Juan Valera

Juan Valera y Alcalá Galiano (1824–1905)

Juan Valera y Alcalá Galiano (born October 18, 1824 in Cabra , Cordoba Province , Spain, † April 18, 1905 in Madrid ) was a Spanish writer , politician and diplomat .

He is difficult to classify in the current literary epochs of his time ( realism , naturalism ); as a great stylist, he is more of a singular figure in this epoch.

Life

Juan Valera came from a not wealthy Andalusian noble family from the province of Cordoba; his father was a liberal naval officer, already retired. He spent his childhood in Cabra and the neighboring village of Doña Mencía (both often appear in his works). From 1837 to 1840 he attended the Seminario Conciliar in Málaga , published first verses and met through his brother José de Espronceda and other romantics . He studied for a year at the Colegio del Sacro Monte in Granada , in 1842 he went to Madrid, where he studied little, wrote a lot and was also able to publish one or the other. There he had a love affair with the ten years older poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda , which he immortalized in his poems under the code name "Lelia". He failed his exams, had to return to Granada and finished his law studies there; his father paid him to publish the volume of poetry, Ensayos poéticos . In 1846 he went back to Madrid, where he found access to aristocratic society and led a very pleasant salon life; Ángel de Saavedra , Duque de Rivas, got him a post as attaché without pay at the Spanish embassy in Naples , where the Duque himself was ambassador. Valera subsequently served as a diplomat in Naples (1847–49), Lisbon (1849–51), Rio de Janeiro (1851–53), Dresden (1855), Russia (1856), Frankfurt am Main (1865), Lisbon (1881) –84), Washington, DC (1884–86), Brussels (1886–88) and Vienna (1893–95). He spoke several languages, was a man of the world and very educated, but still suffered from financial problems. As a politician, he was on the side of the Moderados (moderate party). In 1858 he was elected member of the Cortes , the Spanish parliament, where he (like his fellow writer Benito Pérez Galdós ) developed little activity. He later became senator for the province of Córdoba and for a short time Subsecretario de Estado (State Secretary, during the so-called Revolución Gloriosa , the "Glorious Revolution" of 1868).

He was a charmer and don Juan well into old age : Among other things, he had a love affair with Malvina, the daughter of Duque de Rivas; after numerous other adventures, he finally married in 1867, at the age of 43, more out of boredom than love, as the saying goes (the marriage was not very happy either). He also had a relationship with an actress in Saint Petersburg , and there was a scandal in Washington when the young Katherine Lee Bayard committed suicide out of unhappy love for the 60-year-old in the anteroom of the embassy, ​​which caused him some trouble. Much about the same time Valera was in Washington, his eldest and favorite son died at home.

He spent the last years of his life, gradually going blind (he dictated his last works to a secretary) in Madrid, where he took part in the meetings of the Real Academia Española (he became a member in 1861) and where he died on April 18, 1905.

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As a man of letters, Valera was actually a man of the 18th century who represented classical and humanistic values. In the midst of the fierce political disputes in the Spanish 19th century, he was distinguished by ideological tolerance , he was primarily an esthete and hedonist . Valera was often called a "realist with white gloves", others described his worldview as "poetic realism" and his works as psychological character novels . Its main characteristic could be described as the predominance of an internal action over the purely external occurrence; the novels are usually centered around a main character who also forms the title and whose psychological conflicts are the focus of interest. He analyzes states of the mind, not objective reality like the other realistic writers of his time. According to his own statements, Valera aimed at a broad audience and still could not reach it, as he often indulged in learned digressions and his slowly flowing novels seemed too long-winded for the average reader, who is used to the action-packed and tense feuilleton novels . He also wanted to earn money with his literary works and often complained in his letters about how few books were sold and how few readers he had. This although the focus of his works is a love theme that transcends some taboos; In his work, women are not infrequently classified as intellectually and emotionally superior; the man appears in a role that is unfit for life and determined by unclear illusions.

Juan Valera also has an important role for the Goethe - Reception played in Spain (he authored in 1878 a preface to the Spanish translation of Faust , and even individual parts translated).

Pepita Jiménez

Juan Valera wrote his first novel Pepita Jiménez in 1874 when he was already 50 years old. It was about the awakening love of a seminarian, Don Luis de Vargas, for a twenty-year-old widow, the title character Pepita Jiménez, and at the same time about the conflict between spiritual calling and worldly love, about a possible reconciliation between Catholicism and modernity. In his enthusiasm for the groundbreaking work, the somewhat younger Spanish writer Clarín coined the bon mot: "If the philosophy is called Pepita Jiménez, it will be unforgettable".

Other works

Novels

• Las ilusiones del doctor Faustino 1875
• El comendador Mendoza 1877
• Pasarse de listo 1878
• Doña Luz 1879
• Juanita la Larga 1896
• Genio y figura 1897
• Morsamor 1899

Stories and short stories

• Parsondes 1859
• El pájaro verde 1860
• El bermejiano prehistórico 1879
• Zorina 1880
• El hechicero 1894
• El caballero del azor 1896
• El cautivo de Doña Mencía 1897
• Garuda o la cigüeña blanca 1898
• El maestro Raimundico 1898.

Poetry

• Ensayos poéticos 1844
• Poesías 1858
• Canciones, romances y poemas 1886

Plays

• Tentativas dramáticas 1871

Web links

• Literature by and about Juan Valera in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin
• Literature by and about Juan Valera in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Juan Valera in the catalog of the library of the Instituto Cervantes in Germany
• Works by Juan Valera in the Gutenberg-DE project