Miguel de Unamuno - Biography

Biography

Miguel de Unamuno was born in Bilbao, a port city of Spain, the son of Félix de Unamuno and Salomé Jugo. As a young man, he was interested in the Basque language, and competed for a teaching position in the Instituto de Bilbao, against Sabino Arana. The contest was finally won by the Basque scholar Resurrección María de Azkue.

Unamuno worked in all major genres: the essay, the novel, poetry and theatre, and, as a modernist, contributed greatly to dissolving the boundaries between genres. There is some debate as to whether Unamuno was in fact a member of the Generation of '98, an ex post facto literary group of Spanish intellectuals and philosophers that was the creation of José Martínez Ruiz — a group that includes Antonio Machado, Azorín, Pío Baroja, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ramiro de Maeztu and Ángel Ganivet, among others.

In addition to his writing, Unamuno played an important role in the intellectual life of Spain. He served as rector of the University of Salamanca for two periods: from 1900 to 1924 and 1930 to 1936, during a time of great social and political upheaval. Unamuno was removed from his two university chairs by the dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1924, over the protest of other Spanish intellectuals. He lived in exile until 1930, first banished to Fuerteventura (Canary Islands), from whence he escaped to France. After a year in Paris, Unamuno established himself in Hendaye in the French Basque Country, on the border with Spain. Unamuno returned to Spain after the fall of General Primo de Rivera's dictatorship in 1930 and took up his rectorship again. It is said in Salamanca that the day he returned to the University, Unamuno began his lecture by saying "As we were saying yesterday, ...", as Fray Luis de León had done in the same place four centuries before, as though he had not been absent at all. After the fall of Rivera's dictatorship, Spain embarked on its second Republic. He was a candidate for the small intellectual party Agrupación al Servicio de la República. He always was a moderate and refused all political and anticlerical extremisms.

Having begun his literary career as an internationalist, Unamuno gradually became convinced of the universal values of Spanish culture, feeling that Spain's essential qualities would be destroyed if influenced too much by outside forces. Thus he welcomed Franco's revolt as necessary to rescue Spain from the excesses of the Spanish Republic. However, the harsh tactics employed by the Francoists in the struggle against their republican opponents caused him to oppose both the Republic and Franco. Unamuno said of the military revolt that it would be the victory of "a brand of Catholicism that is not Christian and of a paranoid militarism bred in the colonial campaigns", referring in the latter case to uprising of Franco's forces in Spanish Morocco.

In 1936 Unamuno had a public quarrel with the Nationalist general Millán Astray at the University in which he denounced both Astray—with whom he had had verbal battles in the 1920s—and elements of the rebel movement. He called the battle cry of the elite armed forces group named La Legión—"Long live death!"—repellent and suggested Astray wanted to see Spain crippled. One historian notes that his address was a "remarkable act of moral courage" and that he risked being lynched on the spot but was saved by Franco's wife who took him out of the place. Shortly afterwards, Unamuno was effectively removed for a second time from his University post, broken-hearted. His death followed ten weeks later.

Unamuno was a well-known lusophile, being probably the best Spanish connoisseur of Portuguese culture, literature and history of his time. He believed it was as important for a Spaniard to become familiar with the great names of Portuguese literature as with those of Catalan literature. He was also a supporter of Iberian Federalism.

In the final analysis Unamuno's significance is that he was one of a number of notable interwar intellectuals, along with luminaries such as Julien Benda, Karl Jaspers, Johan Huizinga and José Ortega y Gasset, who resisted the intrusion of ideology into western intellectual life.