Spanish · 1864–1936
Unamuno was a Basque from Bilbao who became professor of Greek and then rector of the University of Salamanca, and who spent his life picking fights — with the monarchy, with Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, which exiled him to Fuerteventura in 1924, and finally with the generals who rose in 1936. He taught himself Danish to read Kierkegaard. He wrote novels he refused to call novels, coining the word nivola for books stripped of scenery and plot until only argument and character remained. The question that would not leave him was whether a man who cannot believe in God can bear to die, and he never pretended to have solved it. On 12 October 1936, in the Salamanca lecture hall, he answered the Nationalist general Millán-Astray's cry of Death to intelligence with the line that ended his public life: you will win, but you will not convince. He died under house arrest ten weeks later.