The Bridge Over the Drina

Product Information

Nel discorso pronunciato all’ assegnazione del premio Nobel, nel ’61, lui stesso dice di essersi ispirato a Sherherazade, non tanto nella sostanza ma come modello narrativo in cui il narratore cerca “ di sospendere l’inevitabile condanna a morte e di prolungare l’illusione della vita e della sua durata. Un unico rimpianto: averlo accantonato negli anni ’60 quando lo comprai. Avrei capito quello che accadde poi, negli anni ’90, quando la vendetta di feroci criminali si incarnò da "storia" nell’indifferenza dell’Europa. Velikonja, Mitja (2003). Religious Separation and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 978-1-58544-226-3.

The bridge is built and it becomes a witness of history… And it becomes an inanimate partaker in all the events around it… And it mutely participates in lives of those who surround it… As an example of the poetic imagery, there is the Jewish woman, Lotte, who slaves to raise her many relations from poverty, but whose business shares, in the new economic climate,"play like dust in a high wind". The huge symbolism, of course, and the steadfast pillar of the whole book, is the bridge, the bequest of the Grand Vizir, a gift to Allah. It is a thing beloved, as is the town to its people, and in their brief burst of life it seems eternal and unchanging. 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 FairThe Bridge Over the Drina (sometimes translated to The Bridge on the Drina) is not really a novel, but a chronicle (as Andrić himself preferred to call it), or even closer to a short story collection with a single unifying theme—the bridge. It covers four centuries of Balkan history surrounding the bridge as this near-perfect (indeed, perhaps, perfect) structure in the middle of a storm. Andrić's writing comes across as being telling and cold for the most part, but also oddly sympathetic. The novel begins around the 16thC when the bridge is constructed in the small Bosnian town of Višegrad, and ends in 1914. The bridge itself, in reality, is called the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge (pictured below). The novel is also, then, regarded as a "historical novel" or even a "non-fiction novel", into Capote territory. Georges Perec (whom I'm very fond of) said of it in Le Monde: Ivo Andrić's expressed his wish that the original manuscript of his novel be kept in Sarajevo. In 1961, after he already donated manuscript to the City, the writer Razija Handžić decided to take advantage of the fact that Andrić was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to push for establishing a Museum of Literature of Bosnia and Herzegovina where the donated valuable original manuscript could be taken care of and displayed to a public in form of permanent exhibition. She succeeded and also became a museum's first director. The museum is located in Stari Grad, in Baščaršija neighborhood in the heart of Sarajevo, Sime Milutinovića Sarajlije 7 street. The museum is housed in a traditional-style old family mansion, built in the middle of the 19th century, which was originally owned by the Skarić family, and its collection is distributed in 67 literary and 17 theater collections, which contain more than 20,000 valuable items, among which the most important one is the original manuscript of the The Bridge on the Drina, the Museum of Literature of Bosnia and Herzegovina most valued possession. [58] [59]

Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, the bridge stands witness to the countless lives played out upon it: Radisav, the workman, who tries to hinder its construction and is impaled on its highest point; to the lovely Fata, who throws herself from its parapet to escape a loveless marriage; to Milan, the gambler, who risks everything in one last game on the bridge with the devil his opponent; to Fedun, the young soldier, who pays for a moment of spring forgetfulness with his life. War finally destroys the span, and with it the last descendant of that family to which the Grand Vezir confided the care of his pious bequest - the bridge. A vivid depiction of the suffering history has imposed upon the people of Bosnia from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of World War I, The Bridge on the Drina earned Ivo Andric the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961.Hawkesworth, Celia (1984). Ivo Andrić: Bridge Between East and West. London, England: Athlone Press. ISBN 978-1-84714-089-0. Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend our lives.” Ivo Andrić of Yugoslavia wrote novels, dealing with the history of the Balkans, and won the Nobel Prize of 1961 for literature. Juričić, Želimir B. (1986). The Man and the Artist: Essays on Ivo Andrić. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. ISBN 978-0-8191-4907-7.

Merima Čustović (5 September 2021). "Andrić je tražio da se njegov rukopis Na Drini ćuprija čuva u Sarajevu". www.faktor.ba (in Bosnian) . Retrieved 17 December 2021. The Bridge on the Drina is a historical novel by Ivo Andric. As the title implies, it is the story of a bridge, ranging from its construction to its use to, finally, its demise. Andric uses this bridge as a metaphor for the relations between the people on either side of the bridge. A great stone bridge built three centuries ago in the heart of the Balkans by a Grand Vezir of the Ottoman Empire dominates the setting of Andric's stunning novel. Thus the generations renewed themselves beside the bridge and the bridge shook from itself, like dust, all the traces which transient human events had left on it and remained, when all was over, unchanged and unchangeable.Norris, David A. (1999). In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-230-28653-5. It remains unclear whether I have finished this novel before. Scenes like the impalement and the flood were rooted firmly in my memory. The instances and intrusions of ideology and modernity not so much. And Perec is right, Andrić constantly reminds the reader at the end of every chapter that the bridge is there as the centre of this novel's universe. Most of the action even takes place on the bridge itself, if not within seeing distance of it. Throughout, it is the observer as much as we are of all that befalls Bosnia (and its fictional inhabitants) over two centuries. And the returning images of the bridge at the end of most chapters contained some of my favourite lines in the novel— In that way it also reminded me of War and Peace, with its multifaceted elements of history and fiction, and I suppose the same for Les Misérables for its Waterloo dissection, etc. It also felt somewhat Sebaldian... All those books that do not fit so neatly into one category. These are my favourite sorts of novels. Nesreća nesrećnih ljudi i jeste u tome što za njih stvari koje su inače nemoguće i zabranjene postanu, za trenutak, dostižne i lake, ili bar tako izgledaju, a kad se jednom trajno usele u njihove želje, one se pokažu opet kao ono što jesu: nedostupne i zabranjene, sa svim posljedicama koje to ima po one koji za njima ipak posegnu.