SOURCE: Butler, Thomas. “Ivo Andrić, a ‘Yugoslav’ Writer.” Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 10, (1991): 118-21.

In the following essay, Butler analyzes Andrić's shift from writing in his native Bosnian ijekavian dialect to the Serbian ekavian.

Ivo Andrić, the Nobel Prize laureate for literature in 1961, author of Bridge on the Drina and Travnik Chronicle, wrote in a style that is deceptively simple, in seamless sentences in which words seem to slip into place almost by accident, a style that is so “easy” we feel we are listening to the tale of a village storyteller and not to the creation of a very wise man. As Miloš Bandić notes, “Everything seems to be created without effort and strain, by some magnanimous grace. From this comes the unobtrusiveness and simplicity of Andrić's art, which really is the result of a methodological, systematic and prolonged work of filigree...