Ivo Andric as red rag and political football (Yugoslav writer, Nobel-Prize winner)

At a time of violent upheaval and radical change, a reappraisal of significant aspects of a nation's culture in inevitable. In the general process of reassessment confronting the Yugoslav successor states, the figure of Ivo Andric is an obvious target. In his lifetime Andric represented a unique phenomenon in being one of the few genuinely and explicitly Yugoslav writers and the only Yugoslav Nobel-Prize winner. He was hailed and praised in all the republic of the former Yugoslavia. Such a phenomenon is meaningless today. The man and his work have become the object of energetic and impassioned debate among all the main cultural groups in the new post-Yugoslav states. This article discusses the various claims and resentments of Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims in respect to Andric. The main theme is the inability of many commentators to separate political from artistic considerations.