More than 50 years have passed since Ivo Andrić received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He donated the prize money of one million dollars, received on that occasion, to libraries in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
A writer for whom the kindness, poverty, but also the tragic despondency of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina was central to his literature, considered it logical to try to alleviate that despondency.
And how else than by reading books?!
Sam stayed away from people as much as possible during his life. He expressed an open distaste for any type of literature that overemphasizes the role of the author. He considered the biographical method in criticism to be fruitless and an expression of the inability to analyze a literary work, so instead he concentrated on the personality of the writer. He never visited his birthplace in Travnik in his life, he considered it an unnecessary distraction. He was not enthusiastic about the idea of opening a memorial museum, because he was an extremely modest person, he thought it was wrong to build some kind of mausoleum for him.
On one occasion he said: "Believe me, I've always wondered what my native house in Travnik would do to them? It's neither Chateaubriand's castle in Brittany, nor Victor Hugo's big house in Paris, nor Tolstoy's Clear Field."
Emir Kusturica and Milorad Dodik built a private business complex in Višegrad at the expense of the people of Republika Srpska and named it after Andrić. Although the majority financed it, this people is not the majority owner of this city. It will belong to him, say the current owners, sometime in the distant future.
Nothing in Andrić's literary oeuvre or the interviews he gave gave any indication that such a thing was ever his wish. With his attitude towards the Nobel Prize, he clearly communicated that the education and enlightenment of people is the only thing he considers important.
That is why the business tourist complex named after Ivo Andrić, Andrićgrad, has nothing to do with him. Just as appropriate and out of context quotes from his works, on fridge magnets or framed in kitsch frames, have nothing to do with what he won the Nobel Prize for. Especially interesting is Andrić's best-selling quote about smart people who keep silent in difficult times, which he has proven never to have uttered, and which again corresponds to any exploitative government.
At the end, Andrić wrote about this kind of conformity and "wise" silence: "There is a story that in the court of a sultan there was a special official whose title was: evetefendija." His only duty was to nod his head in approval to whatever the sultan said."
Until now, the construction on the Drina has cost this nation twenty times more than the award that Ivo Andrić donated to that same nation. To the people who, again, read it less and less, and more and more posthumously count the national composition of blood cells. At the same time, the number of illiterates is growing every year. Just as the number of libraries and rented books in them is also decreasing.
Andrićgrad like this is exclusively a monument to an unprecedented self-love, selfish and greedy, incompetent politics that leaves behind wasteland, empty funds, decades of debt, unemployed and unhappy people, while at the same time it makes these defenders of national interests and their family members into millionaires overnight, at the expense of the same and the poor described in Andrić's novels. A perfidious and failed attempt to glorify the national, behind which is actually only personal profit.
After all, as the great writer once wrote: "Whenever and wherever I came across people who showed too developed concern for national pride and general interest or excessive sensitivity for personal honor and dignity, I always, almost as a rule, also encountered a limited mind, undeveloped abilities, a hard heart and a crude, short-sighted selfishness."
Bonus video:
