The Bridge on the Drina

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The common people remember and tell of what they are able to grasp and what they are able to transform into legend. Anything else passes them by without deeper trace, with the dumb indifference of nameless natural phenomena, which do not touch the imagination or remain in the memory. This hard and long building process was for them a foreign task undertaken at another's expense. Only when, as the fruit of this effort, the great bridge arose, men began to remember details and to embroider the creation of a real, skilfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales which they well knew how to weave and to remember. This is an extraordinary novel, a true epic of 400 years of Bosnian history. Ivo Andric centers his story in the central eastern village of Visegrad on the Drina River. The bridge spans the river Drina and links Bosnia and Serbia making Visegrad the central transportation route from Sarajevo in central Bosnia with Serbia to the east. This bridge, village and positioning made Visegrad a successful city with a respectable economy for all living there.

The three novels Andrić published in 1945 were an immediate success. [23] The Bridge on the Drina was instantly recognized as a classic by the Yugoslav literary establishment. [17] The novel played an important role in shaping Andrić's Tito-era reputation as the very embodiment of Yugoslav literature, a "living equivalent to Njegoš". [40] From its publication in 1945 until the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991–92, the novel was required reading in Yugoslav secondary schools. [41]

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Popović, Radovan (1989). Ivo Andrić: A Writer's Life. Belgrade, Yugoslavia: Ivo Andrić Endowment. OCLC 22400098. The historian Tomislav Dulić interprets the destruction of the bridge at the novel's conclusion as having several symbolic meanings. On the one hand, it marks the end of traditional Ottoman life in the town and signals the unstoppable oncome of modernity, while on the other, it foreshadows the death and destruction that await Bosnia and Herzegovina in the future. Dulić describes the ending as "deeply pessimistic", and attributes Andrić's pessimism to the events of World War II. [39] Reception and legacy [ edit ] Andrić signing books at the Belgrade Book Fair Patterson, Annabel (2014). The International Novel. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-21040-8. Andrić had been Yugoslavia's ambassador to Germany from 1939 to 1941, during the early years of World War II, and was arrested by the Germans in April 1941, following the German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia. In June 1941, he was allowed to return to German-occupied Belgrade but was confined to a friend's apartment in conditions that some biographers liken to house arrest. The novel was one of three that Andrić wrote over the next several years. All three were published in short succession in 1945, following Belgrade's liberation from the Germans. The Bridge on the Drina was published in March of that year to widespread acclaim.

Wachtel, Andrew Baruch (2008). The Balkans in World History. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-988273-1.The dreadful events occurring in Sarajevo over the past several months turn my mind to a remarkable historical novel from the land we used to call Yugoslavia, Ivo Andric’s The Bridge on the Drina."—John M. Mohan, Des Moines Sunday Register In all his novels, Andrić is particularly interested in the characters whose ethnicity is marginalized or problematic or has undergone multiple historical vicissitudes. In The Bridge on the Drina such a character is Mehmed Pasha Sokolli, the Christian peasant snatched as a little boy by the Turks. Mehmed Pasha, one of many boys acquired in this forceful way, eventually becomes a Turkish vizier. Pained by the memory of his lost childhood and nationality, the vizier imagines the construction of a stone bridge in his hometown. This initiating story encapsulates the symbolic framing of the bridge. Spatially, the bridge is a meeting point metaphor, the location at which the diverse peoples get together and unite in its creation and protection. Temporally, the stone bridge is also a symbol of endurance of human creation as contrasted with the transient lives of those who have lived by it. Criterion (ii): Located in a position of geostrategic importance, the bridge bears witness to important cultural exchanges between the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean world, between Christianity and Islam, through the long course of history. The management of the bridge and repairs made it to have also involved different political and cultural powers: after the Ottomans came the Austro-Hungarians, the Yugoslav Federation, and the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I am putting into this village all the money I made from films and music," said Kusturica who, as well as being a film director is also an accomplished bass guitarist.

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But in Bosnia, this is where it started to get really complicated. Young Bosnia included members of all four confessions – Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Islam and Judaism – but the majority was Serb. United in their antipathy towards Habsburg rule, they were sometimes divided by different perceptions of where liberation from the Austrian overlord might lead. Yugoslavism had emerged both in Croatia and Serbia during the nineteenth century – the idea that you could unite all southern Slavs (excepting Bulgarians who already had their own state) in one country. But whereas Croatia and Bosnia were under foreign occupation, Serbia was an independent kingdom and the bulk of the Young Bosnians, who were Orthodox, i.e. Serbs, believed that Serbia would play the role that Piedmont had played in Italy. After his death in 1975 and again following the wars in Croatia and Bosnia which finally ended in 1995, literary critics and writers from Andrić’s home country have engaged in intense discussion about the writer’s literary merits. Contributions to this debate range from the obsequious to the vitriolic. Throw in equally serious reflections about linguistic, political and cultural identity and this discussion becomes hard to understand for those without a decent grasp of the politics and culture of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, not to mention the former Yugoslavia in both its royalist and communist variants. The issue is complicated still further because none of the five countries which Andrić might have called his ‘home country’ exists any more (the last one collapsed in 1991).