ABSTRACT
Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) repeatedly refers to Søren Kierkegaard as his brother in The Tragic Sense of Life, his most philosophical work, published in 1913.1 In the first chapter Unamuno names Kierkegaard along with others like Pascal and St. Augustine as men who shared his tragic sense of life.2 However, the stories of Kierkegaard and Unamuno were intertwined at an earlier date. Unamuno’s foremost biographer, Mario Valdés, states that Unamuno ordered and received the 14 volumes of the first edition of the Samlede Værker published by Drachmann and Heiberg as they came out from 1901 to 1906.3 How did it happen that Unamuno began to read Kierkegaard, who was virtually unknown in the Iberian peninsula at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth? In a 1907 essay entitled, “Ibsen and Kierkegaard,” Unamuno reveals that his reason for learning Danish was so that he could read Ibsen, but he says that he was rewarded for his efforts by gaining access to the works of Kierkegaard.4
