L’Empire Ottoman d’Ivo Andrić

• Main Author: Branka Šarančić
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre d'Études Balkaniques 2008-12-01
• Series: Cahiers Balkaniques
• Subjects: Andrić Ivo (1892-1975); serbo-croate literature; Ottoman empire; Drina; Literature; Bosnia
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ceb/1480

The purpose of our article is to reveal the subversive potential of Ivo Andrić’s novelistic philosophy and whose artistic process tends less to revive the past in its historical reality than to call the notion itself of the “historical truth” in question. In Andrić’s opinion, the writer’s main task lies essentially in expressing all that is beyond the reach of the so-called objective history in a novelistic language (relationship with Marcel Proust’s work). For, what still remains once the storms of History have died down, is the need one has to appropriate the historical fate and change the external events in as much tales, which restitute the Ottoman period not as it really was but as it could be read and understood by people searching for their own identity.