 Most scholars have interpreted the eponymous bridge as a metonym for Yugoslavia, which was itself a bridge between East and West during the Cold War.In his Nobel acceptance speech, Andrić described the country as one "which, at break-neck speed and at the cost of great sacrifices and prodigious efforts, is trying in all fields, including the field of culture, to make up for those things of which it has been deprived by a singularly turbulent and hostile past.