SOURCE: Dimić, Milan V. “Ivo Andrić and World Literature.” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes: An Interdisciplinary Journal 27, no. 3 (September 1985): 269-83.

In the following essay, Dimić discusses Andrić's place in the “universal heritage” of literature.

Ivo Andrić was born in Travnik in 1892, when Bosnia was still under Austrian rule; he was brought up to speak and write in the “ijekavian” form of Serbo-Croatian and educated in a Catholic and Croatian environment. As a nationalist, he was jailed by the Austro-Hungarian authorities during World War I; he later made a brilliant diplomatic career in the service of the Yugoslav monarchy. During the German occupation, he devoted himself entirely to writing and after World War II he became, with Miroslav Krleža, one of the two star authors of the socialist regime. He died in Belgrade in 1975 as a self-proclaimed Serb, a writer who had come to use...