Ivo Andrić, the Nobel Prize winner who wrote in a language that no longer exists

He rarely smiles — no more than a fleeting sketch. He even seems somewhat sullen. Perhaps it’s the weight of taciturn bile, lingering insomnia, or the awareness of being outmatched — or maybe simply the feeling of being misunderstood amid compliments and congratulations.

At times, he is seen in a trench coat, a relic of the post-war era, with his civil servant-like glasses, blending into his drab existence. He is usually pictured in a classic pose, standing beside the famous Ottoman bridge over the Drina River — the setting of his most renowned novel, The Bridge on the Drina.

In other photographs, he appears with his hands tucked into the pockets of his overcoat. He strolls through the fallen leaves of Belgrade’s parks or sits on a bench beneath the soft sunlight. His portrait is printed on banknotes, and statues immortalize him in public spaces. Graffiti and mural profiles of his face are also abundant, especially in Višegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina — once again, the setting of the bridge, the Drina, and the novel that transformed this small town into both a literary landmark and a place of quiet oppression.

This is Ivo Andrić (1892–1975), the Yugoslav diplomat, writer, and 1961 Nobel Prize laureate. March 13 marks the 50th anniversary of his death in Belgrade. He was the greatest author in the shared yet diverse language of the South Slavs — a literary embodiment of that construct, now irreversibly dissolved, known as Yugoslavia, the country that no longer exists.

Of Bosnian-Croatian descent (his parents lived in Sarajevo), Ivo Andrić was born by chance on October 9, 1892, in a remote village called Dolac, near Travnik, Bosnia. It was the poor “Catholic suburb” frequently mentioned in Bosnian Chronicle, one of his great novels, set in the Ottoman era amidst the echoes and gunpowder fumes of the Napoleonic Wars. Here, the confluence of dates is striking. This year marks not only the 50th anniversary of Andrić’s death but also the 80th anniversary of the publication of Bosnian Chronicle (1945), The Bridge on the Drina, and The Woman from Sarajevo. He had written them in a single stretch under the shadow of the Nazi occupation of Belgrade, the terrifying bombings, and his confinement to an apartment on Prizenska Street.

Another twist of fate brings us to the tragic. In 2025, we also mark the 30th anniversary of the end of the Bosnian War (1992-1995). As fate would have it, the centenary of the writer’s birth aligned with the start of the shooting and the long siege of Sarajevo —one of the most atrocious episodes of the war took place, literally, on the parapet of the bridge over the Drina in Višegrad.

The jury that awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature did so “the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from his country’s history.” Claudio Magris, in his brilliant reflections on Utopia and Disenchantment, articulates this similarly, but in a more poetic and expansive manner. He suggests that Andrić is a writer who delves into the depths of time, managing to connect the ancient past — reflecting Ottoman Bosnia, a melting pot of East and West — with the sudden modernity thrust upon him during the darkest hours of the 20th century.

The figure of Andrić, portrayed by Serbian actor Tihomir Stanić, was recently adapted into a television series, Nobelovac, broadcast on Serbia’s public channel. One might wonder if Andrić‘s character, almost inarticulate in his actions yet efficient, upright, and discreet, makes for a fitting hero in dark times, with two world wars behind him and the creation of Tito’s Yugoslavia following the monarchy (Andrić had served in several diplomatic missions for his government, including one in Madrid on Calle Velázquez, where he remained from 1928 to 1929).

Today, 50 years after his death, Andrić stands as the Nobel Prize winner of paradox and nonexistence. His country, Yugoslavia, no longer exists. A Yugoslavist by conviction, he never paid attention to national particularism as a claim — whether Bosnian by birth, Croat by family, or Serbian by personal choice. Settling in Belgrade in 1941, he believed Serbia was the closest embodiment of the idea of a Balkan Piedmont (the simile is Claudio Magris’s). In his view, Serbia represented the spearhead of a country built on brotherhood and unity, where Bosnia itself was another Yugoslavia, albeit in miniature.

Nationalism, before, during, and after the war, sometimes repudiated Andrić’s view (no longer today), and at other times manipulated and exalted it for convenience. If Andrić wrote in a language that no one is willing to acknowledge today, it is a language that invites nuances. Writers and translators such as Marc Casals, Miguel Roán, and Christian Martí-Menzel agree that Serbo-Croatian (srpsko-hrvatski) is now nothing more than a relic. It even struggled to be recognized as a common and official language within Yugoslavia itself. It was always spoken differently according to region, with dialectical variations — ijekavica more common among Croats and, to some extent, Bosnians, and ikavica more among Serbs.

Since 2017, most post-Yugoslav authors have endorsed the so-called Declaration on a Common Language, which asserts that “Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, and Montenegrins share a common standard language of a polycentric type.” In professional translation, as Marc Casals notes, the politically correct term now used is BCMS (Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian). A polyglot fluent in eight European languages, Andrić himself — a Bosnian-Croat — ended up writing in Cyrillic and in the Serbian variant.

Reading the Yugoslavian Nobel Prize winner

Andrić‘s canonical works, historically translated by Tihomir Pištelek and Luisa Fernanda Garrido, include Bosnian Chronicle, A Bridge on the Drina (a historical, oral, and legendary fable spanning the 16th century to 1914), and The Woman from Sarajevo (in which the protagonist is both a heroine and a usurer). These novels depict how history and the passage of time float through fiction, altering the cycle of human experience and giving rise to the conflict between the old and the new, progress and natural stagnation. The Bosnian identity in the atmosphere permeates the landscapes and stealthily penetrates the bloodstream and minds of its people.

Andrić was a master at crafting human types. The essence of his characters is revealed not only through their physical features but also through the kindness or mistreatment of their internal organs. His novellas, such as The Vizier’s Elephant and The Cursed Courtyard, illustrate this depth.

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