Peace in War

The first and most traditionally realistic of Unamuno’s novelsThis volume presents an authoritative English translation of Miguel de Unamuno’s first novel, Paz en la guerra (1897). The book draws heavily on the author’s childhood memories of the siege of the Basque city of Bilbao in 1874. Unamuno, the great Spanish forerunner of existentialism, portrays a collective hero—the humble citizens of the bombarded city, whose daily lives are disrupted by historical forces beyond their control or understanding. He mingles these fictional characters with the generals and politicians of mid-nineteenth-century Spain, participants in the struggle between the conservative and traditionalist supporters of the Pretender Don Carlos and the liberal central government in Madrid. His novel gives vivid life to the arguments he presented in a series of essays in 1895, En torno al casticismo (“On Authentic Tradition”). In these essays, he urged his fellow citizens to abandon the ideologies and dogmatism that divided the nation—the oversimplified slogans that lead to war—and to seek instead the unity to be found in their common mortality.