The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule

Ivo Andric, John F. Loud, Z. B. Juricic

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 1991
• Print ISBN: 9780822310631
• eBook ISBN: 9780822382553
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

Ivo Andric (1892-1975), Nobel Prize laureate for literature in 1961, is undoubtedly the most popular of all contemporary Yugoslav writers. Over the span of fifty-two years some 267 of his works have been published in thirty-three languages. Andric's doctoral dissertation, The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule (1924), never before translated into English, sheds important light on the author's literary writings and must be taken into account in any current critical analysis of his work.
Over his long and distinguished career as a diplomat and man of letters Andric never again so directly or discursively addressed, as a social historian, the impact of Turkish hegemony on the Bosnian people (1463–1878), a theme he returns to again and again in his novels. Although Andric's fiction was embedded in history, scholars know very little of his actual readings in history and have no other comparable treatment of it from his own pen. This dissertation abounds with topics that Andric incorporated into his early stories and later novels, including a focus on the moral stresses and compromises within Bosnia's four religious confessions: Catholic, Orthodox, Jew, and Muslim.
Z. B. Juricic provides an extensive introduction describing the circumstances under which this work was written and situating it in Andric's oeuvre. John F. Loud's original bibliography drawn from this dissertation stands as the only comprehensive inventory of historical sources known to have been closely familiar to the author at this early stage in his development.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Editorial Note
• Preface
• I. Prologue: Spiritual Life in Bosnia Before the Turkish Conquest
• II. The Spread of Islam as a Direct Effect of Turkish Rule
• III. The Social and Administrative Institutions of Islam, as Embodied in Turkish Sovereignty, and Their Impact on the Life of the Non-Muslim Population
• IV. The Spiritual and Intellectual Life of the Catholic Populace Under the Turks in Its Characteristic Embodiment: The Literary and Cultural Work of the Franciscans
• V. The Serbian Orthodox Church: Its Evolution Under the Turks and Activity as a Distillation of Spiritual Life Among the Orthodox
• Supplement: The Hybrid Literature of the Bosnian Muslims as an Articulation of Islam‘s Effect on This Part of the Population
• Notes
• Work Cited
• Index