Pereda, Jose Maria de

José Maria de Pereda was born on February 6, 1833 in Polanco to an impoverished noble family. In 1852 he entered the artillery school in Madrid , but three years later he left him and returned home.

After the overthrow of Queen Isabella II in 1868, he became an ardent opponent of the revolution. In 1871, Pereda was elected a deputy from the Carlists .

In 1897, José Maria de Pereda was admitted to the Royal Academy of Spain, in which a year earlier, specifically for the sake of the writer, they changed the clause of the statute that required the candidate to stay in the capital.

After completing humanitarian studies in the autumn of 1852, he moved to Madrid with the intention of continuing the preparatory classes for admission to the Segovia Artillery Academy. There he stopped at Calle del Prado No. 2, along with other students from his own province, was not very interested in scientific books, and devoted himself more to meetings in the Esmeralda cafe, chaplains and theater dances. A few years later, speaking of this stage of his life, he said that he began in Madrid

The writer died March 1, 1906 in Santander .

After returning from school, José María de Pereda began writing articles for the magazine La Abeja montañesa , as well as for the local daily newspaper El Tío Cayetín . The first collection of stories Pereda published in 1864 under the title “Mountain Sketches” ( Spanish Escenas montañesas ), in which he described the life of the inhabitants of his native land ( Besaya ), showing the difficult conditions of peasant life, poverty and hunger. Antonio de Trueb , who wrote the preface to the first edition, noted the pessimism of the Pereda stories, focusing on the most unattractive aspects of human life. The second collection of stories “Types and Landscapes” ( used by Tipos y paisajes ), published in 1871, was inspired by the same motives - longing for a patriarchal past and the grim irreversibility of bourgeois changes ^[1] .

In 1871, José Maria de Pereda published a compilation entitled “Etudes of Tempera” ( Spanish: Bocetos al temple ), consisting of three narratives: “The Wife of Caesar”, “Decent People” and “Gold Wins”, the last is narrated about the bitter political experience of Pereda .

In 1878, the novel “The Bull in Freedom” ( Spanish El Buey suelto ) was released, conceived as an answer to O. Balzac’s Petty Adversity of Marital Life , and in 1880 the novel “What is a Tree, is a Stick” ( Spanish: De Tal palo tal astilla ), as an answer to Perez Galdos .

In the novel "Don Gonzalo Gonzalez de la Gonzalera" ( Spanish Don Gonzalo González de la Gonzalera ), published in 1879, Pereda ridicules the ideas of revolution, trying to show how rich people skillfully use the ideas of liberalism to promote their personal, selfish goals ^[2] .

The late stage of the work of José María de Pereda is characterized by such works as Sotyles, a novel about the life of a simple fisherman Silda; “On the mountain tops”, about the metropolitan residents who found happiness in the outback; "The taste of earth" ^[1] .

• Plavskin Z.I. Spanish literature XIX-XX centuries. - High school. - p. 24-28. - 252 s.

• Pereda, José Maria // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary : 86 t. (82 t. And 4 add.). - SPb. , 1890-1907.
• Pereda Jose Maria de - article from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia .
• José María de Pereda (Spanish) . cervantesvirtual.com. The appeal date is October 26, 2012. Archived December 28, 2012.