Ivo Andric (1892-1975), the first Yugoslav writer to receive the Nobel prize (1961), is considered one of the most important South Slavic writers. Starting his career as a poet, he also wrote and published six volumes of short stories, five novels, and various essays, chronicles and novellas. A native of Bosnia, he worked as a diplomat in a number of European countries before returning to Belgrade after the Germans invaded Yugoslavia during World War II. He wrote the novel he is most famous for, Na Drini chuprija, during World War II in Belgrade, where he lived until his death in 1975.
In my opinion and in the opinion of some Andric scholars, one of the most compelling aspects of Ivo Andric's works is his treatment of eroticism and sexuality. "In Andric's poetic universe, sensual love plays the most important role in men's lives," Radmila Gorup writes in "Women in Andric's Writing" (Ivo Andric Revisited: The Bridge Still Stands, ed. Wayne S. Vucinich, 1995). "That is why woman appears to hold the most central position in Andric's fiction." According to Petar Dzhadzhic in Ivo Andric (1960), sexuality in Andric is characterized by guilt, fear and shame. He associates "the female" with "disease" in Andric, "for sensuality appears rather as a stigma, a degeneration, a punishment, than as a means of enjoyment." Zelimir B. Jurichic writes of the "dual nature" of Andrich's women in "The Man and the Artist: Essays on Ivo Andric" (1986). A woman is the "symbol of physical beauty which emits a magnetic influence over men," as well as destroys men "slowly from within" by her beauty and inaccessibility.
These studies on Andric add important insights into his treatment of sensuality and women, yet they do not offer detailed analyses on his treatment of eroticism and sexuality per se, in particular using a feminist or gender framework. This is not unusual, considering that Slavics has only recently accepted gender studies and women's issues as a discipline (as Helena Goscilo, Pamela Chester, Sibelan Forrester and others have pointed out). Most of this critical attention has focused on Russian literature, making feminist criticism of South Slavic rare and all the more needed. For example, among the eleven essays published in the most recent English-language volume of Andric criticism, Ivo Andric Revisited: The Bridge Still Stands, none approach Andric from a feminist framework (though a few of them, such as Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover's "Grief, Shame, and the Small Man in the Works of Ivo Andric" and Radmila Gorup's afore-mentioned essay, address some issues involving sexuality). My paper, "Eroticism and Sexuality in Ivo Andric's Works," attempts to fill in a gap in Slavic feminist and gender criticism by approaching Andric's representation of eroticism and sexuality from a feminist perspective. The OED defines "erotic" as "of or pertaining to the passion of love; concerned with or treating of love," as well as the obsolete sense (as I also use it) "of the nature of, or pertaining to, sexual love." I take Svetlana S. Grenier's definition of an author's feminism as "that author's ability to entertain the philosophical idea of the equal value of both sexes and to imagine women--and consequently to construct female characters--as autonomous philosophical, moral and intellectual subjects." Andric's work lends itself well to feminist and gender criticism, since he writes about socially and sexually marginal women who live in a patriarchal world. My paper focuses on assessing the degree of Andric's feminism by examining his portrayals of men and women as erotic beings.
For my methodology I rely on recent volumes of Slavic feminist or gender criticism, primarily Grenier's Representing the Marginal Woman in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature: Personalism, Feminism and Polyphony (2001), Amy Mandelker's Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel (1993), Helena Goscilo's Dehexing Sex: Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost (1996), and Engendering Slavic Literatures (ed. Pamela Chester and Sibelan Forrester, 1996). I also refer to criticism on Andric by Zelimir B. Junicic and Petar Dzhadzhic.