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Abstract:

In our paper, we have analysed the role of the dacha in the life and work of Ivo Andrić (1892–1975), a classic of Yugoslav literature and Nobel Prize winner (1961). In the spring, summer and early autumn of 1963–1968, the dacha, with a plot of land on the Adriatic coast, became the centre of his domestic and creative life and a source of inspiration. The “sunny” story “A Moment in Topla” (1963), on the one hand, conveys the atmosphere of the resort area of Topla in Montenegro, where the writer’s summer house was located. On the other hand, due to its rich history and beautiful nature, the space of Topla acquires the quality of heterotopia. In addition, Andrić’s ego-documents contain a testimony about how the writer reflected on his literary hero while standing on the balcony of his villa-house in Topla and looking at the chapel where the ruler of Montenegro in 1830–1851 and Metropolitan of Montenegro and the Hills, Petar II Petrovic Njegos (1813–1851), was buried. Thanks to his intuitive insight, Andrić recognizes the process of maturation and development of poetic thought under the Mediterranean sun, not only in himself, but also in his hero. Being in the heterotopic space of Topla, like the prototype of his literary hero, the writer constructs the entire artistic world of the story as a hierotopia, i.e. a sacred space. Thus, the topicality of the dacha in the Yugoslav writer’s story is successively transformed into a heterotopia and then into a hierotopos.