Boris Pahor's Literary Republic

Boris Pahor’s (1913) Literary Republic will be the first Slovenian project to comprehensively examine the textual construction of the autobiographical self through comprehensive study of this, oldest living Slovenian Trieste-based author’s entire body of work including his entire Vorlass (premortem bequest), which was acquired by the National and University Library of Slovenia over the course of the last decade. The project builds on the realization that partial examination of narrative prose, correspondence, and journals simply doesn’t suffice. The above textual forms in Pahor’s oeuvre and Vorlass must be viewed primarily as fragmented modes of expression and of the construction of the self, i.e. in their association with the author’s personality, and in their widest sense, as forms of autobiographical textuality. These serve to express the author’s individuality and personality, expose and construct the self, and lean on life experience – all this in profound expressivity. Thereby the letter, journal, and artistic prose, being layers of the same identity and mentality, will be examined analytically and in mutual correlation. Our sources include: 1) letters, or written correspondence, which represent the largest inventory unit (consisting of more than 5000 letters, according to our preparatory study’s preliminary estimation), 2) manuscripts/typescripts of journals, and 3) manuscripts/typescripts of artistic prose. These are the three main categories of the so-called Vorlass, i.e. materials bequeathed by the author during his lifetime. The use of Vorlass is another innovation in our proposed project. Partially leaning on the Austrian example, we will institute a new synergistic archival paradigm for the digital age by linking the Slovenian Literary Archive in the National and University Library (whose Manuscript Collection has traditionally specialized in gathering and processing manuscript cultural heritage) with literary history, history, and cultural science. This is an innovation in the collection, preservation, promotion, and scientific study of cultural heritage in its widest sense. Our aim is to apply a synergistic approach and so advance research, organization, and promotion of recent manuscript- and literary-documentary cultural heritage in an age of widespread display-based technologies. Studying the entirety of his oeuvre as a totality and our emphasis on Vorlass are the project’s two key, compatible, complementary tasks and objectives. It is worth emphasising that our project is tackling paper sources, which still make up the majority of the manuscript collection, at a time when the thread of hand- and letter writing cultures is at its end. Another parallel objective worth highlighting is our project’s use of new digital mapping information technologies to analyse and present the author’s literary republic in view of his openness to multicultural personal and institutional networks. The project is geographically and chronologically framed as a (with an emphasis on the second half of the century) miniature 20th-c. panorama linking the Slovenian diaspora, homeland and, audiences across Europe, both Americas, Canada, and Australia. From this perspective, it becomes increasingly easy to make out the contours of Boris Pahor’s literary republic, which doubles as an excellent example of implementation of intercultural dialogue and multiculturality.