Even his early childhood memories of the siege of Bilbao by the reactionary Catholic army in the Second Carlist War were of both kinds of Basques (intellectual and religious) locked in bitter combat. His deep desire to reconcile the opposites, or at least to accept them both, controls the structure of Unamuno's first published novel, the largely autobiographical
Paz en la guerra (Peace in War, 1897), just as it informs the conflict of themes and moods in his later poetry. When Unamuno went to Madrid at sixteen for university studies, he disliked the big city and its frivolity, and dedicated himself to reading in the library, learning German and English to read Georg Hegel and Herbert Spencer, and straying off campus mostly to attend talks at the Ateneo, a liberal literary society with a good library. By age twenty he had written a doctoral thesis attacking as ridiculous most of the then-current theories of the origin of the Basque language and people. With his degree in hand he returned to Bilbao to work as a private tutor, while he studied for and took
oposiciones (competitive national examinations for teaching posts), until in 1891 he placed first in Greek.
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