The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić

Published 1945 · 314 pages · 141,317 words · about 11 hours at an average pace · Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

How hard is The Bridge on the Drina to read?

The Bridge on the Drina scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Serbo-Croatian, Ottoman.
Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
Andrić's clear prose.
Abstraction: 60 out of 100
History, cultures, fate.
Information density: 62 out of 100
Centuries of history.
Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
Chronicle structure.
Symbolic density: 65 out of 100
Bridge, cultures.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Historical perspective.
Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
Bridge destroyed.
Structural complexity: 55 out of 100
Multi-century scope.

How The Bridge on the Drina is regarded

The Bridge on the Drina holds a literary regard score of 85 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where The Bridge on the Drina sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (254 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, The Bridge on the Drina scores 70 out of 100. A second mythos, tragedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
Here, where the Drina flows with the whole force of its green and foaming waters from the apparently closed mass of the dark steep mountains, stands a great clean-cut stone bridge with eleven wide sweeping arches.
Symbol: Formal
Mythos: Tragic Irony: Tragic Pathos (Irony iv) (irony iv)
Just beyond the kapia the bridge stopped short. There was no longer any seventh pier; between the sixth and the eighth yawned a gulf through which he could see the green waters of the river.
Genre: Anatomy + Novel
The Bridge on the Drina is not a novel in the usual sense of the word. Its scope is too vast, its characters too numerous, its period of action too long; it covers three and a half centuries.

Where the story of The Bridge on the Drina takes place

  • The Drina bridge in Bosnia, 1577-1914 (1577 to 1914), the main setting
  • Višegrad on the Drina, building of the bridge, 1516-1571 (1516 to 1571)
  • Ottoman Višegrad, floods, Serbian revolt and the blockhouse, 1571-1878 (1571 to 1878)
  • Austro-Hungarian Višegrad, occupation to the eve of war, 1878-1914 (1878 to 1914)
  • Višegrad under bombardment, summer-autumn 1914

6 things that are true of The Bridge on the Drina, with the passage for each

  1. The bridge has eleven arches.

    stands a great clean-cut stone bridge with eleven wide sweeping arches.

  2. The Vezir who founded the bridge was taken as a ten-year-old boy in the blood tribute.

    a dark-skinned boy of about ten years old from the mountain village of Sokolovići sat silent and looked about him with dry eyes.

  3. Radisav is impaled for sabotaging the bridge and is still alive and speaking from the stake some hours later.

    Radisav was even then, four hours after the sentence had been carried out, alive and conscious.

  4. The inscription gives 979 AH, equivalent to 1571 AD, as the year of the bridge's completion.

    the fortunate year 979 ah, that is to say 1571 in the Christian calendar, when it was completed.

  5. The Austrian engineers sank a mine shaft in the bridge pier in 1908.

    workmen specially brought for the job began to drill a hole about a yard square in one of the piers.

  6. The bridge is destroyed by the blowing of the seventh pier in 1914, and Alihodja sees the gap.

    There was no longer any seventh pier; between the sixth and the eighth yawned a gulf through which he could see the green waters of the river.

Scenes in The Bridge on the Drina that Frye would name

34 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Displacement, I
The children were walled into the pier, for it could not be otherwise, but Rade, they say, had pity on them and left openings in the pier through which the unhappy mother could feed her sacrificed children. Foundation sacrifice, a myth pattern, appears as a local legend explaining the bridge's niches and white stains.
Pathos, VIII
sprang from the saddle as if she had wings, leapt over the parapet and threw herself into the roaring river below the bridge. Fata's leap from the kapia is an ironic-tragic sacrifice for honour.
Epos, III
'The Serbian Tsar Stefan Drank wine in fertile Prizren, The Montenegrin guslar's recital of epic verse to the forced labourers is an oral epos embedded in the prose.
Pharmakos, III
The silence from both banks of the river was such that not only every blow but even its echo from somewhere along the steep bank could be clearly heard. Radisav is the community's scapegoat, impaled in public to atone for sabotage and purge fear.
Sparagmos, III
The man was impaled on the stake as a lamb on the spit, only that the tip did not come through the mouth but in the back The hero's body is mutilated before the whole town; a ritual tearing-apart.
Pathos, IV
'Don't you see that he has become a saint?' And everyone glanced up at the dead man who stayed there as upright as if he had been marching at the head of a company. Radisav's death becomes a sacrificial martyrdom for the Serbian peasants.

Books that share these scenes with The Bridge on the Drina

About the author

Ivo Andrić