Jovan Ćirilov, the playwright of the Yugoslav Drama Theater of which Andrić was the chairman of the management board, is asking for permission to dramatize the Cursed Courtyard. Andrić remembers 1914 and his prison days and the time when, released from prison, he spent his confinement with his mother in Ovčarev and the Guča Gora monastery, hanging out with the friars. His memory takes him to Višegrad in 1917, to the bridge over the Drina where he meets his teacher Ljubomir, and to the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy where he lies together with Ivo Vojnović, with whom he is planning a future Yugoslav theater. In 1919 and 1920, he hangs out with Crnjanski and Boro Stanković at literary evenings in the Hotel Moskva in Belgrade. At 61, he is waiting to write his will and go to Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize.
