Background
Miguel de Unamuno was born on September 29, 1864 in Bilbao, Spain, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo.
(La aventura amorosa de un hombre que se ve enfrascado en ...)
La aventura amorosa de un hombre que se ve enfrascado en una apasionada devoción frente a una dama. Junto con el encuentro de este hombre con un perro que pasaría a ser su compañero más adelante, es la historia del engaño y la pasión. Unamuno cuenta de manera extraña su historia, inventando su nuevo género narrativo, la "nivola", donde los personajes hablan en monólogos propios durante la obra. Agregando extraños sucesos literarios (como el encuentro del personaje con su creador o el monólogo del mismo perro) convierten este libro en un tesoro literario. Augusto Pérez es una persona que tiene una vida muy rutinaria y tranquila. Al verse afectado por el amor y por las pláticas que hace frecuentemente con su amigo Víctor Goti, comienza a cuestionar cada uno de los aspectos de su vida: se pregunta si alguien sabe lo que es amar, qué es vivir y cuál es la finalidad de la existencia, entre otros temas. Esos pensamientos lo consumen en el momento en el que su novia Eugenia huye con otro hombre después de que él abandona a Rosario, una muchacha que le había jurado estar con él y quererle siempre. Al verse sin salida, decide buscar ayuda y se dirige a la casa de Miguel de Unamuno, un reconocido escritor, con la idea de que podría decirle qué hacer. Los resultados son inesperados cuando Unamuno se pronuncia su creador y le dice que es un ente de ficción a quien, incluso, puede matar si lo desea. Augusto, en su defensa, dice que quizá Unamuno también es el personaje nivolesco de alguien más y que ese ente terminará con su vida cuando menos lo espere; y defiende su existencia al mencionar que él volverá a vivir cada que alguien lea su historia, mientras que el autor vasco, en cambio, no lo hará. De esta forma, Miguel de Unamuno intenta plasmar el encuentro de un creador con su creación simulando la relación Dios-criatura; Niebla se construye alrededor de este tema mediante el desarrollo de conceptos como la concepción de la vida y el destino
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( Delve into three of Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamu...)
Delve into three of Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno's most haunting parables. This essential Unamuno reader begins with the full-length novel Abel Sanchez, a modern retelling of the story of Cain and Abel. Also included are two remarkable short stories, The Madness of Doctor Montarco and San Manuel Bueno, Martyr, featuring quixotic, philosophically existential characters confronted by the dull ache of modernity. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan and with an insightful introduction by Mario J. Valdes
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(The truth is that reason is the enemy of life. Regarded...)
The truth is that reason is the enemy of life. Regarded as Spains most influential thinker, Miguel de Unamuno was a prolific writer of novels, essays, poetry, and plays. Tragic Sense of Life, published in 1912, was his most important philosophical work and is now generally considered one of the great existential texts of the 20th centuryas provocative a work in its own right as anything written during the post-war period by Sartre, Camus, or Heidegger. In it Unamuno rejects the life of reason for one of intense passion, faith, and love, establishing Don Quixote as the great role model for contemporary man. Wisdom Classic Editions. The goal of SophiaOmnis Wisdom Classic Editions is to reintroduce important works by great thinkers from the past that have something significant to say about the human condition and our place in the universe.
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(En 1913, Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) recogió en El espe...)
En 1913, Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) recogió en El espejo de la muerte veintiséis relatos que había publicado, desde 1888, en diferentes periódicos y revistas. Todos ellos ofrecen claves importantes, que a veces nos niega en sus obras largas, para profundizar en su universo literario y filosófico, así como en su pensamien
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( Fog is a fresh new translation of the Spanish writer Mi...)
Fog is a fresh new translation of the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamunos Niebla, first published in 1914. An early example of modernisms challenge to the conventions of nineteenth-century realist fiction, Fog shocked critics but delighted readers with its formal experimentation and existential themes. This revolutionary novel anticipates the work of Sartre, Borges, Pirandello, Nabokov, Calvino, and Vonnegut. The novels central character, Augusto, is a pampered, aimless young man who falls in love with Eugenia, a woman he randomly spots on the street. Augustos absurd infatuation offers an irresistible target for the philosophical ruminations of Unamunos characters, including Eugenias guardian aunt and theoretical anarchist uncle, Augustos comical servants, and his best friend, Victor, an aspiring writer who introduces him to a new, groundbreaking type of fiction. In a desperate moment, Augusto consults his creator about his fate, arguing with Unamuno about what it means to be real. Even Augustos dog, Orfeo, offers his canine point of view, reflecting on the meaning of life and delivering his masters funeral oration. Fog is a comedy, a tragic love story, a work of metafiction, and a novel of ideas. After more than a century, Unamunos classic novel still moves us, makes us laugh, and invites us to question our assumptions about literature, relationships, and mortality.
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(Aunt Tula (La tia Tula), published in 1921, is one of the...)
Aunt Tula (La tia Tula), published in 1921, is one of the few novels written by Miguel de Unamuno to centre on a female protagonist. It is a vivid, nuanced portrait of the intelligent, wilful and yet vulnerable Tula.
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(Don Manuel, por sobrenombre Bueno (apelativo que toma Una...)
Don Manuel, por sobrenombre Bueno (apelativo que toma Unamuno de Alonso Quijano, el Bueno), parroco de Valverde de Lucerna, es el personaje central de la novela y una de las mas complejas criaturas de ficcion unamunianas. La novela se organiza en torno a su lucha interior y a su comportamiento para con el pueblo. En don Manuel se condensan ademas muchos de los problemas que inquietaron a Unamuno durante su vida.(De la edicion de Joaquin Rubio Tovar)
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(Al igual que la mayor parte de las novelas de Unamuno, y ...)
Al igual que la mayor parte de las novelas de Unamuno, y a diferencia de las novelas realistas al uso en la época, Abel Sánchez carece de indicaciones cronológicas y geográficas concretas se sitúa así en un "tiempo sin tiempo". Por otro lado, en esta novela Unamuno refleja una lucha interior del protagonista, acosado por sus miedos, por sus celos y por sus concepciones encontradas, su religiosidad sin dogmas y la eterna historia bíblica que se repite, en los caínes y abeles.
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essayist novelist philosopher playwright professor rector poet
Miguel de Unamuno was born on September 29, 1864 in Bilbao, Spain, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo.
In 1880 Unamuno began his studies at the University of Madrid and there received a doctorate in philosophy and letters.
Although of Basque extraction, Unamuno always advocated the use of Castilian by his countrymen. At the age of ten he witnessed the siege of Bilbao by revolutionary troops, and this experience he later employed in his first and only orthodox novel, Paz en la guerra (1897; "Peace in War"). As an adolescent, Unamuno developed an intense interest in rationalistic philosophy, and he almost defiantly forsook the faith of his family and his nation. Unlike most men, however, he did not allow this conflict to die in terms of any final decision, and later he was to build from it his own personal and passionately paradoxical sense of religion. After unsuccessful attempts to obtain professorships in philosophy and Latin, he was finally given a chair in Greek at Salamanca in 1891 and was appointed rector of that university in 1900. Characteristically, Unamuno was never a member of a political party, but his personal and sometimes irresponsible journalistic attacks on the political systems and personalities of his country demonstrated his state of constant intellectual revolt against the civil authority. His real political enemy was, perhaps, politics itself; political theory and practice both, he seemed to feel, tended to conceive of man in terms of estimations and principles which in themselves were not human. Thus, he was content to attack and to stir up antagonisms. As he himself said, he was a confirmed and all-embracing "confusionist" in these matters, and he had to suffer the results of such an attitude. He was given a suspended sentence for lese majesty by the monarchy; exiled in 1923, first to the bleak Canary island of Fuerteventura and later voluntarily to France, by Primo de Rivera's dictatorship; bitterly opposed by Spanish Republican politicians whom he attacked; and placed under virtual house arrest by the Falangist insurgents when, after a few weeks of support, he publicly denounced the rebellion. He died on December 31, 1936, almost isolated in his Salamanca home. Unamuno's literary and philosophical works, like his political activities, were characterized by a struggle against external formalism. He wrote in all literary genres but submitted to none of them. He was never concerned with writing a novel, a lyric, a drama, or a philosophical essay as such. In each case he attempted to remake the form in order that it might express not his personality but his "personalism"; that is to say, his basic belief that the will of the individual person and the spiritual conflicts produced by its passions contained the final sense of his and of all existence. Thus Unamuno entitled one of his novels Niebla (1914; Mist, 1928) in order to accentuate the unreality of the environmental world of "mist" in contrast to the meaningful world created by the developing will of the protagonist. Since in this way Unamuno had reversed traditional novelistic procedure, he invented for his work the burlesque genre of the nivola (from novela, or "novel") to show his freedom from usual artistic classifications. Other novels by Unamuno employing this same approach are Abel Sanchez (1917), to which has been added one of his finest short stories, "San Manuel Bueno, mártir" (1933); La tía Tula (1921; "Aunt Tula"); and Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo (1920; Three Exemplary Novels and a Prologue, 1930). The prologue referred to in the last of these is an excellent expression of Unamuno's theory of the novel. Unamuno's lyric poetry is equally specific in essence. Being the poetry of the will in action, it seems to reach out for some opposition, for some interlocutor. The poet does not content himself either with his internalized monologue or with his mostly successful effort to perceive his soul in terms of its surroundings. With its frequent direct address and its metaphysical metaphors and paradoxes, his poetry seems rather to correspond to the lines of one speaker of a dialogue that is both passionate and spiritual. The consciousness of message, the urge to convince, which is fundamental to each poem, seems to overshadow the contemplative mood ordinarily conceived of as part of the lyric substance. Unamuno's poetry could be at once rhetorical and beautiful because his rhetoric was so passionate and so spontaneous a manifestation of his entire being. His first volume, Poesías, appeared in 1907 and was followed by Rosario de sonetos líricos (1911; "Rosary of Lyrical Sonnets"), a title indicating the constant religious preoccupation of his poetry. Probably the greatest example of his lyricism is the long poem, El Cristo de Velásquez (1920), translated as The Christ of Velásquez. In 1953 Cancionero, diario poetico, a "diary" of 1, 755 poems, begun in exile in 1928 and carried on until his death, was published. In the line of Petrarch, it is a major poetic display of a great man's intimate thoughts. Unamuno's philosophy, and again the word is inappropriate in its common acceptance, was first presented in essay form in En torno al casticismo (1895; "An Examination of the Idea of Purity"), five essays on Spanish traditionalism; in Tres ensayos (1900; "Three Essays"); and later in a series of books. The first of these books was his personal re-creation and reinterpretation of Cervantes' Don Quixote, the Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905; The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, 1927), which attempted to discover the underlying and vital philosophy of Spanish life in the symbolism of the various incidents of the great novel. In 1913 Unamuno published what is probably his most important work, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Peoples, 1921). Here, harking back to his earlier spiritual crisis, he states his fundamental belief that for "the man of flesh and blood, " a man who for him was the real man and not an abstraction like "the common man, " "the rational man, " or "the economic man, " neither blind faith nor rational skepticism can furnish an adequate foundation for existence. Since the basic urge of life, he says, is not only to continue living but to grow and to achieve more living, the only really fundamental problem for man is death and the possibility of life after death. The will demands such afterlife but reason discounts it, and each man, whether he knows it or not, lives in the agony of this conflict. Therefore, according to Unamuno, it is necessary to exist spiritually and to create on the basis of a full realization and utilization of this agony. This is his "tragic sense of life, " and its denial, the nontragic solutions of our era, he maintains, can only lead to sterility and to disaster. The will to passionate personal action, even if it is only meaningless action, must be developed in contemporary men in order to provide a necessary counterpoint to the all-pervading dependence on reason and technique. A third book which further develops certain of the ideas of Del sentimiento tragico de la vida is La agonia del cristianismo (1925; The Agony of Christianity, 1928).
(Al igual que la mayor parte de las novelas de Unamuno, y ...)
(Don Manuel, por sobrenombre Bueno (apelativo que toma Una...)
(En 1913, Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) recogió en El espe...)
(Aunt Tula (La tia Tula), published in 1921, is one of the...)
( Fog is a fresh new translation of the Spanish writer Mi...)
(La aventura amorosa de un hombre que se ve enfrascado en ...)
( Delve into three of Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamu...)
(Del sentimiento tragico de la vida, publicada en 1913)
(The truth is that reason is the enemy of life. Regarded...)
Member of the Royal Spanish Academy