Nobel Prize winner for literature, a successful diplomat of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the giant of European literature and intellectual whose work today some people want to deny – Ivo Andric, died on the 13th of March 1975.
Andric was born in 1892, in Dolac near Travnik.
He spent his childhood in Visegrad, where he finished primary school. In 1903, he enrolled in the Sarajevo Great gymnasium, and he studied Slavic literature and history at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, Vienna, Krakow and Graz, where he defended his doctoral dissertation in 1924, on the topic “Development of spiritual life in Bosnia under the influence of Turkish rule”.
50 years from his first appearance in the literary world (1911), when his first song “U sumrak (In twilight)” was published in the magazine Bosanska Vila, this giant from Travnik won the most prestigious awards in the field of literature. It is, of course, the Nobel Prize that he was awarded in 1961 for his novel “Bridge on the Drina”, as well as for his entire former work on “the history of one nation.” In the explanation was stated that “his prose contains epic tension that follows human destiny from history of their country.”
Some of Andric’s famous works are following: novels “The Bridge on the Drina”, “Bosnian Chronicle”, “Woman from Sarajevo”, “Damned Yard”, “Omer Pasha Latas” (unfinished), collections of short stories “Restless years”, “Thirst”, “Jelena, the Woman of my Dream”, “Signs along the Road”, “Children”, “Remote cottage”, travel books and sketches “Paths”, “Faces”, “Landscapes”, meditative prose, “Signs along the road”, essays, critics, articles, notebooks…
Andric had a very successful diplomatic career. He was first appointed for the mission at Vatican, and then traveled almost through the whole of Europe, working 10 years as a diplomat in consulates in Bucharest, Trieste, Graz, Marseilles, Paris and Madrid. After that, he was Secretary of the permanent delegation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the League of Nations in Geneva.
Between World War I and World War II there was the function of Minister Plenipotentiary and extraordinary deputies of the Yugoslav government in Berlin.
On the 13th of March 1975, the Military Medical Academy in Belgrade released that Andric died at 1:15 am, and at the time of death he was 83 years old.
