SOURCE: "Ivo Andrić's Kuća na osami (The House in a Secluded Place): Memories and Ghosts of the Writer's Past," in Fiction and Drama in Eastern and Southeastern Europe: Evolution and Experiment in the Postwar Period, edited by Henrik Birnbaum and Thomas Eekman, Slavica Publishers, 1980, pp. 239-50.

In the following essay, Johnson urges a reassessment of Andrić's later fiction, and views the stories and sketches that comprise Lica as an important predecessor to Kuća na osami.

When he died in 1975 at the age of 82, Ivo Andrić had been Yugoslavia's foremost writer for three decades. He was a national institution. Recognized as a talented storyteller in the twenties and thirties, he achieved national prominence in 1945 with the publication of his three novels, Travnička hronika (The Bosnian Story), Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina), and Gospodjica (Miss). Worldwide recognition came in the form of...