SOURCE: Rosslyn, Felicity. “The Short Stories of Ivo Andrić: Autobiography and the Chain of Proof.” Slavonic and East European Review 67, no. 1 (January 1989): 29-41.

In the following essay, Rosslyn examines Andrić's thoughts on the nature and purpose of human testimony and autobiography.

In most of Andrić's stories a character experiences some kind of agonizing constraint, whether from physical causes, like disease or old age, or metaphysical ones, like guilt. The character chokes on his or her sensations, and the reader chokes in sympathy—for no one is better than Andrić at arousing the feelings he describes. Some of the stories are positively unpleasant to read, in consequence, and perhaps none of them is more strikingly unpleasant than Autobiography, where the narrator of the story (a kindly literary figure hardly to be distinguished from Andrić himself) goes through a series of tortured emotions from an anxiety that Andri...