Unamuno, Miguel de

UNAMUNO, MIGUEL DE. - Spanish writer, b. in Bilbao on 29 Sept. 1864, d. in Salamanca on 31 Dec. 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, whence he returned to his homeland upon the fall of the monarchy (1930), subsequently adhering to the Francoist movement.

His many-sided activity as a publicist and writer drew the world's attention to the Spanish culture of the Alfonsine age. He made masterly use of the ensayo, to set down in it the results of his tormented religious, philosophical, literary and historical itineraries, and at the same time to stir the souls of his compatriots: extremely significant in this regard are Vida de don Quijote y Sancho (1905); Mi religión (1910); Del sentimiento tragico de la vida (1913); La agonía del cristianismo (1925). U. was also an effective narrator (Amor y pedagogía, 1902; Niebla, 1914; Abel Sánchez, 1917; La tía Tula, 1921) and a conceited and rough lyric poet (Poesías, 1907; Rosario de sonetes líricos, 1911; El Cristo de Velázquez, 1920). He also cultivated, though less successfully, the theater (the dramas La Esfinge, 1909; Fedra, 1911; Todo un hombre, 1926).

U.'s thought gravitates around the contrast between the negations of reason and the demands of life, to which, following in the footsteps of James, he clings with a desperate will to survive, in an agonistic and tragic vision and practice: the activity of a breathless and ceaseless struggle. For the man who thinks, but above all who feels, no alternative remains but this revolt against the cold conclusions of reason, this creating and pursuing (like Don Quixote, understood by U. as the supreme incarnation of human idealism) a goal, watched over and loved not as a term of possession, but as a call or a mirage. Such an attitude excludes, as is obvious, the technicality of a philosophical system. U. proceeds by flashes and thrusts, an essayist, poet and narrator bristling and aggressive: he does not graze, but charges, venturing not arguments of thought, but arbitrariedades of a typically Hispanic passion, often flowing into the excessive or the absurd. Reasoning provokes his laughter, with the consequent collapse of common certainties: God created by the will and the sentimental need of man, and therefore reduced to a mythical projection of consciousness; Christianity emptied of every dogmatic structure and absorbed into the general 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 postulated not by command of reason, but by the need to project one's own "I" beyond the barriers of space and time; life configured as a succession of "hopes in eternal flowering" and thriving in solitude, which is, for U., the true and only way of communicating with one's fellow men. "Nothing must exist," U. affirms, "that cannot be the object of examination," and in his restless exploration he hurls himself, irascible and implacable, against every obstacle. Hence his fury against the "priestly caste," in which he believes he discerns the monopolizer of dogma and the mortifier of the Christian spirit; his spite against militarism, sophisticator of the genuine concept of fatherland; his rancor against the traditionalist and fetishistic hindrances of his people, which obstruct their insertion into the spiritual order of Europe, delaying the fusion of the entire human family into a hoped-for common fatherland. A tormented spirit, he felt perpetually the assault of the religious problem, which he placed at the summit of human interests. But he made his religion "the struggle tirelessly against the mystery... to struggle with God from dawn to night," and he did not know, fatally, the noonday lights of Truth and Life.

Enzo Navarra