‘Steering the Wheel of History’

Abstract

This article explores the paradoxical position of Serbian modernist authors, chiefly Ivo Andrić, vis-à-vis Gavrilo Princip. It addresses the discrepancy between the powerful hold that Princip, as a symbolic figure, had on the members of his generation and the absence of literary representations of his act in the literature of the interwar period. A more attentive reading of the texts in which Princip’s act is mentioned or alluded to, shows, however, that he performed an important and highly symbolic function in the modernists’ auto-designation as the members of a new generation of authors.