Forgotten, Famous and Favourite Nobel Literature Prize Winners, Laxness to Andrić (1955-1961)
Leftists, diplomats, and the story of Doctor Zhivago
The Nobel Prize for Literature pivoted away from Anglo-Americans after 1954. The Academy’s choices highlighted the other side of the Cold War. Between 1955 and 1961 the seven winners included:
Two leading leftist moralists from Iceland and France
Two top diplomats connected to events that began both world wars, and
One great Russian writer whose reputation the CIA nearly destroyed.
Since 1901, 120 writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some are forgotten. Many remain famous. A few became notorious for reasons that might surprise you and change your understanding of modern history. Discover them all in the 120 Nobels Challenge and let me know your favourites.
This week, we read the winners from 1955 to 1961:
1955 Halldór Laxness, Iceland
1956 Juan Ramón Jiménez, Spain
1957 Albert Camus, France
1958 Boris Pasternak, Soviet Union/Russia
1959 Salvatore Quasimodo, Italy
1960 Saint-John Perse, France
1961 Ivo Andrić, Yugoslavia
Voiceover is available if you want to listen on a walk.
My next monthly workshop looking back over 30 Nobel Laureates is coming soon. You can join the workshop and dive deeper into the 120 Nobels by becoming a paid subscriber.
1955 Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Iceland
Halldór Laxness was the major Icelandic writer of the twentieth century. He wrote thirteen novels, five plays and many short stories and essays. He refreshed the traditions of the Icelandic sagas. He was a citizen of a small island, forced to kneel first to Denmark and then the USA. Yet in its uncommon language, he spoke to international themes of the whole post-1945 world.
He wrote in Icelandic and made innovations in the language and script. But Laxness chose the tongue of his island home only after a decade of considering more careerist choices. Danish was the power language for Icelanders in the 1920s. Iceland was then a colony of Denmark. But Laxness refused this choice in his twenties.
He then explored religiosity and the old Catholic traditions of Iceland, then a Protestant country. Laxness entered a monastery (after fathering a child and fleeing responsibility), and was on the path to become a Catholic theologian.
But Laxness felt the spur of fame. In 1927 he travelled to America to become a Hollywood script writer. He approached the first US Nobel Laureate, Sinclair Lewis, and befriended Upton Sinclair. He discovered Hemingway’s pared down prose and translated Farewell to Arms. But Laxness failed in Hollywood. His ambitions were frustrated. His values were offended. The anti-immigrant WASP culture of 1920s America excluded him. In 1928 he criticised American capitalism in a letter to a friend. The Californian immigration authorities charged Laxness with treason.
He returned to write in Iceland. At home he found a new way to embrace Icelandic traditions and leftist international values. In the 1930s he began to write a form of socialist realism in novels and historical epics that focused on lower class community life. Literature rarely focussed on the lives of lower-class people then. Today the reputation of socialist realism is rightly tainted by its Stalinist associations. But in the 1920s and 1930s, it was a rebellion against cloying self-preoccupations of literary aristocrats. Laxness’s turn to sagas of modern lower-class people reactivated the traditions of the sagas. He reimagined them with rising socialist values.
His major work from this period was Independent People: An Epic [Heroic Tale] (1934, 1935, transl. 1945). It melded the heroic traditions of socialist realism and Icelandic literature. It was a leftist response to the pastoral idyll of the rural North by the Nazi Nordic Nobel Laureate, Knut Hamsun (The Growth of the Soil).
It was set in the early twentieth-century among rural people on the eastern moors of Iceland. This area had depopulated during the migration period of the nineteenth century. It was an Icelandic, agricultural version of “flyover country” in the USA today. The novel’s central character, Bjartur decides to work an abandoned piece of land, which some consider to be cursed. He becomes a tyrant to his family in the pursuit of the “independent life”. His family turn against him. A change in livestock prices ruins him. But the idea of independence becomes the fixed idea of his life and ruin. In chapter 74, faced with ruin, Bjartur said
My opinion has always been this, “he said, “that you ought never to give up as long as you live, even though they have stolen everything from you. If nothing else, you can always call the air you breathe your own or at any rate you can claim that you have it on loan.
Laxness, Independent People
Despite doubt and failure, Bjartur marched on. He renewed his ideal of independence by walking north to a new plot of cheap, barren land. At the end of the novel, he disappears into the mist of his own ideal of independence.
In May 1940 US and British forces occupied Iceland. German forces occupied Iceland’s former coloniser, Denmark. The influx of soldiers into a large military base brought the boons and curses of an occupied country. The slow collapse of Germany in the war brought independence to Iceland, and a political challenge for Laxness. In 1944 Iceland separated from Denmark to become an independent country. Intellectuals began to debate the meaning of national identity for a small island in an internationalised world.
But it was a very brief spring for Icelandic communal autonomy. After the war, the USA converted its wartime occupation into an ongoing military base. Laxness and many others opposed it. He published a series of articles and resisted the new rhetoric of Western Cold War. In 1948 he wrote the novel, The Atom Station about his country being turned into a base for atomic weapons. He fell out of favour in the Anglo-American world due to his left-wing and anti-American views.
But his importance to Iceland and his fellow citizens of Northern Eurasia continued. He wrote many more novels and essays, and only died in the 1990s, after a long sad struggle against dementia. He wrote for the international world from his small island of great literature. The later Icelandic writer Guðmundson summarised Laxness’ approach to writing from a minor culture as:
This is possible. Nothing has to hinder you: not the language; not the smallness of the nation; and as for the subject matter it floats in the air.
His house, Gljúfrasteinn, is now a literary museum. You can visit 20 minutes outside Reykjavik or discover more about Laxness at the museum’s website. You can read his works in translation at this dedicated website.
1956 Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881–1958) Spain
Juan Ramón Jiménez, known in the Hispanic world as Juan Ramón, was a prolific, protean poet.
The Nobel Committee gave Ramón the prize “for his lyrical poetry, which in the Spanish language constitutes an example of high spirit and artistic purity.”
His early poetry sprang from French symbolism. In the early twentieth-century Ramón was the major Spanish avant-garde writer. His poetry went through many phases: avant-garde modernism, sentimental lyrics, hermetic poems, influenced by Emily Dickinson, with much use of private symbols and self-references, and, in his later years, a new synthesis of the Romantic tradition of the poet as divine seer.
He had at least two periods of major depression in his life, including periods of complete breakdown and admission to sanatoria. He oscillated between bohemian modernist, narcissist, and private symbolist searching for spiritual comfort.
Stability in his life came from his marriage to the poet Zenobia Camprubi Aymar in 1916. She was the Spanish translator of the 1913 Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. She collaborated with him and remained his lifelong companion.
Their joint life was changed in 1936. They fled Spain to exile when the Spanish Civil War broke out. They travelled between Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Eastern USA, until finally settling after the war in Puerto Rico. Like many writers, he served his host country during the war. In 1943 he gave radio broadcasts to Latin America on modernism in Spain and contemporary poetry in the US. I imagine some State Department official working hard to make the enigmatic poet useful in some way to the state.
But Ramón found America an uncultured place that pretended to the prestige of a new world power. In “Author’s Club”, one of his prose poems, he wrote:
I had always thought perhaps there would be no poets at all in New York. What I had never suspected was that there would be so many bad ones, or a place like this, as dry and dusty as our own Ateneo in Madrid, in spite of its being on the 15th floor, almost at the altitude of the Parnassians.
Tenth-rate men, all of them, cultivating physical resemblances to Poe to Walt Whitman, to Stevensen, to Mark Twain, letting their soul be burned up with their free cigar, since the two are the same… And they show me wall after wall of portraits and autographs in holograph, of Bryant, of Aldrich, of Lowell, etc., etc., etc….
Light and Shadows: Selected Poems and Prose of Juan Ramon Jiminez (1987), p. 25
His literary life culminated in a love-death scene. Days after receiving the Nobel Prize his beloved Zenobia died of cancer. Ramón did not recover from the grief. He never wrote again and wandered his home like a wraith for the last sad years of his life.
His most famous work is in prose. Platero and I (in Spanish here) described his home region, Andalusia, and its village people. The story’s portrait of a relationship between the poet and his donkey, Moguer and Platero, has been compared to Cervantes’ Sanchez and Quixote. It comprises brief single page near prose poem segments. It is among the most widely read pieces of translated Spanish literature, in part because, like a great fable, it appears to be a book for children. He protested that he never wrote for children because they read the books that adults can. In the short prologue, he wrote:
“Wherever there are children”- Novalis used to say-”there is a Golden Age.” Well, it is within this Golden Age, which is like a spiritual island fallen from the skies, that the heart of the poet walks, and it finds itself there so at home that its most cherished wish would be not to have to ever abandon it. Island of grace, of freshness and of joy, Golden Age of children; I always could find you in my life, a sea of mourning.”
Light and Shadows: Selected Poems and Prose of Juan Ramon Jiminez (1987), p. 51
If you know Spanish, you can listen to Ramón read his poems and an essay on modernism at the Library of Congress in these two audio files.
You can read three of his poems in translation here.
1957 Albert Camus (1913–1960) France (Algeria)
Camus wrote novels, philosophic and political essays, dramas, and journalism.
His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall and The Rebel. He was a famous existentialist who liked simple titles.
His novel, The Plague got a boost in readers in the Plague Year of 2020, which renewed his reputation. It may be his most read book, but his others are worth reading. The Stranger is a bleak portrait of existential angst in a young man who commits a meaningless crime. The Fall is a great novella of dread and failure in an older man, a judge who recounts his failure.
Camus himself was born in French colonial Algeria, where The Plague was set. The struggle to liberate France’s Northern African colonies was essential to French Left politics after 1945. Yet Camus kept a neutral stance during the Algerian War (1954–1962). He advocated a multicultural, pluralistic Algeria. But as decolonization and Cold War realities clashed, most parties rejected Camus’ position.
But that was Camus’ style. He was not a party man. He was a moralist, not a pragmatic negotiator of real-world politics. Yet Camus was personally brave. In World War Two he could not fight due to tuberculosis. He still took an active role in the underground resistance movement against the Germans during the French Occupation. He wrote for the banned newspaper Combat during and after the war. After the war, as we saw with Mauriac, he wanted to purge France of its many collaborators. But he did not prevail.
In The Rebel, Camus queried leftist totalitarianism, still strong in Europe and the Soviet Union, including among his fellow-travellers like Jean-Paul Sartre, a later Nobel Prize winner. Some say he was an anarcho-syndicalist. I think he might be better described as a man driven by empathy and wide sympathies, capable of detaching from immediate loyalties.
The Rebel is a brave investigation of the contribution of intellectuals to political violence, and more simply mass killing.
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The line that divides them is not clear… Our criminals are no longer those helpless children who pleaded love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults, and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for anything, even for transforming murderers into judges.
The Rebel, p.12
The long essay is a deep, humane, searching examination of the experience of violence and rebellion. Camus wanted to relieve rebellion from the burden of guilt induced by a century of violence by revolutionaries. He wanted to face the taint of the political violence of the twentieth century in both leftist and rightist politics; indeed, in all politics that seeks power, not compassion.
One might think that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings, should only and forthwith be condemned. But also its guilt must be understood… slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste for the superhuman cripple judgement. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself.
The Rebel, p.13
Regrettably, Camus’ age was not so peculiar that we cannot recognise our own in his great essay.
In the 1950s, Camus channelled his passion for a more compassionate politics into a cause of a world of federalism, beyond the nation-state. He joined Einstein and other Nobel laureates at the People’s World Conventions in 1950 and 1951. These conferences promoted international cooperation and federal world governance. They continued as world constituent assemblies in 1968, 1977, 1978-79, and 1991. Now that the illusion of the unipolar world has been exposed, the world might convene another one, if we could find a moralist like Camus.
1958 Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) Soviet Union/Russia
Pasternak was a major Russian twentieth-century poet. He is best known in the West for Doctor Zhivago. Most Westerners know that book through the film (original in 1965, remade for Western TV in 2002). Viewers who love the film may not know the international scandal of the book. Admirers of Hollywood’s treatment of this epic of Russian history may not appreciate the deeper affection for Pasternak in Russian literary culture.
Doctor Zhivago (1957) won Pasternak the Nobel Prize. Then became an event in the Cold War. Pasternak was the first Soviet writer to win the Nobel Prize, forty years after the Revolution. But the Nobel Committee could not offer a simple honour to its political rival. It chose a banned book that inflamed the rivalry between capitalist and communist blocs.
The Soviet Union, with the consent of its Union of Writers, had refused to publish Doctor Zhivago. So, the Nobel Committee defied the leaders of the Soviet Union when it awarded the Prize; quite a contrast to awarding the same Prize in 1953 to the serving Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill. Awarding the prize to Pasternak then infuriated the Soviet government, even in its milder post-Stalinist form during the Kruschev thaw. The Soviet Union demanded Pasternak decline the prize. It was not till 1989, under Gorbachev’s reforming leadership, that the Soviet Union relented and allowed the son of its great poet to accept the award on his dead father's behalf.
Unlike authors like Pearl Buck, or indeed Winston Churchill, Pasternak was a great writer. Doctor Zhivago is a great novel. It is a tragic epic that spans events from the Russian Revolution of 1905 to the Second World War. Zhivago is a member of the Russian intelligentsia who gets caught between the two sides of the Civil War between the Whites and Reds. Millions died and the Reds won. Stalin imposed terror and industrial discipline on Soviet society. More died and suffered, yet culture, individuals and the ordinary virtues survived.
Pasternak celebrated their survival in his novel, more than he criticised the regime. But after internal debate the censors banned the book for departing from socialist realism and for his treatment of the still sensitive topics of the Terror, the Gulag and the suffering of the people after the Revolution. But a Eurocommunist official from Italy obtained a copy of the manuscript when visiting Moscow. The samizdat was smuggled to Italy and published in 1957. The CIA then actively promoted the book to undermine the reputation of the Soviet Union. Books have been written about the scandal, and the CIA has declassified at least some documents related to the affair.
Since Gorbachev’s reforms and Russia’s reclamation of its non-Soviet culture, Doctor Zhivago has become a modern classic read by most Russian school children. It is well worth reading. It is richer than the Western versions, tainted by Cold War and nineties propaganda. Your experience of the novel will be enhanced by reading some history of the tragedies of revolution, civil war, world war, and revolutionary politics on the peoples of the Russian world in the twentieth century. But you can get the essentials in this podcast in my Russian history series.
I encourage readers to read Pasternak’s poetry to sense his importance for Russian literary culture. His first book of poems, My Sister, Life, was published in Berlin in 1922 and quickly became a Russian classic. Marina Tsvetaeva, the great exiled Russian poet, read My Sister, Life in exile in Berlin and praised Pasternak as a born poet in a rhapsodic essay, “Downpour of Light: poetry of eternal courage”.
And what a book! As if he’d deliberately let everyone else say all they had to say, then at the very last moment, with a gesture of bewilderment, he takes a notebook from his pocket: ‘Well actually I… though I can’t guarantee anything…’ Pasternak, let me be your guarantor to the West - for the moment - till your ‘Life appears here…. It’s a precious thing to take part in such a destiny.
Marina Tsvetaeva Art in the Light of Conscience, p. 21
Here is the first stanza of My sister, Life first in Russian, then in English
Сестра моя — жизнь...
Сестра моя — жизнь и сегодня в разливе
Расшиблась весенним дождем обо всех,
Но люди в брелоках высоко брюзгливы
И вежливо жалят, как змеи в овсе.
Sister my life
Sister my life burst forth today
In torrents of spring rain, everywhere.
But people in jewels are highly squeamish
And bite politely, like hidden vipers.
Pasternak translated Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare. He carried literature across the bridge between Europe and Russia. Anna Akhmatova wrote of Pasternak, “And the whole world was his inheritance, and he shared it with everyone.”
Shakespeare was especially important to Pasternak, and twentieth-century Russian literature. One of his most famous poems was Hamlet. It expressed his endurance through the repressions of the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, and so was banned. In the 1930s Pasternak had almost become one of the many victims of the Yezhovian Terror. He survived but suffered greatly. Yet he was deeply loved. His funeral in 1960 was a major public event. Party officials controlled the crowd to prevent outbursts of dissent. But a mourner began to recite Pasternak’s banned verse, Hamlet.
The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter.
I am trying, standing at the door,
To discover in the distant echoes
What the coming years may hold in store.
The nocturnal darkness with a thousand
Binoculars is focused onto me.
Take away this cup, O Abba, Father,
Everything is possible to Thee.
I am fond of this Thy stubborn project,
And to play my part I am content.
But another drama is in progress,
And, this once, O let me be exempt.
But the plan of action is determined,
And the end irrevocably sealed.
I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a walk across a field.
You can read some Pasternak poems in Russian and translation here
1959 Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968), Italy
Quasimodo was a major Italian poet of the twentieth century, who won the Prize “for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times."
His background is not obviously poetic. He was a Freemason from a masonic family. He studied and worked as a civil engineer. But his poetry was private and hermetic, at least until the traumas of World War Two.
During this time, he turned to literature to endure the troubled times. He translated the Gospel of John, the cantos of Catullus, and episodes of The Odyssey. His writing became morally engaged. It voiced social criticism, reflecting Quasimodo’s long privately held anti-Fascist convictions. In 1945 he briefly joined the Italian Communist Party, reflecting a widespread sentiment in Europe that scared the Americans. His post-1945 verse continued in his new mode.
Quasimodo reflected on his pivot in his Nobel lecture:
War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost. Poetics and philosophies disintegrate “when the trees fall and the walls collapse.” At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question. Men of letters who cling to the private successes of their petty aesthetics shut themselves off from poetry’s restless presence.
But since his death critics have come to see more continuity between the two phases of Quasimodo’s writing life, and an integration of his private and public concerns in his late poems. One poem from his last collection, Debit and Credit, expressed the dilemmas of life in the new Cold War and a poetic life of secrets and lies. It begins.
WORDS TO A SPY
There is a spy who writes
love poems in my city. His feet
rise along the shop windows,
the hopeful pavements.
You crawled once
on the face of your dead,
those who nailed themselves to the walls
for one kind secret word from you
in the code of leading rhymesters.
An audio of Quasimodo reading his poetry in Italian is here, and a collection of his poems can be read here.
1960 Saint-John Perse (1887–1975) France
Alexis St. Léger wrote under the pseudonym Saint-John Perse. He was a French poet, writer, and diplomat.
Perse was a child of French colonialism. He grew up in Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean. After the Spanish-American war (1898), in which the USA marched into Cuba, citizens of Guadeloupe feared an American invasion of the isolated French colony. Communal violence broke out between blacks and whites, and the Léger family fled to France.
Despite his privileges, his colonial past marked Perse out in the French elite. He saw himself as an outsider and a “man of the Atlantic.” During his later diplomatic career, gossips whispered rumours of a mixed-race heritage based on his slightly darker skin. They nicknamed him "the mulatto of the Quai d'Orsay." His outsider experience drove him to succeed as a career diplomat and to write poetry despite the shaming, gossipy elite.
His youthful poetry reflected on his childhood but was put on hold after he joined the diplomatic service during World War One. His career was remarkable. He served in China (1916-21), as Secretary to the French Prime Minister, Aristide Briand (1921-32), and then Secretary of the French Foreign Office (1932-40).
Historians differ on how he managed his dual personality of poet and diplomat. American historian Elizabeth Cameron wrote:
From the start he was no ordinary diplomat. He was a poet, and as a poet, lived in a world not much frequented by other diplomats.… Many, and most of all the worldly and the ambitious, were made uneasy by his aloofness, the subtleties of his language, and the sinuous progressions of his thought.
On the other hand, the diplomat Jean Chauvel wrote that he would appear at the Quai d'Orsay "wearing a narrow black tie, with a pasty face, a veiled look in his eyes, using elegant and refined language in a low voice". Chauvel described his boss as a dilettante who arrived at work at 11 am, would leave for lunch at noon and only return to the Quai d'Orsay at 4 pm. I suspect Chauvel was one of the gossips Perse hated who did not see his diplomacy at work in the evening meetings.
His diplomatic career culminated in participation at the Munich 1938 conference, more famous in the Anglophone world for Chamberlain’s appeasement. The British historian Robert Payne wrote: "The hero of the Munich conference was Alexis St. Léger, the permanent secretary of the French Foreign Office, who kept urging Daladier to resist Hitler's demands, but Daladier was too stunned, too sunk in melancholy, to pay him much attention."
His experience at Munich may have been the basis for his aphorism: “it is enough for the poet to be the guilty conscience of his time.” It certainly made him a marked man when two years later the German army marched into Paris. The Vichy government dismissed him and revoked his citizenship. Perse went into exile in the USA. There he wrote poetry and practised informal diplomacy. He had contacts with Roosevelt and the later UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld. Perse remained in the USA for years after the war, and only returned to France in 1957.
You can read more about this intriguing man here. His poetry is written in prose poem form, like several French poets of the time, such as René Char. You can read Anabasis in a dual language edition (translated by T.S. Eliot) here and here.
A collection of poems can be read at his foundation. Here is his poem, “Snows” from his collection Exile (1944).
1961 Ivo Andrić (1892–1975), Yugoslavia/Bosnia
Like Perse, Andrić was both writer and diplomat. He was a Yugoslav novelist, poet, and short story writer. His stories reflected on life and history in his troubled nations.
His diplomatic career did not reach the Munich summit like Perse, but Andrić was connected to the incident that precipitated World War One. He was a young nationalist student activist in 1914, in the same circles as the assassins of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The Austro-Hungarian authorities arrested Andrić on suspicion of involvement in the assassination that ignited the world war. He was cleared but spent the rest of the war under house arrest.
After the war, the Austro-Hungarian empire dissolved, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was established. Andrić served the Kingdom as a diplomat from 1921 to 1941 when this state ceased to be after German occupation. He lived out the war in Belgrade, effectively under house arrest again. In those conditions he wrote his important works, including Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina).
Andric called the book a chronicle of the town in which he lived, Višegrad. He was the chronicler of its stories, legends, and history from the sixteenth century to the First World War. On the eastern edge of Bosnia, near the border of Serbia, the town’s bridge crossed the river Drina and the histories of the Bosnians and Serbs, the Muslims, and Christians of the town. Over history, and across the bridge, fate, chance, events, and culture created a coherent, common experience of the town. Transient individual lives mingled in the enduring, constant flow of the Drina. It is a story of history itself, made by individual personalities, mass movements, shared symbols, misunderstandings, and the drumbeats of the rise and fall of empires.
He established the bridge as a metaphor early in the chronicle.
Only when, as the fruit of this effort, the great bridge arose, men began to remember details and to embroider the creation of a real, skilfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales which they well knew how to weave and remember.
The Bridge on the Drina p. 27
By the end of the chronicle the town and its bridge are besieged in World War Two. Andric describes the scene of evacuated citizens, shelters, and impending bombardment, as the army withdrew from the Drina.
The bridge remained as if under sentence of death, but none the less still whole and untouched, between the two warring sides.
The Bridge on the Drina p. 307
After 1945, Yugoslavia became a socialist republic, haunted by the massacres of its citizens by ethnic extremists, such as the Ustaše, and German occupiers, including the future Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim. Andrić was reintegrated into political life despite the initial wariness of the communist government of his past support for royalists. He became the President of the Union of Yugoslav Writers and a significant figure in Yugoslav politics.
Andrić's work explored the complex cultural mix of life in Bosnia, with Muslim, Serb and Croat traditions, influenced by Western and oriental empires, including the French, Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans. His language reflected the polyglot world he shared, with Turkish, Arabic and Persian word borrowings in his South Slavic.
Most scholars have interpreted the eponymous bridge as a metonym for Yugoslavia, which was itself a bridge between East and West during the Cold War. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Andrić described the country as one "which, at break-neck speed and at the cost of great sacrifices and prodigious efforts, is trying in all fields, including the field of culture, to make up for those things of which it has been deprived by a singularly turbulent and hostile past."
Since his death in 1975, Yugoslavia broke up and its peoples went through hell and NATO-sponsored wars in the 1990s. Ethnic extremism returned, and some of them sought to burn the bridge that Andrić built. In Croatia, his works were blacklisted. Some Bosnian Muslims accused him of Islamophobia. But overall, certainly in Serbia, the literary community preserved what was good in his writing. His critics might read his line from The Bridge on the Drina:
Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.
You can read more about this intriguing writer and cultured diplomat at his foundation.