Miguel de Unamuno was a 20th century versatile Spanish writer. He wrote in major genres of literature, including novels, poetry, plays and essays. He is famous for his Abel Sánchez: The History of a Passion (1917) and The Tragic Sense of Life (1913).
Miguel de Unamuno was born on 29 September 1864 in Bilbao, a port city of Spain and grew up in a Catholic household. He pursued 11 languages and philosophy at the University of Madrid and in 1884, earned a Ph.D. He was passionate about teaching Basque language, thus applied for a teaching position in Instituto de Bilbao but could not get it. However, in 1891 he became a language professor, teaching Greek at University of Salamanca. Later, he was appointed principal of the university from 1900 to 1924. In 1924, he was removed from his post, during a period of great political upheaval, by General Miguel Primo de Rivera. He was banished but found a way to make an escape to France. As soon as General Rivera’s rule ended, he returned to his homeland and resumed his position as a rector in 1930.
Unamuno began his writing career with fiction. His first novel was published in 1987, titled Paz en la guerra (Peace in War). The novel delves into a philosophical subject about the dynamics between the self and the world. The theme of death is explored in the novel in relation to the subject matter. The novel was influenced by Unamuno’s childhood experience during the Third Carlist War. In 1902, he penned an uncanny blend of tragedy and comedy. It was a parody based on a system of philosophy called positivism. His key works include Abel Sánchez (1917) in which he explored the theme of envy through modern depiction of Cain and Abel’s story. Other fiction works comprise short story collections and novels include El espejo de la muerte (The Mirror of Death), Niebla (Mist, 1914) and La tía Tula (Aunt Tula) (1921).
He is still considered among the esteemed intellectuals of Spain ever produced. Unamuno wrote diverse forms of literature, mostly in hope of blending several genres together. For him art served as a medium for expressing spiritual problems. He began writing poetry in his early forties. His poetry dealt with themes like death, time, ignorance of God and the spiritual dilemma. He published his first collection of poetry in 1970, titled Poesías (Poems). The work addressed the religious conflicts in Spain, their domestic life and social upheaval that would later permeate his poetry.
In 1920, he published El Cristo de Velázquez (The Christ of Velázquez). It was a religious poetic work that explored figure of Christ from various perspectives. Unamuno experimented with a travel sketch in his volume, Andanza y visions (Spanish Travels and Visions). This volume was filled with profound resonant landscape imagery. Several of the prose poems contained in this volume were published in newspapers. The works followed include Rimas de dentro (Rhymes from Within, 1923) and Rimas de un poeta desconocido (Rhymes from an Unknown Poet, 1924). Subsequent to escaping exile, he wrote De Fuerteventura a París (From Fuerteventura to Paris, 1925) and Romancero del destierro (Ballads of Exile, 1928).
Unamuno produced numerous successful plays which also dealt with philosophical subject matter. He explored the question of individual faith in his remarkable plays, La esfinge (The Sphinx, 1898), La verdad (Truth, 1899) and El hermano Juan o El mundo es teatro (Brother Juan or The World is a Theatre, 1934). Miguel de Unamuno died on New Year’s Eve in 1936.
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