SOURCE: Krivak, Andrew. “Going Back Over ‘The Bridge on the Drina’.” America 172, no. 11 (1 April 1995): 24-7.

In the following essay, Krivak discusses The Bridge on the Drina in light of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

It was three years ago, in 1992, when the ethnic nations of the one-time Federation of Yugoslavia split, staked out their own independent national territories and began the bloodshed that we in the West now numbingly refer to as “the war in Bosnia.” The siege of Sarajevo, a city in Yugoslavia once held up as a model of culture and cosmopolitanism, a city in which Muslims, Serbs and Croats all lived and worked communally, became for us a constant mystery and frustration. Why and how could such a rage prevail in this late 20th-century period of seeming political enlightenment?

For 12 years now, I have had on my shelf a novel called The Bridge...