New Releases by Ivo

The Drina bridge, a bridge that spans generations, links early sixteenth century Ottoman Empire with the pre-WWI Austro-Hungarian Empires; giving a glimpse into day-to-day living under such diverse regimes. Chronicles the lives of Catholics, Moslems, and Orthodox Christians -- with their deep seated loyalties to their respective faiths, but giving hope that it is possible for such diverse groups to live in peace -- with each other.

Andric''s sweeping novel spans the seven years 1807-1814, when French and Austrian consuls served alongside the Turkish Viziers in the remote Bosnian town of Travnik, distant outpost of the Ottoman Empire. Divided as the community is, Muslims, Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Jews and Gypsies all unite in a common contempt for their visitors. Isolated in a claustrophobic atmosphere of suspicion and mutual distrust, the consuls and Viziers vie with each other, following the fluctuations of their respective foreign policies. When international politics permit however, they console each other as best they can in this harsh and hostile land. Andric uses his native Bosnia as a microcosm of human society, stressing its potential for national, cultural and religious misunderstanding and conflict, and identifying the barriers of all kinds that hinder communication between individuals. Written against the background of violence released in these mixed communities during the Second World War, the novel now has renewed and poignant relevance.

Ivo Andric (1892-1975), Nobel Prize laureate for literature in 1961, is undoubtedly the most popular of all contemporary Yugoslav writers. Over the span of fifty-two years some 267 of his works have been published in thirty-three languages. Andric’s doctoral dissertation, The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule (1924), never before translated into English, sheds important light on the author’s literary writings and must be taken into account in any current critical analysis of his work. Over his long and distinguished career as a diplomat and man of letters Andric never again so directly or discursively addressed, as a social historian, the impact of Turkish hegemony on the Bosnian people (1463–1878), a theme he returns to again and again in his novels. Although Andric’s fiction was embedded in history, scholars know very little of his actual readings in history and have no other comparable treatment of it from his own pen. This dissertation abounds with topics that Andric incorporated into his early stories and later novels, including a focus on the moral stresses and compromises within Bosnia’s four religious confessions: Catholic, Orthodox, Jew, and Muslim. Z. B. Juricic provides an extensive introduction describing the circumstances under which this work was written and situating it in Andric’s oeuvre. John F. Loud’s original bibliography drawn from this dissertation stands as the only comprehensive inventory of historical sources known to have been closely familiar to the author at this early stage in his development.

Sifting through a huge fund of hitherto unexploited sources, Banac demonstrates that the so-called Cominformists, long considered an inconsequential fifth column, in fact represented as much as 20 percent of the party membership. He shows that this fifth column included a variety of oppositional groups within Yugoslav communism who wanted to exploit the crisis for their own purposes. Their aims often diverged, and only from the official Yugoslav perspective could they be said to have constituted a unified opposition. Banac reconstructs the history of the labyrinthine factional struggles that preceded and accompanied the 1948 split and demonstrates that, as always, the national question played the dominant role in Yugoslav politics. After identifying the members of the opposition and mapping its course, Banac recounts the harsh repression of the movement.

The subject of this study has two distinct but not unrelated aspects: first, an investigation into the sociology of music as an autonomous and specialized discipline; and second, an examination of certain fundamental facts that may be considered within the purview of the sociology of music itself. If an analysis and study even a preliminary one of these facts is to be properly focused and fruitful, we must first try to determine the subject and methods of the sociology of music, its position and boundaries in respect to musicology, and, most especially, its relation to the aesthetics of music and music history. It is equally indispensable to ascertain what the sociology of music as a separate scholarly discipline embraces, where its investigation leads, and, finally, to establish its position vis-a-vis sociology in general. (From the Author''s Introduction.)

Chronicle of three centuries of Balkan life, centering around a great stone bridge in present-day Yugoslavia.

"In 1935 Raika Radakovich died in Belgrade on Stishka Street, No. 16 A, of natural causes. Case dismissed- by the police, but not by the Nobel-prize winning Yugoslavian who reconstructs her life into this novel. A miserly old maid with one obsession, to make a million, Miss Radakovich starts out to avenge her ruined father''s death by living in the "world of money." She husbanded capital happily in Sarajevo from 1906 until 1919, when money was suddenly declared extinct and she was accused of war-profiteering. With bloodless single-mindedness, she began again in Belgrade only to die alone without achieving her dream.... A poetic story of a life without poetry, again Andric has managed to invest a simple narrative with the morality and some of the quality of the folk tale. The climate of Yugoslavia in one of its most historic moments is, in itself, almost enough. Andric never judges; his story does it for him. Although not as unusual as some of his other books which have appeared here (Bosnian Chronicle, etc.), the novel will be welcomed by those who know his work, admire his artistry in his contemporary, native idiom."--Kirkus

A Bosnian Franciscan, Fra Peter, is put in an Istanbul jail, wrongly accused of plotting against Ottoman rule.

The clash of Napoleon''s consul and his Austrian rival in Turkish Bosnia, where the westerners struggle to maintain their standards in a Balkan maelstrom.