Ivo Andric – författare

In the Bosnian town of Visegrad, a stone bridge commissioned in the sixteenth century becomes the centre of three centuries of Balkan history.Built under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the bridge at Visegrad at first unites a divided town. Generations gather on its arches: traders, soldiers, children, lovers, and gamblers, each leaving their mark as empires rise and fall.As Ottoman rule gives way to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, daily life shifts under new laws, new loyalties and growing nationalist tensions. Through characters such as Radisav, who resists the bridge’s construction, and Fata, who leaps from its parapet rather than submit to marriage, The Bridge Over the Drina traces the intimate dramas that unfold against imperial control.When the collision of forces in the Balkans ignites the First World War in 1914, the bridge that has endured centuries of occupation and upheaval finally faces destruction.The Bridge Over the Drina reveals how ordinary lives are shaped, divided, and bound together by the pressures of empire.

Ivo Andric (1892-1975), Nobel Prize laureate for literature in 1961, is undoubtedly the most popular of all contemporary Yugoslav writers. Over the span of fifty-two years some 267 of his works have been published in thirty-three languages. Andric’s doctoral dissertation, The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule (1924), never before translated into English, sheds important light on the author’s literary writings and must be taken into account in any current critical analysis of his work.Over his long and distinguished career as a diplomat and man of letters Andric never again so directly or discursively addressed, as a social historian, the impact of Turkish hegemony on the Bosnian people (1463–1878), a theme he returns to again and again in his novels. Although Andric’s fiction was embedded in history, scholars know very little of his actual readings in history and have no other comparable treatment of it from his own pen. This dissertation abounds with topics that Andric incorporated into his early stories and later novels, including a focus on the moral stresses and compromises within Bosnia’s four religious confessions: Catholic, Orthodox, Jew, and Muslim.Z. B. Juricic provides an extensive introduction describing the circumstances under which this work was written and situating it in Andric’s oeuvre. John F. Loud’s original bibliography drawn from this dissertation stands as the only comprehensive inventory of historical sources known to have been closely familiar to the author at this early stage in his development.

'By the time I finished it something in me had shifted forever' Elif Shafak, New StatesmanThere is no hero or heroine in this book. Instead, there is a bridge, and there are the characters that have loved it, hated it, built it or tried to destroy it. Ivo Andric, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, grew up beside it.For more than four hundred years a bridge has spanned the River Drina in Bosnia. This novel is its chronicle. Radisav, a workman, tries to hinder its construction and is impaled alive on its highest point. Beautiful Fata leaps from its parapet to escape an arranged marriage. Milan, inveterate gamble, risks all in one last game on it. Spanning generations, nationalities, creeds, and a great stretch of green water, the bridge bears witness to the lives played out on it, connections forged and centuries of conflict.

The town of Visegrad was long caught between the warring Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but its sixteenth-century bridge survived unscathed--until 1914 when tensions in the Balkans triggered the first World War. Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, The Bridge on the Drina brilliantly illuminates a succession of lives that swirl around the majestic stone arches. Among them is that of the bridge's builder, a Serb kidnapped as a boy by the Ottomans; years later, as the empire's Grand Vezir, he decides to construct a bridge at the spot where he was parted from his mother. A workman named Radisav tries to hinder the construction, with horrific consequences. Later, the beautiful young Fata climbs the bridge's parapet to escape an arranged marriage, and, later still, an inveterate gambler named Milan risks everything on it in one final game with the devil. With humor and compassion, Ivo Andric chronicles the ordinary Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians whose lives are connected by the bridge, in a land that has itself been a bridge between East and West for centuries.

Por primera vez en español, un amplio catálogo de relatos cortos de Ivo Andric, Premio Nobel en 1961 y uno de los grandes maestros de la literatura de los Balcanes.Las primeras historias forman parte de La casa aislada, obra póstuma publicada en 1976, considerada el testamento narrativo de Andric. En ellas encontramos a un escritor-narrador que habita una solitaria casa del casco antiguo de Sarajevo, cuya soledad se ve alterada por las visitas de personajes históricos o ficticios de diferentes épocas y condiciones sociales --desde aristócratas turcos, austriacos y franceses, hasta un geómetra, un director de circo o una prostituta--, que le van relatando circunstancias y episodios de su vida pasada o de la de otros personajes que les atormentan.Como elemento característico de todos los relatos, el sello fatalista del destino balcánico, tema central en la obra literaria de Andric, que recrea con gran belleza una atmósfera donde la vulnerabilidad y desdicha de los personajes se presentan como consecuencia natural del ambiente del que forman parte.El resto de narraciones que aparecen en el libro, publicadas entre los años 1920 y 1975 en distintos medios impresos, cubren la evolución temática, lingüística, estilística y de pintura de personajes del autor, desde su periodo de juventud --influido vivamente por las vanguardias de entreguerras-- hasta su madura consagración como referente absoluto de las letras yugoslavas en serbocroata.

Por primera vez en español, un amplio catálogo de relatos cortos de Ivo Andric, Premio Nobel en 1961 y uno de los grandes maestros de la literatura de los Balcanes.Las primeras historias forman parte de La casa aislada, obra póstuma publicada en 1976, considerada el testamento narrativo de Andric. En ellas encontramos a un escritor-narrador que habita una solitaria casa del casco antiguo de Sarajevo, cuya soledad se ve alterada por las visitas de personajes históricos o ficticios de diferentes épocas y condiciones sociales --desde aristócratas turcos, austriacos y franceses, hasta un geómetra, un director de circo o una prostituta--, que le van relatando circunstancias y episodios de su vida pasada o de la de otros personajes que les atormentan.Como elemento característico de todos los relatos, el sello fatalista del destino balcánico, tema central en la obra literaria de Andric, que recrea con gran belleza una atmósfera donde la vulnerabilidad y desdicha de los personajes se presentan como consecuencia natural del ambiente del que forman parte.El resto de narraciones que aparecen en el libro, publicadas entre los años 1920 y 1975 en distintos medios impresos, cubren la evolución temática, lingüística, estilística y de pintura de personajes del autor, desde su periodo de juventud --influido vivamente por las vanguardias de entreguerras-- hasta su madura consagración como referente absoluto de las letras yugoslavas en serbocroata.