Realtà e finzione letteraria a confronto: riflessioni sul colloquio fra Miguel de Unamuno e Augusto Pérez in Niebla

[Autom. eng. transl.] The narrative production of Miguel de Unamuno can be divided into three fundamental stages. Realist aesthetics distinguishes youthful writings, still influenced by the verist tendencies that spread in Europe since the mid-nineteenth century. The second is a transitional stage that marks the transition from youthful enthusiasm to literary maturity. In the third phase, dedicated to the "desarrollo de acciones y pasiones humanas", the author pays the utmost attention to the psychological characterization of the characters. This division is accompanied by a further distinction between imitative narration and the conception of the novel as pure fiction. The "imitative manera" is the way in which the reader produces the illusion that the novel's content belongs to a real dimension. The narrative "como pura ficción" is instead the technique by which the author ceases to have as the only concern the verisimilitude of the text and begins to overlap the plans of reality and fiction, as in the case of Niebla. The article explores the analysis of the conversation between author and character in the XXXI chapter of the novel, trying to focus attention on the game of overlapping between dream and reality. The contrast between the two dimensions, not only in this chapter but in much of the unamunian literary production, is the fulcrum around which the entire human existence takes shape and is built.