Boundaries and Crossings: Bridging the Gap of Fragmented Identity in Ivo Andrić’s Prose

Dictionaries give several definitions for the words “boundary” and “border,” all suggesting a division or margin, the other side of something: a limit. Throughout history, crucial boundaries were often created not only on geo graphical maps, but also in the minds of people. These constructed boundaries shift with time, but their symbolic significance is often hard to erase.

In his 1924 dissertation, Ivo Andrić invokes such a division caused by the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans:

So it came about that down the middle of the South Slavic lands a line was etched. … This dividing wall split in two the Serbo-Croatian ra cial and linguistic complex, and its shadow, where four centuries of ghastly history were played out, was to lie heavy on the landscape to either side into the far distant future.¹

Complex divisions run deep within the Balkans and Andrić’s native Bosnia, but also in the relationship between the East and the West, all results of legacies of empires that dominated the region in the past. This fascinating area has been an enduring inspiration for the writer and served as a setting for most of his narratives, whose underlying theme was to reveal these lines of separa tion and seek to bridge the trauma caused by them.

The famed East-West opposition invoked by Andrić refers to societies that co-exist side by side but are juxtaposed in the political, religious, and cultural senses. Bosnia, which can be seen as a microcosm of the former Yu goslavia and perhaps the whole of the Balkans, is a place where citizens are divided by religion: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Islamic, and Jewish; cultural traditions: Byzantine, Ottoman, and central East European; as well as other minor attributes.

Several frameworks have been advanced for understanding the East-West division, the most famous being the theory of Orientalism advanced by Ed ward Said, according to which the West constructed the Orient in order to de fine itself against it with the intention of dominating and conquering it, both materially and spiritually.² Milica Bakić-Hayden introduced the concept of “nestling Orientalisms” as a structural variant of Orientalism according to which each Balkan imagined community identified itself with the West and located its boundaries beyond its actual physical borders.³ In her seminal work Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova modifies Said’s model to fit the Balkans’ historical and geographical realities. Not only the Orient, but also the Balkans were constructed as Europe’s “other,” even though they were a geographical part of it. For Todorova, the Balkan alterity, which she calls “Balkanisms,” is similar, but not identical, to that of Said’s Orientalisms.⁴

Several past colonial legacies have produced deep fissures in the territory of the Balkans, but, according to Todorova, the 500-year Ottoman legacy is proving to be the most enduring. This legacy can be said to have the strongest influence on the Western perception of the region, and it has been invoked in the creation of the most recent stereotypes about the Balkans as a region of primitivism and barbarity in the 1990s.

Seemingly different, all these approaches treat the West as the standard according to which the others are defined. The West invented not only the Orient, but also the other others, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, which are seen as part of a broader Oriental other.

Tomislav Z. Longinović adds to this discussion by questioning whether the above models could account for the culture created by Ottoman-Balkan juxtaposition. He points out that Said’s concept of Orientalism was based on the premise of European domination of the East, while the Balkan types of Orientalisms were the result of a reversed situation in which an Eastern power colonized European territory in order to dominate and restructure it.⁵

This idea of the borderline has been built into the creation of Andrić’s Orientalisms first elaborated in his Ph.D. dissertation, in which he blames the Ottoman legacy for the divisions and conflicts in Bosnia as well as the re gion’s...