SOURCE: "The Later Stories of Ivo Andrić," in The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. XLVIII, No. 112, July, 1970, pp. 341-56.

In the following essay, Eekman refutes the idea that Andrić's later stories are pessimistic in nature, maintaining that hope can be found in his work.

Ivo Andrić acquired his fame as the most outstanding modern Yugoslav prose writer primarily because of his short stories set in old Bosnia, written in the 1920s and 1930s, and his Bosnian novels, published after the second world war. It is generally held that his 'Bosnian' prose is superior to his works on other themes; and the Nobel prize for literature, awarded him in 1961, honoured the chronicler of Višegrad, Travnik, Sarajevo and other Bosnian places, rather than the author of 'Zeko' or of the collection of prose pieces: Faces (Lica). The two Bosnian novels are considered the coping stones of...