Miguel de Unamuno

Miguel de Unamuno
Miguel de Unamuno
	Photographed in 1925
Born	Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo; September 29, 1864; Bilbao (Spain)
Died	December 31, 1936 (aged 72); Salamanca (Spain)
Resting place	San Carlos Borromeo Cemetery
Alma mater	University of Madrid
Occupations	Writer and philosopher
Spouse	Concha Lizárraga (m. 1891; died 1934)
Children	Nine children:; Fernando Esteban Saturnino (1892–1978); Pablo Gumersindo (1894–1955); Raimundo (1896–1902); Salomé (1897–1934); Felisa (1899–1980); José (1900–1974); María (1902–1983); Rafael (1905–1981); Ramón (1910–1969)
	Writing career
Language	Spanish; Basque
Genres	Essay, poetry, novel and theater
Notable work	See Works
Movement	Generation of '98

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. In his work he cultivated a wide variety of literary genres, such as the novel, the essay, theater and poetry. Rector of the University of Salamanca over three periods, he was also a deputy in the constituent Cortes of the Second Republic, from which he gradually distanced himself to the point of supporting the military uprising that began the civil war, although he ended up retracting that support.

He was posthumously awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Salamanca.^[1]

Biography

Family, childhood and early schooling

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo^[2] was born at number 16 of Ronda Street in Bilbao, in the Siete Calles neighborhood. He was the third child and first son, after María Felisa, born in 1861,^[3] and María Jesús, who died in 1863,^[4] of the marriage between the merchant Félix María de Unamuno Larraza and his niece, María Salomé Crispina Jugo Unamuno, seventeen years his junior.^[5] Later came Félix Gabriel José,^[6] Susana Presentación Felisa^[7] and María Mercedes Higinia.^[8] 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 for several competitive examinations.

His father, born in 1823, the son of a confectioner from Vergara,^[9] emigrated as a young man to the Mexican city of Tepic. On his return, in 1859, thanks to the capital he had accumulated, he applied for a municipal license so that his bakery oven in Achuri could use water from the Uzcorta spring.^[10] In 1866, at the age of forty-three, he requested permission to set up a bread shop in the arcades of the Plaza Vieja.^[11] He ran in the municipal elections held after the Glorious Revolution, being elected for the District of San Juan with 120 votes.^[12] On January 1, 1869, he was sworn in as a councilman at the inaugural session of the new city council.^[13]

Before Félix, in 1835 and because of the Carlist war, two of his sisters had arrived in the Biscayan capital: Benita, born in 1811, and Valentina, fifteen years her junior.^[14] Benita, once the war was over, married José Antonio de Jugo y Erezcano,^[15] a small rentier native of Ceberio,^[16] who owned with his wife the confectionery "La Vergaresa". The youngest, Valentina, married in 1856 Félix Aranzadi Aramburu, perhaps a former worker in her father's pastry shop,^[14] who opened a chocolate shop in Bilbao with the same name that his in-laws' business had had.^[17] Félix and Valentina were the godparents at Miguel's baptism.^[18]

His mother, Salomé, an only child, was baptized in Bilbao on October 25, 1840.^[19] Shortly after she turned four her father died^[20] and her mother remarried in 1847, this time to José Narbaiza.^[21]

A few months after his birth, Unamuno's parents moved and settled in the second-floor right apartment at number 7 of Calle de la Cruz. On the ground floor was his aunt and uncle's chocolate shop; they lived on the first floor.^[18] He was not yet six years old when he lost his father. Félix de Unamuno died on July 14, 1870, at the Urberuaga spa, in Marquina, "of pulmonary phthisis".^[12]

He learned his first letters with Don Higinio at the private school of San Nicolás, located in an attic on Calle del Correo.^[22] In the catechism classes preparing for his first communion, at the church of San Juan, he met the girl who, in time, would become his sweetheart and wife: Concepción Lizárraga, Concha.^[23]

On finishing his first studies at the San Nicolás school and about to enter secondary school, he witnessed the siege of his city during the Third Carlist War, which he would later reflect in his first novel, Paz en la guerra. The town was besieged by the Carlist troops under the command of General Elío from December 28, 1873. From February 1874, the situation worsened when all supplies through the estuary were cut off and, finally, on the 21st of that same month, the bombardment of Bilbao began. The siege ended on May 2, 1874, with the entry of the liberal troops under the command of General Gutiérrez de la Concha.^[24] For his biographers, this experience of civil war marked his transition from childhood to adolescence.^[24]^[25]

Secondary education

The next stage in Unamuno's academic life began on September 11, 1875, the date on which he took his entrance examination at the Instituto Vizcaíno^[26] to study for the Bachillerato, an exam in which he obtained the grade of "Pass", and he did not sit the prize examination.^[27] Both the entrance examination and the first year had to be taken at the old school on Calle del Correo,^[28] since the Instituto had been turned into a military hospital during the war.^[29] Santos Barrón was his teacher of Latin and Castilian, and Genaro Carreño of Universal Geography. He obtained the grade of notable (very good) in all three subjects.^[27] Unamuno described this formative period of his life very vividly in his Recuerdos de niñez y de mocedad (1908), of which there are different published versions, since the author reworked various articles on the subject published between 1891 and 1892.

He completed the remaining four years at the Instituto. In general, he disliked the method of rote learning applied in almost all subjects, and he was bored in particular by the classes in Latin, History, Geography and Rhetoric, although he loved memorizing the examples of figures of speech in the latter. He had no problems with Arithmetic, Physics, Geometry or Trigonometry, and he enjoyed Algebra. He also liked Philosophy, which at the time appeared in a fourth-year subject, "Fundamentals of Psychology, Logic and Ethics", even though he did not appreciate the teaching method of his teacher, the priest Félix Azcuénaga. In his Recuerdos de niñez y de mocedad, Unamuno relates that he began to be curious about philosophy by reading the only works on the subject in his father's library, which were by Jaime Balmes ("a sort of fifth-hand Scotsman") and Donoso Cortés.^[30] In those classes he could show off his talent as an orator, often competing with his classmate Andrés Oñate. Finally, in the subjects taught by Fernando Mieg, Natural History, Physiology and Hygiene, he obtained outstanding grades in each, probably as a consequence of the teaching system used by the professor, who knew how to awaken his students' curiosity and interest.^[31]^[32] As his record states, literally, "on June 19 and 21, 1880, he passed the examinations for the degree of Bachelor of Arts; on August 17 of the same year the title was issued to him by the Rector of this district, and on the 30th of the same month he received the said title".^[27]

A good draftsman, he studied in the Bilbao workshop of Antonio Lecuona,^[33] but, as he himself confessed, his lack of mastery of color made him give up an artistic career.^[34]

University studies

In September 1880 he moved to the University of Madrid to study Philosophy and Letters. In that very year Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo had just published the first volume of his Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880–1882), which impressed him not a little, especially regarding the Protestant José María Blanco White, with whom he identified in essentials, as the Count of Motrico pointed out.^[35] On June 21, 1883, at nineteen, he finished his studies and took the degree examination for that licentiate, obtaining the grade of outstanding. A year later, on June 20, 1884, he received his doctorate with a thesis on the Basque language: Crítica del problema sobre el origen y prehistoria de la raza vasca.^[36] In it he anticipated his idea about the origin of the Basques, an idea contrary to the one that Basque nationalism, recently founded by the Arana Goiri brothers, would develop in the years to come, advocating a Basque race uncontaminated by other races.

In 1884 he began working at a school as a teacher of Latin and psychology, published an article titled "Del elemento alienígena en el idioma vasco" and another, a costumbrista piece, "Guernica", and increased his contributions in 1886 to El Noticiero Bilbaíno.

In 1888 he sat the competitive examination in Madrid for the vacant chair of Psychology, Logic and Ethics at the Instituto of Bilbao and, while he was in the capital for this reason, the Provincial Council of Biscay announced a position of interim teacher of the Basque language at the same Instituto with "an annual allowance of one thousand five hundred pesetas". He applied for the latter together with Pedro Alberdi, Eustaquio Madina, Sabino Arana and the novelist and folklorist Resurrección María de Azkue, and the position was awarded to the latter. The first report submitted by the secretary of the Provincial Council stated that, of the five candidates, only Unamuno and Azkue held a professional degree: the former, a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters, and the latter, a Bachelor's in Theology. According to Sabino Arana, the award was due to "Deputy Larrazabal, a friend of Azkue and a friend of my late father, (who) wrote to me begging me to withdraw my application, so that the appointment would fall to Azkue, a bright young cleric who had to support his mother and sisters and who, to that end and in order to develop his faculties, wished to settle in Bilbao".^[37]

He had a polemic with Sabino Arana, who was beginning his nationalist activity, since Arana regarded Unamuno as a "Spanish-leaning" Basque because, although he had already written some works in Basque, Unamuno considered the language close to disappearing and also held that bilingualism was not possible. "Basque and Castilian are incompatible, say what one will, and, while there may be bilingual individuals, there cannot be bilingual peoples. This state of bilinguality is a transitory one."^[38]

In 1889 he prepared for other competitive examinations and traveled to Switzerland, Italy and France, where the World's Fair was being held and the Eiffel Tower was inaugurated.

On January 31, 1891, he married in Guernica his "Concha", Concepción Lizárraga Ecenarro, with whom he had been in love since childhood 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 spent the winter months of that year preparing for the competitive examinations for a chair of Greek at the University of Salamanca, a less controversial subject, which he obtained from a panel that included, among others, Juan Valera.^[39]^[40] In June 1891 he passed the examinations and in July he took possession of the chair of Greek Language, returning to Bilbao. With the start of the academic year on October 1 he moved permanently to Salamanca. On the occasion of these examinations he struck up a friendship with Ángel Ganivet of Granada, a friendship that would grow ever closer until the latter's suicide in 1898. Between October 1892 and April 1893 he also studied the Cantar de mio Cid in order to compete for the prize offered by the Royal Academy of the Language for the best study of its lexicon and grammar.^[41] He was a finalist, as the prize went to Ramón Menéndez Pidal; Unamuno's study was only published in 1977.^[42]

On October 11, 1894, he joined the Socialist Group of Bilbao and contributed to that city's weekly La Lucha de Clases; in 1895 his first collection of essays appeared, En torno al casticismo, 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, moved him deeply. He left the socialist party in 1897, suffering a great depression: his third son fell ill with meningitis that degenerated into hydrocephalus; he believed himself at death's door when he suffered an anxiety neurosis;^[43] and dialectical materialism could not explain his existential doubts and his religious concerns, which began to dominate his thought. That same year he also published his only historical novel, Paz en la guerra, about the Third Carlist War in Bilbao, which did not satisfy him because it was too deliberate and structured; he reflected something of his spiritual crisis in his tragedy La esfinge, written in 1897 but only premiered in 1909, which tells the story of Ángel (an echo, perhaps, of his friend Ángel Ganivet?), who, pushed by those around him into the world of politics, suffers a crisis of spirit and values that leads him to let himself be killed.^[44] Moreover, 1898 saw the end of the Spanish–American War, in which Spain lost its colonies and it became evident that the country was not what it had been believed to be. The corrupt Canovist system was in crisis and patriotic concerns spread: regenerationist thought was in the air, and Joaquín Costa published Reconstitución y europeización de España (1898). From this conjuncture arose the group of "the three" (Azorín, Baroja and Unamuno) and the so-called Generation of '98, which would offer a subjective (artistic: narrative and poetic) vision of the decline, inspired by the objective studies of regenerationism, seeking through various journeys around the country the real Spain, what Unamuno would call in his 1895 essays eternal tradition or intrahistory, a history of small human groups as opposed to that of official Spain, metahistorical, false and merely epiphenomenal. By 1898 Unamuno already had five children and he multiplied his efforts and his journalistic contributions in order to support his family.

From the beginning of his stay in Salamanca, he took an active part in its cultural life, and he became a regular presence on the terrace of the Novelty literary café,^[45] next to the city hall, a habit he kept until 1936. From that terrace, when Unamuno was asked whether the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca was a perfect square or not, he would say: "It is a quadrilateral. Irregular, but astonishingly harmonious."^[46] In 1900,^[47] at only thirty-six years of age, he was appointed by the minister as rector of the University of Salamanca for the first time, an office he would hold three times.^[48]^[47] He created a chair of Comparative Philology which he himself ended up holding. In 1901 he began to read his favorite philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard; he even learned Danish to understand him better, and his conflict with the Bishop of Salamanca, Tomás Cámara, intensified.^[49] In 1902 he published the novel Amor y pedagogía, a severe critique of the educational thought of positivism and of the repression of every natural impulse. In this work, as in others, he upholds the essential dichotomy between life and thought. He was named president of various floral games. On the occasion of the tercentenary of the publication of the Quijote (1905), he published his rather unorthodox essay Vida de don Quijote y Sancho on heroism and Herostratism, and he received the Grand Cross of Alfonso XII. In 1906 he was again struck by anxiety neurosis. In August 1909, during the Melilla War and after the Disaster of the Barranco del Lobo, he wrote his controversial poem "Salutación a los rifeños", in which he sides with them against the mining ambitions of the Westerners, represented by Spain.^[50] He engaged in polemics with Ramiro de Maeztu and José Ortega y Gasset, and his articles were 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 Rosario de sonetos líricos, Por tierras de Portugal y España, Soliloquios y conversaciones and Una historia de amor; in 1912 a collection of essays, Contra esto y aquello, appeared. In 1913 the first of his important philosophical works appeared, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos, as well as his first dramatic work, La venda.^[49] In 1913 he traveled through Las Hurdes with Maurice Legendre and Jacques Chevalier in search of the wretched real Spain (Alfonso XIII would do so eight years later, with Doctor Gregorio Marañón, in 1922). From 1895 until his death, he maintained an intense correspondence with various Latin American intellectuals, politicians, artists and writers, such as Rubén Darío, Rufino Blanco Fombona, Rómulo Betancourt, José Rafael Pocaterra and Pedro Emilio Coll.^[51]

Under the monarchy of Alfonso XIII until the fall of Primo de Rivera

In 1914 he published his most important nivola / novel, Niebla, written in 1907, which reflects 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 European irrationalist philosophy in this creation is notable (mainly Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard), but so is that of classical philosophy (Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Spencer). In August 1914 the Minister of Public Instruction removed him from the rectorship for political reasons, although the official pretext was an irregular validation of a bachiller's degree for a Colombian; the adverse reactions to that government decision were not only national but international in scale.

In 1917 he published his nivola Abel Sánchez. Una historia de pasión, in which he presents envy, which he calls cainismo, as an essential element of the Spanish character, in the form of the belittling of everything elevated, honest and hard-working, of "natural superiority", as he sets out in the prologue to the second edition; for example, the protagonist is not the one who gives the work its title, but Doctor Joaquín Monegro, who sees all his efforts to do good to others scorned and in the end kills Abel when the latter steals the love of his grandson. The following year (1918) he was elected councilman of the Salamanca city council and premiered without success at the Ateneo his tragedy Fedra, perhaps too dense and short on action for popular taste. In 1920 he was elected by his colleagues dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and published his religious poem El Cristo de Velázquez, an attempt to make amends for his unbelieving poem "El Cristo yacente de Santa Clara", which he had published on May 26, 1913, in Los Lunes del Imparcial and which had provoked adverse reactions in Catholic circles, which considered it blasphemous,^[52]^[53] and Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo. 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.^[54]

[...] that adventurer of bad faith, rapacious, mendacious and incapable that is Primo de Rivera, whom I must crush as Sarmiento crushed Rosas.^[55]

In 1921 he was appointed vice-rector. His constant attacks on the King and on the dictator Primo de Rivera led the latter to remove him once again and exile him to Fuerteventura in February 1924.^[56] On July 9 he was pardoned, but he went into voluntary exile in France; first to Paris, where he was very warmly received by the Hispanist Jean Cassou, who introduced him to the Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes and to the Czech-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke,^[57] and, shortly afterward, to Hendaye. He remained there until the fall of Primo de Rivera's regime in 1930, and on his return to Salamanca he entered the city to a triumphant welcome.

The Republic

Miguel de Unamuno stood as a candidate for councilman for the Republican–Socialist Conjunction in the elections of April 12, 1931, and was elected. On April 14, it was he who proclaimed the Republic in Salamanca: from the balcony of the city hall, the philosopher declared the beginning of "a new era, and the end of a dynasty that has impoverished, debased and stupefied us".^[58]

The Republic reinstated him as rector of the University of Salamanca. He stood in the elections to the Cortes and was elected deputy as an independent on the Republican–Socialist Conjunction ticket in Salamanca, holding the office between July 12, 1931, and October 9, 1933.^[2]

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 to the dictator, with his exile...—to the coming of the Republic, began to become disillusioned, like other intellectuals who had accompanied him in his struggle in favor of the Republic, such as José Ortega y Gasset and Ramón Pérez de Ayala. In 1933 he decided not to stand for reelection. Besides, he had also quarreled with many other famous intellectuals who nonetheless admired him, such as Ortega himself, who could not stand his subjectivism at least since 1909, when he met with him in Salamanca; Ramón Gómez de la Serna noted that, when Unamuno entered the Revista de Occidente, Ortega would get up and leave, to which he maliciously added: "He never noticed his absence";^[59] or Pío Baroja, whom his intransigence made extremely uncomfortable (he wrote that "Unamuno believed himself to be everything. He was, without setting out to be, a philosopher, mathematician, geographer, philologist, naturalist, architect, as well as a seer and a prophet" and that he "would not willingly have let anyone speak. He did not listen"), although he noted that his novels seemed written "to make the reader uncomfortable". Nor was he much liked by Valle-Inclán or by Fernando Pessoa, who suffered his slights and noted the absurdity of his contradictions.^[60] Imbued with what he called, with the neologisms that characterize his style, his alterutralidad or active neutrality, he was described by the great philologist Ernst Robert Curtius as excitator Hispaniae.^[61]

In 1934 he retired from teaching and was named honorary rector for life of the University of Salamanca, which created a chair bearing his name. That same year he was designated corresponding member of the National Academy of History of Venezuela, on the nomination of Pedro Emilio Coll, with whom he had corresponded since 1895. However, although the diploma dated November 23, 1934, reached Unamuno's hands, he never accepted the distinction from that country, governed by the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez.^[51]

In 1935 he was named honorary citizen of the Republic. As a result of his disillusionment, he publicly voiced his criticism of the agrarian reform, the religious policy, the political class, the government and Manuel Azaña.^[62] On February 10, 1935, he received a visit at his home from José Antonio Primo de Rivera and other Falangists and attended the presentation of the Falange in Salamanca, according to his correspondence with the writer Concha Espina.^[63]

According to a controversial claim by Manuel Menchón, in 1935 the Nobel Prize in Literature was left unawarded. A report from the "Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda" of the Third Reich addressed to the Nobel Foundation asked that the prize not be awarded to Miguel de Unamuno, since "After the political change that has occurred since 1933, Unamuno has taken such a clear stance against us that he can be considered the spiritual spokesman of the struggle against Germany in the intellectual circles of Spain. Because of this attitude we do not support his application for the Nobel."^[64]

The Civil War

When the civil war began, Unamuno supported the Nationalist side: he wanted to see in the rebel officers a group of authoritarian regenerationists ready to steer the country away from its drift. When on July 19 practically the entire Salamanca city council was removed by the new authorities and replaced by their supporters, Unamuno accepted the councilman's seat offered to him by the new mayor, Major Del Valle.^[65]

In the summer of 1936 he called on European intellectuals to support the rebels, declaring that they represented the defense of Western civilization and of the Christian tradition, which caused sadness and horror around the world, according to the historian Fernando García de Cortázar.^[62] Azaña removed him from office, but the Burgos government reinstated him.

However, his enthusiasm for the uprising soon turned into disappointment, especially in view of the character the repression took on in Salamanca. According to the historian Francisco Blanco Nieto, Unamuno had already shown his disagreement with several acts of repression on July 19 and 20, although he also donated 5,000 pesetas to the rebel army, perhaps out of fear.^[66] In Unamuno's pockets piled up letters from the wives of friends, acquaintances and strangers, asking him to intercede for their husbands, who had been imprisoned, tortured and shot. At the end of July, his Salamanca friends 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, was arrested on October 7. Also held in prison were his close friends Doctor Filiberto Villalobos and the journalist José Sánchez Gómez, the latter awaiting execution by firing squad. Another friend of his, the Anglican Church pastor and Freemason Atilano Coco, was under threat of death (he would be shot in December 1936). In early October, Unamuno visited Franco at the episcopal palace to plead, in vain, for clemency for his imprisoned friends.^[67] Salvador Vila was executed on October 22, the same day on which Unamuno was removed as rector by order of Franco.^[68] The Basque writer, by then disillusioned with the consequences of the military pronunciamiento, would come to attribute (in a private communication to a friend) the origin of the "stupid regime of terror" that prevailed in the Nationalist zone to "the marriage of the barracks mentality with that of the sacristy".^[69] And in the hurried handwritten notes for El resentimiento trágico de la vida. Notas sobre la revolución y guerra civil españolas, reviewing the victims of the violence, several of them close to him, he wrote:

Those branded as intellectuals are as much in the way of the hunos as of the hotros. If the fascists do not shoot them, the Marxists will. [...] Poor Dean of Toledo, Polo Benito! Poor Arturo Pérez Martín! Poor Prieto Carrasco! Poor Beúnza! Poor Lieutenant Castillo! Poor Calvo Sotelo! Poor... Perhaps that other one was not a good person, but unruly, envious, but who among us are good people? Who is good? Only God is good, "but Jesus said to him: why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God".

— Miguel de Unamuno^[70]

Venceréis, pero no convenceréis

Miguel de Unamuno also publicly repented of his support for the uprising. On October 12, 1936, in the paraninfo of the University of Salamanca, during the opening ceremony of the academic year, which was traditionally held on the same date as the Día de la Raza, the rector publicly confronted General Millán-Astray, who had delivered some harangues against intelligence and exalting death. A memorable speech was later attributed to Unamuno that would have included his famous phrase:

You will win, but you will not convince. You will win because you have more than enough brute force, but you will not convince, because to convince means to persuade. And to persuade you need something you lack in this struggle: reason and right. It seems useless to me to ask you to think of Spain.

The last days

He spent the last days of his life (from October to December 1936) under house arrest in his home, in a state, in the words of Fernando García de Cortázar, of resigned desolation, despair and loneliness.^[62] On October 20 or 21, in an interview with the French journalist Jérôme Tharaud (commonly and mistakenly attributed to the writer Nikos Kazantzakis) he declared:

As soon as the saving movement led by General Franco took place, I joined it, saying that what must be saved in Spain is Western Christian civilization and with it national independence, since here, on national territory, an international war is being fought. (...) Meanwhile I was becoming horrified by the character this tremendous civil war without quarter was taking on, owing to a true collective mental illness, an epidemic of madness with a certain pathological-bodily substratum. The unheard-of savageries of the Marxist, Red hordes exceed all description, and I must spare myself cheap rhetoric. And the tone is set not by socialists, nor communists, nor syndicalists, nor anarchists, but by gangs of degenerate evildoers, born ex-criminals without any ideology who go about satisfying fierce atavistic passions without any ideology. And the natural reaction to this also often, unfortunately, takes on psychopathic characteristics. It is the regime of terror. Spain is terrified of itself. And if it is not checked in time it will reach the brink of moral suicide. If the wretched government of Madrid has neither been able nor willing to resist the pressure of the savagery called Marxist, we must hope that the government of Burgos will have the courage to oppose those who want to establish another regime of terror. (...) I insist that the sacred duty of the movement gloriously headed by General Franco is to save Western Christian civilization and national independence, since Spain must not be at the dictate of Russia or of any other foreign power, given that here, on national territory, an international war is being waged. And it is also its duty to bring a peace of conviction and conversion and to achieve the moral union of all Spaniards in order to restore the homeland, which is bleeding, bleeding to death, poisoning itself and growing stupefied. And to that end to prevent the reactionaries from going, in their reaction, beyond justice and even beyond humanity, as they sometimes try to do. That it is no path to seek to form compulsory national unions, by force and by threat, forcing through terror both the convinced and the converted to enlist in them. It would be a sad thing if the barbarous, anti-civil and inhuman Bolshevist regime were to be replaced by a barbarous, anti-civil and inhuman regime of totalitarian servitude. Neither the one nor the other, which at bottom are the same.

And a few days later, on this occasion indeed with Kazantzakis:

At this critical moment of Spain's suffering, I know that I must follow the soldiers. They are the only ones who will restore order to us. They know what discipline means and they know how to impose it. No, I have not become a right-winger. Pay no attention to what people say. I have not betrayed the cause of freedom. But for now it is absolutely essential that order be restored. But one day I will rise up—soon—and throw myself into the struggle for freedom, alone. No, I am neither a fascist nor a Bolshevik; I am a solitary man.

On November 21 he wrote to Lorenzo Giusso:^[62]

The barbarism is unanimous. It is the regime of terror on both sides. Spain is frightened of itself, horrified. The Catholic and anti-Catholic leprosy has broken out. The hunos y los hotros howl and call for blood. And here is my poor Spain, bleeding, ruining, poisoning and stupefying itself...

In one of his last letters, dated December 13, he gives his view of the rebel officers in light of the character the conflict was taking on, and his famous sentence appears once again:^[71]

This is a campaign against liberalism, not against Bolshevism. Anyone who was a minister in the Republic, however right-wing he may be, is already proscribed. (...) They will win, but they will not convince; they will conquer, but they will not convert.

He died suddenly at his Salamanca home on Calle Bordadores, on the afternoon of December 31, 1936, during a visit paid to him by the Falangist Bartolomé Aragón, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law. The inhalation of fumes from a brazier has been proposed as the cause of death, although it has also been hypothesized that he was murdered by his visitor.^[72]^[73]^[74] Despite his virtual confinement, at his funeral he was exalted as a Falangist hero.^[67] On his death, Antonio Machado wrote: "Let us note today that Unamuno has died suddenly, as one who dies in war. Against whom? Perhaps against himself; perhaps also, though many will not believe it, against the men who have sold Spain and betrayed its people. Against the people itself? I have never believed it and never will."^[75]

His remains rest beside those of his eldest daughter, Salomé (married to his secretary, the poet José María Quiroga Plá, who had died three years earlier), in a niche of the San Carlos Borromeo Cemetery in Salamanca, behind this epitaph: "Put me, Eternal Father, in your breast, mysterious home; I will sleep there, for I come undone from the hard toil."^[76]

Works

Narrative

The narrative work of Miguel de Unamuno, in chronological order, is as follows:

From 1886 he wrote a total of 87 stories and short tales^{[citation needed]}. Of these, in 1913 he selected only twenty-six for his book El espejo de la muerte.^[77] Notable among them are the one that gives the book its title and Revolución en la biblioteca de Ciudámuerta.^[78]
Paz en la guerra (1897), a work in which he uses the context of the Third Carlist War (which he experienced in his childhood) to explore the relationship of the self with the world, conditioned by the awareness of death.
Amor y pedagogía (1902), which combines the comic and the tragic in a reductio ad absurdum of positivist sociology.
Recuerdos de niñez y mocedad (1908) is an autobiographical work. In it the Basque author reflects on the first years of his life in Bilbao.
El espejo de la muerte (1913), a book of stories.
Niebla (1914), a key work of Unamuno's, which he characterizes with the name "nivola" to set it apart from the supposedly fixed form of the novel.
In 1917 he wrote Abel Sánchez, in which he inverts 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 a man's true personality by his own public image.
Also in 1920, three short novels were published with a prologue of great importance: Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo.
His last long narrative is La tía Tula (1921), which presents the longing for motherhood already sketched in Amor y pedagogía and in Dos madres.
Teresa (1924) is a narrative tableau containing Bécquerian rhymes, achieving in idea and in reality the re-creation of the beloved.
Cómo se hace una novela (1927) is the autopsy of the Unamunian novel.
San Manuel Bueno, mártir (1930), in which he tells of a priest who preaches something he cannot manage to believe in.
Don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez (1930).
Diario íntimo (posthumous), written around 1897, published in 1970.

Novel

In the literary period surrounding the author at that time, rigid procedural patterns were required when writing and publishing a novel: a particular subject matter, specific timelines and plotlines, social conventions... a sort of unwritten script accepted by all. For Unamuno this was a corset he would try to free himself from in some way, so as to express himself in his pages as he saw fit. His solution was to invent a new literary genre, which he christened "nivola", and in this way he could receive no criticism whatsoever regarding rules of aesthetics or composition, because he would only have to abide by the rules he himself had designed for his new genre. He expresses it thus in Niebla (1914), in chapter XVII:

—And what is its plot, if one may ask?
—My novel has no plot, or rather, it will be whatever turns up. The plot makes itself.
—And how is that?
—Well, look, one of these days when I did not quite know what to do, but felt a longing to do something, a very intimate itch, a scurrying of the imagination, I said to myself: I am going to write a novel, but I am going to write it the way one lives, without knowing what will come. I sat down, took some sheets of paper and began the first thing that occurred to me, without knowing what would follow, without any plan. My characters will take shape as they act and speak, above all as they speak; their character will form little by little. And at times their character will be to have none.
—Yes, like mine.
—I don't know. It will emerge. I let myself be carried along.
—And is there psychology? Descriptions?
—What there is is dialogue; above all dialogue. The thing is for the characters to talk, to talk a lot, even if they say nothing (...). The point is that in this novel I intend to put everything that occurs to me, come what may.
—Then it will end up not being a novel.
—No, it will be... it will be... a nivola.

Philosophy

Unamuno's philosophy was not systematic, but rather a negation of any system and an affirmation of faith "in itself". He was formed intellectually under rationalism and positivism, and in his youth he wrote articles in which his sympathy for socialism was clearly evident and in which he expressed great concern about the situation in which Spain found itself. In his youth Unamuno also fell under the influence of Spanish Krausism, although there is some controversy over the extent to which he allowed himself to be influenced by it.^[79]

The influence of philosophers such as Adolf von Harnack led to Unamuno's rejection of rationalism. That 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 stance in favor of faith—the mountain on which the snow creates forms, landscapes, as opposed to the lake, where it dissolves and turns into nothing. His religious thought has been placed within Christian existentialism.^[80]

For him death is something definitive; life ends. However, he thought that the belief that our identity survives death is necessary in order to be able to live. Of course, one needs to believe in a God, to have faith, which is not rational; thus there is always an inner conflict between the need for faith and the reason that denies such faith.^[81] In the same way, feeling and reason are like water and oil: they cannot be mixed ("feeling thinks and thought feels"). He is considered one of the forerunners of the existentialist school, which, several decades later, would reach its peak in European philosophy as a reflection of the doubts about the human condition raised by the great world wars. 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 long predates 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, to which he was drawn by his Nordophile friend Ángel Ganivet, as the Bilbao writer's biographer Emilio Salcedo has pointed out.^[82]

As a Cervantist, he was the author of a Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905).^[83]

His concern for Spain was expressed in the essays collected in his works:

En torno al casticismo (1895);
Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905);
Por tierras de Portugal y España (1911).

During the war and from August 1936, Unamuno began taking notes for a book he would never manage to write and in which he set down his political testament: El resentimiento trágico de la vida. Notas sobre la revolución y la guerra civil españolas.

His most purely philosophical works are:

Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1912) and
La agonía del cristianismo (1925).

Poetic works

Unamuno was fundamentally a great poet of Post-Romanticism; the paradoxes of this aesthetic were deeply rooted in him. For Unamuno art was a means of expressing the anxieties of the spirit. For that reason, in his poetry and in his novels he treats the same themes he had developed in his essays: his spiritual anguish and the pain caused by the silence of God, time and death; patriotic concern, cainismo, exile, the need for individual survival and the impossibility of reconciling feeling and thought. He was also moved by the austere landscape of Castile, which reflected with its casticismo the identity and the self-sacrificing and noble spirit that he sought to embody.

He was always attracted to traditional meters and, although in his first compositions he tried to eliminate rhyme, he later turned to it, with a particular predilection for the romance and the sonnet. Critics have pointed out his scant attention to the sonority of verse at a time when it was common to exaggerate it (Modernismo), as well as the scant imagination of his metaphors, but they have appreciated in him his great command of concept and his great post-Romantic inspiration. In fact, he himself considered it the genre that best expressed him. Notable among his poetic works are: Poesías (1907), Rosario de sonetos líricos (1911), El Cristo de Velázquez (1920), Andanzas y visiones españolas (1922), Rimas de dentro (1923), Teresa. Rimas de un poeta desconocido (1924), De Fuerteventura a París (1925), Romancero del destierro (1928) and Cancionero (1953).

From his very first book, Poesías (1907), the themes that would dominate Unamuno's poetics take shape: religious conflict, the homeland and domestic life. He dedicated these beautiful words to the city: "Salamanca, Salamanca, renaciente maravilla, académica palanca de mi visión de Castilla" ("Salamanca, Salamanca, reborn marvel, academic lever of my vision of Castile").

Rough and prosaic, he has never been recognized for harmonious and polished verses, but rather for brief, Castilian and highly personal stanzas: in the words of Ramón Irigoyen, who wrote the prologue to Niebla in the El Mundo edition, Unamuno was always a "premature ejaculator of verse", referring to the little care he took in revising his finished poems, compared to other poets of the period such as Machado or Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Theater

Unamuno's dramatic work presents his usual philosophical line; hence its rather scant success. Themes such as the inquiry into individual spirituality, faith as a "vital lie" and the problem of the double personality are treated in La esfinge (1898), La venda (1899) and El otro (1932). He updated Euripidean tragedy in Fedra (1918) and translated Seneca's Medea (1933).

Unamuno's theater has the following characteristics:

It is schematic, stripped of all artifice, and has room only for the conflicts and passions that affect the characters. This austerity is an influence of classical Greek tragedy.
If the characters and conflicts appear bare, the stage design is also stripped of all artifice. It is a stage design simplified to the utmost.
What really matters to him is presenting the drama that unfolds within the characters and, no doubt, within himself.

With the symbolization of the passions and the austerity of both language and stage design, Unamuno's theater connects with European dramatic experiments and opens a path toward the renewal of Spanish theater, which would be followed by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Azorín and, later, Federico García Lorca.

Plays

La esfinge (1898)
La venda (1899)
La princesa doña Lambra (1909)
La difunta (1909)
El pasado que vuelve (1910)
Fedra (1910)
Soledad (1921)
Raquel encadenada (1921)
Sombras de sueño (1926)
El otro (1926)
El hermano Juan o el mundo es teatro (1929)
Razón y fe

Travel books

Apuntes de un viaje por Francia, Italia y Suiza (1889, printed in 2017)
Paisajes (1902)
De mi país (1903).
Por tierras de Portugal y España (1911)
Andanzas y visiones españolas (1922)
Paisajes del Alma (1944)
Madrid, Castilla (2001)

Correspondence

Unamuno was a true letter writer. "He used to write three or four letters a day; some fifty thousand missives could be counted. And in the Casa de Unamuno alone there are twenty thousand letters received. But, during the Franco regime, many people got rid of the letters the writer had sent them out of fear…".^[84] The most recent and complete edition of his letters (2017), produced by the Hispanists Colette and Jean-Claude Rabaté, consists of eight volumes (Epistolario. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2017–) with 8,000 pages and nearly 3,000 letters.^[85]

Editions

There is no critical edition of Unamuno's complete works, a very complex task because, although the writer claimed not to retouch his works, at least in the early years of his life (and even afterward) he contradicted himself, reworking, rewriting, correcting and expanding various editions without touching their essential spirit; moreover, the press articles he published in Europe and America are more than numerous. Already during the author's lifetime, the Editorial Renacimiento publishing house had dared to publish an incomplete Obras completas.

There is an edition of the Obras completas (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado / Editorial Vergara, 1958–1964, 16 vols. of more than a thousand pages each) carried out by his disciple Manuel García Blanco, later reprinted (Las Américas / Escélicer edition, 1966–1971, in 9 vols.). Ricardo Senabre began publishing an Obras completas first with the publisher Turner (2005) and later jointly with the José Antonio de Castro Foundation for its Biblioteca Castro, of which ten volumes had already been published by 2020.

Miguel de Unamuno, Obras completas. Study, edition, bibliography and notes by Manuel García Blanco. Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado / Editorial Vergara, 1958–1964, XVI volumes.
- Volume I: Paisaje.
- Volume II: Novela I
- Volume III: Ensayo I
- Volume IV: Ensayo II
- Volume V: De esto y de aquello
- Volume VI: La raza y la lengua.
- Volume VII: Prólogos, conferencias, discursos.
- Volume VIII: Letras de América y otras lecturas
- Volume IX: Novela, II y monodiálogos.
- Volume X: Autobiografía y recuerdos personales.
- Volume XI: Meditaciones y otros escritos.
- Volume XII: Teatro.
- Volume XIII: Poesía.
- Volume XIV: Poesía II.
- Volume XV: Poesía III.
- Volume XVI: Ensayos espirituales y otros escritos.

Unamuno and film

Film adaptations

Todo un hombre (1943), an Argentine film by the Belgian director Pierre Chenal adapting the novel Nada menos que todo un hombre.^[86]
Abel Sánchez (1946), an adaptation of the novel of the same name directed by Carlos Serrano de Osma.^[86]^[87]
La entrega (1954), by Julián Soler. A Mexican film adapting Nada menos que todo un hombre.^[86]
La tía Tula (1964), a Spanish film directed by Miguel Picazo adapting the acclaimed novel of the same name.^[86]^[87]
Niebla (1965), a miniseries produced by Televisión Española adapting Miguel de Unamuno's novel of the same name.^[86]
Nada menos que todo un hombre (1971), by Rafael Gil, adapting the novel of the same name.^[86]^[87]
Niebla (1976), a Televisión Española television film directed by Fernando Méndez-Leite adapting the novel Niebla.^[86]
Las cuatro novias de Augusto Pérez (1976), by José Jara, based on the novel Niebla.^[86]^[87]
Acto de posesión (1977), directed by Javier Aguirre.^[86]^[87]
Fedra (1981), by Mercè Vilaret, an adaptation of the play of the same name.^[86]
Todo un hombre (1982), by Rafael Villaseñor, an adaptation of Nada menos que todo un hombre.^[87]
Lluvia de otoño (1988), a Spanish film directed by José Ángel Rebolledo based on the play Sombras de sueño.^[87]