3

SERBIAN STUDIES PUBLISHED BY THE NORTH AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR SERBIAN STUDIES

CONTENTS VOLUME 4, NUMBER 3 SPRING 1988

Alex N. Dragnich AMERICAN SERBS AND OLD WORLD POLITICS 5

Vasa D. Mihailovich THE IMAGE OF AMERICA IN CONTEMPORARY SERBIAN LITERATURE 2 7

Michael Bora Petrovich KARADZIC AND NATIONALISM 41

George Vid Tomashevich BIBLICAL MOTIFS IN MEDIEVAL SERBIAN PAINTING AND LITERATURE 59

Laura Gordon Fisher THE PATRIOTIC POETRY OF MILAN RAKIC 71

NOTES (Student essays)

Jelona S. Bankovic-Rosul ORIENTAL FATALISM AND VICTORY OF TANAT SIN DEVJL'S YARD AND DERVISTI AND DEATJJ. 79

Ani Lo. L kic-Trboj vic NARRATOR AND NARRATIVE IN ANDRI ' Pll KLETA AVLIJA. 33

Jelena Bankovic-Rosul 79

ORIENTAL FATALISM AND VICTORY OF THANATOS IN DEVIL'S YARD AND DERVISH AND DEATH

I am calling time, a beginning and end of everything, to witness that every man is destined to lose. 1

There is a land, obscure and remote, unreal and dark, yet a place of fantasy and mystery. It is "a place not fit for a dog, a place where bears cry."2 It is a frontier, a bridge between East and West, a bond between reality and fantasy. What seems to be real turns there into illusion, dreams become reality, and "lies are truer than any truth." 3

This spellbinding Bosnia of past times is a setting and a frame of the oriental story which conveys a universal truth about human existence. At the well of the Moslem religion and oriental philoso­phy, both Ivo Andric and Mesa Selimovic create a vision of human life constantly followed by oppressions, evil and inevitable loss. It is the same losing game and eternal life engima viewed by Shake­speare as a meaningless story told by a lunatic about a huge theatre in which people play the roles given to them by an unknown force . With their own "entrances and exits", dervish Ahmed Nurudin, his brother Harun, Kamil, fra Peter and other characters of Dervish and Death and Devil's Yard played their roles in the theatre of life.

Entering the world of Devil's Yard, we encounter people of all creeds, vocations and age. They are mad or sane, guilty or innocent. A big wall separates them from the outer world, and only a patch of sky can be seen from the inside. The governor of the Turkish prison is Lalifaga, called Karagoz afler the grotesque character in the Turkish shadow theatre. Here, an element of the Shakespearian vi­sion of life as a stage is again obvious. Karagoz, a dark shadow of the human mind, is driven by animalism and abnormality into a sadistic behavior toward the world he once belonged to. A mentally deranged person and a criminal chases and persecutes the prisoners who are destined to suffer. He fights his own, socially undesirable, instincts allacking others for what he feels. Andric uses prison as an archetypal motive alluding to human life:

So the Yard ceaselessly sifts the variegated crowd of its population and, always full, it is constantly being filled and emptied anew.4

]elena Bankovic-Rosul 80

Celia Hawkesworth5 finds a connection between this passage and The Bridge on the Drina- Andric's idea about life that constantly spends itself, and yet endures. It contains the old Heracles' truth about ephemerality and transience of everything, though Andric adds a new dimension, endurance and controversial harmony of tran­sience and eternity. Thus, through the story about the cursed yard, Andric elucidates his perception of the world as a dark and cruel reality, however, with a hope for a second reality and another plane of existence which endures and wins. He envisages lives of Kamil, Haim, and all other "Josefs K.", merging finally, in all their diver­sities, into a general whiteness and an amorphous blur.

The outer frame of Andric's narrative, which is a system of con­centric circles- the story of a story, is a scene of fra Peter's funeral. Snow covers the grave and this is what remains:

the general whiteness which stretched as far as the eye could see and merged imperceptibly with the grey de­sert of the sky still full of snow. 6

The description of the grave covered with snow contains Andric's philosophy of life, deep and methaphysical. This same vision of reality turning into illusion is a speculation of the main character of Selimovic's novel Dervish and Death. While talking to Hasan, Ahmed Nurudin once said:

Space is our prison ... Man does not have his true home. Nothing is ours but an illusion - that is why we so des­parately cling to it. We deceive ourselves saying that this is our real home ... Perhaps the way out for man is to turn back, to become just a blind force. 7

The passage has the same methaphysical orientation of Devil's Yard, with the archetypal prison, a motive of the true horne (imply­ing a different existence], and illusion. However, Selimovic's incli­nation toward fatalism seems to be more obvious and more pessimistic. His dissatisfaction with an aimless human struggle against blind, evil forces is final.

In Dervish and Death, the author tells the story of Ahmed Nurudin which is given through monologues and introspective reflexions of

Jelena Bankovic-Rosul 81

the main character. Nurudin is a sheik who once belonged to the world of spirituality and calmness. Devoted to the Moslem dogma, he believes in human chastity and justice, but being caught in a life turmoil, the sheik is unable to adjust to the new circumstances as a noble and honest man. He becomes a victim of the ruthless plot in the inhumane, dictatorial society and finally changes into a man full of hatred and obssessed with revenge. After experiencing a collision of values, he continues his long search for a "golden bird", the sym­bol of happiness, peace, and certainty. He hopes that he will find the bird through his friendship with Hasan, and then through power, as a kadi.

Nikola Milosevic8 explains this desperate Nurudin's search as a universal human need to find the Archimedes' solid point which gives the feeling of security. Ahmed Nurudin neither finds his solid point through spirituality and friendship, nor through hatred, re­venge or power. Selimovic prophesies an inevitable loss on the path of both goodness and evil.

At the end, when his tragedy is obvious and irreversible, Nurudin thinks that man is cursed, always regretting the roads he has not taken. However, there seems to be no choice in SelimoviC's story. He lets Thanatos win, and the oriental fatalism prevails: life is a losing game, man is destined to suffer and his final balance is trag­ical. Individual trials to confront a dictatorial society, evil and ephemerality are in vain. Summing up his life balance in a quasi citation from the Koran, Ahmed Nurudin is calling ink, pen, dark­ness, the moon, doom's day and time to witness the misfortune of human existence. He realizes the bitter truth and concludes: "Golden bird, what an illusion you are."

There is a striking similarity between the end of Dervish and Death and Devil's Yard. An unknown monk, almost a ghost, sees this scene looking through the window at the cemetery:

There is nothing anymore. Only the grave among the invisible graves of the other monks, lost like a snow flake in the deep snow which spreads like an ocean and transforms everything into a cold desert without name or sign ... There is nothing. Only the snow and the simple fact that we die and go under the earth. So it seemed to the young man by the window ... 9

}elena Bankovic-Rosul 82

The grim view of life which ends in whiteness, silence and a desperate nothing gets another dimension in the last senlence of the cited paragraph. Andric leaves the whole methaphysical speculation open, as if he still believes in a little sparkle of hope, or in wonders which happen only in dreams. The twilight and blur of Devil's Yard are multidimensional for him, whereas Selimovic's heroes are al­ready completely lost. In the victory of Thanatos, falalislic and gen­eral blur of evil, sin and punishment, Andric "desperately clings"10

to a dream about the universal and macrocosmic value of human existence.

University of Illinois at Chicago

'Mesa Selimovic, Dervis i smrt, Sloboda, Beograd, 1975, pp. 9. 2Bosnia, viewed by the French consul Daville in Bosnian Story. 3Jvo Andric, The Vizier's Elephant. •Ivo Andric, Prokleta avlija, Prosveta, Beograd, 1972, pp. 129. •Celia Hawkesworth, Iva Andric: Bridge Between East and West, Tho Athlonc Press,

London, 1984, pp. 194. •Ivo Andric, Prokleta avlija, Prosveta, Beograd, 1972, pp. 125. 1Mesa Selimovic, Dervi§ i smrt, Sloboda, 1975, pp. 109-110. •Nikola Milosevic, Zidanica na pesku, Slovo Ljubve, Beograd, 1978, pp. 466. 0 lvo Andric, Prokleta avlija, Prosveta, Beograd, 1972, pp. 205. '"an allusion to the citation of dervish Nurudin.