Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo

After studying Literature and Philosophy in Madrid (1880-1884), he received a doctorate at the age of twenty. In 1891 he won the Chair in Greek at Salamanca, and was rector of the university from 1901 (except for several brief interruptions) until his death.
Unamuno was at once a poet, man of letters, philologist, philosopher, positivist, humanist, existentialist, pragmatist, spiritualist, irrationalist, mystic, Catholic, Christian, Protestant, Lutheran, Calvinist, atheist, socialist, liberal...there have been many definitions, but his thought and works cannot be completely understood without considering the four fundamental stages of his life:

• 1884-1897: from the doctoral thesis (Crítica del problema sobre el origen y preistoria de la raza vasca) to a religious crisis.  In this period, Spain and the problems of Europeization, regionalism, Carlism, the social question, and language as an expression of the ‘soul’ of the nation occupy his attention.  His principal works, apart from the doctoral thesis, are the essays collected in En torno al casticismo (1895) and a novel: Paz en la guerra (1897).
• 1897-1913: a period dedicated to religious problems, and to immortality as the source of life’s meaning.  From this concept he develops the oppositions between pistis/gnosis, love and pedagogy, science and religion, and faith and reason. He describes Quixotism as a life according to faith, Spanish popular Catholicism as a reaction to European modernity, and polemicizes against the culturalism of Ortega y Gasset.  These themes begin to emerge in three essays written in 1900: ¡Adentro!, La ideocrazia, La fe. They are then further developed in Amor y pedagogía (1902); Vida de don Quijote y Sancho (1905); Del Sentimiento trágico de la vida (1912).
• 1913-1927: During this period Unamuno dedicates himself primarily to writing novels, as a way of studying the intimate contradictions of personality. This can be seen in: Niebla (1914), Cómo se hace una novela (1927), and El otro (1926), in which the intimate contradiction of a personality is dramatized in the struggle between two brothers. El Cristo de Velázquez (1920), Canto a Teresa (1924)and La agonía del cristianismo (1924) were also written during this period.
• 1927-1936: This period witnessed an attempt at sythesis on the part of Unamuno, as in the novel San Manuel Bueno, mártir, which is a kind of summary of the ideas dearest to him. A nostalgic vision of the past is also evident in his writings on the Republic from this period: República española y España repúblicana 1931-1936 (Salamanca 1979).