Ivo Andrić as Red Rag and Political Football

Abstract

THE SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN REVIEW Volume8o, Number2 April2002 Ivo Andric as Red Rag and Political Football CELIAHAWKESWORTH 'Todaywe knowless about Andricthan before. He used once to be forus far more a writerthan the political or national symbolwhich he later undoubtedlybecame, particularlyin the lastfiftyyears.'Muhamed Filipovic, Dani,22 October I999, P. 41 'Today everyone claimsAndric, althoughfew readhim, and even fewer nurturethe spiritcontained in his novels and stories.'ZdravkoZima, Zadovo1jstvo utekstu, www.modernavremena .hr/zado/es_zima.asp, 29 November 2000 THE title of this article deliberately uses hackneyed terms in order to reflect the crude nature of the abuse of language that has characterized the recent conflict in former Yugoslavia. It is extraordinarily easy to inflame passions with a carefully chosen word as the regimes of both Milo'sevic and Tudjman abundantly demonstrated. This generally frenzied atmosphere, in which language has exceptional power, is the context for a reappraisal of many aspects of the region's past. At a time of violent upheaval and radical change, such a reappraisal of significant aspects of a nation's culture is inevitable. The old certainties have shattered and the future belongs to those who can create the most compelling story to give new shape to the past and cast the most Celia Hawkesworth is Senior Lecturer in Serbian and Croatian Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. 202 CELIA HAWKESWORTH favourable possible light on the present. Or so at least it seems at the time to those with the power to forge the stories.The hollow nature of the projectwas clear almost immediately in Croatia,where Tudjman's significance seemed to have been largely extinguished with his death. The trauma confronting Serbia since Milosevic was extradited to The Hague to face charges of crimes against humanity is far deeper and more problematic. In this generalprocess of reassessment,the figureof Ivo Andric is an obvious target. In his lifetime Andric representeda unique phenomenon in being one of the few genuinely and explicitly Yugoslavwriters and the only YugoslavNobel-Prize winner. He was hailed and praised in all the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Such a phenomenon is meaningless today. The man and his work have become the object of energetic and impassioned debate among all the main culturalgroups in the new post-Yugoslavstates. Andric himself would not have been surprisedat the way he and his worksare being treated today. Shortly before his death, he wrote in one of his numerous jottings on the writer's craft: 'Your work will provide cover for decent fighters of various trends and ideologies, and for fanatics who have nothing whatsoever to do with them, who will use it ruthlesslyinsofar as it is advantageousto them and in the manner thatbest suitsthem." Some biographicalfacts andtheir symbolic value If we consider some elements of his biographywe shallsee that Andric is in a quite specificsituationin relationto allthree of the main cultural groups in the region: Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Andric was born, in I892, into a Catholic family in western Bosnia, in or near the town of Travnik.(A recent article suggeststhat so uncertain has everything about Andric become that he may not actually have been born in Travnik at all, but in a train, his mother having unexpectedly gone into labour before the family could reach the town.) It shouldbe saidthatAndrichimselfcontributedto the sense of mystery about his birthplace. He was proverbially resistant to discussion of his personal life, regarding it as quite irrelevant to an understandingofhiswork.When he was once askedthe directquestion: 'Mr Andric, is the house in Travnik,which bears a plaque with your name, in fact the house in which you were born?', Andric is said to have replied: 'Aman must be born somewhere.' After the family had lived for a very short time in Travnik, Andric's father died and his mother went with the child to live with her brother-in-lawand his wife in Visegrad in easternBosnia. This small town, with its mixed Muslim ' Quoted by Ivo Zanic, 'The Writer in Isolation. How Andric's writing was used in the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina', MOST,I999, p. 172. ANDRIC AS RED RAG AND POLITICAL FOOTBALL 203 andOrthodoxpopulationon theDrinariver,whichformedfromthe...