Boris Pahor - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Pahor was born into a Slovene minority community in Trieste, then the main port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the capital of the Austrian Littoral.

His father moved to the city from the nearby Kras region and was employed as a civil servant in the Austro-Hungarian administration until he became, as member of Slovene minority in Italy (1920-1947), target of the Fascist Italianization and state repression and lost his office job. To support his family he had to work as a costermonger, instead.

Witnessing the Italianization becoming more and more violent during Fascism, Pahor was destined to become a lifelong intellectual fighter against totalitarianism in the name of Christian humanist and communitarian values.

In July 1920, he witnessed the Fascist squads burning down the Slovene Community Hall (the Narodni dom) in Trieste. The event had a profound impact on him. He would later frequently recall this childhood memory in his essays, as well as in one of his late novels, Trg Oberdan ("Oberdan Square", from the name of the square on which the Narodni dom stood, named after Guglielmo Oberdan, a 19th century Italian radical nationalist terrorist from the Austrian Littoral).

From 1919 to 1923 Pahor attended a Slovene-language school in Trieste, which was closed down by the Fascist Gentile regime and he had no other choice but to go to Italian school. He enrolled in a Roman Catholic seminary in Capodistria, then also part of Italy, and graduated in 1935. He continued to study theology in Gorizia, but quit in 1938. During his studies in Gorizia, he was shocked by the brutal assassination of the Slovene choirmaster Lojze Bratuž, who was assaulted, kidnapped, tortured and killed by Fascist squads on Christmas Eve of 1936. He later referred to the event as a turning point in his personal growth, confirming his dedication to anti-Fascism and the Slovene national cause.

During his stay in Capodistria and Gorizia, he began to study standard Slovene. At the time, all public and private use of Slovene in the Julian March was prohibited and the relations between Slovenes living in Fascist Italy and those from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia were forcibly cut off. Pahor nevertheless managed to publish his first short stories in several magazines in Ljubljana (then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) under the pseudonym Jožko Ambrožič. In 1939, he established contact with the Slovenian personalist poet and thinker Edvard Kocbek. Kocbek introduced him to contemporary literary trends and helped him to improve his use of standard Slovene.

Pahor returned to Trieste in 1938, where he established close contacts with the few Slovene intellectuals that still worked underground in Trieste, including the poet Stanko Vuk and some members of the Slovene militant anti-fascist organization TIGR.