Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-r5zm4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-17T01:57:35.222Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Miguel de Unamuno

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Gerhard Masur*
Affiliation:
Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar, Virginia

Extract

THE history of Ideas is still terra incognita on our map of the Latin American world. We are aware of certain European influences on the Hispanic American people, such as the Spanish mystics, Rousseau and the French romanticists, or Comte and his school of thought. But few comprehensive studies of Latin American thought exist. Not even the impact of Spanish philosophy has been fully evaluated. Although we know that the representative thinkers of the generation of 1898, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Luis de Zulueta and others were widely read, we know little of their effect on the writings of Alfonso Reyes, B. Sanin Cano, Francisco Romero and Jose Carlos Mariategui, to mention only some outstanding examples. Yet Unamuno was deeply interested in Latin American problems and his comments on Bolivar, Sarmiento and Latin American literature command our attention. Many critics recognize this significant relationship. Rafael Heliodoro Valle, for instance, remarks: “No cabe duda de que Unamuno ha sido el escritor espanol que mas curiosidad intelectual ha tenido hacia nosotros.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1955

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Letter to the author. I also wish to express my thanks to Senor Rafael Heliodoro Valle and Senores B. Cano, Luis Monguio and Americo Castro for the interest they have shown in my inquiries.

2 de Madariaga, Salvador, Semblanzas liter arias contempordneas (Barcelona, 1924), pp. 127161.Google Scholar

3 Weidle, Wladimir, Russia, Absent and Present (New York, 1952).Google Scholar

4 Azorin, , Cldsicos y modernos (Madrid, 1919), pp. 233257 Google Scholar; Jeschke, Hans, Die Generation von 1S98 in Spanien (Halle, 1934), p. 47.Google Scholar See also Mora, Jose Ferrater, Unamuno (Buenos Aires, 1944), pp. 13 ff.Google Scholar

5 Jeschke, op. cit., pp. 9 ff.

6 Ibid., pp. 19 ff.

7 de Unamuno, Miguel, Paz en la guerra (Buenos Aires, 1940);Google Scholar Recuerdos de rimez y de mocedad (Buenos Aires, 1945), pp. 75, 77.

8 Barea, Arturo, Unamuno (Cambridge, England, 1952), p. 10.Google Scholar

9 Madrid, F., Genio e ingenio de Miguel de Unamuno (Buenos Aires, 1942), pp. 50, 61.Google Scholar

10 Curtius, Ernst Robert, Kritische Essays zur Europaischen Literatur (Bern, 1950), p. 228.Google Scholar

11 de Madariaga, Salvador, Introduction to Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life (London, 1926), p. x.Google Scholar

12 del Rio, A., “Vida y obra de Unamuno,” in Revista Hispdnica Moderna, 1 (Oct., 1934), 12–19.Google Scholar

13 Barja, Cesar, Libros y autores contempordneos (New York, 1935), p. 39.Google Scholar

14 de Unamuno, Miguel, Rosario de sonetos liricos (Madrid, 1950), p. 44.Google Scholar

I search for war in peace, for peace in war;

Repose in action, in action repose. …

Neither martyr nor hangman am I.

15 Unamuno, Ensayos, I (Madrid, 1916), passim; Barea, op. cit., p. 15. Marcel Bataillon entitled his translation of Unamuno’s work, L’essence de I’Espagne.

16 Curtius, op. cit., pp. 225–226.

17 Unamuno, Ensayos, I, 48.

18 Ibid., p. 43.

19 Ibid., p. 48. “The best books of history are those in which the present lives.”

20 Ibid., pp. 211, 214.

21 Ibid., p. 218.

22 Ibid., II, 168 f.

23 Ibid., VII, 161; Barja, op. cit., p. 50.

24 Ibid., II, 201, 205.

25 Ibid., p. 205.

26 Ibid., 11,210.

27 Barja, op. cit., p. 51.

28 Unamuno, Ensayos, II, 163; see also, ibid., I, 96.

29 Ibid., II, 172.

30 Unamuno, Vida de don Quixote (7th ed.; Buenos Aires, 1946).

31 Curtius, op. cit., p. 232.

32 Unamuno, Vida de don Quixote, p. 270.

33 Unamuno, Soliloquios y conversaciones (Madrid, 1911), p. 111.

34 Unamuno, Vida de don Quixote, p. 270.

35 Unamuno, Paz en la guerra (2nd. ed.; Buenos Aires, 1940), p. 7.

36 Unamuno, La tia Tulia (Madrid, 1921).

37 Unamuno, Cuenca Iberica (Mexico City, 1943), p. 19; see also Paisajes del alma (Madrid, 1944).

38 Unamuno, Algunas consideraciones sobre la literatura Hispano-Americana (Buenos Aires, 1947), p. 106.

39 Unamuno, Sonetos, p. 147.

40 Ibid., p. 147; Unamuno, El sentimiento trágico de la vida (Madrid, 1912), English translation by G. E. Crawford Flitch (London, 1926), p. 1. All quotations are taken from Flitch’s translation.

41 Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, p. 32.

42 Ibid., p. 34.

43 See the introduction by Flitch to Unamuno’s Essays and Soliloquies (New York, 1925), pp. 23–24.

44 Flitch, op. cit.

45 Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, pp. 11, 43, 115.

46 Ibid., p. 309.

47 Unamuno, Essays (Trs. Flitch), pp. 156–157.

48 Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, pp. 36, 11.

49 Marias, Julian, Miguel de Unamuno (Madrid, 1943), pp. 2122, 156157.Google Scholar

50 Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, pp. 132, 194.

51 For the criticism of Unamuno’s religious contradictions, see Curtius, Mora, and Marias, opera citata; see also Barja, op. cit., p. 68.

52 Unamuno, La agonia del Cristianismo (Madrid, 1931); first published in French (Paris, 1930).

53 Barja, op. cit., pp. 96–97.

54 Flitch, op. cit., pp. 96–97.

55 Cuadernos de la cdtedra Miguel de Unamuno (Salamanca, 1948), pp. 7–8.

56 Madrid, F., op. cit., p. 80 Google Scholar; Unamuno, Ensayos, III, 23.

57 de Torre, Guillermo, “The Agony of Unamuno,” New Mexico Quarterly Review, XVIII (Summer, 1948), 150.Google Scholar

58 Unamuno, La ciudad de Henoc (Mexico City, 1940), pp. 79, 84.

59 de Torre, G., loc. cit.Google Scholar

60 Cuadernos de la cdtedra Miguel de Unamuno, p. 126.

When you think me most dead,

I shall tremble again in your hands.

Here I leave you my soul—the book, the man—a world in truth.

And if you vibrate in all your being,

It is I, O reader, who vibrates in you.