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The Bridge on the Drina: Introduction by Misha Glenny (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)
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About The Bridge On The Drina: Introduction By Misha
Product Description In this masterpiece of historical fiction by the Nobel Prize-winning Yugoslavian author, a stone bridge in a small Bosnian town bears silent witness to three centuries of conflict. The town of Visegrad was long caught between the warring Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but its sixteenth-century bridge survived unscathed--until 1914 when tensions in the Balkans triggered the first World War. Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, The Bridge on the Drina brilliantly illuminates a succession of lives that swirl around the majestic stone arches. Among them is that of the bridge’s builder, a Serb kidnapped as a boy by the Ottomans; years later, as the empire’s Grand Vezir, he decides to construct a bridge at the spot where he was parted from his mother. A workman named Radisav tries to hinder the construction, with horrific consequences. Later, the beautiful young Fata climbs the bridge’s parapet to escape an arranged marriage, and, later still, an inveterate gambler named Milan risks everything on it in one final game with the devil. With humor and compassion, Ivo Andrić chronicles the ordinary Christians, Jews, and Muslims whose lives are connected by the bridge, in a land that has itself been a bridge between East and West for centuries. About the Author IVO ANDRIĆ (1892-1975) was born in Bosnia. He was a distinguished diplomat and novelist, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961. His books include The Damned Yard and Other Stories and The Days of the Consuls. MISHA GLENNY is an award-winning British journalist who specializes in central and eastern Europe, global organized crime, and cybersecurity. He covered the Balkan Wars during the 1990s and is the auhor of numerous books, including The Fall of Yugoslavia and DarkMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. from the INTRODUCTION by Misha Glenny But the bridge still stood, the same as it had always been, with the eternal youth of a perfect conception, one of the great and good works of man, which do not know what it means to change and grow old and which, or so it seemed, do not share the fate of the transient things of this world. Ivo Andrić was no run-of-the-mill Nobel laureate. He was the only individual personally acquainted with both Gavrilo Princip and Adolf Hitler, the two men whose actions triggered the First and Second World Wars respectively. One could easily adapt Andrić’s own biography into a novel as it encapsulates many of the fateful and sometimes fatal dilemmas which people from Central and South-Eastern Europe faced through much of the twentieth century. After his death in 1975 and again following the wars in Croatia and Bosnia which finally ended in 1995, literary critics and writers from Andrić’s home country have engaged in intense discussion about the writer’s literary merits. Contributions to this debate range from the obsequious to the vitriolic. Throw in equally serious reflections about linguistic, political and cultural identity and this discussion becomes hard to understand for those without a decent grasp of the politics and culture of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, not to mention the former Yugoslavia in both its royalist and communist variants. The issue is complicated still further because none of the five countries which Andrić might have called his ‘home country’ exists any more (the last one collapsed in 1991). Ivo Andrić was born in 1892 in Travnik. This town built into the hills of central Bosnia not far from Mount Vlašić, now a popular tourist destination, commands little attention outside the country. Nonetheless, it played an important part in the country’s history because from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, it was the capital of the Ottoman province
