The Voice of the Oppressed

THE VIZIER'S ELEPHANT (247 pp.)--Ivo Andric--Harcourt, Brace & World ($4.75).

DEVIL'S YARD (137 pp.)--Ivo Andric--Grove ($3.95).

Few regions in the world have known so little freedom as Bosnia, now part of Yugoslavia. For centuries it was brutally governed by the Turks of the Ottoman Empire. When the Turks were driven out toward the end of the last century, the Austrians moved in for 40 years. The Nazis took over in 1941, and the Communists in 1945, each adding its own refinement to the art of oppression. Out of this blood-soaked, soul-scarred land, a writer has emerged whose works constitute a massive indictment of tyranny. Ivo Andric, 70, won the 1961 Nobel Prize chiefly for his novel The Bridge on the Drina, in which he chronicles three centuries of heroic Bosnian endurance of oppression. Devil's Yard and the three short novels contained in The Vizier's Elephant are less epic works but no less powerful.

In his earlier novels, Andric attacked tyranny by parable, in his later, by character portrayal. In The Vizier's Elephant, the earliest of the four novels, tyranny is symbolized by a rambunctious elephant, the pet of a ruthless Turkish vizier of a Bosnian town. The vizier is seldom seen; instead his elephant takes his place in public, inspiring all the fear, doing all the damage that the vizier normally would. Andric's implied moral: when man is a tyrant, he may as well be a beast.

Universal Guilt. The hero of Zeko is a forlorn little shadow of a man who returns to Belgrade after fighting in World War I. Rootless and despairing, he is browbeaten by a tigress of a wife called the Cobra, and bullied by her son, who may or may not be his. But when World War II breaks out, Zeko snaps out of his malaise. He sees a group of peasants hanged from lampposts by the Nazis, and in sudden outrage, he resolves to join the underground. Simultaneously, he finds the courage to revolt against the tyranny of his wife, and at last becomes the master of his own house.

Devil's Yard, the best of the four novels, is a searching examination of the mind of 20th century totalitarianism. The novel is set in a massive, fetid prison near Istanbul, in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, but the prison is obviously a modem police state in miniature. Guilty and innocent alike are cast into this prison where all standards have disappeared. Its chief warden is a masterpiece of characterization, both repellent and sympathetic, a tyrant trapped by fate as his victims are trapped by him.

Warden Karadjos mingles with the prisoners to learn their weaknesses, and with this knowledge wrings confessions from them all, guilty or not. "He needed a confession," writes Andric, "as the one relatively fixed point on which to be able to base some semblance of justice and create some sort of order in a world where all are guilty and deserve punishment." To get his confessions, Karadjos jokes, bullies, wheedles, blackmails, but the prisoners, with shrewd insight, admire him as much as they fear him. "As things are today," one later reflects, "he was the right man in the right place."

In contrast to rough, wily Karadjos is the prisoner Djamil, a sensitive, footloose scholar, who is thrown into Devil's Yard because the paranoid Turks are suspicious of his solitary life. Even Karadjos is at a loss as to what to do with a man who is obviously incapable of crime. But a solution is found: Djamil is executed for conspiring against the state. The evidence: books he had been reading about a conspirator who lived four centuries ago.

Creativity in Jail. Andric has lived most of his life with war and tyranny. Arrested for associating with the Serbian nationalists who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, Andric spent World Wrar I in prison. There he composed his lyrical diary, Ex Ponto. Between the wars he joined the diplomatic corps and became minister to Germany just before World War II. The Nazis imprisoned him for ten months, then, because he was ill, allowed him to return to occupied Belgrade. While the bombs burst outside his apartment, he calmly produced his finest novels. Since the war, he has been feted by Tito's Communists, has served seven years as president of the Yugoslav Federation of Writers. Tito, despite the 5,000 political prisoners in his jails, does not seem to feel that Andric's attacks on tyranny could have anything to do with him--and Andric apparently finds it wiser not ta raise the point if nobody else does.

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