SOURCE: Olson, Paul R. “Lacquer Boxes: Como se hace una novella and the Return of the Nivola.” In The Great Chiasmus: Word and Flesh in the Novels of Unamuno, pp. 156-74. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2003.

In the following essay, Olson explores the Hegelian conceit of the ontological equivalence of Pure Being and Pure Nothingness in Unamuno's novels as represented by a set of nesting boxes each containing another laquered box and argues that over a period of forty years, Unamuno's use of the nesting-box motif provided a structural and topological guiding principle that informed his work.

In 1914 Unamuno was summarily dismissed from his position as Rector of the University of Salamanca for reasons that Emilio Salcedo (188-90) supposes to be a combination of the indignation of conservatives over the heterodoxy of the recently published Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, his continuing socialist affiliations, and...