Ivo Andrić and the bridge on the Drina:
For download, with footnotes! (clearly superior):
http://www.mediafire.com/file/qzom5ntwunu/Yugoslav Identity and Ivo Andric.doc
Ivo Andrić, one of Yugoslavia’s most important writers, and probably its most well known internationally, was in many ways the prototypical artist - and citizen - of the former Yugoslavia. Andrić came from a Catholic family and so is often considered a Croat; he spent most of his life living in Belgrade, and so was deemed a Serbian; he wrote almost exclusively about Bosnia and its history, and so was thought of as Bosnian. He was born in the city of Travnik, the center of Ottoman power in Bosnia for some two centuries, in 1892: only fifteen years after control of the city had passed to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When Andrić was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961 – the first and only writer from a Yugoslav republic to have received this honor – he is reported to have said, “I think that the award goes first of all to my country…The honor that has been given to me encompasses all of Yugoslav literature.” perhaps unsurprisingly for one who so completely exemplified the mix of ethnicities and divergent historical legacies that typified the spectrum of Yugoslav identity, Andrić was a firm believer in Yugoslavia and supporter of pan-Slavism.
Though there were many other proponents of pan-Slavism and supporters of a strong, centralized Yugoslav state, Andrić occupied a unique place in the nation’s artistic community as an author who was considered purely Yugoslav. In the same way that US states set their own curriculums for students, each of the Yugoslav republics developed their own programs of public education. The Croatian curriculum consisted largely of Croatian authors; the Serbian of Serbians; Slovenian of Slovenians, etc. When an author from a different Yugoslav republic appeared in the classroom, they were generally labeled as such. The chief exception to this rule was Andrić, who appeared in school readers across the nation, referred to only as one of “our best contemporary writers.” This contrast – between writers like Mažuranić and Cankar who were considered totally Croatian or Slovenian (respectively) and Andrić who was regarded as Yugoslavian - is a reflection of a larger tension between the concept of a unified Yugoslav identity and the reality of entrenched heterogeneity in the Yugoslav republics.
In 1954 the Novisad Agreement was signed by a conference of writers from across Yugoslavia, agreeing that they shared a common literary tradition and spoke a single language: Serbo-Croat. This was an important cultural analog to Tito’s post-war heralding of South Slavic brotherhood in the political sphere. However, a clear shift on the question of Yugoslav-ness began to take place in 1962 - the year after Andrić’s Nobel Prize – away from fraternalism, and toward more of a passive coexistence between the country’s republics. The Yugoslav nation-state envisioned by some gave way to a more robust decentralized federalism. The new constitution of 1963 asserted the right of the republics to secede from the union, a clause that had been absent from the country’s previous constitutions. This reduction in centralized state authority was a conscious strategy designed to reduce nationalist tensions between Yugoslavia’s six republics and two autonomous provinces. Until Tito’s death in 1980, the force of his personality and stature were enough to hold together the country, but a debate raged the whole time, always simmering under the surface, over Yugoslavia’s national identity. This debate, and the dichotomy between centralization and pan-Slavism on the one hand and federalism and distinct nationalisms on the other, can be seen as the central issue and defining thematic motif in much of the literature and cinema created in the Yugoslav republics during this period.
The place of pride gained by Andrić upon his receipt of the Nobel Prize illuminates another difference in the place of artists in society between the United States and the former Yugoslavia. In many nations in Eastern and Central Europe, authors are considered to have played key roles in the formation of a national identity. In Ljubljana’s central square stands a statue of the Slovenian nationalist poet, France Prešeren. Petar II Petrović Njegoš, a 19th century prince of Montenegro and Serbian-language national poet, appears on banknotes and statues throughout the republics of Serbia and Montenegro. Though the United States has its Walt Whitmans and Ernest Hemingways, who are seen as artists who typified the American spirit, they are not seen as shaping it in the same way as authors from the Balkans. This difference in public outlook towards the artist has an important legacy in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav art. Writers and filmmakers in the Yugoslav republics tend to feel more social responsibility than artists in America, to engage in social dialogue, analyze societal problems and raise difficult issues about identity and national culture.
Ivo Andrić’s most famous work, The Bridge on the Drina follows four hundred years in the history of an eastern Bosnian town of Višesgrad, from the point of view of the bridge that spans the river that bisects the town. Andrić’s novel presents a conspicuously multiethnic society, and deals to a large extent with the relationships between Bosnian Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Bosniaks in the town. The Bridge on the Drina became a key work for its understanding of Yugoslav society (particularly abroad) and for its depiction of historical ethnic multiculturalism, and the material and psychological legacy of subjugation and imperialism. Likewise, Emir Kusturica’s 1985 film When Father Was Away on Business, which won the Palm d’or at the Cannes Film Festival, portrays a Bosnia in which Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats live side by side, their heritage never raised more than in passing. The writer Miroslav Krleža is widely viewed as Croatia’s finest, though he made a point to never write about nationalist themes, instead taking on subjects of wider Yugoslav or universal relevance.
On the other side, in Meša Selimović’s novel Death and the Dervish, a mono-cultural Bosnia is portrayed, where all of the characters are Bosniaks, and the settings are solidly within the Muslim world. In “The Culture of Lies,” written after the breakup of Yugoslavia, Dubravka Ugresic writes that she “grew up in a multinational, multicultural and mono-ideological community that had a future.” She discusses the emotional toll taken when her Yugoslav-ness evaporated in 1991. From a childhood where “the words ‘religion’, ‘people’, ‘nationality’” meant nothing to her, she was now forced to orient herself within these labels. Ugresic likens “Yugoslavs” in the modern world to gypsies: “the left-over ex-Yugoslavs have in the mean-time become homeless, exiles, refugees, countryless, excommunicated, new nomads – in a word, gypsies.”
The seminal Yugoslav filmmaker from the 1970’s, Dušan Makavejev, is known for his radical experiments with film structure and stylistic montage. His films deal with themes that are in line with other artists in this “golden” middle period of Yugoslav culture – namely their disillusionments with the Socialist system in Yugoslavia compared with the ideals of the Revolution - but the techniques he uses to explore them are totally distinct, and in many ways representative of Yugoslav society. In his 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism, which deals with the confluence of sexual revolution and socialist revolution in the context of the German psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, Makavejev marries together multiple strands – self-made documentary segments about Reich and American counter-culture artists, a fictional story about a liberated Yugoslav woman who seduces a Russian ice skater with whom she argues revolutionary ideology, a 1931 Nazi propaganda film on mental patients, combined with Yugoslav patriotic hymns and footage of transvestite Jackie Curtis walking around New York dressed in an army uniform. These disparate strands can come together in different ways for each viewer, but taken in conjunction in each other they offer an utterly unique examination of Makavejev’s theme. The structure of this film – and others by Makavejev – can be seen as a sort of extended metaphor of Yugoslavia itself: diverse strands, though held together by a common form, coming together in a single entity, rather it be a nation or a film.
The responsibility of the artist in the Balkans is conceived of much differently from that of artists in the United States, and this leads in turn to different kinds of art. Coupled with the distinct histories of the two regions, this means that American artists are much less likely to write about American identity, or the conflict between regionalism and nationalism, because there is not the same concurrent political and cultural struggle as there was in Yugoslavia. Though Ivo Andrić may be the only purely Yugoslav writer in the country’s history – the literary equivalent to Tito – the literature and film that came out of the Yugoslav and former Yugoslav republics shared a common interest in defining their identity, either as a South Slav nation, or as a distinctive culture within the larger body.
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