imagining Yugoslavia: The Historical Archeology of Ivo AndriŒ Andrew Wachtel 82 Ivo AndriŒ and the Sarcophagus of History Dragan Kujund§iŒ 103 East Within the West: Bosnian Cultural Identity in the Works of Ivo AndriŒ Tomislav Z. LonginoviŒ 123 v vi Contents Grief, Shame, and the Small Man in the Works of Ivo AndriŒ Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover 139 Women in AndriŒ’s Writing Radmila Gorup 154 Folk Tradition in the Storytelling of Ivo AndriŒ Tatyana PopoviŒ 173 AndriŒ on Bosnia: The 1924 Dissertation John F. Loud 187 Narrative Voice and Listener’s Choice in the Prose of Ivo AndriŒ Ronelle Alexander 200 Index 231 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to the panelists who participated in the conference; all the papers were excellent. I am also grateful to those who helped prepare and organize the conference, especially Irina Barnes, assistant director of the Center for Russian and East European Stud- ies (CREES), and Rosemary Schnoor, CREES administrator, both dedicated professionals. Also I grateful acknowledge the assistance and encouragement of Professors Ronelle Alexander, Gordana Crnkovic, and Radmila Gorup and of Mrs. Zaneta Perišic of the Andric Foundation in Belgrade. I am deeply indebted to Professors Gordana Crnkovic, Thomas A. Eekman, Radmila Gorup, and Tomis- lav Longinovic, who read the manuscript and made valuable sug- gestions. The work of Jasmina Bojic on publicity was much appreciated, as was the administrative and technical assistance of Dusan J. Djordjevich, Stark Draper, JoAnn Giaconi, Jasmina Man- daric, and Glen Reed. On behalf of the panelists and other dinner guests, I want to thank Mrs. Sophia McConnell and her husband, Professor Harden McConnell of the Department of Chemistry, Stanford University, for hosting a splendid reception and dinner at their home. Finally, the conference would not have been possible without the financial sup- port of CREES, the Mara Tomashevich Karabas Fund for Serbian Language and Culture, the Sara Stys Vucinich Fund for Serbian Stud- ies, the Steve P. Rados Fund for East European Studies, and the Wayne S. Vucinich Fund for Russian and East European Studies. W. S. V. xi PREFACE The one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ivo AndriŒ, the distinguished Yugoslav poet, storyteller, and novelist, was com- memorated in 1992 by many scholarly circles. On 22 November 1992, a conference at Stanford University, sponsored by the Center for Russian and East European Studies (CREES), honored AndriŒ; and undertook an in-depth assessment of his work. Scholars have examined many aspects of Ivo AndriŒ’s work, evaluating him as a writer, historian, artist, political philosopher, psychologist, and humanist. There have been studies of how AndriŒ treats madness, prison, myth, withdrawal and alienation, Jews, Franciscans, and women and on how he uses humor and physical imagery. Critics have as- sessed AndriŒ’s language, poetry, prose, short stories, novels, works in foreign translation, and much else. The papers in this collective work—an introductory essay, eight papers read at the conference, and two commissioned papers—contribute significantly to a better understanding of AndriŒ’s literary achievements and to our knowl- edge of AndriŒ as a writer and a man. In the first paper, Thomas A. Eekman argues that AndriŒ was not an isolated “monadic” phenomenon in the literature of South- eastern Europe, even though his talent lifted him above his fellow writers, but that the main aspects of his creativity (his realistic peas- ant and urban themes; his stories about old, half-oriental, legendary Bosnia; and the lyrical prose of his earliest stories) are also present, both thematically and stylistically, in the works of numerous prede- cessors, contemporaries, and followers in Serbian, Croatian, Slo- vene, and Bulgarian literature. Gordana CrnkoviŒ opposes the common critical assessment that considers AndriŒ’s early works inferior to his later ones. She juxtaposes Ex Ponto (1918) and Unrest (1920) with AndriŒ’s acclaimed masterpieces, The Bridge on the Drina (1945) and Bosnian Chronicle (1945), focusing on the relationship between individual victimization and art. In the later novels, the eternity of art, community, or humanity in general minimizes and displaces specific individual vii viii Preface victimizations. Ex Ponto and Anxieties, in contrast, assert an art that does not neutralize but rather articulates the urgency of individual victimizations, which cannot be glossed over by the immortality of humanity or art. Andrew Wachtel concludes that AndriŒ imagines the Yugoslav nation by appealing to the specificity of its historical experience. Wachtel claims that the central historical metaphor in AndriŒ’s major works is archaeology and that the structure of his major fiction is an attempt to explore the archaeological site that is Yugoslavia verti- cally (The Bridge on the Drina), horizontally (Bosnian Chronicle), and randomly (The House on Its Own). Through this multichronotopic exploration of his nation’s history, AndriŒ concludes that the only constants are ethnic conflict, interaction, and interrelationship, com- bined with a conviction that nothing ever changes. But no matter how much the different ethnic groups that make up the mosaic of Yugoslavia may hate one another and wish to shut themselves off from the various others who surround them, they are unable to do so. Just as pagan civilization folded into Roman civilization, as Ro- man ways were incorporated by the Bosnian and Serbian kingdoms, and as the Slavs became part of the Turkish empire, so AndriŒ imag- ined a Yugoslav nation that would be unified through its common legacy of change and stasis. The historical aspect of Ivo AndriŒ’s writing is also examined by Dragan Kujund§iŒ, who notes that history plays the most promi- nent role in AndriŒ’s work. The metaphor AndriŒ uses to represent history in his stories and novels is that of a bridge, which becomes both the lasting historical monument commemorating the great man who built it (the Grand Vizier Yusuf in “The Bridge on the ¬epa” or Mehmed Pasha SokoloviŒ; in The Bridge on the Drina) and a monument to the historical conflicts, violence, and wars that surround it. Kujund§iŒ; explores these two contradictory aspects of the bridge and history—the monument that connects past and present yet at the same time represents violence, disruption, and destruction in Bosnia. He also interprets AndriŒ’s interest in bridges in psychoana- lytic and biographical terms in that AndriŒ, as some biographers have pointed out, experienced the bridge in Viéegrad as separating him from his mother. Tomislav LonginoviŒ places AndriŒ in the context of the current debate about Bosnian cultural identity. He analyzes narrative strate- Preface ix gies AndriŒ used to qualify the influence of Turkish rule on the for- mation of Bosnian culture, infusing it with a peculiar type of orien- talism. In Bosnia, the Turkish colonial domination over the Slavic population produced a hybrid culture where clear distinctions between Eastern and Western elements gradually became indistin- guishable. Although the worlds of Christianity and Islam drifted apart, the people they controlled imperceptibly blended together. This, according to LonginoviŒ, creates the problem with the Bosni- ans’ identity: their religion forces them to define their particular

Load more