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Culture · ·5 min read

Sarajevo — Andrić wrote a Sarajevo novel nobody reads, and it opens with the heroine already dead

The Nobel laureate wrote The Woman from Sarajevo — Gospodjica — during the German occupation of Belgrade in 1944, and Svjetlost of Sarajevo published it in 1945. Joseph Hitrec translated it into English for Knopf in 1965. The novel opens in February 1935 with the postman finding Miss Rajka Radaković dead in the hall of her house on Belgrade's Stishka Street. She had come from Sarajevo in 1919, and never gone back.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

The book most readers reach for when they want the Ivo Andrić novel is Na Drini ćuprija, The Bridge on the Drina, the 1945 masterpiece that carried him to the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. It is set in Višegrad, on the Drina, three hours east of Sarajevo. It is not a Sarajevo book.

Andrić’s Sarajevo book is a different novel, written the same year, from the same desk, in occupied Belgrade. It is called Gospodjica, literally The Miss, translated by Joseph Hitrec for Knopf in 1965 as The Woman from Sarajevo. It is shorter, quieter, and, on almost every page, more Sarajevan than the book that won the Nobel.

The desk in occupied Belgrade

Andrić spent the Second World War in Belgrade. He had been the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s ambassador to Berlin from March 1939 to April 1941. When the Wehrmacht invaded Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, he was recalled and placed under what was effectively internal exile in Belgrade for the duration of the German occupation. He worked at a single desk, alone, in the apartment of a friend at 8 Prizrenska Street. In those four years he wrote three novels.

Na Drini ćuprija was one. The second, Travnička hronika, Bosnian Chronicle, was another. The third, finished at that same desk in the summer of 1944, was Gospodjica. All three were published in 1945, the year the war ended, by different Yugoslav publishers. Gospodjica went to Svjetlost of Sarajevo.

Three novels in four years, one of them a Nobel book, the other two easily strong enough to have carried a career on their own. The Andrić of occupied Belgrade wrote as if he was working against a deadline he did not want to know about.

The Miss who left Sarajevo

Gospodjica opens with its heroine already dead. The specific paragraph, in Hitrec’s translation, is one of the great sentence-turns of twentieth-century Yugoslav prose:

“One day toward the end of February 1935, there was a news item in all the Belgrade papers to the effect that the owner of house No. 16a in Stishka Street had been found dead in her apartment. Her name was Raika Radakovich. Originally from Sarajevo, she had been living at the same house for some fifteen years in complete seclusion, leading the life of a lonely old maid with a reputation for stinginess and eccentricity.” — Andrić, The Woman from Sarajevo, chapter opening (Hitrec trans., 1965).

The novel then flashes back. Rajka Radaković is a Sarajevan of the last Ottoman decade and the first Habsburg one. She grows up in a bankrupted merchant family. Her father dies leaving her one instruction, never trust anyone with money, not even yourself, and she spends the rest of her life executing it with an inhuman single-mindedness. She becomes a moneylender. She works out of a small ground-floor room. She keeps a ledger. She never marries. Then in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Habsburg administration, she and her mother sell up in Sarajevo and move to Belgrade, the capital of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Her mother dies two years later. Rajka lives alone in the small house on Stishka Street for another fifteen years, and dies of a heart attack, on her back in the hall, in February 1935.

The novel is on the surface a portrait of a miser. Underneath it is a portrait of what happens to a Sarajevan who leaves Sarajevo and cannot get back into any city that isn’t Sarajevo. Rajka’s Belgrade is a stage set. Her Sarajevo is a lost interior country. She becomes a citizen of neither city. She becomes a citizen only of her ledger.

Andrić’s own Sarajevo years

Andrić came to Sarajevo in 1903 at the age of eleven, to attend the Velika gimnazija, the elite Sarajevo grammar school. He lived and studied in the city through the last decade of Habsburg rule. He knew Baščaršija from ground level, walked past Vijećnica on the way to school, went to poetry evenings with the Young Bosnia circle. He was in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 when Gavrilo Princip fired at the Archduke on the corner just north of the Latin Bridge. He was arrested in the mass round-up that followed, held in Šibenik and Maribor prisons, released for lack of evidence, and effectively banned from returning to Sarajevo as a resident for the rest of his life.

So the Sarajevo in Gospodjica is a remembered Sarajevo. Andrić wrote it three decades after he last lived there, from a desk in a city that was itself under occupation. The novel is one lonely writer imagining another lonely woman missing the same city he was missing. That is the argument of the book.

Sarajevo kept forming him

Andrić went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961, the only Nobel from the former Yugoslavia to this day. The Swedish Academy’s citation named “the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country.” The book they principally meant was Na Drini ćuprija. But Sarajevans read that citation and know that the human destinies drawn from the history of his country include Rajka Radaković on her back in a Belgrade hall in February 1935.

Which is to say: the city that formed Andrić kept forming him, at a distance, for the rest of his life. He never lived in Sarajevo again after 1914, but every one of his major books draws its water from the Sarajevo aquifer. The formative city continued to be the productive city long after the residency ended. This is a common Sarajevan pattern. Aleksandar Hemon writes it, Ozren Kebo writes it, Miljenko Jergović writes it, and Andrić is the great early instance of it.

The 1965 Hitrec translation is out of print, but freely readable at Archive.org. Six hours of your life. Bring it home to Sarajevo.

Read Gospodjica between the walk through Baščaršija and the walk up to Kovači. When you reach the small stone houses above the mosque, look at one of them. Andrić did.

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