FELTON – MANAGER OF HIS LIFE AND WORK: Great loves sprout unexpectedly and fade slowly and sadly

AS his aunt Ana was his emotional mother, so Vera Stojić, the third most important woman in his life, was his practical stepmother, taking care first of his manuscripts and fees, then of the writer’s age and illness, and finally of the life of his work. and names long after his life. All other women in Ivo Andrić’s life, except his mother, Milica and Vera Stojić, were his decor for various uses.

Vera Stojić is the third, special woman in Andrić’s life. She spent about half a century with him while he was alive, serving him with the devotion of a medieval nun. She was all he needed: a translator, a personal secretary, a housewife, a caregiver, a financial consultant, a representative before publishers … a friend to the grave and after the grave, and finally the executor of his will … Andrić’s friends called her manager of his life and work.

ONE thought that Vera felt the maturity of the genius in Andrić by some instinct and that is why she decided to serve him. Scholars from Andrić’s vicinity supplemented this theory by noting that Vera believed that average people were in some kind of obligation to help and serve great artists with all their being. It is believed that Vera Stojić knew Ivo Andrić best and most deeply: but, alas, she did not comment on that at all or explain Andrić’s private character.

Vera Stojić was born in Budapest, she graduated from the Trade Academy, finance and money business were her specialty, but among other things she spoke, translated and wrote in several languages, typed and proofread (even) various Andrić’s texts. She was the ideal person he needed: she knew about money and words, she knew how to keep quiet and she didn’t look for any benefit for herself.

This detail is also interesting: Vera Stojić leads the entire gallery of girls – foreigners from Andrić’s half-century boyhood. All of Andrić’s public and famous heroines of his love affairs are foreigners and Catholics, respectively. Only Serb Serb Milica Babic violates that rule. Here are some other foreign women who entered Andrić’s life and permeated his personality.

THIS LIST is led by a young teenager from Zagreb, Evgenija Gojmerac, whom he met as a young lyricist while studying in Zagreb around 1910. From a rich family, junior artists of that time gathered in the salon of her home in the Upper Town: Pjer Križanić, Vladimir Čerina, Miroslav Krleža … Andrić and Krleža met and met for the first time at that place, and that is where the great rivalry between them. As rarely or never since, young Andrić presented himself in the worst light towards Evgenija, who was trembling at his appearance. He was cynical in almost every letter sent to the sensitive and already leukemic-attacked Evgenija, and in one he wrote a sentence that many still believe that Andrić simply could not pass something like that over his heart and pen.

Addressing the already seriously ill, Evgenija, who will die at the age of almost 20, he also wrote this: “… And you will not commit the awkwardness of dying. , but you still try to answer. And remember me in the will … “Well, that was Andrić too, true young and arrogant, but these words remained forever” glued “to his name.

Andrić had a completely different relationship with another woman from Zagreb, Dr. Zdenko Marković, a professor of Polish studies, a poet and a translator. She was about ten years older than him. They met in the fall of 1917, after his release from prison. He sent 120 letters to Zdenka, more than to all his other friends combined: and she sent him more than 200. He burned all her letters, she saved all his letters to her. She lived a long time, she died a year before Andrić.

In one letter, Zdenko described Andrić, as it were, in a single sentence: “You are, anyway, so little of you”! He discovered his mother’s care with Zdenka, so he used it the most for contacts with his mother Kata, to forward his letters to her, to send her money. He did not want to write her a review of a collection of poems that she published in 1920. in Zagreb, with a laconic and somewhat cynical explanation that “good friends are not good critics”!

ANDRIC suffered because of certain women, mostly because of Jelena from Krakow, while he stayed there as a student in 1914, which again opened in him an exceptional narrative inspiration for the famous story “Jelena, a woman who does not exist”. That woman and that unrequited love later stretched in various ways through many of Andrić’s works and characters from poetic prose. That emotional somersault in Andrić’s soul and poetics later gave birth to great works that came out from under his pen. Many, many years later, he received bitter satisfaction from his Krakow emotional suffering: when he received the Nobel Prize, a letter arrived from Krakow: “Dear Ivo, I don’t know if you remember Krakow and the Irzukovski family, I am Jelena (shoots) now an old limb Latakowska, I have to send you heartfelt congratulations for your ‘Noble’ … I’ve read all your books in Polish … I’m waiting for an answer. “

Here, after 54 years, a woman called him, about whom he stated in a record: “I attacked a woman’s door in vain, and then sat on a stone with bloody hands for a long time.” He concluded the saga about the Deer from his stories with a brilliant reflection: “Great loves sprout unexpectedly and fade away slowly and sadly!”

Many women or he went through the life of Ivo Andrić through their hearts: the beautiful Maja Nižetić, a revolutionary from Split, the wife of the Yugoslav integralist and tragic poet Vladimir Čerina, the wife of Andrić’s godfather Gustav Krklec, the Polish Persida (Siđuška) Krasnijević, fell into his arms and bed. Gustav finds them, after a sudden return from the road, in the sin “in flagranti”, Ivo explains the situation as a moment of uncontrolled passion and a stylistic figure that everything happened suddenly as a “timid shower”.

Krklec forgives his godfather but not his wife, he divorces Siđuška. Since they were both Freemasons, they were expelled from the Belgrade Freemasonry Lodge, and then soon returned. It was a time when writers lived in the wine and smoke of the tavern, drank a lot, drowned, spent their health and the last penny … shot and renewed friendships through the thick oblivion that the tavern drink brings so easily.

LETTERS FROM SWEDEN

GUN BERGMAN, a Swede, a Slavist, translator of his books into Swedish, whom he met in 1960, is in a way the third most important woman in his life: right behind Milica and Vera. She was equally close with Milica and Ivo, whom she sincerely admired, until her tragic death in 1971. She exchanged about a hundred letters with our writer, of which the one from November 1, 1961 begins with: “Dear Mr. Andrić, I cannot tell you how happy I am for you. If anyone deserves the Nobel Prize, then it is you.” . She welcomed Ivo and Milica in Stockholm, advised them on how to train for the Nobel Prize ceremony, comforted him and mourned him when Milica died. Gun was a rare person, and the only woman whose letters and meetings Andrić rejoiced after Milica’s death, when he had already lost all need for another being.

TOMORROW: THE DEVELOPMENT PATH OF A NOBEL MAN