Vicente Risco

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Vicente Martínez Risco Agüero (Born in Ourense, 1884 and dead in 1963) was a Galician intellectual of the 20th Century. He was a founder member of the xeración Nós.

He was one of the most important persons of the history of the galician literature. He was born in a well off family, with an high cultural level. He setted the elements of the Galician nationalism and the Galician New Narrative.

1 First years
2 Meeting the Galicianism
3 Second Republic
4 Franco's dictatorship
5 Ideology
6 Literature
7 External links

[edit] First years

He was a son of a public official, and he was a bad-health boy. He was a good friend of Ramón Otero Pedrayo. In 1899 he obtained his high school certificate. He studied Laws in the University of Santiago, and in 1906 he became a public official as his father was.

In these years he participated in social gatherings directed by Marcelo Macías, with other intellectual men as Xulio Alonso Cuevillas or Arturo Vázquez Núñez, who had an high influence in the literary vocation of Vicente Risco. He read the English and French decadentist authors, putting him in contact with the ocultism and the orientalism. He studied the budism and he became an theosophyst author.

In 1910 he entered in a local newspaper, El Miño, where he wrote philosophical articles with the pseudonyms of Rujú Sahib and Polichinela. He became a follower of Rabindranath Tagore, announcing it in the intellectual social gatherings of Ourense.

In February of 1912 Risco he met with Castelao and praised one of his speeches in El Miño, but Risco was still far from the Galicianist movement.

In 1913 he went to Madrid to study Teaching. There he was pupil of José Ortega y Gasset, he spoke with Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Luis de Hoyos Sáinz and becames to the catolicism.

In 1916 he finished his studies and he returned to Ourense as a professor of History. In 1917 he founded with Arturo Noguerol Román the literary magazine La Centuria, an antecedent of the future nationalist magazine Nós.

[edit] Meeting the Galicianism

Ending 1917 Vicente Risco entered in the Irmandades da Fala under the influence of Antón Losada Diéguez, and in December 18 of 1917 he did his first speech in Galician language, in an act to support Francesc Cambó. In the campaign for the Parliamentary Elections of 1918, he took part in many speeches in the district of Celanova, with no god results. In July of 1918, Riscostarted to write articles for A Nosa Terra. He tried to impulse the Galician literature writing articles about Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Apollinare or Omar Khayyam.

In a few of time Risco was converted in the theoretician and in the leader of the Galician nationalism, and in November of 1918 he had an important role in the I Nationalist Assembly.

In 1920 he published the book Theory of the Galician Nationalism, considered the foundational text of the galician nationalism. Risco took ideas from Murguía and combined it with the philosophical irrationalism, the geographic determinism, the neotraditionalism and the ethnography; and he defined the nation as a natural entity based on land, race, language, social organisation, and national feeling. He valued Galicia's geographical and cultural belonging to the Celtic and Atlantic area, as opposed to Spain's Mediterranean heritage.

In 1920 he started the magazine Nós, where he wrote more than 100 articles until their cancellation on Julñy of 1936. He also directed the ethnographic section of the Seminario de Estudos Galegos.In 1922 he married with María Carme Fernández Gómez. In 1923 his first son born. In 1923 borns Antón Risco.

Risco supported at the first time the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, because he saw in it the opportunity to destroy the caciquist system and accept the role of provincial deputy in Ourense thinking in the possibility of the establishment of a Commonwealth of Galicia as the Commonwealth of Catalonia.
After his rupture with the Irmandade da Fala da Coruña and A Nosa Terra he wrote for the Rexurdimento, the newspaper of the Irmandade Nazonalista Galega (Galician Nationalist Brotherhood), although he returned to A Nosa Terra after a few time.

In April of 1930 he travelled to Berlin to have a course of ethnography in the University of Berlin, where he lived four months. After that he became more consevadurist and Catholic. He wrote a book, Mittleuropa, where he described his European trip.

[edit] Second Republic

In the VI Nationalist Assembly Risco supported the idea of the transformation of the Irmandades da Fala in a political party. He founded with Ramón Otero Pedraio the Partido Nazonalista Republicán de Ourense to take part in the elections of 1931. He didn't obtain the deputy act, and then he started to lose influence in the galicianist movement in favour of Otero Pedraio and Castelao.

In October 25, 1931, he led a group of galicianist people that published a Catholic manifest against what they considered a persecution of the Catholic Church by the republican govern.

In 1933 he published Nós, os inadaptados, where he explains his spiritual and ciclic conception of the history.

In the Third Assembly of the PG (October of 1935), he accepted the momentary collaboration with the left-wing parties to avoid the dissolution of the PG. In January of 1935 he published an article in the "Heraldo de Galicia", where he claimed for the reconquest of Galicia to God. In confrontation with the leaders of his party he didn't go to the IV Assembly of the PG in Monforte de Lemos. Was in that assembly where were ratified the accords with the left-wing parties. In the extraordinary Assembly of Santiago in February of 1936 where the PG did a coalition with the Popular Front. Risco united with the group of right-wing galicanist people, and he left the PG to direct Dereita Galeguista.

In June 13, 1936, when started the campaign to the establishment of the Statute of Autonomy of Galicia, he supported the affirmative vote. When the Army started the Civil War, he didn't do something to help his galicianist friends that were murdered or imprisoned. After 1937 he directed Misión founded with Otero Pedraio. After 1938 he started to write articles for La Región where he supported Franco's band. Is with that action when his old galicianist friends called him traitor. This is symbolized in the phrase of Castelao is his book Sempre en Galiza: "...sayed Risco, when Risco was somebody".

[edit] Franco's dictatorship

In 1940 he published the ethnographic work The end of the world in the galician popular tradition and in 1944 he published the book History of the Jews after the destruction of the Temple. He lived for a time in Pamplona and he wrote articles for El Pueblo Navarro. In 1945 he lived in Madrid, where he did articles for El Español, Pueblo and La Estafeta Literaria, and he published in 1947 Satanás. Biografía del Diablo. He returned to Ourense in 1948.

with the help of his galicianist friends Otero Pedrayo and Francisco Fernández del Riego, he started again to write in galician in his ethnographic studio to the History of Galiza directed by Otero Pedrayo, in the translation of the Camilo José Cela's book The family of Pascual Duarte, realized in 1951.

Although that, the Castilian will be the language employed in the rest of his literary production after the civil war. The best book of this stage was La puerta de paja. He wrote also La tiara de Saitaphernes, Gamalandafa and La verídica historia del niño de dos cabezas de Promonta, that were non published.

He died in April 30, 1963, in Ourense, a few days after Franco's govern gave him the Medail of Afonso X.

[edit] Ideology

The politic ideology of Vicente Risco is based in the critic to the modern world, considered as a decadent world. He exalted the irrationalism, the mysticism and the popular religiousness, and for the same reason he rejected the realist literature. He also despised the mediterran civilation and he supported the celticism.