Bosnian Chronicle

by Ivo Andrić

  Works of Ivo Andrić

  Ex Ponto—POEMS, 1918

  Unrest—POEMS, 1919

  The Voyage of Ali Djerzelez—NOVELLA, 1920

  Tales I—1924

  Tales II—1931

  Conversations with Goya—ESSAY, 1934

  Tales III—1936

  The Bridge on the Drina—NOVEL, 1945

  Bosnian Chronicle—NOVEL, 1945

  Miss—NOVEL, 1945

  New Tales—1948

  The Vizier’s Elephant—NOVELLA, 1948

  Devil’s Yard—NOVELLA, 1954

  Under the Hornbeam—NOVELLA, 1952

  Faces—STORIES, 1960

  Notes on Goya—ESSAY, 1962

  First published 1963

  First Arcade Publishing edition 1993

  This paperback edition 2015

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Andric, Ivo, 1892-1975, author.

  [Travnicka hronika. English]

  Bosnian chronicle : a novel / Ivo Andric.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-62872-418-9 (paperback)

  1. Travnik (Travnik, Bosnia and Hercegovina)--History--Fiction. I. Hitrec, Joseph George, 1912-, translator. II. Title.

  PG1418.A6T713 2015

  891.8’235--dc23

  2014041506

  Cover design by Abby Kagan

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-457-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Translator’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Translator’s Note

  In October 1961, the Swedish Academy awarded Ivo Andrić the Nobel Prize for literature, citing him for “the epic force with which he has depicted themes and human destinies from the history of his country.” The Academy paid special tribute to the three works that comprise his Bosnian trilogy—of which Bosnian Chronicle is the longest and most monumental. The other two are The Bridge on the Drina and Miss.

  While the subject of all three are the people of Bosnia, Bosnian Chronicle delves deepest into those elements of the turbulent Bosnian heritage which give it its unique ethnic and spiritual flavor. This is the territory—roughly the size of West Virginia—which has been the contending ground of Eastern and Western cultures for almost two thousand years. Roman legions and the phalanxes of Philip of Macedon have roamed over it in search of plunder and new frontiers. Byzantium and the Church of St. Peter have wrangled for its soul. The Ottoman tide, cresting into Europe in the sixteenth century, made of Bosnia a buffer province and a base for its incursions against Vienna and Budapest. Later, it became a precarious East-West trade route in Napoleon’s Continental System. And after the Austrian occupation in the nineteenth century, it was the fatal shot fired at Sarajevo in 1914 that plunged the world into the first global war.

  This, then, is the tortured, flamboyant tapestry of Andrić’s stories—stories in which Bosnian men and women live their perilous and extraordinary lives amid oppression and cruelty, ever haunted by visions of freedom and human dignity which history has dangled before them but has been painfully slow to deliver.

  Born in Travnik in 1892, Andrić was part of the struggle of which he writes. At the age of nineteen, while studying in Sarajevo, he joined the Bosnian Revolutionary Youth Organization, which fought for the liberation of Bosnia from Austrian rule and for the unification of the South Slavs. Thrown in jail by the Austrians, Andrić read Kierkegaard and wrote two volumes of brooding poetry, Ex Ponto (1918) and Unrest (1919). After World War I, when the South Slavs finally realized their historic dream of independence, he entered his country’s new diplomatic corps and served with distinction in Italy, Rumania, Spain, and Switzerland. He also wrote a great number of stories and novellas which quickly established him as one of the foremost Yugoslav writers of the day. Among his critical writings of that period, Conversations with Goya occupies a special place in that it states his credo as a writer and humanist.

  On the eve of World War II he was appointed Minister to Germany. When the Nazis attacked Yugoslavia he returned to Belgrade and lived as a recluse in his apartment. “The long night of the occupation seemed to have no end,” he told a friend later on. “Hope was an act of desperate defiance against monstrous odds.” Hope and the oblivion of work. He translated Giardini’s Riccordi, wrote a score of tales, and read everything in sight. He began work on his Bosnian trilogy—first Bosnian Chronicle, followed by The Bridge on the Drina and Miss. Four and a half years later the trilogy was ready for publication.

  The three books, published one after another during 1945, made him, overnight as it were, a dominant figure in Yugoslav letters. He was hailed as a prose-poet of the past, a storyteller of genuine power with a philosophic viewpoint, whose style of expression perfectly fitted his material. Moreover, the epic sweep of his canvas and the deeply compassionate spirit playing over it gave his writings a universal quality that raised them from the purely regional and placed them in the European mainstream. Here was a small-nation writer who was “big” in a fashion that transcended his “local” subject matter. It was largely through Andrić that Yugoslav literature—talented and interesting but flourishing on the European periphery—gained international recognition and a world audience for the first time. By the late fifties, Andrić’s stories, novellas, and novels were read and admired in some twenty-eight languages.

  In the years following World War II Andrić served in his country’s National Assembly and was elected president of the Yugoslav Federation of Writers. He received the highest literary award of Yugoslavia. He wrote more stories, essays, and several important novellas, notably Devil’s Yard, a phantasmagoric study of an oriental prison that has drawn critical comparisons with Gogol, Dostoevski, Kafka, and Orwell. Since the Nobel Prize, he has been living and writing in Belgrade and is now completing another chronicle of his native Bosnia.

  The main themes of Ivo Andrić’s writing—causative interplay of guilt and human suffering, the individual versus tyranny, the warping of men’s destinies through historic circumstance—which are explored singly in some of his stories, are woven in Bosnian Chronicle into a harmonious whole. The elegiac mood of his early poetry, the preoccupation with personal sin as an agent of general evil, which marks his longer st
ories written between the wars, are transmuted here into a relentless, many-leveled scrutiny of the character, psychology, and moral sap of a whole people. What is the truth behind the harshness of Bosnian life and its tormented heritage, how real is that audible and visible melancholy which the Austrian Colonel von Mitterer, in Bosnian Chronicle, speciously calls Urjammer—ancient misery? Why, as a discerning Yugoslav critic has asked, is “everything weighed down by some heavy and sinister burden, as if paying back who knows what kind of ancient and eternal debt”?

  For his answer Andrić turns to the past, and his quest is absorbing and illuminating. The act is neither escapism nor a deliberate turning back on the modern world, but a clear-eyed, unsentimental pursuit of durable values and pertinent atavistic wisdom. It is the method of a compassionate researcher who knows that much of the truth of an individual and his group lies locked in his antecedents and must be dredged up for the sake of the total truth. So his answers are neither pat nor necessarily flattering to his subject.

  The past, like the present, is ridden with guilt and evil, individual as well as communal, but it also yields a residue of good. Long centuries of oppression have forced the Bosnian character to grow like a stubborn plant in one of the country’s mountain passes, close to the ground and bending with the wind. But there is also a hard core of patrimony that shows through, a hardy perennial undergrowth which no wars, tyranny, or brutalities could trample out of existence. In that patrimony, heroism, nobility, and greatness of heart exist side by side with moral turpitude and coarseness. Enduring values are handed down through generations and become a distinctive heritage. And all of it together, in Andrić’s special amalgam of storytelling and large-scale canvas, makes for powerful, often shocking, but always fascinating and engrossing reading.

  The Bosnian usage of the name “Turk” to denote a Moslem of local origin and domicile has been retained in this translation. Thus “Turk” may mean either a member of the ruling Osmanli race or a Bosnian Moslem, usually of Slavic origin, whose ancestors became converts to Islam.

  The Serbo-Croatian original contains a good many Turkisms and Bosnian adaptations of Turkish titles of respect, rank, and social status. Most of these have been changed into rough-and-ready English equivalents, but a few, resisting this method, are used here in their original forms. To avoid italicizing them in the text, their meanings are given here:

  Aga: Military title, used loosely of any higher rank.

  Beg: A title of honor, usually connected with Moslem landed gentry.

  Divan: Council or council chamber; also audience or reception.

  Effendi: Master, or sir.

  Hodja: Muezzin.

  Kavass: Groom, attendant, or bearer.

  Illyria: Name of Roman province, revived under Napoleon.

  Pashalik: Territory under the jurisdiction of a pasha.

  Rayah: Subject Bosnian Christians, collectively.

  Schwabe: A Swabian, popular generic term for Germans.

  J.H.

  Prologue

  On the outskirts of the bazaar at Travnik, under the cool and clamoring springs of Shumech, there stands, older than the town’s living memory, a little coffeehouse known as Lutva’s Café. Not even the oldest inhabitants remember Lutva, the original owner of the café—he has been lying in one of the scattered cemeteries of Travnik for at least a hundred years—but they all go to Lutva’s for coffee and his name is remembered and spoken where the names of sultans, viziers, and begs have long been forgotten. In the garden of this coffeehouse, under a cliff at the foot of the hill, there is a secluded spot, cool and slightly elevated, where an old lime tree grows. Around this lime tree, between the bushes and the rocks, low benches of irregular shape have been set up, on which it is a pleasure to sit and from which it is difficult to rise. Warped and worn smooth with the years and long use, the benches have completely blended into and become a part of the tree, the earth, and the stone around them.

  During the summer months—that is to say, from the beginning of May to the end of October—it is a place where, according to a long-standing tradition, the begs of Travnik and the more distinguished citizens who are admitted into their company foregather in the afternoon about the time of prayer. At that hour of the day, no one else in town would dream of going up to the elevation and sitting down to drink a coffee.

  The place is called “the Sofa.” In the popular usage of Travnik the word has acquired, through generations, a particular social and political connotation of its own, and anything said, discussed, and settled at the Sofa may be taken with almost the same authority as if it had been settled among the town elders in the Vizier’s divan, or council.

  On this particular day, there are some ten begs sitting at the Sofa, even though the sky has clouded over and a wind is rising, which at that season of the year means there is rain in the offing. It is the last Friday in the month of October 1806. The begs are chatting quietly, sitting in their accustomed places; most of them are thoughtfully watching the hide-and-seek of the sun and clouds and coughing in a moody fashion.

  They are discussing an important piece of news.

  One of them, a certain Suleiman Beg Ayvaz, who in the last few days had gone to Livno on business, had talked there with a man from Split—a serious person, from all appearances—and had learned from him the piece of news which he is now communicating to the begs. The latter, however, can’t quite make head or tail of it, and they are pressing him for details and asking him to repeat what he has already told them. And Suleiman Beg obliges them: “Well, here’s how it was. The man asked me a perfectly civil question: ‘Are you people over in Travnik getting ready for visitors?’ ‘Not we,’ I said to him, ‘we’ve no use for visitors.’ ‘Well, maybe you do and maybe you don’t,’ he says, ‘but you’d better get ready all the same, because you have a French consul coming. Bonaparte has asked the Porte at Istanbul to be allowed to send his consul to open a consulate at Travnik and stay on there. It has already been approved, so you can expect a consul some time this winter.’ I laughed it off as a joke. ‘For hundreds of years we’ve got along quite well without any consuls,’ I told him, ‘and we can live without them from here on too. Besides, what would a consul do in Travnik?’ But he stuck to his story. ‘How you’ve lived so far is neither here nor there,’ he said. ‘From now on you’d better get used to living with consuls. That’s how it is these days. And he’d find something to do, don’t you worry. He’ll sit beside the Vizier, ordering this and arranging that, he’ll watch and see how you begs and agas are behaving and how the Christian rayah is treated, and he’ll report everything to Bonaparte.’ That’s never happened before and never will,’ I protested. ‘No one’s ever poked his nose into our affairs and this fellow’s not likely to either.’ ‘Well, then, I don’t know about that,’ he says to me, ‘but you’d better get used to the idea, because when Bonaparte asks for something there’s nobody can refuse him, not even the government in Istanbul. And not only that, but as soon as Austria sees you’ve accepted a French consul, she’ll demand that you take one of hers as well, and after Austria there’ll be Russia . . .’ ‘Oh come now, stop it, neighbor,’ I said to him, but he kept on grinning, the Latin pest, and stroking his mustache. ‘You can cut it off if it doesn’t turn out just as I’m telling you,’ he said. So there you are, my good friends, that’s what I have heard and I simply can’t get it out of my head,” Ayvaz finished his tale.

  Conditions being what they are—the French army occupied Dalmatia over a year ago and Serbia is in continuous revolt—a vague rumor of this kind is sufficient to baffle and disturb the begs, who have enough worries of their own. They are stirred and anxious, though no one would guess it from the expressions on their faces and the calm way they puff at their pipes. They speak slowly, in fits and starts, one at a time, conjecturing what this might mean, how much truth and untruth there is in the news, what steps they should take to verify it and perhaps stop the whole thing before it develops.

  Some are of
the opinion that the rumor is a lurid exaggeration, invented by someone who wanted to disturb and frighten them. Others again say, with bitterness in their voices, that the rumor is not surprising, seeing how such things are happening in Istanbul and Bosnia and all over the world, and that one ought to be ready for anything. Then, there are those who comfort themselves with the thought that this is Travnik—Travnik!—not just any little market town, and that whatever happens to other people need not and cannot happen to them.

  Each one of them makes a remark or two—enough to show that he is participating—but none will commit himself definitely, for they are all waiting to hear what the oldest of them will say. And the oldest is Hamdi Beg Teskeredjich, a big-boned old man, slow of movement but still boasting a powerful body of giant proportions. He has been through many wars and suffered wounds and captivity; he has had eleven sons, eight daughters, and a numerous progeny between them. His beard and mustache are sparse, the skin of his keen regular face is tanned and full of scars and livid blotches from a blast of gunpowder long ago. The heavy eyelids are leaden in color and perpetually half-lowered. His speech is slow but clear.

  At length, Hamdi Beg cuts short their guessing, speculation, and fears in his strangely youthful voice: “Come, come, let’s not wail over the judge before he’s really dead, as the saying goes. Let’s not get stirred up prematurely. One should listen to everything and remember everything, but not take everything to heart right away. As for these consuls, who knows what’s what? Maybe they’ll come, maybe they won’t. And even if they come, the Lashva won’t turn around and flow backwards—it will run the same as now. We’re here on our own ground, anyone else who may come will be on strange ground and he won’t tarry long. Armies have gone through here before and they never could hold out for long. Many have come here to stay, but so far we’ve always managed to see the back of them, just as we will see the back of these consuls too, even supposing they come. For the moment, they’re not even in sight. And as for Bonaparte’s request to Istanbul, that needn’t be final, for all we know. For years a good many people have asked for a good many things, but what a man asks and what he gets is not always the same thing. . . .”