The Bridge on the Drina is the cronicle of a small town, and in particular
of the focal point of that town: the bridge over the river Drina. The town is
Visegrad on the eastern edge of Bosnia, near the border of Serbia. The chronicle
traces its history from the sixteenth century to the First World War, and uses
the bridge to bind the individual chapters and stories together. The emphasis is
on the evolution of a common mentality in the town, deriving from common
experience and a common heritage of legend and anecdote. The population of the
town is mixed, but Andric chooses in this case to stress the coherence of the
whole. This is achieved partly by the time-scale, but also by Andric's basic
intention in the work. This is to contrast the transience and insignificance of
individual human life with the broader perspective of life as itself enduring, a
constant ebb and flow. On this level the bridge provides not only a structural
but also a symbolic link.
Each chapter or anecdote is in some way connected with the bridge. It is the
focal point of the town, and most important events occur on or near it. Such an
apparently simple structural function contributes also to the main direction of
the work, which depicts the growth, from a series of disparate events, of a
common heritage.
The movement of the cronicle through the four centuries it describes is not
steady. The first event of major importance to the people of Visegrad, the
building of the bridge in the mid-sixteenth century, is described in detail over
three chapters; the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when no important
historical events affected the town, pass by in a single chapter; the nineteenth
century covers ten chapters, and the years from 1900 to 1914, the remainder of
the work, further nine chapters. Such a scheme allows the author to describe the
main events affecting the life of the town in detail and also suggest an
awareness of history as never uniformly well-konown or related. The static
nature of the centuries of Ottoman rule is then highlighted by the changes which
take place during the nineteenth century and increase in speed and scope with
Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina at the end of that century. The
clearest implication of the broad time-scale is the predictable one in Andric’s
work: that, for all these events and changes, nothing of significance alters.
The Bridge on the Drina can be seen as a portrait of history itself. History
is made as much by individual personalities as by mass movements and the
upheavals created by the rise and fall of empires.
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