Miguel Sawa y la Revista "Don Quijote" (1892-1903)

Abstract

In late 19th century and early 20th coexisted in time in Spain a lot of writers, many of them well known today, but many others who haven’t been rescued yet. This stage has been called the Silver Age of Spanish literature. Among the best known and most representative of Madrid’s bohemian characters were the Sawa brothers: Manuel, Alejandro, Miguel and Enrique. All of them had related to the literature or journalism, in greater or lesser extent, and were very significant figures in their time. Alejandro, who reached a high literary level, has recently been subject of various studies and biographies which have located him in his place as a outstanding writer, rescuing him from forgetting where he remained sunk until a few decades ago. But it has not happened the same with the rest of the brothers, especially with Miguel, who was also a writer. The object of the first part of this thesis is to recover the figure of the Miguel Sawa, rebuilding his biography and both journalistic and literary career. Miguel Sawa, belonging to the so-called generation of literarian bohemia, born in Seville in 1866. After moving with his family to Málaga, where he spent his childhood, settled definitively in Madrid in 1880. In Madrid lived the atmosphere of the newspapers offices and the literarian gatherings of the “cafes”. He was a friend of Valle Inclán, the Machado brothers, the Baroja brothers, and belonged to the “Gente Nueva” and to the Germinal generation. In 1901 he married María Palacio, with whom he had a son, Emilio, who died before completing one year of life, and a daughter, Carmen, who had five years when Sawa died. After spending a season in La Coruña, as director of the newspaper La Voz de Galicia, returned to Madrid at the beginning of 1910, ready to continue his literary career, but died suddenly on 1 October of that same year because of a fulminant pneumonia...