1904-1939

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1904-1939

  CHILDHOOD AND TEENAGE YEARS (1904-1923)

  UNIVERSITY EDUCATION (1924 -1929)

  COMMITMENT TO THE REPUBLIC (1930-1936)

  THE CIVIL WAR (1936 -1939)

 

CHILDHOOD AND TEENAGE YEARS (Málaga-Segovia, 1904-1923)

María Zambrano was born on 22 April 1904, in Vélez-Málaga (Málaga), to Blas José Zambrano García de Carabantes and Araceli Alarcón Delgado, both teachers and children of teachers themselves.

When she was three years old, while staying with her maternal grandfather in Jaén, María suffered a fainting spell and was believed to be dead for several hours, an event that, years later, she would consider to be a decisive moment in her personal and intellectual development.

In 1908, the family moved to Madrid, where Blas continued to teach Spanish grammar. They moved again in 1909, this time to Segovia, where Araceli Alarcón worked as a teacher and her husband became a professor at the Escuela Normal (School for Teachers). In 1911, María’s sister Araceli was born, with whom she would maintain a very close relationship throughout her life. In 1913, María started high school at the Instituto of Segovia, where she was one of only two female students.

During those years, Blas Zambrano - in whose books appeared some of the topics that María would later develop in her own work- became a leader of the progressive movement in the Castilian capital.

Blas sympathized with the Institución Libre de Enseñanza; he was a Republican, a Socialist, a Socratic and an enlightened man.

He founded the journal Castilla (1917) and the newspaper Segovia (1919); helped to establish " La obra,” a working-class society; joined the Socialist Workers' Association, which he chaired for a time; and, together with Antonio Machado, who was a close friend of the family, participated in the Universidad Popular (People's University).

A highly intellectual atmosphere permeated María’s youth and adolescence. She was first introduced to literature in her father's library, where she discovered Azorín, Baroja, Maeztu, Valle-Inclán and Galdós, and later, through the guidance of her cousin, Manuel Pizarro, who, according to her, was the love of her life from 1917 on. He was a professor of Spanish at the University of Osaka starting in the mid-1920s, and he introduced her to Sufism, contemporary Spanish, French and Russian literature, and to the philosophy of Nietzsche, with which María maintained a constant dialogue throughout her life.

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION (Madrid, 1924 -1929)

In 1921, María Zambrano enrolled as a “libre” student at the Universidad Central of Madrid to study philosophy, and attended Rosa Chacel’s lectures on Nietzsche at the Ateneo. It was also in the early 1920s that she met León Felipe and Federico García Lorca through her cousin Miguel Pizarro in Segovia, and Eugenio d'Ors and Manuel García Morente at the colloquia held at the People's University.

In 1924 she moved to Madrid, where she finished her degree by attending classes taught by Manuel García Morente, Julián Besteiro, Xavier Zubiri - who she admired and who taught her about Aristotle - as well as José Ortega y Gasset, who would become her mentor.

Until the end of this decade, her intellectual, political and social activism was reflected in her participation in the Federación Universitaria Española (FUE). One of the aims of this students’ union was to act as a liason between intellectuals and well-known politicians, among them Ortega y Gasset, Gregorio Marañón, Pérez de Ayala, Valle-Inclán, Indalecio Prieto, and Azaña, and young writers, such as her friends Antonio Sánchez Barbudo and Aurora Riaño. The Liga de Educación Social (LES), modeled on the Liga de Educación Política founded by Ortega in 1914, was born out of these meetings. María played an active role in the propaganda activities of the LES.

María published sixteen articles in the newspaper El Liberal, in which she developed her political and social concerns through her renewed interpretation of liberalism and her defense of an inclusive feminism.

Her most important article was entitled “Ciudad ausente” (“Absent City”), published in the journal Manantial, in which two of the fundamental elements of her philosophy were already apparent: poetic reason and the city of liberty, or “absent city”. In addition to these activities, she taught philosophy classes at the Instituto Escuela and participated in the tertulia of the Revista de Occidente.

She met her best friend of those years, Maruja Mallo, who showed her works in the only exhibition organized by the Revista de Occidente, in 1928. Between 1928 and 1929 she stopped her intellectual activities after she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. During her convalescence, María became friends with Fernando de los Ríos, with whom she began writing her first book, Horizonte del liberalismo which was published in 1930, and continued working with the FUE to fight against the repression of the students' movement carried out by the dictatorship.

COMMITMENT TO THE REPUBLIC (1936-1939)

In 1930, Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship fell and Zambrano declared her support for the Republic. She collaborated with the politics of socialist humanism espoused by the group Nueva España and confronted her mentor, Ortega y Gasset, urging him in a letter to abandon his monarchical stance if he wanted “to be inside history“. In1931, after the proclamation of the Second Republic, Zambrano taught metaphysics at the Central University in Madrid, began her dissertation on Spinoza (which she never finished), and declined the invitation by the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) to become a candidate to parliament.

In 1932, encouraged by Ortega y Gasset, she founded the Frente Español (FE), a group that she herself dissolved when the first signs of fascist tendencies emerged within it. She became involved with Ramón Gómez de la Serna and the coterie of the Pombo coffee house, and, through the Revista de Occidente, she became acquainted with Massignon’s writings on Islamic art, which would have a strong influence on her.  Through her contributions to Hoja literaria, a literary publication led by Sánchez Barbudo, Arturo Serrano Plaja, and Enrique de Azcoaga, María also established a friendship with Luis Cernuda, whose work she had read since 1928, and with Rafael Dieste. From 1933 on, she worked at the Secretariat of the Cultural Relations Board under the Ministry of the State and came in contact with other literary circles, such as the journal Cruz y Raya through her friendship with Bergamín, and Los cuatro vientos, led by Lorca, Guillén, Dámaso Alonso, and Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Between 1932 and 1935, she participated in the Misiones Pedagógicas, (Educational Missions), led by Manuel Bartolomé Cossio, which aimed to improve the living conditions of the inhabitants of rural Spain through education and access to culture. Together with Antonio Sánchez Barbudo, Enrique de Azcoaga, and Rafael Dieste, she traveled through several Spanish provinces including Cáceres, Cuenca, Alava, Almeria, and Toledo.

In 1934 the definitive schism between Zambrano and Ortega y Gasset's political philosophy occurred, a position that she reiterated in her declaration for the need of a new theory on mankind, especially in its relations with the state, and the development of her logic of feeling outlined in Hacia un saber sobre el alma. In 1935 she worked as a professor at the Instituto Cervantes and the Residencia de Señoritas.
The tertuliaswith young intellectuals and poets, such as Miguel Hernández, whom she had met the previous year at the gathering of Cruz y Raya, and at her home on Conde de Barajas St., as well as her literary studies of Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Proust, and other writers, consumed the time needed for her own writing.

THE CIVIL WAR (1936-1939)

In the months just before the outbreak of the Civil War, Zambrano participated in several meetings in support of the Popular Front.
On July 18, she signed the founding manifesto of the Alianza de Intelectuales para la Defensa de la Cultura (AIDC) (Alliance of Intellectuals for the Defense of Culture), along with Cernuda, Manuel Altolaguirre, Concha Albornoz, and Rosa Chacel. She worked as the Consejera de Propaganda y Consejera Nacional de la Infancia Evacuada (Adviser for Propaganda and National Adviser for Exiled Children)

In the month of October of 1936, she married Alfonso Rodríguez Aldave, secretary of the Spanish Embassy in Chile, where they traveled soon afterwards. On their stopover in Havana, María met José Lezama Lima, who would become a very close friend. In Chile, Zambrano published Los intelectuales en eldrama de España, a work dealing with the need for intellectuals and the common people to rally behind the Republic. She also worked on an anthology of poems by García Lorca, focusing on the love-death dichotomy, and on her Romancero de la Guerra Civil Española.

The couple returned to Spain on June 19,1937. Rodríguez Aldave went to fight at the front.  Zambrano went alone to Valencia, where she re-encountered many other Republican intellectuals with whom she had worked on the executive committee of the House of Culture. She participated in the Second Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, where she met Octavio Paz, Nicolás Guillén, and Alejo Carpentier; she was reunited with her friends Emilio Prados, Guillermo Díaz Plaja, Rafael Dieste, and the rest of the group working for the periodical Hora de España; she became a member of its editorial board and published numerous articles in that periodical including
" Españoles fuera de España.” She also wrote for the journal Madrid: Cuadernos de la Casa de la Cultura; she published " La libertad del intelectual,” an article that was echoed in Miguel Hernández’ Viento del pueblo. She defined the meaning of her "poetic reason" more precisely, following Blas Zambrano’s conception of the poetic language as a holistic knowledge that should bring together insight, ethics and aesthetics.

In 1938, she moved with her family to Barcelona, where she frequently received Prados, José María Quiroga, Serrano Plaja, and Vicente Salas Viu in her home. She published her articles on the war in Hora de España and in La Vanguardia, including " Manifiesto de los intelectuales de España por la victoria del pueblo.” (Manifesto of the intellectuals of Spain for the victory of the people), sponsored by her father, who died that year, and to whom Antonio Machado paid homage in an article in his posthumous Mairena.