The Cervantes inaugurates the XII Conference on the life and work of Manuel Azaña, which enters the Caja de las Letras

He Cervantes Institute and the Henares Forum inaugurate this Thursday the XII Conference on the life and work of Manuel Azaña, on the occasion of the 145th anniversary of the writer’s birth in Alcalá de Henares. The monographic program will take place until January 14 at the Cervantes headquarters in the native municipality.

The conference will be inaugurated by the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero; the Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, of the Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Fernando Martínezthe president of the Henares Forum, José Morilla Critz.

After the inauguration, the round table will be held ‘Letters to Manuel Azaña: Lerroux, Jiménez and Prieto‘ in which three significant letters sent to Azaña will be discussed. In the first, Alejandro Lerroux (1864-1949) talks to him about the persecution that those involved in the republican conspiracy of 1930 are suffering. The second letter is dated 1920 and in it the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958), whose Friendship with Azaña led him to dedicate his publishing project Guerra en España to him. Prose and verse (1936-1954), sends him his unpublished collection of poems.

The last letter is from 1935, in which the socialist leader Indalecio Prieto (1883-1962), very close to Azaña, wrote to him to begin organizing the Popular Front, an electoral coalition of the main left-wing parties that ran in the elections of February 1936.

José Álvarez Junco, emeritus professor of History of Thought and Political and Social Movements at the Complutense University of Madrid, will participate in the colloquium; Alfonso Alegre Heitzmann, poet and essayist, and Bruno Vargas, professor and researcher at the University of Toulouse and the INU Champollion-campus of Albi.

Next Friday, January 10, the second session of the Conference will take place, which will be dedicated to three other emblematic letters. The first was sent by Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) in 1918 to Azaña, who had just been re-elected secretary of the Ateneo de Madrid, to tell him that he would like to talk to him about Catalonia. The second was sent by Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936), Azaña’s co-worker at both La Cacharrería del Ateneo in Madrid and Café Regina in the capital.

Finally, in the third letter the poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939) wrote to him in 1923 to send him a poem dedicated to Valle-Inclán, which would be published in 1923 in the magazine La Pluma.

The Conference will end on Wednesday, January 14, and the letters from Hernández Saravia, Rivas Cherif and Victoria Kent will be discussed. In that of Juan Hernández Saravia (1880-1962), head of Azaña’s military cabinet while he was Minister of War, the personal and economic situation of the Republican military in exile is addressed.

The second letter is sent by Cipriano de Rivas Cherif (1891-1967), brother-in-law and friend of Azaña since 1913. And, finally, the one sent to him by Victoria Kent (1898-1987), the second woman to register to practice the profession, will be read. lawyer and one of the three women with a seat in the Congress of Deputies in 1931.

‘IN MEMORIAM’ LEGACY TO THE BOX OF LETTERS

Furthermore, this Friday, January 10, the Caja de las Letras will receive the in memoriam legacy of Azaña, who always shone for his oratory and in whose life there were periods of literary creation and political activity, his diaries being his great literary work. and historical.

Participating in the delivery of the legacy will be García Montero, Martínez López y Morilla, María José Navarro Azaña, grandniece of Manuel Azaña, and Isabelo Herreros, president of the Manuel Azaña Association. The event will be closed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, José Manuel Albares.