Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)
Two autograph letters signed (‘Miguel de Unamuno’) to A[ntonio] Bórquez Solar, [Salamanca], 19 September 1905 and 7 May 1906
In Spanish. 10 pages in total, 200 x 130mm, on bifolia, headed paper of the Rector of the University of Salamanca. [With:] an autograph letter signed by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and two autograph postcards signed Emilia Pardo Bazán to Solar. Provenance: Sotheby’s, 2 December 1994, lot 687.

Two letters expressing his thoughts on the interplay of national, regional and global identities – including mention of his Basque heritage – and the connections between Spanish-speaking peoples. Unamuno professes himself always happy to receive letters from educated [South] Americans – many write to him asking to work together – and particularly from Chile, for which he feels a particular affinity because the Basque form one of the most significant ethnic groups; his correspondent tells him he has not heard of his recent studies published in La España Moderna, so he encloses a copy of his most recent work, ‘La vida de D. Quijote y Sancha’. It is, he believes, ‘an essential work, and I am very interested in how it will be understood and publicised in America. I’m sure that it will be the best known of all of my works’, asking for the best bookseller [in Chile] to have carry the work. He expresses sadness at the huge distance which separates the Spanish-speaking peoples: he makes an effort to make himself known to American publicists and writers but the struggle is with the inertia of the booksellers, noting that it is hard to find an American book in Spain. His correspondent would like to be better known in Spain, but Unamuno’s opinion is that the only truly international reputations are forged by those writers who have ‘saturated’ their own country, voicing his distrust of the ‘cosmopolitan’ international elite. Later, he offers his thoughts on national independence: ‘the same as individual freedom, [it] is not an end but a means, and is not deserved by the people who do not at least aspire to form their consciousness of the use they must make of that independence’ [translation] (1905).