Ispovijed i druge priče

This selection of stories, among other things, corrects an often repeated and long-established stereotype - namely, that Andrić's interest in depicting the Bosnian-Croatian milieu is exhausted and limited to the "Franciscan cycle" of stories and the period of Ottoman rule in Bosnia. The prose from the second part of this book corrects this in a striking way, bringing a series of "new" themes and characters from that world, set in a completely different, post-Ottoman era.

From the story "Mara milosnica", which still belongs to the old age, through the prose "O starim i mladim Pamukovićima" (which obviously continues the atmosphere and characters from Mara milosnica, and which is by all accounts the torso of a much larger whole, probably an unfinished novel "from Sarajevo life"), to the already classic "Čud u Olovo", and shorter stories such as "Pekušići", "Svečanost" or "Æilim", concluding with the masterful story "Bife 'Titanic'", Andrić continues to examine the "condition humaine" of little people thrown into these new, completely different historical, social circumstances and forms of life.

These are most often stories about evil, eternal and incomprehensible, about that predominance of evil in the world, about which Andrić will tell Ljubo Jandrić that he learned to reason about it from Kierkegaard in his youth... In fact, these are entire prose "studies" about evil, about its infinitely diverse types and forms (after all, masterfully narrated from the beginning - from "Confession", "In the Inn of the Wanderer", "Stories in Samsara's Inn", "The Corpse", "In the Watermill", "Mustafa the Magyar", "Miracles in Lead"), which, through "Mary of Mercy" and the torso about the Pamukovićs, end with "The 'Titanic' Buffet", and in "The Letter" from 1920, they find their miraculous narrative-"theoretical" sublimation.