Ivo Andrić

Ivo Andrić
File:Andric Ivo.jpg
Born	(1892-10-09)9 October 1892 Dolac (village near Travnik), Austria-Hungary
Died	13 March 1975(1975-03-13) (aged 82) Belgrade, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer

Ivo Andrić ; October 9, 1892 – March 13, 1975) was Croatian novelist, short story writer, and the 1961 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature from Yugoslavia. His novels The Bridge on the Drina and Chronicles of Travnik / The Days of the Consuls dealt with life in Bosnia under the Ottoman Empire.

Biography

Andrić was born on October 9, 1892 of Croat parentage 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 Andrić 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.

Andrić attended the Jesuit gymnasium in Travnik, followed by Sarajevo's gymnasium and later the universities in Zagreb, Vienna, Krakow and Graz. Because of his political activities, Andrić 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) Andrić 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 Radić, 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, Andrić 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, Andrić 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." He donated all the prize money for the improvement of libraries in Bosnia & Herzegovina.

Following the death of his wife in 1968, he began reducing his public activities. As 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).

Works

File:IvoAndricPortrait.jpg

Portrait of Ivo Andrić by Kosta Hakman

The material for his works was mainly drawn from the history, folklore, and culture of his native Bosnia. At the beginning of his career, the language Andrić composed in was Croatian, but, like many other Croatian writers in the period immediately after the founding of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, he switched to the Ekavian dialect, considered exclusively Serbian. Some are of the opinion that, as a proponent of a unified Serbo-Croatian language, this was for him a change from one form to another of the same language (specifically, from the Western form of Serbo-Croatian to the Eastern form). On the other hand, others point to the fact that, upon closer scrutiny, his drafts for novels and stories reveal that Andrić "purged" his texts, as far as he could, of characteristically Croatian orthographic, syntactic, morphological, and lexical features -- in short, he consciously switched from one dialect to another. One can speculate that had he been a believer in a single Serbo-Croatian language, he would have instead "mixed" freely both languages's idioms on all levels, from phonology to semantics. After the political turmoil in the Kingdom in the late 1920s most Croats abandoned Ekavian, but Andrić didn't follow suit. Many of his works have been translated into English; the best known are the following:

Ivo Anrić monument in Belgrade (Serbia)

• The Bridge Over the Drina
• The Days of the Consuls (a.k.a. Chronicles of Travnik / Bosnian Chronicle)
• The Woman from Sarajevo

Those were all released in 1945 and written during World War II while Andrić was living quietly in Belgrade. They are often referred to as a "trilogy" because they were released at the same time and had been written near together in time. However, they are connected only thematically -— they are indeed three completely different works.

Some of his other popular works include:

• The Journey of Alija Đerzelez (Put Alije Đerzeleza, 1920)
• The Vizier's Elephant (Priča o vezirovom slonu, 1948; trans. 1962)
• The Damned Yard (Prokleta avlija, 1954)
• Omer-Pasha Latas (Omerpaša Latas, released posthumously in 1977)

It is assumed that "Jelena, žena koje nema" is dedicated to Andrić's secret love Jelena Trkulja.

Classification

During his studies at the University of Kraków, Poland, Ivo Andrić declared himself as Croatian (Narodowość: Chorwat)

Andrić belongs to those writers that are hard to classify: he was both a Serbian and Croatian writer. Although he wrote predominantly in Serbian, his earlier works (mostly poetry and novellas) which constitute about 30 percent of his opus, were written in Croatian. In deference to his vision, it could be said that he intended to write in Serbo-Croatian rather than purely Serbian or Croatian; prior to World War I he had been a believer in Yugoslav unity and quasi-racial Slavic nationalism.

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:

• Andrić 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 Andrić'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, Andrić's shorter works of fiction 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 Andrić, as for other great regionalist authors like Hardy or Hawthorne, the regional permeates the universal.

• However, with the collapse of Yugoslavia previously suppressed doubts about Andrić's work began to pop up. The commonest criticism is that Bosniaks are portrayed stereotypically in Andrić'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 Andrić the reputation of a Greater Serbian propagandist and pamphleteer. Since Andrić primarily wrote fiction, such accusations remain hard to substantiate. They do, however, express legitimate reservations about Andrić'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 Andrić's posthumous placement: since the project of Yugoslav literature collapsed (just like Czechoslovak or Soviet literatures), a squabble about "who Andrić belongs to?" began. Serbian culture and tradition have the strongest claim: 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 Stefanović Karadžić and Petar Petrović Njegoš, who both figured in several of Andrić's essays. Accordingly to Serbian critic Borislav Mihailović-Mihiz, Andrić allowed himself to be included in Mihailović's "Anthology Of Serbian Poets Between The Two World Wars" ("Српски песници између два рата"). Croatian curricula at high schools and universities have put Andrić among other writers in Croatian literature departments and programs: the arguments seem to be mostly "genetic" (Andrić 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, the bulk of his best earlier work was written in the Croatian language (in contrast to Serbian writers such as Petar Kočić or Aleksa Šantić, who wrote in Ijekavian (Croatian) dialect) and Andrić 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.

File:200km front.jpg

Ivo Andrić on the Bosnian Convertible Mark 200 KM banknote.

At any rate, Andrić's work is now in the official curricula of Croat and Serb literature programs, and, grudgingly, in that of Bosnians. Since aesthetic sensibilities have significantly altered in past decades, a traditionalist storyteller like Andrić 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, that of Mehmed Selimović - a Bosniak writer who, like the Croat Andrić, "opted" for Serbdom during a major part of his life.

External links

• Andric at NobelPrize.org
• The Swedish Academy secretary Anders Oesterling presentation speech
• Ivo Andrić Foundation

References

• Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina - The University of Chicago Press, 1977 - two biographical notes written by William H. McNeill and Lovett F. Edwards

Template:Persondata Template:Link FA