Biography

Ivo Andrić was born in the Croatian family of Antun Andrić, a court janitor and Katarina Pejić. At the age of two he lost his father and soon moved to Višegrad with his mother to his father's sister Ana and her husband Ivan Matkovšik, a border policeman. enrolls in Sarajevo's Velika Gymnasium, the oldest high school in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After receiving a scholarship from the Croatian cultural and educational society "Napredak", Andrić began his studies at the Faculty of Arts of the Royal University of Zagreb in 1912. He later studied in Vienna and Krakow (1913-1914).

As a high school student from Sarajevo, Andrić moved in the company of young people from the rebel association Mlada Bosne, and as a student from Zagreb he met Matoš, and although he did not belong to the Matoš family, he commemorated Matoš's death with a lecture at the Croatian Students' Club "Zvonimir" in Vienna. , 1914). Interned during the war as a Yugoslav nationalist, after reunification he entered the diplomatic service, where he quickly progressed to Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs and finally to the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary in Berlin. He spent the Second World War in seclusion in Belgrade, and later, in 1946, he was the first president of the Writers' Union of Yugoslavia. He was also a Member of Parliament in the Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the Federal National Assembly. In 1961 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his entire life's work.

The question of nationality

Documents from Andrić's student days testify to his Croatianness. Thus, the picture of the application form for enrollment in the first semester of the Faculty of Philosophy (University of Zagreb) (right), which Ivo Andrić signed as a 20-year-old in Zagreb on October 14, 1912, testifies that his mother tongue is Croatian. He made the same statement when enrolling at the University of Krakow in Poland, where he writes that he is a Catholic Croat from Bosnia. Also in his first critical appearance in the magazine Vihor, writing about the novel by the Croatian writer Andrija Kovačević The Last Nenadić (Matica hrvatska, Zagreb, 1913), Andrić classifies himself as a Croat:

 During this period he also became an advocate of the idea of ​​Yugoslavism. After the creation of the common state, Andrić began to identify with the Serbs and he would maintain that national identification for the rest of his life. Almost all of his oeuvre, literary works (except for a few short stories published in his early youth and at the beginning of his literary career) and great novels he wrote in Ekavian and Serbian (or the Eastern version of Serbo-Croatian). He used the Cyrillic alphabet in his personal correspondence. However, ambiguities and controversies have multiplied over Andrić over the years. Did the change of national identity come about for ideological reasons or because of his career, since he soon became a civil servant (and then an ambassador in Berlin) of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which is dominated by Serbia.As this controversy has not been resolved, today both Croats and Serbs consider him their writer. The first because he was born into a Croatian family, and the second because he took over their national identity.According to Enes Čengić, Miroslav Krleža received a letter from Milan Bogdanović stating that Ivo Andrić had asked Milan Bogdanović to delete from the encyclopedic article written by Milan Bogdanović in 1952 the part of the introduction emphasizing Andrić's Croatian origin. Krleža responded sharply to Bogdanović, and ordered the deletion of the origin from the encyclopedic article. Nevertheless, the General Encyclopedia of JLZ from 1977 in an article with a length of 49 lines states that Andrić prolongs the tradition of cro. and sickle. realistic narratives

 Diplomatic service

At the beginning of October 1919, with the help of Tugomir Alaupović, he began working as an official in the Ministry of Religion in Belgrade. He meets other writers and friends with Crnjanski, Vinaver, Pandurović, Sib Miličić and other writers, who gather around the cafe "Moscow". Soon his diplomatic career began, he was given a job at the embassy to the Vatican City State.In the same year, the publisher Kugli published a new collection of poems in the prose Nemiri, and the publisher S. B. Cvijanović published the short story Put Alija Đerzeleza. In the fall of 1921, Andrić was appointed an official at the Consulate General in Bucharest, and in the same year he began cooperating with the Serbian Literary Herald by publishing the story Ćorkan i Švabica, which justifiably adheres to his beginning of turning to Visegrad.Already in 1922 he moved to the consulate in Trieste and published two more short stories For Camps and Ivory Woman, a cycle of poems What I Dream and What Happens to Me and several literary reviews, and in early 1923 he was vice consul in Graz.