"My Trieste address": The ethno-cultural self-identification in the conditions of the Slovenian-Italian borderlands

Abstract

In the focus of the attention are the problems of the creative work of an outstanding writer from Trieste, a representative of the Slovenian national minority in Italy Boris Pahor. This Slovenian, who celebrated his 105 th birthday in 2018, was born in the multinational and multicultural Trieste at the time when the city was still a part of Austria-Hungary, then survived three European dictators of the 20 th century: Mussolini, Hitler and Tito. During his long creative life (Pahor’s literary debut took place in 1948, the last novel was published in 2012), the writer has created a collective image of the Trieste Slovenian, making extensive use of his autobiographical motifs. The heroes of his works, representatives of the Slovenian diaspora in Trieste, have different names and professions, but all of them defend their right to freedom and ethno-cultural originality. The experience of concentration camps was the basis of his autobiographical novel “Necropolis” (1967). This work is ranked with the works by A. Solzhenitsyn, P. Levi, J. Semprun and I. Kertész. This is one of the most vivid literary evidence about the Nazi death factory in the time of World War II in the modern European prose. In the context of the Slovenian literary paradigm, Pahor’s creative individuality is es- pecially unique, because his poetics is not connected with the national literary tradition, he was guided by Italian neorealists, first of all V. Pratolini, as well as by E. Hemingway, J. Dos Passos, and W. Saroyan.