The Biographies of Boris Pahor

Abstract

After a brief terminological reflection on biography as a generic term for the field of academic research on life narratives, in this article I analyze five non-literary biographies of Boris Pahor, a Slovenian writer with Italian citizenship, which are available in book form and in Slovenian. His life has become the subject of biographical research, especially in recent decades, when interest in his work has increased in Slovenia and abroad. In addition to the general structure and content of biographies, I am primarily concerned with the questions of the extent to which these works are constructed in the context of understanding the position of the Slovenian minority in Italy, the extent to which they are about self-knowledge or understanding the Other, what function the author has in them and what their fundamental characteristics are from the perspective of biographical genres. In doing so, I describe their genre hybridity and note that the function of the author in them is dialogical—with two exceptions—and that the biographical subject is elusive and fluid, although it consistently asserts its national identity.