armstron@grinnell.edu

IVO ANDRIĆ

1892-1975

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Spring 2001
Film Festival

Follow the links to find out more about Ivo Andric and The Bridge on the Drina

Ivo Andric (Nobel e-Museum site)

This site has a short biography, the Nobel Prize announcement, and Andric's Nobel Prize acceptance speech (Andric was awarded the prize for literature in 1961).

Ivo Andric Foundation Site

This site has Serbian and English Versions, and contains a detailed biography, with lots of links and photos. There is also a film of his acceptance speech. There are also photos of the actual bridge on the Drina.

Some critical commentary on the novel:

Imbued with a deep understanding of peoples and creeds other than his own, Andrić's book penetrates the quintessence of historically authentic collisions as well as feelings, ideas and values with which people view their society at various times. The microcosm of Yugoslav history and destiny highlights "a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence... a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together." --Vanita Singh Mukerji. Ivo Andrić: A Critical Biography (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., Inc., 1990) NB: the quoted section is taken from T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent.

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Andrić’s basic intention in the work ... is to contrast the transience and insignificance of individual human life with the broader perspective of life itself enduring a constant ebb and flow. On this level the bridge provides not only a structural but also a symbolic link. --Celia Hawkesworth. Ivo Andrić: Bridge between East and West (London: The Athlone Press, 1984)

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To accommodate the book’s longue durée, Andrić narrows his spatial focus, describing only events that take place on or about the bridge itself. What is more, he by necessity does not provide nuanced and detailed portraits of each of the historical periods he covers. Instead each one is sketched lightly, through a focus on a single, almost anecdotal event or person from a chosen period. The separate sections are for the most part unrelated to one another, except through their shared contiguity to the bridge. The resulting fictional structure is analogous to the archeologist’s core sample. By digging straight down through all the layers in a specific place, we get a deep feeling for the various temporal layers of local development, exactly the opposite effect from the one produced by the broad but temporally shallow approach of the historical novel. --Andrew Wachtel. "Imagining Yugoslavia: The Historical Archeology of Ivo Andrić." Ivo Andrić Revisited: The Bridge Still Stands , ed. W. Vucinich; UC at Berkeley Research Series, Number 92, 1995.

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To choose one identity over the other presupposes the loss of the other one. The love of one community requires the hate of the other one--a choice a humanist like Andric could not make. This is also one of the reasons he found answers to the dilemma of identity in Mlada Bosna, which fought for the unification of all the Southern Slavs, regardless of their national origin or religious affiliation. -- Longinović, Tomislav, " "Ivo Andrić Revisited: The Bridge Still Stands , ed. W. Vucinich; UC at Berkeley Research Series, Number 92, 1995

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As one critic states (and I’ll get back to you on the precise citation!), "a bridge [in general terms, as a symbol--T.P.A.] connects and divides life from death, memory and forgetting, presence and transcendence. We build bridges to both confirm our presence here on earth and to mark it profoundly as passing, temporal, and evasive. To cross a river over the bridge is to cross Lethe, the river of death and forgetting, but also to be confronted with truth and remembrance. (...) The bridge designs (that is constructs) both the earthly destination and the passage of time for mortals, for it commemorates the fact that earthly time always ends in the messianic, apocalyptic time of death. This balance between life and death, which marks the passage of time for generations (and is therefore constitutive of the historical as well), is what we call "the bridge".

An excerpt from ‘Conversation with Goya’ by Ivo Andrić (my emphasis added):

..it is necessary to heed legends, those traces of collective human endeavor through the centuries, and surmise from them, as much as possible, the meaning of our destiny.

There are several points of human activity around which through all time, slowly and in fine layers, legends appear. Long bewildered by what took place directly around me, in the latter part of my life I came to a conclusion: that it is futile and wrong to seek a meaning in the insignificant and yet apparently so important events taking place around us, rather we should seek it in those layers which the centuries build up around a few of the main legends of humanity. Those layers constantly, if ever less faithfully, repeat the form of the grain of truth around which they cohere, and thus hand it down through the centuries. The real history of mankind is in tales, from them it is possible to guess, if not to discover totally, its meaning. There are a few fundamental legends of humanity which indicate or at least illumine the road we have travelled, if not the goal towards which we are going. the legend of the Fall, the legend of the Deluge, the legend of the Son of Man, crucified for the salvation of the world, the legend of Prometheus and of the stolen fire...

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From "Bridges," a fragment by Ivo Andrić:

In the end everything by which this life of ours expresses itself--thoughts, efforts, glances, smiles, words, sighs--all of it is striving towards another shore, to which it is directs as to its aim, and on which it gains its true meaning. All that has something to conquer and bridge: chaos, death, or senselessness. For everything is transition, a bridge, the ends of which are lost in eternity, and compared to which all our earthly bridges seem like toys, bleak symbols. And all our hopes are on the other side.