Andrić Ivo: Ex Ponto

Ivo Andrić: Ex ponto

first edition

Ex Ponto is the first published book by the Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić, which was printed in 1918 by the Croatian Printing Office in Zagreb in the "Literary Jug" edition. Two years later, in 1920, its first Belgrade edition was printed.

The work was created in the early period of Ivo Andrić's creativity as a book of prose verses that Niko Bartulović, the author of the foreword to the first edition, calls "conversations with the soul". Most of the book was written under special circumstances during Ivo Andrić's stay in the Maribor prison, where he was imprisoned because of his political activities.

The title of the book Ex Ponto is taken from the collection of poems Epistulae ex Ponto, by the Latin poet Ovid, in which he sings about suffering and exile in Pontus on the coast of the Black Sea, where he was sent by the Roman emperor August Octavius.

In Ex Ponto, Andrić initially focuses on the motifs of loneliness, anxiety melancholy, subject to the imprisonment of his thoughts and the overwhelming loneliness that accompanies him throughout the blackout period, but also for most of his life. The stay in the prison cell left Andrić with an indelible feeling of restlessness and loneliness, and this is the basic motif that runs through the entire book.

In his thoughts, he often remembers his mother and scenes from his childhood. Looking through the bars of the seasons, memories come to him. He thinks about women in an idyllic way and these female characters follow him as a leitmotif in his other works.

He is constrained by loneliness, he understands life's truths in a rough way and the meaning of the struggle that illuminates his dark days. Ex Ponto is full of life truths that Andrić arrived at and which he conveys to us so that we can learn and live from them.

The very point of the work is found in the epilogue when a young man, disappointed with life, decides to live anyway because life is one and lasts very short.

What makes Ivo Andrić stand out in our contemporary literature are the extraordinary analyzes of his characters and psychological observations of human conditions which, until him, were the more significant literary interests of other writers. He is most interested in that dark and unclear impulse in man that is beyond the reach of consciousness and will.

Starting from some contemporary psychological assumptions, Andrić shows how these mysterious inner impulses fatally burden and poison man. That is why his prose is rightly said to bear the hallmarks of so-called philosophical realism.

The book has a dedication