This section contains 2,702 words (approx. 7 pages at 400 words per page) |
In the following excerpt from an essay originally published in 1905, Unamuno, one of the most influential Spanish writers and thinkers of his era, argues that Cervantes "extracted Don Quixote from the soul of his people and from the soul of all humanity."
[Today], there is scarcely a literature that yields less individual and more insipid works than that of Spain, and there is scarcely a cultured nation— or one that passes for such—where there is such a manifest incapacity for philosophy. [This] philosophical incapacity which Spain has always shown, as well as a certain poetic incapacity— poetry is not the same as literature—has allowed a host of pedants and spiritual sluggards, who constitute what might be called the school of the Cervantist Masora, to fall upon Don Quixote.
The Masora was, as the reader will doubtless remember, a Jewish undertaking, consisting...
This section contains 2,702 words (approx. 7 pages at 400 words per page) |