The Adventures of the Last Abenserag

The Adventures of the Last Abenserag ( French Les aventures du dernier Abencerage ) is a romantic novel by Francois Rene de Chateaubriand on a plot from Spanish-Moorish history, published in London in 1826.

The Adventures of the Last Abenserag
Les aventures du dernier abencerage
Illustration from "Vignettes for the Works of Chateaubriand" by A. Joanne. Paris, 1833
Genre	Short story
Author	Francois Rene de Châteaubriand
Original language	French
Date of first publication	1826

Plots from the history of the Abenserachs have been developed since the middle of the 16th century by Antonio de Villiegas , Gines Perez de Ita , Madeleine de Skuderi , John Dryden , Marie Madeleine de Lafayette , and during the Chateaubriand - Jan Potocki and Washington Irving . In April 1813, Luigi Cherubini ’s opera “Abenseragi, or the Grenada Banner” ( Les Abencérages, ou L'Étendard de Grenade ) was staged in Paris, which was based on the pastoral of Florian's “Gonzalve of Corduan, or Conquered Grenada” ( Gonzalve de Cord ou Grenade reconquise , 1791). Interest in Spain, the "country of romance par excellence" ^[1] , revived at the beginning of the 19th century, in connection with the stubborn resistance that this country exerted against Napoleonic aggression. In turn, the Egyptian expedition gave a new impetus to the development of oriental themes in European fiction.

Chateaubriand wrote his short story under the impression of visiting Granada and the Alhambra on his return trip from his eastern journey, as well as under the influence of Perez de Ita's novel, The Story of the Enmity of Segri and Abenserachs , published in France in 1809, from which he made direct borrowings. According to him, he began to write at a time “when the ruins of Zaragoza were still smoking”, and imperial censorship would not have missed the publication of a work glorifying the valor of the Spanish people ^[2] .

Exaggerating and romanticizing the courage of the Spaniards, Chateaubriand writes:

Adamantly courageous, infinitely persistent, unable to bow to fate, the Spaniards either triumph over it or die, defeated in dust. They are not distinguished by a special liveliness of mind, but instead of this, a lamp lit by the wealth and refinement of thoughts, they have indomitable passions. A Spaniard who does not utter a word in a day, who has not seen anything in his life, does not want to see anything, has not read anything, has not studied anything, has not compared anything, draws in his greatness his feelings the strength necessary to withstand any test with dignity.

- Chateaubriand . The Adventures of the Last Abenserag

At the beginning of the short story, Châteaubriant retells the famous legend about the words spoken by the emir to Boabdil as his mother after his escape from Granada: "Cry like a woman, since I could not fight like a man."

According to the plot of the novel, the noble Abenserag family, who lost their Spanish homeland after the conquest of Granada by the Christians, moved to the vicinity of Tunisia , having founded a settlement near the ruins of Carthage . In a new place, they turned from fearless warriors into skilled healers, but an unusual climate, living conditions and homesickness for a quarter century brought to the grave almost all representatives of the clan. The last offspring of the once powerful family - 22-year-old Aben-Amet decided to go to Spain to fulfill a secret plan. A meeting with the beautiful Blanca, which came from the glorious but decaying family of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar , violated his plans. Young people fell in love, but since no one wanted to change their faith, and interfaith marriages were not practiced at that time, their union was faced with an insurmountable obstacle.

The matter was complicated by the fact that Blanca was also the last of her kind; her brother Carlos, a stern warrior, ally of Hernan Cortez and a participant in the Battle of Pavia , preferred the cloak and cloak of the knightly order of Calatrava to the joys of family life. He would like to pass off his sister for the valiant French nobleman de Lautrec, nephew of the famous Ode de Foix , who was captured at Pavia.

Throughout the novel, these four compete with each other in nobility, until the denouement, also sustained in a romantic and sentimental spirit. The image of the “noble Moor”, capable of being guided by the ideals of knightly ethics, was borrowed by the author from Perez de Ita and correlates with the plots of Walter Scott ’s novels “The Betrothed ” and “ The Talisman ”, published a year earlier.

In 1893, based on the short story, the opera Giacomo Setaccioli, The Last of the Abenseragi ( L'ultimo degli Abenceragi ), was staged.