The Bridge on the Drina

About this book

The committee that awarded the Nobel prize for literature to Ivo Andric in 1961 cited the epic force of The Bridge on the Drina first published in Serbo-Croat in 1945 as justification for its award. The award was indeed justified if as I believe The Bridge on the Drina is one of the most perceptive resonant and well-wrought works of fiction written in the twentieth century. But the epic comparison seems strained. At any rate if the work is epic it remains an epic without a hero. The bridge both in its inception and at its destruction is central to the book but can scarcely be called a hero. It is rather a symbol of the establishment and the overthrown in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That civilization was Ottoman - radically alien to and a conscious rival of both Orthodox Russia and the civilization of western Europe. It was predominantly Turkish and Moslem but also embraced Christian and Jewish communities along with such outlaw elements as Gypsies. All find a place in Andrics book and with an economy of means that is all but magical he presents the reader with a thoroughly credible portrait of the birth and death of Ottoman civilization as experienced in his native land of Bosnia.