Miguel de Unamuno: Life, Works, and Thought
Miguel de Unamuno: Life and Background
Miguel de Unamuno was born in Bilbao in 1864. He pursued studies in Arts in Madrid. He became professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca, a city to which he was bound forever. A member of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, he suffered a religious crisis that led him away from socialism and plunged him into an ongoing internal conflict. He served as Rector of the University of Salamanca and was a social and intellectual figure of the first order in Spain at the time. With the coup by Primo de Rivera, he opposed the dictatorship and was exiled to Fuerteventura, where he managed to escape to France. He remained in exile until the fall of the dictator, returning to Spain as a hero for Republicans. Reinstated, he served as a deputy in the Constituent Assembly of the Republic. When the Civil War broke out, he initially sided with the insurgents, although he later recognized this as an error. Known for his love of controversy, his life was a struggle, an agony. He defined himself as an ‘agonist’ (from the Greek ‘agon’, meaning struggle), a term that also defines the protagonists of his novels.
Essays by Miguel de Unamuno
He was one of the major essayists of Spain in his time, writing many newspaper articles and numerous books. His first book was an essay: Around Traditionalism (En torno al casticismo). He developed the concept of intrahistory, understood as the everyday life of ordinary people, which he considered more important than the historical facts recorded in books and newspapers. Following his crisis, his political concerns gave way to those of an ethical and religious order. His later texts reveal his disenchantment with the Enlightenment ideal that reason would bring humanity development, progress, virtue, and happiness. His language, often described as ‘squeezed and forced’, expresses the impossibility of a philosophical construction of a complete and perfect world. Three basic ideas permeate his essays:
- The fear of death.
- The need to believe in a God to guarantee personal immortality.
- The rational certainty that such a God does not exist.
Miguel de Unamuno’s Novels
His interest in the novel was constant throughout his life. He published Peace in War (Paz en la guerra), which uses techniques close to the realistic novel and contains many autobiographical elements. Love and Pedagogy (Amor y pedagogía) is a novel that breaks with traditional narrative forms and approaches the genre of the essay. Mist (Niebla) was published in the same year as significant works by Azorín (Will) and Baroja (The Way of Perfection). In Mist, the author himself becomes a fictional character who confronts the protagonist, demanding that characters be masters of their own future. The character seems to escape his fictional fate, confronting the real author and blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction. Other notable novels include Aunt Tula (La tía Tula) and San Manuel the Good, Martyr (San Manuel Bueno, mártir). Unamuno plays with narrative techniques, the structure of his stories, and the conception of his characters. His novels are an intellectual game that offers the reader many questions.
The Poetry of Miguel de Unamuno
For Unamuno, poetry was the highest expression of the spirit. In his poems, he avoided easy musicality, believing that poetic sentiment must be deeply thought. His poetry addresses the same themes as his prose: existential angst, religious sentiment, family life, politics, nostalgia, and more. Regarding form, he favored traditional verse forms (sonnets, ballads) but often used assonance rhyme and irregular meter, paying little attention to strict musical rhythm.
Unamuno’s Dramatic Works
He wrote about a dozen plays, in which his concerns are visible: problems of conscience, God, life, death, and more. His theater is an intellectual drama, close to the essay form, which neither sought nor achieved commercial success.