UNAMUNO, MIGUEL DE. - Spanish writer, b. in Bilbao on Sept. 29, 1864, d. in Salamanca on Dec. 31, 1937.
He taught Greek literature at the University of Salamanca. Exiled to the Canary Islands (1924) for his republican ideas, he managed to escape and took refuge in France, from where he returned upon the fall of the monarchy (1930), later adhering to the Francoist movement.
His multifaceted activity as a publicist and writer drew the world's attention to Spanish culture during the Alfonsine era. He masterfully employed the *ensayo* to record the results of his tormented religious, philosophical, literary, and historical wanderings, while stirring the souls of his countrymen. Particularly significant in this regard are *Vida de don Quijote y Sancho* (1905); *Mi religión* (1910); *Del sentimiento trágico de la vida* (1913); and *La agonía del cristianismo* (1925). Unamuno was also an effective storyteller (*Amor y pedagogía*, 1902; *Niebla*, 1914; *Abel Sánchez*, 1917; *La tía Tula*, 1921) and a rough, conceptually dense lyricist (*Poesías*, 1907; *Rosario de sonetos literarios*, 1911; *El Cristo de Velázquez*, 1920). He also dabbled in drama, though less successfully (*La esfinge*, 1909; *Fedra*, 1911; *Todo un hombre*, 1926).
Unamuno’s thought revolves around the clash between the denials of reason and the demands of life, to which he clung with desperate will to survive, in a vision and practice that were agonistic and tragic: the fatality of a struggle without respite or peace. For the man who thinks, but who above all feels, there remains no alternative but this revolt against the cold havens of reason, this creation and pursuit (as Don Quixote, whom Unamuno understood as the supreme incarnation of human idealism) of a goal, watched over and loved not as a possession, but as a call or mirage. Such an attitude, obviously, precludes the technical precision of a philosophical system. Unamuno proceeds in flashes and thrusts, as an essayist, poet, and narrator who is bristling and aggressive: he does not graze but strikes, hurling not reasoned arguments, but the arbitrariness of typically Spanish passions that often spill over into excess or absurdity. Reasoning provokes his laughter, with the consequent collapse of common certainties: God created by the will and emotional need of man, and thus reduced to a mythical projection of consciousness; Christianity stripped of all dogmatic structure and absorbed into the agonistic conception of life (Christ is born, suffers, dies, and rises again incessantly in the soul of the believer and in history); the immortality of the soul posited not by the force of reason, but by the need to project one’s “self” beyond the barriers of space and time; life configured as a succession of “eternally blooming hopes” and thriving in solitude, which is, for Unamuno, the true and only way to communicate with his fellow men. “Nothing should exist,” Unamuno affirms, “that cannot be subjected to examination,” and in his restless exploration he lashes out, peevish and unrelenting, against every obstacle. Hence his vehemence against the “priestly caste,” which he believes monopolizes dogma and mortifies the Christian spirit; his animosity toward militarism, which distorts the genuine concept of fatherland; and his bitterness toward the traditionalistic and fetishistic restraints of his people, which hinder their integration into the spiritual order of Europe and delay the fusion of the entire human family into a hoped-for common fatherland. A tormented spirit, he felt the religious problem perpetually gnawing at him, which he placed at the summit of human concerns. But he made his religion “the unceasing struggle against mystery... struggling with God from dawn to night,” and he never knew, fatefully, the meridian lights of Truth and Life.