Azorín belonged to Generación del 98, a literary movement that he formed, together with Pío Baroja and Ramiro de Maeztu, and later joined by Miguel de Unamuno, Antonio and Manuel Machado, Angel Ganivet, Ramón María del Valle Inclán and the philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal, among others. In his youth, he professed revolutionary ideas and published violent anarchist-inspired booklets, such as Social Notes (1895) or Pecuchet, demagogue (1898). However, he soon drifted towards conservatism, from whose ranks he held various political positions. From his yearnings for revolution, he will move on to an appreciation of the Hispanic “essences”. Similarly, religiously he went from his initial anticlericalism to a serene skepticism, to end up proclaiming in his old age a "firm, clean and calm Catholicism."

The author shares with his literary companions the interest in regenerating  Spain, adopting a pessimistic and critical attitude towards the Spanish reality in general. Azorin writes with a very personal style, with a preference for a short and precise sentence and minimal, expressionist descriptions, using a  minimum of resources to say as much as possible. His particular aesthetic of life takes him to show great interest in the abandoned towns, the ones of Castile in particular for historical reasons, reevaluating its landscape, traditions, and characters often with a pure and spontaneous language. 

 His philosophy is centered on an obsession with the passing of time,  the transience of life, and the flow of everything towards death. It is not found in him the torn pathos of Unamuno, but an intimate sadness that flows meekly and a desire to capture what remains below what flees, to fix in memory the life events. He seems to be a nostalgic spirit that lives to evoke situations of the past. His writings remind the experience of his youth,  and the men and landscapes of Spain. In his writing, he revives the past of Spain, with its noblemen and its mystics, with its cathedrals and castles,  and with its cities and towns. It is an insistent effort to regain the time gone by, to find the essence of Spain in its history, or better still, in its “intrahistory”, this is, the happenings of ordinary people. In his evocations of the landscape, he looks at it narrowing his eyes to better focus and project his nostalgic sensitivity onto the reality he observes, producing a peculiar fusion of landscape and soul in his prose.

La voluntad 

La ruta de Don Quijote 

Castilla 

El político

El paisaje de España visto por los españoles 

The book is a reflection on different landscapes of Spain and the feelings that they evoke in different authors from the point of view of literature.

Travel literature

The Generation of '98 is made up of a series of writers who respond with their literary works to the tragic awareness of decline that is perceived in Spain at the end of the 19th century. In 1895 began the rebellion of the overseas colonies against the metropolis. The decisive intervention of the United States in favor of the colonies, particularly in Cuba, forces Spain to sign the Treaty of Paris, by which it abandons what was left of its old empire. Human and economic losses will go down in history under the name of "Disaster of 98". 

The founding nucleus of writers from the Generation of '98 is made up of Azorín, Pío Baroja, and Ramiro de Maeztu. Autodidacticism and their religious heterodoxy are some of the traits that most identify them, in addition to their revolutionary ideas and their admiration for similar philosophers of the time. They will be joined by Unamuno, Antonio Machado, and Valle-Inclán. All of them are concerned about the politics of the moment, the historical problems of Spain, and its desire for Europeanization. 

From an aesthetic point of view, his style is characterized by a sustained opposition to traditional rhetoric, as well as a taste for the use of traditional speaking in their writings. The subjectivist character of the literary movement impregnates these authors' works with an intense subjectivism, notably in their descriptions of the Castilian landscape, where what is seen is inseparable from the way of looking, fusing landscape with their soul in an intense combination of reality and sensitivity.

Generation of '98

Antonio Machado publishes his collection of poems Soldedades, galerias y otros poemas.

Azorín publishes Castilla, a book that represents the quintessence of Azorín's work, contemplating the landscape as a "small" story passed through time and seeking in literature an expression of the national spirit.

Antonio Machado publishes Campos de Castilla, a book that includes a mixture of poems, proverbs and a romance, in which the autor captures the tark landscape and spirit of Castile.

José Ortega y Gasset prublishes Meditaciones del Quijote, a profound introspection on the universal meaning of life.

Miguel de Unamuno publishes his novel Niebla, a story of impossible love that explores the confusion of existence.

Juan Ramón Jiménez publishes Platero y yo, a prose poem about his homeland in Andalusia, tells the story of a man and his donkey.

Ortega y Gasset publishes La deshumanización del arte, a philosophical book in which he alludes to avant-garde art and literature (the “isms”) that emerged after the First World War.

Rafael Alberty publishes Marinero en tierra, where the poet recovers the memory of the immediacy of the sea in his childhood.

Marcel Proust publishes In Search of Lost Time, the story of Proust's own life, told as an allegorical search for truth.

Frank Kafka publishes The Metamorphosis, the life struggles of a man that wakes up one morning inexplicably transform into a huge insect.

Herman Hesse publishes Demian, a demonic hero who rejects Chistian morality with contempt.

The play Six Characters in Search of an author, by Luigi Pirandello is performed for the first time. The work is an aburdist methatheatrical play in which the caracters claim that they are incomplete creations of an author who couldn't finish the work for which they were conceived. 

Rainer Maria Rilke publishes his collectionof then elegies,Duino Elegies, a loud cry out of his solitude.

Italo Calvino publishes Zeno's Conscience, a novel about a neurotic Italian businessman.

World economic crisis starts in New York.

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El paisaje de España visto por los españoles (1917)

By José (Azorín) Martinez Ruiz

Time Period: Generation of '98

Genre: Travel literature

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