Angel Ganivet
Spanish writer, essayist and diplomat (1865–1898), born in Granada into a modest family and trained in law and philosophy and letters in Granada and Madrid, regarded, alongside Miguel de Unamuno, as one of the intellectual precursors of the Generation of '98, although he died just before this movement formally coalesced in the wake of the 1898 colonial disaster and the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He spent his entire adult life as a Spanish consul in various cold, remote cities of northern Europe —Antwerp, Helsinki and finally Riga— a perspective of voluntary, solitary exile from which, melancholic and increasingly isolated, he developed his most influential reflection on the soul and historical destiny of Spain. His central work, Idearium español (1897), is an essay of national introspection that harshly seeks to diagnose the deep causes of Spanish decline since the loss of the American empire and to propose remedies, arguing that Spain had to definitively renounce all expansionist or imperial ambition and concentrate instead on an inward, spiritual and cultural regeneration, apart from foreign political action —a thesis that directly anticipates the 'problem of Spain' that would obsess the entire Generation of '98 and the later regenerationist movement. His novel The Conquest of the Kingdom of Maya (1897), a colonial satire and dark-humoured adventure about a fictional African empire conquered by Spanish adventurers, complements this diagnosis with a biting and cynical critique of contemporary European colonial expansionism and of civilising hypocrisy itself. Afflicted by profound emotional instability, alcoholism and a depressive crisis worsened by family and financial troubles, Ganivet took his own life in 1898, still young, by throwing himself into the icy waters of the Daugava river in Riga, a tragic and premature end that decisively helped turn his figure —already admired in his lifetime by Unamuno— into an early symbol of the existential and national malaise that would define the spirit of an entire generation of Spanish intellectuals at the turn of the century.