Born in Trieste at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the author of “Pélerin among the shadows”, travels at the end of the concentrationnaire night, died on May 30, at the age of 108.
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He had to wait until the age of 80 to savor his victory against fate: to be finally recognized at its true value, that is to say as a very great writer, after years of suffering and rejection – After an extraordinary existence. The Slovenian author (but of Italian nationality) Boris PAHOR died on May 30 in his hometown of Trieste, a literary land celebrated by James Joyce, Umberto Saba, Italo Svevo or Claudio Magris. One of his consolations will have been to have taken advantage of this late recognition for a long time, since it was at the age of 108 that he bowed out.
It is said that his exceptional longevity held in the daily bath he took – up to a certain age at least – in the Adriatic. Was it really the youthful secret of this courteous man, so cultivated and so “old Europe”? We remember it, during one of his last passages in Paris. He had come to present when Ulysse returns to Trieste (Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2013), a novel with a high autobiographical coloring. It was the year of his centenary and he walked the rue de Richelieu, groaning vigorously against the poor quality of French coffee. Difficult to imagine that this man was born under the Habsburg, at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
However, the Archduke François-Ferdinand was still very alive when the little Boris was born in Trieste on August 26, 1913. “I was born Austrian. I became Italian at 5 years old. The official papers of My father were in three languages, German, Italian and Slovenian, “he said, recalling that Trieste is the fruit of immemorial brewing, a cosmopolitan city that has become the maritime outlet of the Empire and where had, for centuries, coexisted from the Germans, the Italians, the Slovenes, the Croats, the Greeks, the Jews …
Symbolic destruction
PAHOR’s father was a photographer in the gendarmerie. His mother, a cook. Both were born on the Slovenian Karst and left to settle in Trieste. But, from 1918, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed and the city became Italian, the situation was becoming increasingly harsh for the Slovenian population.
In 1920, Boris Pahor attended, dumbfounded, at the Narodni Dom fire, the Maison de la Culture Slovenne, by the fascists. This big brazier left on him an indelible trace which he later explored in his collection of new place Oberdan in Trieste (Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2018). “I was 7 years old. It was the end of the world,” he explained, more than ninety years later, in impeccable French-one of the many languages he was handling perfectly, just like the Italian, German and several Slavic languages other than Slovenian. Paradoxically, this symbolic destruction conjugated for him with the discovery of words and literature. As if this original trauma had forever released the little boy from his childish torpor: “I” awake “, as the Buddhists say.”
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