Resumen de Tener y no tener: Lecturas de Sancho Panza en la dictadura de Primo de Rivera (1923- 1930)

Ana Fernández Cebrián, Víctor M. Pueyo Zoco

• Don Quixote was at the center of a philosophical and political debate that took place in Spain during the dictatorship of general Miguel Primo de Rivera. Readings of Cervantes’s masterpiece range from Manuel Azaña’s celebration of Sancho’s radical democratic spirit to Ramiro de Maeztu’s emphasis on his substantial lack of nobility;

  from Ramiro Ledesma’s advocation for Don Quixote as the Nietzschean Übermensch (and against the soulless masses) to Ramón J. Sender’s later glorification of Sancho as the only true republican citizen. Such a battle for interpretation may be easily disregarded as anachronistic and therefore irrelevant to the understanding of Cervantes’s work. We will argue, however, that far from amputating any trace of historical authenticity, the suggested reading scenario contributes dramatically to its full restoration, by making it possible to embody the original antagonisms that sustain Don Quixote in a new historical event. This event (opened by Cervantes at the beginning of the seventeenth century and still looking for its consummation at the beginning of the twentieth) is the republican event