SOURCE: Hawkesworth, Celia. “Devil's Yard.” In Ivo Andrić: Bridge between East and West, pp. 189-205. Dover, N.H.: Athlone Press, 1984.

In the following excerpt, Hawkesworth addresses Andrić's examination of the nature of art in The Devil's Yard.

More than is the case with many of Andrić's other works, the sense of Devil's Yard¹ depends closely on its intricate structure.

The composition is one that Andrić had used earlier for another story in the Brother Petar group: “Torso”. It is a system of concentric circles forming successive frames, focusing increasingly on the central point of the tale. The Petar stories in any case all have a similar outer frame, since each of them is explicitly the “story of a story”. Petar is a man with a particular gift for story-telling:

In everything he said there was something cheerful and wise at the same time. But, besides, there...