TAMNICA KAO PAD I APOKALIPSA U PRIPOVEDAČKOJ PROZI IVE ANDRIĆA

Abstract

The paper examines the semantics of the dungeon in Ivo Andric’s short stories, primarily in the writer’s dungeon stories. In the theoretical footsteps of Northrop Frye, Nikolai Berdyaev and Michel Foucault, we point to the dungeon as two symbolic forms of human fall, external and internal. The outer dungeon is reflected in the social determinants of the ideologically conceived identities of Andric’s heroes, while the inner dungeon is explained through the psychological and ontological aspects of their existence, through the metaphysical rethinking of the idea of freedom – as an impossible free will in the context of modernity which revalues the Biblical concept of innocence. In accordance with such representations, the dungeon is also contextualized through two apocalyptic visions of the human fall that correspond to Berdjaev’s dialectic of external (worldly) and internal (spiritual) apocalypse. It is concluded that the Biblical-Christian semantics of the Fall is deconstructed in Andric’s stories, in order that his heroes become bearers of an absurd desire for ontological salvation, fall as a feeling of modern(istic) self-exile.