Trieste’s Intellectual Past: Yugoslavian Nobel Prize Winner Who Lived in Piazza Venezia

Reading Time: 5 minutes

by Alessandra Ressa

After the war in former Yugoslavia broke out in 1991, Ivo Andric was able to capture the reason for the conflict perfectly in his masterpiece, The Bridge over the Drina. 

Its precise account of centuries of foreign invasion and internal rivalry in former Yugoslavia resulted in the most prestigious recognition for the Bosnian author, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1961.  

Yet, despite his popularity and that of his book (and several others), few people know that young Andric lived and worked in Trieste as a diplomat for the former Yugoslavian consulate (then known as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) in Piazza Venezia 1 in the early 1920s. There he wrote an unfinished autobiography, a collection of stories published posthumously with the title La storia Maledetta, Racconti Triestini (Trieste tales, a cursed story,  edited by Mondadori 2007).

Born in a Catholic family in Travnik, Bosnia in 1892, young Andric moved around tumultuous Europe as a student while supporting the monarchic party. The same party embraced by Gavrilo Princip, who later assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and the Archduke’s wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Saeajevo on 28 June 1914, thus initiating the crisis which led to the outbreak of World War I.  

Like Princip, Andric also spent time in jail, an experience which permanently weakened his health. Immediately after the war, Andric joined the diplomatic service of the newborn Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. At the end of 1921 he was apponted vice-consul to the diplomatic representative offices of Trieste’s Piazza Venezia.

The beautiful building where he lived and worked is known as Palazzo Scuglievich. Built in 1875, it was donated to the Serb-Orthodox community of Trieste by a wealthy benefactor Cristoforo Scuglievich. 

Although Andric remained in Trieste for a little over a year, he often described those months as a very unhappy period of his life. He couldn’t cope with Trieste’s winter and icy Bora winds (he moved to Trieste in early December). He complained that his apartment was so cold that the ink he used for writing kept freezing. There was probably a reason for this. 

The official consulate in Trieste was set on fire during the nationalistic riots in 1920, the same that burnt down the Balkan hotel – headquarters of the Slovenian minority during the so-called Trieste’s Kristallnacht events. 

Apparently, the temporary headquarters in Piazza Venezia weren’t properly furnished or heated. In addition, in Trieste Andric found the same unsteady border atmosphere he had left in his beloved Bosnia.

While in Trieste, he wrote reviews on Gabriele D’Annunzio for Belgrade literary magazines. At the same time, Trieste being at the heart of the political changes in Italy, Andric closely followed with great apprehension the rise of the fascist movement. 

Andric expressed his worries in several articles published under the pseudonym Res. He left Trieste in 1923 and was back in 1926 to investigate for his government the mysterious disappearance of the Yugoslavian consul, who according to what the local Trieste newspaper Il Piccolo wrote at the time,  escaped to Provence, with all the money entrusted in him for the diplomatic mission in Trieste. 

In his notes, Andric didn’t expressely talk about the incident, but remembered the escapee as a person who “took long lunch breaks to go back to his Trieste house with a private beach and enjoy a good swim”.   

By then, Andric’s fame as a writer and poet began to affirm itself among European intellectual circles. The main obstacle for international distribution remained the translation of his unique style.  

In the years that followed, he was appointed to Austria, France, Spain, Switzerland and Belgium. In 1939 he was nominated ambassador in Berlin, from where he witnessed the outbreak of World War II and the invasion of his Yugoslavia. 

Although much appreciated especially by readers who belonged to the Adriatic and Eastern European scene, it was the Nobel prize for literature in 1961 that made Andric one of the most acclaimed authors on the international scene. The Bridge over the Drina is a must read, a sort of modern epic poem where East and West meet. However, according to many critics, the short but intense experience in Trieste greatly influenced some of his writings. His latest collection of short autobiographical stories, all based in Trieste, were published posthumously in 2007.

Titled La Storia Maledetta, Racconti Triestini (Triestine Tales, a Cursed Story edited by Mondadori, 2007), it is a collection of four stories, three of which previously unpublished, that were originally written to form a novel. They may have been translated into English but there appear to be no editions available through an online search.  

The stories expose the soul of the city that hosted Andric in those turbulent times, in all its elusive and fascinating nature. If it is true that most of his works were inspired by Bosnia and the Ottoman empire, it mustn’t be forgotten that Trieste represented for a long time the only door to the West for the people of former Yugoslavia. Interestingly, in these tales, written when he was far from reaching artistic maturity, it is Trieste the place where East and West meet.