The news that Ivo Andrić had won the Nobel Prize in Literature spread around the world like wildfire on October 26, 1961. The renowned writer awaited the news in his apartment in central Belgrade where he lived with his wife, Milica Bobić.
After the celebrations in the capital, the couple traveled to Stockholm on December 5th, where, exactly 56 years ago today, Ivo Andrić was awarded this prestigious prize.
“For the epic force” with which he “shaped motives and fates from the history of his country,” on this day in 1961, Ivo Andrić was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. – “I consider the Nobel Prize to be an exceptional recognition for the entire literature of my country,” Ivo Andrić modestly commented when he received the news that it was he who had been awarded the prize by the Swedish Academy, thus surpassing English writers Lawrence Durrell and Graham Greene, American John Steinbeck, and Italian Alberto Moravia, who were among the finalists. Andrić traveled to Stockholm on December 5th, accompanied by his wife Milica Babić-Andrić. The award was presented to him on Alfred Nobel’s death day, December 10, 1961, by the Swedish King Gustav VI in the magnificent hall of the Swedish Academy’s Concert Hall. Ivo Andrić stood in a place where before him had been Henryk Sienkiewicz, Rabindranath Tagore, Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw, André Gide, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus…
“Your diploma states that the Nobel Prize has been awarded to you for the epic force with which you have described the motives and fates of the history of your country. It was a great pleasure for the Swedish Academy to reward in you a representative of a linguistic area that has not been previously represented among the prizewinners. With our best wishes for you, we ask you to accept the award from the hands of His Royal Highness”, said Dr. Anders Österling, a member of the Academy, upon presenting the award to our writer.
About an hour later, at the gala banquet, on behalf of all the award winners that year, Ivo Andrić addressed the world’s greatest dignitaries. The speech of the Serbian writer has been remembered for all time and was later published in Andrić’s Collected Works under the title “On Story and Storytelling”.
PRATITE NAS I NA FEJSBUKU:
Excerpts from Ivo Andrić’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
“In carrying out its high tasks, the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy has decided this time to honor a writer from a, as it is said, small country with the Nobel Prize, which, measured by international standards, signifies a high recognition. Allow me, in accepting this recognition, to say a few words about that country and to add a few general considerations regarding the narrative work that you have chosen to reward. My homeland is truly a “small country among the worlds,” as one of our writers said, and it is a country that in rapid stages, at the cost of great sacrifices and exceptional efforts, is trying to make up in all areas, including the cultural one, for what its unusually turbulent and difficult past has denied it. With your recognition, you have cast a spotlight on the literature of that country and thus drawn the world’s attention to its cultural endeavors, and that precisely at a time when our literature, with a series of new names and original works, has begun to penetrate the world, in a justified endeavor to give world literature its due contribution.
…
It is permissible, I think, to conclude by wishing that the story that today’s storyteller tells to the people of his time, regardless of its form and its theme, be neither poisoned by hatred nor drowned out by the thunder of murderous weapons, but rather as much as possible driven by love and guided by the breadth and serenity of the free human spirit. For the storyteller and his work serve nothing if in one way or another they do not serve man and humanity. That is what is important. And that is what I considered it good to emphasize in this brief occasional consideration which I shall, if you allow me, end as I began: with an expression of deep and sincere gratitude.”
You can check out the whole speech HERE.
In the Company of the Best
Apart from Ivo Andrić who received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the laureates of 1961 were: American Melvin Calvin (winner of the prize for chemistry), German Rudolf Mössbauer and American Robert Hofstadter (for physics), American Georg von Békésy (for medicine), and Dag Hammarskjöld who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
READ MORE:
PRICELESS CONTRIBUTION TO CIVILIZATION: These are Serbian inventions that changed the world! (PHOTO)
CROWNED KING OF SERBIAN AND MARITIME LANDS: Dušan the Mighty crowned in Kosovo on this day!
Source: Istorijski Zabavnik
Photo: Zadužbina Ive Andrića