Sobrevivir en la memoria de los otros: la presencia del Gran Inquisidor de Dostoievski en San Manuel Bueno, mártir de Miguel de Unamuno

Abstract

exists between Spain and Russia as spaces of cultural confluence between East and West. In a letter to Ganivet of 1898, Unamuno confessed for his part: "I have always been convinced that there is an essential similarity between the national character of the Spanish people and that of the Russian people: resignation, attitude towards life, the serene religiosity of its people, the mystical aspirations and impulses of the chosen ones ..." As he wrote in 1915, “Dostoyevsky is my main source regarding Russia (…) I wish for the triumph of the conception and the feeling that Dostoyevsky had of life and the world”. As critics understand, Russia served Unamuno “as a field of experiments on ideas and images that interested him more than the Russian reality: the problem of Spain, the problem of humanity, the problem of the immortality of the soul”. (Korkonosenko: 2000) The short novel San Manuel Bueno, mártir (1931) reconsiders "The legend of the Grand Inquisitor", a chapter of The Karamazov Brothers (1881); it asks about religious faith and the belief in a superior being that gives meaning to man's life, two central themes in the vital concerns of the Spanish writer. In our work we will comparatively analyze affinities and differences between the proposed works and the ideas of their authors.