Andrić's View of Sarajevo in the Thematic Issue of Europe Magazine on Bosnian Culture

Abstract

In October 1979, the French magazine Europe published a thematic issue of Bosnie-Herzégovine, littérature et arts. It comprehensively presented Bosnian-Herzegovinian history, art and literature, from ancient times (Butmir) to contemporary artists and writers from the SFRY era (Samokovlija, Selimović, Ćopić, Sijarić, Ibrišimović, Dizdar, Kulenović, Sekulić, Sarajlić, Vuletić, Koroman, Trifunović, Krnjević and Stojić, among others). However, at the very beginning of the thematic file, as a kind of introduction, is an abridged translated text by Ivo Andrić, “A View of Sarajevo” (translated by Mauricette Begić). The aim of this paper is not so much to offer new insight into Andrić’s vision of Sarajevo, or to address Andrić’s reception in France in the 1970s, but rather to consider the way in which Bosnian and Herzegovinian culture was then presented in France and the French-speaking world, and to try to explain why this entire thematic issue opened with that text, through an analysis of Andrić’s image of the city of Sarajevo, but also through the topos of the crossroads in Midhat Begić, who, like Andrić himself, had a great influence on the editors of this thematic issue.