Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (Bilbao, September 29, 1864-Salamanca, December 31, 1936) was a Spanish writer and philosopher belonging to the generation of '98. variety of literary genres such as novel, essay, drama and poetry. Rector of the University of Salamanca throughout three periods, he was also a deputy of the Constituent Cortes of the Second Republic, from which he distanced himself to the point of supporting the military uprising that started the civil war, although it ended retracting that support.
Biography
Family, childhood and first letters
Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo was born at number 14 Ronda street in Bilbao, in the Siete Calles neighborhood. He was the third child and first son, after María Felisa, born in 1861, and María Jesús, who died in 1863, from the marriage between the merchant Félix María de Unamuno Larraza and his niece by blood, María Salomé Crispina Jugo Unamuno, seventeen years old. younger. Later Félix Gabriel José, Susana Presentación Felisa and María Mercedes Higinia were born. On his father's side, the philosopher was a cousin of the scientist, naturalist and anthropologist Telesforo Aranzadi Unamuno (1860-1945), with whom he prepared various oppositions.
His father, born in 1823, the son of a confectioner from Vergara, emigrated as a young man to the Mexican city of Tepic. Upon his return, in 1859, thanks to the accumulated capital, he requested a municipal license so that his bakery oven in Achuri could use water from the Uzcorta spring. In 1866, when he was forty-three years old, he requested permission to establish a bread office in the porches of the Plaza Vieja. He ran in the municipal elections held after La Gloriosa, being elected by the district of San Juan with 120 votes. On January 1, 1869, he was sworn in as councilor in the constitutive session of the new city council.
Before Félix, in 1835 and due to the Carlist war, two of his sisters had arrived in the Biscayan capital: Benita, born in 1811, and Valentina, fifteen years her junior. Benita, after the war, contracted marriage to José Antonio de Jugo y Erezcano, a small natural rentier from Ceberio, owner with his wife of the "La Vergaresa" confectionery. The youngest, Valentina, married Félix Aranzadi Aramburu in 1856, perhaps a former worker in her father's pastry shop who opened a chocolate shop in Bilbao with the same name as the business of their brothers-in-law. Félix and Valentina were the godparents at Miguel's baptism.
His mother, Salomé, an only child, was baptized in Bilbao on October 25, 1840. Shortly after he was four years old, his father died and his mother remarried in 1847, this time with José Narbaiza.
A few months after he was born, Unamuno's parents changed their address and settled on the second floor on the right-hand side of Calle de la Cruz number 7. On the ground floor was the chocolate shop of his uncles, who lived on the first floor. floor. He had not yet turned six when he lost his father. Félix de Unamuno died on July 14, 1870 in the Urberuaga spa, in Marquina, "of pulmonary tuberculosis disease".
He learned his first letters with Don Higinio at the private school of San Nicolás, located in an attic on Calle del Correo. time, would be his girlfriend and wife: Concepción Lizárraga, Concha.
When he finished his first studies at the Colegio de San Nicolás and was about to enter high school, he witnessed the siege of his city during the Third Carlist War, which he later reflected in his first novel, Peace in the war. The town was besieged by the Carlist troops under the command of General Elío, since December 28, 1873. As of February 1874, the situation worsened when any supply through the estuary was interrupted and, finally, the On the 21st of the same month, the bombardment of Bilbao began. The siege ended on May 2, 1874 with the entry of liberal troops under the command of General Gutiérrez de la Concha.For his biographers, this experience of the civil war marked his transition from childhood to adolescence.
High School
The next stage in Unamuno's academic life began on September 11, 1875, the date on which he took his entrance exam at the Instituto Vizcaíno to study the Baccalaureate, a test in which he obtained the qualification of "Approved", and did not appear for the award exam. Both the entrance exam and the first course had to be taken at the old school on Calle del Correo, since the Institute, during the war, had been converted into a military hospital. Santos Barrón was his teacher of Latin and Spanish, and Genaro Carreño of Universal Geography. He obtained the qualification of notable in all three subjects. Unamuno vividly described this formative period of his life in his Recuerdos de niñez y de mocedad (1908), of which there are different published versions, since the The author consolidated various articles published on the subject between 1891 and 1892.
The remaining four courses were taken at the institute. In general, he disliked the rote learning method that was applied in almost all subjects and was particularly bored by classes in Latin, History, Geography and Rhetoric, although he loved to memorize the examples of figures from the latter. He had no problem with Arithmetic, Physics, Geometry or Trigonometry, and he enjoyed Algebra. He also liked Philosophy, which was then included in a fourth-year subject: "Fundamentals of Psychology, Logic and Ethics", despite the fact that he did not appreciate the didactics of his teacher, the priest Felix Azcuenaga. In his Recuerdos de niñez y de mocedad, Unamuno recounts that he began to feel curious about philosophy by reading the only works on that subject that were in his father's library, which were by Jaime Balmes (" a kind of fifth-hand Scotsman") and Donoso Cortés. In those classes he could show off his talent as a speaker, often competing with his classmate Andrés Oñate. Finally, in the subjects taught by Fernando Mieg, Natural History, Physiology and Hygiene, he achieved outstanding marks, a probable consequence of the pedagogical system used by the professor who knew how to arouse the curiosity and interest of his students. As he literally says, his file, «dated June 19 and 21, 1880, he was approved in the exercises of the degree of Bachelor of Arts, on August 17 of the same the title was issued by the Rector of this district and on the 30th of the same month received the said title".
A good draftsman, he studied at Antonio Lecuona's workshop in Bilbao, but, as he himself confessed, his lack of mastery over color made him give up on an artistic career.
University studies
In September 1880 he moved to the University of Madrid to study Philosophy and Letters. It was precisely in that year that Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo had just published the first volume of his History of Spanish Heterodoxos (1880-1882), which impressed him not a little, especially as it concerned the Protestant José María Blanco. White, with whom he essentially identified, as the Count of Motrico pointed out. On June 21, 1883, at the age of nineteen, he finished his studies and took the undergraduate exam for said degree, obtaining an outstanding rating. A year later, on June 20, 1884, he received his doctorate with a thesis on the Basque language: Critique of the problem of the origin and prehistory of the Basque race. of the Basques, an idea contrary to the one that Basque nationalism, recently founded by the Arana Goiri brothers, will be developing in the coming years, who will advocate a Basque race uncontaminated by other races.
In 1884 he began working in a school as a Latin and psychology teacher, published an article entitled «On the alien element in the Basque language» and another costumbrista article, «Guernica», increasing his collaboration in 1886 with El Noticiero Bilbao.
In 1888, he competed in Madrid for the vacant chair of Psychology, Logic and Ethics at the Bilbao Institute and, while he was in the capital for this reason, the Vizcaya Provincial Council convened a position as temporary professor of the Basque language in the same institute with an “annual allowance of one thousand five hundred pesetas”. He presented himself to the latter together with Pedro Alberdi, Eustaquio Madina, Sabino Arana and the novelist and folklorist Resurrección María de Azkue, awarding the position to the latter. The first report presented by the secretary of the Provincial Council stated that, of the five candidates, only Unamuno and Azkue had a professional title. The first, Doctor of Philosophy and Letters and the second, Bachelor of Theology. According to Sabino Arana, the adjudication was due to "Deputy Larrazabal, a friend of Azkue and a friend of my late father, (who) wrote to me begging me to withdraw the application, so that the appointment would fall on Azkue, a clear-headed young cleric who had to support his mother and sisters and for this purpose and to display his faculties he wanted to settle in Bilbao».
He argued with Sabino Arana, who was beginning his nationalist activity, since he considered Unamuno a "Spanishist" Basque because, although he had already written some works in Basque, he considered this language close to disappearing and that bilingualism was not possible. «Basque and Spanish are incompatible, say what you want, and, if there is room for individuals, there is no room for bilingual peoples. This of bilinguality is a transitory state."
In 1889 he prepared other oppositions and traveled to Switzerland, Italy and France, where the Universal Exposition was held and the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated.
On January 31, 1891, he married his "Concha" in Guernica, Concepción Lizárraga Ecenarro, with whom he had been in love since he was a child and with whom he had nine children: Fernando, Pablo, Raimundo, Salomé, Felisa, José, María, Rafael and Ramón. Salomé later married the poet José María Quiroga Plá. Unamuno spends the winter months of that year dedicated to the preparation of the oppositions for a chair of Greek at the University of Salamanca, a less controversial subject, which he obtained from a court where Juan Valera was among others. In June 1891 he passed the competitive examinations and in July he took possession of the chair of Greek Language, returning to Bilbao. With the beginning of the course on October 1, he definitively moved to Salamanca. On the occasion of these oppositions, he became friends with Ángel Ganivet from Granada, a friendship that intensified until his suicide in 1898. He also studied the Cantar de Mio Cid between October 1892 and April 1893 to opt for the prize that the Royal Academy of Language offered for the best work on its vocabulary and grammar. He was a finalist, since the prize went to Ramón Menéndez Pidal; Unamuno's study was only published in 1977.
On October 11, 1894, he joined the Bilbao Socialist Group and collaborated with the weekly La Lucha de Clases in this city; in 1895 the first collection of his essays appeared, Around traditionalism , which would have a second edition in 1916; the execution of the Filipino leader and writer José Rizal in 1896, at the instigation of the religious orders established on the island, deeply moved him. He left the socialist party in 1897 suffering from a great depression: his third son fell ill with meningitis that degenerated into hydrocephalus, he believed he was at death's door as he suffered an anxiety neurosis; and dialectical materialism cannot explain his existential doubts and his religious concerns, which begin to dominate his thinking. In that year he also published his only historical novel, Paz en la guerra , about the third Carlist battle in Bilbao, but he was not satisfied because it was too well thought out and structured; reflects something of his spiritual crisis in his tragedy La esfinge, composed in 1897 but only premiered in 1909, where he tells the story of Ángel (an echo of his friend Ángel Ganivet, perhaps?), who, Pushed by his environment to enter the world of politics, he suffered a spiritual and values crisis that pushed him to let himself be killed. In addition, the Spanish-American War ended in 1898 in which Spain lost its colonies and it became evident that the country is not what it was believed to be. The corrupt Canovista system is in crisis and patriotic concerns are spreading: regenerationist thinking is in the air: Joaquín Costa publishes Reconstitution and Europeanization of Spain (1898). The group of "los tres" (Azorín, Baroja and Unamuno) and the so-called generation of 98, which will offer a subjective vision (artistic: narrative and poetic) of the decadence inspired by the objective studies of regenerationism, seeking in various trips around the country the real Spain, what Unamuno will call in the essays of 1895 eternal tradition or intrahistory, a history of small human groups against that of the official, metahistorical, false and merely epiphenomenal Spain. In 1898 Unamuno already had five children and multiplied his efforts and his journalistic collaborations to be able to support his family.
Since the beginning of his stay in Salamanca, he actively participated in its cultural life, and his presence on the terrace of the Café Literario Novelty, next to the town hall, became a custom that he maintained until 1936. From that terrace, when Unamuno, referring to the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, was asked if it was a perfect square or not, he stated: «It is a quadrilateral. Irregular, but amazingly harmonious". In 1900 the minister appointed him, at only thirty-six years of age, rector of the University of Salamanca for the first time, a position he held three times. He created a chair of Philology compared that he ended up ruling. In 1901 he began to read his favorite philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard; he even learned Danish to understand it better, and his confrontation with the bishop of Salamanca Tomás Cámara intensified.In 1902 he published the novel Love and Pedagogy , a severe criticism of the educational thought of positivism and the repression of all natural impulse. He maintains in this work, as in others, the essential dichotomy between life and thought. They name him maintainer of various floral games. On the occasion of the tercentenary of the publication of Quixote (1905), he published his unorthodox essay Life of Don Quixote and Sancho on heroism and erostratism and received the Grand Cross of Alfonso XII. In 1906 he was attacked again by anxiety neurosis. In August 1909, during the Melilla War and after the Barranco del Lobo Disaster, he wrote his controversial poem "Salutation to the Rifeños", where he sided with them against the mining ambitions of Westerners., represented by Spain. He argues with Ramiro de Maeztu and José Ortega y Gasset and his articles are published throughout Spain and America. In 1909 he managed to premiere his tragedy La esfinge in Las Palmas. He traveled through Spain and Portugal and in 1911 published Rosary of lyrical sonnets, For the lands of Portugal and Spain, Soliloquios y conversaciones and Una love story; in 1912 a collection of essays appeared, Against this and that. In 1913 the first of his important philosophical works appeared, On the tragic feeling of life in men and in peoples , as well as his first dramatic work, La venda . In 1913 he traveled through Las Hurdes with Maurice Legendre and Jacques Chevalier looking for the miserable real Spain (Alfonso XIII would do so eight years later, together with Dr. Gregorio Marañón, in 1922).
During the monarchy of Alfonso XIII until the fall of Primo de Rivera
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In 1914 he published his nivola / most important novel, Mist, written in 1907, which reflected the existential insubstantiality of life and the problem of identity and survival through an "unreal" character, Augusto Pérez, anticipating the use of metafiction; the weight of the European irrationalist philosophy in this creation is notable (Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, mainly), but also that of the classical one (Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Spencer). In August 1914, the Minister of Public Instruction dismissed him from the rectory for political reasons, although the official pretext is an anomalous validation of a Colombian's bachelor's degree; The adverse reactions to this government decision are not only national, but international.
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In 1917 he published his nivola Abel Sánchez. A story of passion, where he exemplifies envy as an essential element of the Spanish character, which he calls cainismo, in the form of ignoring everything elevated, honest and hard-working, of "natural superiority", as he exposes in the prologue to the second edition; For example, the protagonist is not the one who gives the work its title, but Dr. Joaquín Monegro, who sees all his efforts to do good to others scorned and in the end kills Abel when he steals his grandson's love. The following year (1918) he was elected councilor of the Salamanca city council and unsuccessfully premiered his tragedy Fedra at the Ateneo, perhaps too dense and lacking in action for popular taste. In 1920 he was chosen by his fellow dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and published his religious poem El Cristo de Velázquez, an attempt to make amends for his disbelieving poem "The Reclining Christ of Santa Clara& #3. 4; that he published on May 26, 1913 in Los Lunes del Imparcial and that aroused adverse reactions in Catholic circles, who considered it blasphemous and Three exemplary novels and a prologue . In that same year he was sentenced to sixteen years in prison for insulting the king in an opinion article, but the sentence was never carried out.
[...] that adventurous of bad faith, rapacious, meek and incapable that is Primo de Rivera, whom I shall crush as Sarmiento to Rosas.
In 1921 he was appointed vice-rector. His constant attacks on the king and the dictator Primo de Rivera led him to dismiss him again and banish him to Fuerteventura in February 1924. On July 9, he was pardoned, but he went into voluntary exile in France; first to Paris, where he was very well received by the Hispanist Jean Cassou, who introduced him to the Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes and the Czech-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and, shortly after, to Hendaye. He stayed there until the fall of the Primo de Rivera regime in 1930, and when he returned to Salamanca he entered the city with a tremendous welcome.
The Republic
Miguel de Unamuno presented himself as a candidate for councilor for the Republican-Socialist Conjunction for the elections of April 12, 1931, and was elected. On April 14, it is he who proclaims the Republic in Salamanca: from the balcony of the town hall, the philosopher declares that "a new era begins and a dynasty that has impoverished, debased and stupefied us ends".
The Republic reinstates him as rector of the University of Salamanca. He presented himself to the Cortes elections and was elected deputy as an independent by the candidacy of the republican-socialist conjunction in Salamanca, exercising his position between July 12, 1931 and October 9, 1933.
However, the writer and intellectual, who in 1931 had said that he had contributed more than any other Spaniard —with his pen, with his opposition to the king and the dictator, with his exile...— to the advent of the Republic, began to become disillusioned, like other intellectuals who had accompanied him in his fight for the Republic, such as José Ortega y Gasset and Ramón Pérez de Ayala. In 1933 he decided not to run for re-election. Furthermore, he had also quarreled with many other famous intellectuals, who, however, admired him, such as Ortega himself, who could not stand his subjectivism since at least 1909, when he met with him in Salamanca; Ramón Gómez de la Serna noticed that when Unamuno entered the Revista de Occidente , Ortega would get up and leave, to which he mischievously added: "I never noticed his absence"; or Pío Baroja, whose intransigence made him extremely uncomfortable (he wrote that "Unamuno believed everything. He was, without meaning to, a philosopher, mathematician, geographer, philologist, naturalist, architect, as well as a seer and a prophet" and "would not have let him speak for nobody's sake. I didn't listen"), although he noticed that his novels seemed written "to make the reader uncomfortable". Nor did Valle-Inclán or Fernando Pessoa like him too much, who suffered from being ignored and noticed the absurdity of his contradictions. Imbued with what he called, with those neologisms that characterize his style, his alterutralidad or active neutrality, the great philologist Ernst Robert Curtius came to define it as excitator Hispaniae.
In 1934 he retired from his teaching activity and was named Rector for life, with an honorary title, of the University of Salamanca, which created a chair with his name. In 1935 he was named an honorary citizen of the Republic. As a result of his disenchantment, he publicly expressed his criticism of the agrarian reform, religious politics, the political class, the government and Manuel Azaña. On February 10, 1935, he received a visit from José Antonio Primo de Rivera and other Falangists at his home. and attends the presentation ceremony of the Falange in Salamanca, according to his correspondence with the writer Concha Espina.
According to a controversial statement by Manuel Menchón, in 1935 the Nobel Prize for Literature was forfeited. A report from the "Ministry for Education and Propaganda" of the Third Reich addressed to the Nobel Foundation requested that the prize not be awarded to Miguel de Unamuno since "After the political change that occurred since 1933, Unamuno has taken a so clear against us that it can be considered as the spiritual spokesman for the fight against Germany in the intellectual circles of Spain. Because of this attitude, we do not support his application for the Nobel Prize.
The Civil War
At the start of the civil war, Unamuno supported the national side: he wanted to see in the military a group of authoritarian regenerationists willing to channel the country's drift. When on July 19 practically the entire Salamanca consistory was dismissed by the new authorities and replaced by supporters, Unamuno accepted the act of councilor offered by the new mayor, Commander Del Valle.
In the summer of 1936, he called on European intellectuals to support the insurgents, declaring that they represent the defense of Western civilization and Christian tradition, which causes sadness and horror in the world, according to the historian Fernando García de Cortázar. Azaña dismisses him, but the Burgos government reinstates him in office.
However, the enthusiasm for the uprising soon turned into disappointment, especially given the turn taken by the repression in Salamanca. According to the historian Francisco Blanco Nieto, Unamuno already showed his disagreement with several repressive acts on July 19 and 20, although he also donated 5,000 pesetas to the insurgent army, perhaps out of fear. Letters from women pile up in Unamuno's pockets of friends, acquaintances and strangers, who ask her to intercede for their imprisoned, tortured and shot husbands. At the end of July, his friends from Salamanca Prieto Carrasco (Republican mayor of Salamanca) and José Andrés y Manso (Socialist deputy) were murdered, and his favorite student and rector of the University of Granada, Salvador Vila Hernández, arrested on October 7.. Also in prison are his close friends, Dr. Filiberto Villalobos and the journalist José Sánchez Gómez, who is waiting to be shot. His friend, the pastor of the Anglican Church and Freemason Atilano Coco, is threatened with death (he will be shot in December 1936). At the beginning of October, Unamuno visits Franco in the episcopal palace to beg in vain for clemency for his imprisoned friends. Salvador Vila is executed on October 22, the same day that Unamuno was dismissed as rector by order of Franco. The Basque writer, already disenchanted with the consequences of the military pronouncement, would go so far as to attribute (in private communication to a friend) the origin of the "stupid regime of terror" that prevailed in the nationalist zone to "the marriage of the mentality of the barracks with that of the sacristy". And in the hasty handwritten notes for The tragic resentment of life. Notas sobre la revolución y guerra civil españolas, reviewing the victims of violence, several of them close to him, he wrote:
The wets of intellectuals sneezed so much to the Hun like the Hot. If the fascists are not shot, they will be shot by the Marxists. [...] Poor dean of Toledo, Polo Benito! Poor Arturo Pérez Martín! Poor Prieto Carrasco! Poor Beúnza! But who are good people? Who is good? Only God is good, "but Jesus said to him, "What do you say good to me? no one good but one, God."Miguel de Unamuno
You will win, but you will not convince
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Miguel de Unamuno also publicly regretted his support for the uprising. On October 12, 1936, in the auditorium of the University of Salamanca, during the opening ceremony of the academic year that was traditionally held on the same date as Columbus Day, the rector publicly confronted General Millán-Astray, that he had pronounced some rants against intelligence and exalting death. Unamuno was later attributed a lapidary speech that would have included his famous phrase:
You will overcome, but you will not convince. You will overcome because you have great brute strength, but you will not convince because convincing means persuading. And to persuade you need something that is lacking in this struggle, reason and right. I find it useless to ask you to think of Spain.
The Last Days
The last days of his life (from October to December 1936) were spent under house arrest in his home, in a state, in the words of Fernando García de Cortázar, of resigned desolation, despair, and loneliness. On the 20th or 21st October, in an interview with the French journalist Jérôme Tharaud (commonly and erroneously attributed to the writer Nikos Kazantzakis) stated:
As soon as the Salvadoran movement that was seized by General Franco, I joined him saying that what needs to be saved in Spain is the Christian Western civilization and with it national independence, since it is here, in national territory, venting an international war. (...) As I was horrified by the characters that this tremendous civil war took without barracks due to a true collective mental illness, an epidemic of madness with a certain pathological-corporal substrate. The inaudites saved from Marxist, red hordes exceed all descriptions and I must save myself cheap rhetoric. And they give the non-socialist tone, neither communists, nor trade unionists, nor anarchists, but gangs of degenerate evildoers, excriminal borne without ideology that will satisfy ferocious atavistic passions without any ideology. And the natural reaction to this also takes many times, unfortunately, brakepathic characters. It's the regime of terror. Spain is terrified of itself. And if it is not contained in time it will come to the brink of moral suicide. If the miserable government of Madrid has not been able, nor wanted to resist the pressure of Marxist savagery, we must hope that the Burgos government will have the courage to oppose those who want to establish another regime of terror. (...) I insist that the sacred duty of the movement which is gloriously headed by General Franco is to save Christian Western civilization and national independence, since Spain should not be at the dictation of Russia or any other foreign power, since here an international war is being waged on national territory. And it is also a duty to bring peace of conviction and conversion and to achieve the moral union of all the Spaniards to restore the homeland that is bleeding, bleeding, poisoning and numbing. And to do so, prevent reactionaries from going in their reaction beyond justice and even humanity, as they sometimes treat. That it is not the way to form compulsive national trade unions, by force and by threat, forcing by terror to join them, nor to those convinced or converted. Sad thing would be that the barbarian, anti-civil and inhumane Bolshevist regime would be replaced with a barbarian, anti-civil and inhumane regime of totalitarian servitude. Neither one nor the other, which in the background are the same.
And after a few days, this time with Kazantzakis:
At this critical moment of Spain's pain, I know I have to follow the soldiers. They're the only ones who will return the order. They know what discipline means and they know how to impose it. No, I haven't become a rightist. Don't listen to what people say. I have not betrayed the cause of freedom. But for now, it is absolutely essential that the order be restored. But any day I will get up — soon — and I will be thrown into the struggle for freedom, myself. No, I'm not a fascist or Bolshevik; I'm a loner.
On November 21, write to Lorenzo Giusso:
The barbarism is unanimous. It's the regime of terror on both sides. Spain is scared of itself, horrified. Catholic and anti-Catholic leprosy has sprang. They hurt and ask for blood. Huns and hot dogs. And here's my poor Spain, it's bleeding, ruining, poisoning and numbing...
In one of his last letters, dated December 13, he gives his vision of the military in revolt given the turn the conflict was taking, reappearing his famous sentence:
This is a campaign against liberalism, not against Bolshevism. Everyone who was a minister in the Republic, however right, is already banned. (...) They will overcome, but will not convince; they will conquer, but will not convert.
He died suddenly, at his home in Salamanca on Calle Bordadores, on the afternoon of December 31, 1936, during a visit to him by Falangist Bartolomé Aragón, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law. Despite his virtual seclusion, at his funeral he was exalted as a Falangist hero. Upon his death, Antonio Machado wrote: «Let us point out today that Unamuno died suddenly, like someone who dies in war. Against whom? Perhaps against himself; perhaps also, although many do not believe it, against the men who have sold Spain and betrayed its people. Against the people themselves? I have never believed it and I will never believe it."
His remains rest together with those of his eldest daughter, Salomé (married to his secretary and poet José María Quiroga Plá and who died three years earlier), in a niche in the San Carlos Borromeo cemetery in Salamanca, after this epitaph: « Put me, Eternal Father, in your chest, mysterious home, I will sleep there, because I come undone from the hard struggle.
Work
Narrative
The narrative work of Miguel de Unamuno, in chronological order, is as follows:
- Since 1886 he wrote a total of 87 short stories and stories[chuckles]required]. Of them, in 1913 he selected only twenty-six for his book The mirror of death. The title of the book or Revolution in the Library of Ciudámuerta.
- Peace in the War (1897), a work in which he uses the context of the third Carlist War (which he met in his childhood) to raise the relationship of self with the world, conditioned by the knowledge of death.
- Love and pedagogy (1902), which unites the comic and the tragic in a reduction to the absurdity of positivist sociology.
- Memories of childhood and youth (1908) is an autobiographical work. In it the Basque author reflects on the first years of his life in Bilbao.
- The mirror of death (1913), book of stories.
- Niebla (1914), the key work of Unamuno, which he characterizes with the name "nivola" to separate it from the supposed fixed form of the novel.
- In 1917 he wrote Abel Sánchezwhere he invests the Biblical theme of Cain and Abel to present the anatomy of envy.
- Tulio Montalbán (1920) is a short novel about the intimate problem of the defeat of the true personality by the public image of the same man.
- Also in 1920 three short novels are published with a prominent prologue: Three exemplary novels and a prologue.
- The last extensive narrative is Aunt Tula (1921), presenting the longing for maternity already outlined in Love and pedagogy and Two mothers.
- Teresa (1924) is a narrative picture that contains becquerian rhymes, achieving in idea and in reality the recreation of the beloved.
- How a novel is made (1927) is the autopsy of the novel unamuniana.
- San Manuel Well, martyr (1930), in which he speaks of a priest who preaches something in which he cannot believe.
- Don Sandalio, chess player (1930).
- Intimate journal (posttum), written in 1897, published in 1970.
Novel
In the literary age that surrounded the author at the time, rigid procedural patterns were required when writing and publishing a novel: a particular theme, specific time lines and action, social conventions... a kind of script not written but accepted by all. And this supposed Unamuno a corset from which he would try to get rid of in some way, to express himself in its pages as he deemed appropriate. His solution was to invent a new literary genre, which he named "nivola", and in this way, he could not receive any criticism in terms of rules of aesthetics or composition, because he would only have to attend to the rules that he himself had designed for his new genre. This is how he expresses it in Niebla (1914), in chapter XVII:
- And what is your argument, if you can know?"My novel has no argument, or rather, it will be the one who comes out. The argument is made alone.
- And how is that?
"Well, look, one of these days that I didn't know what to do, but I was eager to do something, a very intimate itch, a mockery of fantasy, I said: I'm going to write a novel, but I'm going to write it as you live, not knowing what will come. I sat down, grabbed some cutters and started the first thing that occurred to me, not knowing what I would follow, without any plan. My characters will be doing as they obey and speak, especially as they speak; their character will gradually be formed. And at times his character will be that of not having it.
- Yeah, like mine.
- I don't know. That'll come out. I'll get carried away.
- And there's psychology, descriptions?
- What is there is dialogue; especially dialogue. The thing is that the characters talk, talk a lot, even if they say nothing (...). The thing is, in this novel I'm going to put everything I can think of, whatever it is.
"Well it will end up not being a novel.
- No, it will be...Nivola.
Philosophy
Unamuno's philosophy was not systematic, but a denial of any system and an affirmation of faith "in itself". He was formed intellectually under rationalism and positivism and during his youth he wrote articles in which his sympathy for socialism was clearly appreciated and he expressed great concern for the situation in which Spain found itself.
The influence of philosophers such as Adolf von Harnack led to Unamuno's rejection of rationalism. Such abandonment is evident in his work San Manuel Bueno, mártir, where the main characters symbolize the three theological virtues (faith, hope and charity) and the metaphor of snow falling on the lake illustrates his position. in favor of faith —the mountain on which the snow creates forms, landscapes, in front of the lake, where it dissolves and becomes nothing. His religious thought has been inscribed in Christian existentialism.
For him death is something definitive, life ends. However, he believed that the belief that our identity survives death is necessary in order to live. Of course, you need to believe in a God, have faith, which is not rational; thus there is always an internal conflict between the necessity of faith and the reason that denies such faith. In the same way, feeling and reason are like oil and water: they cannot mix ("think the feeling and feel the thought"). He is considered one of the predecessors of the existentialist school that, several decades later, would find its peak in European philosophy as a reflection of the doubts that the great world wars raised about the human condition. Thus, he went so far as to say that he studied Danish in order to read Søren Kierkegaard directly, whom in his works he used to call, in his peculiar and cordial style, "brother"; However, the root of his interest in the Nordic languages dates back to much earlier than his discovery of the philosopher, and has to do with his reading of the works of the Danish Sephardic philosopher Georges Brandes and the theater of the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen that his friend encouraged in him. Nordicophile Ángel Ganivet, as the biographer of the Bilbao writer Emilio Salcedo has pointed out.
As a Cervantist, he was the author of a Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (1905).
The concern for Spain was manifested in the essays collected in his works:
- About Castroism (1895);
- Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (1905);
- For lands of Portugal and Spain (1911).
During the war and starting in August 1936, Unamuno began to take notes for a book that he would never write and in which he expressed his political testament: The tragic resentment of life. Notes on the Spanish revolution and civil war.
His more purely philosophical works are:
- From the tragic feeling of life (1912) and
- The agony of Christianity (1925).
Poetic works
Unamuno was fundamentally a great poet of Post-Romanticism; the paradoxes of this aesthetic were well established in him. For Unamuno, art was a means of expressing the concerns of the spirit. For this reason, in poetry and in the novel he deals with the same themes that he had developed in the essays: his spiritual anguish and the pain caused by the silence of God, time and death; patriotic concern, cainism, exile, the need for individual survival and the impossibility of reconciling feeling and thought. He was also moved by the austere landscape of Castilla, which reflected with its authenticity the identity and the self-sacrificing and noble spirit that he tried to embody.
He has always felt attracted to traditional meters and, although in his early compositions he tries to eliminate rhyme, he later resorts to it, feeling a particular predilection for romance and sonnets. Critics have pointed out his scarce attention to the sonority of the verse at a time when it was common to exaggerate it (modernism) as well as his scant imagination of his metaphors, but they have appreciated in him his great mastery of the concept and the great post-romantic inspiration from him. In fact, he himself considered that it was the genre that he expressed the most to him. Among his poetic works, the following stand out: Poesías (1907), Rosario de sonnetos líricos (1911), El Cristo de Velázquez (1920), Spanish wanderings and visions (1922), Rhymes from within (1923), Teresa. Rhymes of an unknown poet (1924), From Fuerteventura to Paris (1925), Romancero del destierro (1928) and Cancionero (1953).
Since his first book, Poesías (1907), outlines the themes that will dominate Unamuno's poetics: religious conflict, homeland and domestic life. He dedicated these beautiful words to the city: «Salamanca, Salamanca, reborn marvel, academic lever of my vision of Castile».
Rough and prose writer, he has never been recognized for harmonious and elaborate verses, but for short, Castilian and very personal stanzas: in the words of Ramón Irigoyen, prologue writer for Niebla in the edition of El Mundo, Unamuno was always a "premature ejaculator of verse", referring to his scant attention when reviewing his finished poems, compared to other poets of the time such as Machado or Juan Ramón Jiménez.
Theater
Unamuno's dramatic work presents his usual philosophical line; hence it obtained rather little success. Topics such as the investigation of individual spirituality, faith as a «vital lie» and the problem of double personality are dealt with in La esfinge (1898), La venda (1899) and The Other (1932). He updates the Euripidean tragedy in Phaedra (1918) and translates Seneca's Medea (1933).
Unamuno theater has the following characteristics:
- It is schematic, it is stripped of all artifice and in it only have room for conflicts and passions that affect the characters. This austerity is the influence of classical Greek tragedy.
- If the characters and conflicts appear naked, the stage is also stripped of all artifice. It's a simplified scenography to the maximum.
- What really matters is to present the drama that happens inside the characters and, without a doubt, their interior.
With the symbolization of passions and the austerity of both words and scenery, Unamuno's theater connects with European dramatic experiences and opens a path to Spanish theatrical renewal, which will be followed by Ramón Valle-Inclán, Azorín and, later, Federico García Lorca.
Theatrical works
- The sphinx (1898)
- The bandage (1899)
- The Princess Doña Lambra (1909)
- The deceased (1909)
- The past that returns (1910)
- Fedra (1910)
- Soledad (1921)
- Raquel chained (1921)
- Dream Shadows (1926)
- The other (1926)
- Brother John or the world is theater (1929)
- Reason and faith
Travel books
- Notes for a trip to France, Italy and Switzerland (1889, printed in 2017)
- Landscapes (1902)
- From my country (1903).
- For lands of Portugal and Spain (1911)
- Spanish ideas and visions (1922)
- Landscapes of the Soul (1979)
- Madrid, Castilla (2001)
Epistolary
Unamuno was a true epistolographer. & # 34; He used to write three or four letters a day, about fifty thousand letters could be counted. And only in the House of Unamuno there are twenty thousand received. But, during the Franco regime, many got rid of the letters that the writer sent them out of fear...". The most recent and complete edition of his letters (2017), produced by the Hispanists Colette and Jean-Claude Rabaté, It consists of eight volumes (Epistolario. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2017-) with 8,000 pages and nearly 3,000 letters.
Editions
There is no critical edition of the complete works of Unamuno, a very complex task, because, although the writer said he did not retouch his works, at least in the first years of his life (and even later) he contradicted himself, recasting, rewriting, correcting and expanding various editions, without touching its essential spirit; In addition, the press articles that he published in Europe and America are more than numerous. Already during the author's lifetime, the Renacimiento publishing house had dared to publish some incomplete Complete Works.
There is an edition of Complete Works (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado / Editorial Vergara, 1958-1964, 16 vols. of more than a thousand pages) carried out by his disciple Manuel García Blanco, later reprinted (Las Américas / Escélicer edition, 1966-1971, in 9 vols.). Ricardo Senabre began to publish Complete Works first at Turner publishing house (2005) and then halves with the José Antonio de Castro Foundation for his Castro Library, of which in 2020 ten volumes had already been published.
- Miguel de Unamuno, Complete works. Study, editing, bibliography and notes by Manuel García Blanco. Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado / Editorial Vergara, 1958-1964, XVI tomos.
- Volume I: Landscape.
- Volume II: Novel I
- Volume III: Test I
- Volume IV: Test II
- Volume V: From this and from that
- Volume VI: Race and tongue.
- Volume VII: Prologues, lectures, speeches.
- Volume VIII: Letters from America and other readings
- Volume IX: Novel, II and monodiálo.
- Volume X: Autobiography and personal memories.
- Volume XI: Meditations and other writings.
- Volume XII: Theatre.
- Volume XIII: Poetry.
- Volume XIV: Poetry II.
- Volume XV: Poetry III.
- Volume XVI: Spiritual essays and other writings.
Unamuno and cinema
Film Adaptations
- All a man (1943), an Argentine film by Belgian director Pierre Chenal that adapts the novel Nothing less than a man..
- Abel Sánchez (1946), adaptation of the homonymous novel directed by Carlos Serrano de Osma.
- The delivery (1954), by Julián Soler. Mexican film that adapts Nothing less than a man..
- Aunt Tula (1964), a Spanish film directed by Miguel Picazo adapting the acclaimed homonymous novel.
- Niebla (1965), mini-series made by Televisión Española that adapts Miguel de Unamuno's homonymous novel.
- Nothing less than a man. (1971), by Rafael Gil, who adapts the homonymous novel.
- Niebla (1976), telefilm de Televisión Española directed by Fernando Méndez-Leite that adapts the novel Niebla.
- The four girlfriends of Augusto Pérez (1976), by José Jara, based on the novel Niebla.
- Act of possession (1977), directed by Javier Aguirre.
- Fedra (1981), by Mercè Vilaret, adaptation of the play of the same name.
- All a man (1982), by Rafael Villaseñor, adaptation of Nothing less than a man..
- Fall rain (1988), Spanish film directed by José Ángel Rebolledo from the play Dream Shadows.
Miguel de Unamuno as a character
Miguel de Unamuno has appeared as a character in at least three films, which have addressed different moments and aspects of his life.
- In the 2015 film The island of the wind, by Manuel Menchón, his exile in Fuerteventura was approached in 1924 for his constant criticism of the Primo de Rivera regime. It was interpreted by the actor and scholar of the RAE José Luis Gómez.
- In the 2019 film As long as the war lasts, by Alejandro Amenábar, is shown the evolution in the thought of the bilbain writer during the first compass of the Spanish Civil War, until his historic confrontation with Millán Astray in the Paraninfo of the University. It was interpreted by Karra Elejalde.
- In October 2020 the documentary was released at the Seminci Words for an End of the World, led by Manuel Menchón who considers that “the official account on that day is false”, and therefore the known account of the writer’s death. It also collects the latest inquiries regarding the famous and questioned “You will have but will not convince.” The documentary is based on the research carried out by Jean-Claude Rabaté and Colette Rabaté, a French biographer marriage from Unamuno.
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