“Between the East and the West”: Vladimir Bartol’s Self-Identification between Central European Ljubljana and Mediterranean Trieste (1946–1956)

Abstract

The article addresses Vladimir Bartol’s fluid self-identification in relation to changeable places of his stay in the first decade after the Second World War. The writer’s constant oscillation between Trieste and Ljubljana was accompanied by the shift in perspectives (minority/majority) and cultural/linguistic dualities which render the Slovenian literature in Italy with existentialist overtone. Bartol’s return to Trieste problematized his self-understanding not only in spatial terms but also with respect to overlapping temporalities (Habsburg multicultural free port of the past versus the present Cold-War image of the city). Consequently, his stay in Trieste gave way to the extensive personal writing which is also the paper’s main source (autobiography and unpublished fragments of diary). Drawing inspiration from the spatial turn and applying the phenomenological prism of experience of certain places, the author attempts to present Bartol’s self-identification reconfigured in alignment with his post-war existential topography stretched between Central European Ljubljana and Mediterranean Trieste.