PÉREZ GALDÓS, BENITO. - Writer, b. at Las Palmas (Canary Islands) on 10 May 1843, d. at Madrid on 4 Jan. 1920. He lived almost always in Madrid, whose life and customs he described. Although a deputy in 1885 and in 1906, he followed political life with greater interest than active participation. In 1897 he became a member of the Real Academia de la Lengua.
He spent his last years afflicted by the hostility of his adversaries and by blindness. His literary production (117 works) is usually grouped into historical novels (the four series of Episodios nacionales, in which the history of nineteenth-century Spain is narrated); realistic novels (among them Doña Perfecta; Gloria; Marianela; La familia de León Roch; Fortunata y Jacinta; Angel Guerra; Misericordia); plays (one may recall Realidad; La Loca de la Casa; El Abuelo); political and literary articles, and memoirs. Although at times somewhat careless and hasty in exposition, P. G. is among the greatest Spanish narrators of the 19th century. In him traditional realism is joined to a wealth of imagination and to the reflection of contemporary literary demands. His innumerable characters throb with intense affective life, in which a sorrowful distrust of the world and its institutions blends with an understanding of infinite human misery, which appeared to him as something tragically irremediable. Despite such a pessimistic vision of life, P. G. discovers in it a primitive human goodness, at times unconscious, at times deliberately concealed. He was opposed to every form of fanaticism and religious intolerance, but he did not understand practicing and militant Catholicism and indeed assumed a distinctly anticlerical position (cf. Doña Perfecta; La familia de León Roch). This attitude did not, however, exclude the aspiration to a simple and genuine religiosity, which would not be limited to the outwardness of a purely formal cult.
Bibliography
Guido Mancini