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- Identity: the
building blocks of
2. Literature
and philosophy
3. Art and
architecture
4. Performing
arts
5. Cinema
and fashion
6. Media and
communications
7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the details of
Vicente Aleixandre. Perhaps the most successful of
the Generation of 27 to survive the Civil War, Aleixandre
only devoted himself to poetry when ill health cut short
a career as a lawyer. He experimented with Surrealism
in the 1930s but secured his place among the literary
elite in 1944 withSombra del Paraíso. No other stretch
of verse better captures Spain’s sense of loss after the
Civil War; the work focussed on universal themes like
nature, love and death rather than anything overtly
political. In 1977 he was rewarded with the Nobel Prize
for Literature.
Coded messages: literature under Franco
Many of the writers with leftist leanings, like the poets
Jorge Guillén and Rafael Alberti, that survived the Civil
War went into exile soon after and often never returned
to Spain. Unsurprisingly, the literature that began to
emerge after the war was consistently bleak. Much
of it, constrained both by censorship and the simple
rawness of subject matter, used an oblique approach
to address the nation’s physical and psychological
self-destruction. Often the tribulations of children
were used as an extended metaphor for deeper ills.
The novel came to the fore, as did female authors,
increasingly active and appreciated.
“I SING TO SPAIN AND
IFEELHERTOTHE
CORE OF MY BEING,
BUT ABOVE ALL I AM
AMANOFTHEWORLD
AND BROTHER OF
EVERYONE.”
Federico García Lorca
War of words: literary lights
in the International Brigades
The foreign literary clientele
of the International
Brigades that fought on the
Republican side in the Civil
War has heightened the
Brigades’ renown. British
writer Stephen Spender got
a taste of war in their ranks,
while André Malraux,
French novelist and later
Minister of Culture, was in
the International Brigades’
Air Force, one of 30,000
Frenchmen to fight with the
Republicans. Laurie Lee
wrote of his experiences
as a Brigades volunteer in
A Moment of War(1991).
George Orwell also joined
the Republicans, but via the
Independent Labour Party -
not the communist Brigades.
He later wrote of his
experiences (apparently
mundane apart from being
shot in the throat by a
sniper) inHomage to
Catalonia(1938). All the
above returned home alive;
the young poets Charles
Donnelly and John Cornford
fared worse. The most
quoted foreign author of
the Civil War remains Ernest
Hemingway, stationed in
Spain as a correspondent
rather than a combatant.
His Republican sympathies
later emerged inFor Whom
the Bell Tolls(1940).
Spanish literary awards
The annual Premio de
Miguel de Cervantes is a
lifetime achievement
award given to an author
of Spanish or Latin
American origin. Other
annual awards include
the Premio Nadal and
the Premio Nacional de
Literatura, both dished
out to individual books.
The Premio Planeta,
awarded by the publisher
of the same name, is
second only to the Nobel
Prize for Literature in
monetary value – the
winner gobbles over
€600,000. Some have
questioned the award’s
credibility because of
the frequency with which
Planeta rewards its
own authors – Miguel
Delibes, signed to
Planeta himself, declined
the award for that very
reason.
