Dušan Pirjevec

His father was the literary historian Avgust Pirjevec from Gorizia; his mother, Iva née Mozetič, came from a wealthy merchant family from Solkan.

[1] His sister, Ivica Pirjevec, later became an anti-Nazi agitator and was captured and killed by the Nazis in 1944 (a street in the Ljubljana neighbourhood of Tacen in the Šmarna Gora District bears her name).

Soon after Pirjevec's birth, the family moved to Ljubljana, in what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where his father worked as the chief librarian of the National Research Library.

In the years before World War II, he published several articles under different pseudonyms in the distinguished liberal-progressive literary journal Ljubljanski zvon.

In the early 1940s, he took part of the "Conflict on the Literary Left", a polemics involving the critical Croatian left-wing writer Miroslav Krleža against the Communist Party's ideological hardliners around Boris Ziherl and Edvard Kardelj.

Soon after the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Pirjevec joined the Partisan resistance in the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People, adopting the battle name Ahac, by which he remained known for the rest of his life.

[2] His talent in organization was spotted by the communist leader Aleš Bebler who secured Pirjevec's promotion to the rank of political commissar in the military units active in Lower Carniola.

In a highly controversial memoir published posthumously in 1990, fellow fighter and famous essayist Jože Javoršek even accused Pirjevec of burning war prisoners alive.

During this period, he became a close personal friend with Vitomil Zupan, with whom he engaged in several provocations of what they saw as the "reactionary and petit bourgeoise" cultural scene in Ljubljana.

Between 1961 and 1962, Pirjevec started a long polemic with the Serbian writer Dobrica Ćosić regarding the cultural policies in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

In this period, Pirjevec also developed a close friendship with literary historian Taras Kermauner and philosopher Ivo Urbančič, who represented critical positions towards the communist system.

He based his scholarly research on the esthetic theories of Hegel, Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin, but also on Sartre's existential philosophy and Roman Ingarden phenomenology of the literary science.

Pirjevec was portrayed in several novels and memoirs, including Gert Hofmann's Die Fistelstimme (1982), Milan Dekleva's Oko v zraku ("The Eye in the Air"), Iztok Osojnik's Braşow, Rudi Šeligo's Izgubljeni sveženj ("The Lost Bundle"), and Taras Kermauner's Navzkrižna srečavanja ("Crossed Encounters"), as well as in Boris A. Novak's epos Vrata nepovrata ("The Door of No Return").

Pirjevec's view on the national question, articulated in polemics with the ideologue of Yugoslav Socialism Edvard Kardelj, was particularly influential among the dissident Slovene intellectuals of the late 1970s and 1980s.