UNAMUNO Y JUGO, MIGUEL DE (1864-1936), Spanish philosopher, one of the major original thinkers of the 20th century, also important as a poet, novelist, and political figure. He was born in Bilbao on Sept. 29, 1864. Although of Basque extraction, he 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. In 1880 Unamuno began his studies at the University of Madrid and there received a doctorate in philosophy and letters. 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 Dec. 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; Abel Sanchez and Other Stories, 1958), to which has been added one of his finest short stories, ``San Manuel Bueno, mártir'' (1933); La tia Tula (1921; ``Aunt Tula''); and Tres novelas ejemplares y un prologo (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, Poesias, appeared in 1907 and was followed by Rosario de sonetos liricos (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).

Copyright © 1996 P.F. Collier, A Division of Newfield Publications, Inc.

Stephen Gilman, UNAMUNO Y JUGO, MIGUEL DE (1864-1936)., Vol. 22, Colliers Encyclopedia CD-ROM, 02-28-1996.

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