An unpublished manuscript of José Echegaray, the Spanish scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, has been found

The manuscript of an unpublished work by a Nobel Prize winner for Literature has been on sale on the internet for 1,600 euros for two decades, without anyone ever being interested.

is summoned

, a comedy written by the Spanish mathematician José Echegaray (1832-1916) in June 1904, months before receiving the award from the Swedish Academy.

The antiques dealer Marta Micaela Fernández de Navarrete recounts that her parents, two deceased Madrid booksellers, bought the personal archive of Mariano Ordóñez —a conservative cacique who was a minister a century ago— and among the papers was the Echegaray manuscript.

Fernández de Navarrete put it up for sale in 2004, without knowing exactly what she had on her hands.

An investigation by this newspaper suggests that it is an unpublished and practically cursed Nobel work.

"I don't remember that anyone has ever asked or shown interest," confirms the antiques dealer, who sells books and documents online from her house in Puebla de Guzmán (Huelva).

José Echegaray, born in Madrid in 1832 and died in the same city in 1916, was "the finest and most exquisitely organized brain in 19th century Spain", in the words of his contemporary Santiago Ramón y Cajal.

He was a mathematician, a civil engineer, a scientific popularizer, an economist, Minister of Finance and Development and, to complete his salary, a playwright.

He himself explained it in his memories.

“The cultivation of High Mathematics does not give enough to live on.

The most unfortunate drama, the most modest theatrical crime, brings much more money than the highest calculus problem;

and the obligation is before the devotion ”, he wrote in his

, published in installments starting in 1894. The scientist, who was Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Central University of Madrid (now Complutense), ended up, however, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The work

premiered in a theater in Santander on September 23, 1904, two months before the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced.

In the comedy, the protagonist, Fernando Salvatierra, in love with a woman named Carlota, goes to see a prestigious German doctor who is an expert in heart disease.

The doctor warns him that he will not live more than 35 years.

Thinking that his death is imminent, Fernando decides to tell all the people around him what he honestly thinks of them.

The famous actress María Guerrero, grandmother of actor Fernando Fernán Gómez, played Carlota, but despite this the play was a fiasco, as the press unanimously certified.

The signature of José Echegaray in the manuscript of 'Don Fernando the summoned', from 1904.PACO PUENTES

The most influential newspaper of the time,

, published a devastating review the following day: “The work offers little originality, both in the matter and in the comic types it presents.

The traits of Echegaray's talent are not seen in it.

In the first act the exposition is well developed;

in the second the action decays, and in the third it is monotonous.

The final scene is cold.

The premiere can be considered a failure.

The newspaper

was somewhat more diplomatic: "In general it was not to the liking of the public."

One of the greatest experts in Spanish manuscripts from the 19th century, the bibliographer Juan Antonio Yeves, recognizes Echegaray's handwriting in the photographs sent by this newspaper and proposes a hypothesis.

“Since it was not successful, it did not get printed.

It is an unpublished work, although it is not so interesting for not having been a triumph.

That affects the cultural and economic value of it, ”says Yeves, director for a quarter of a century of the Lázaro Galdiano Library, in Madrid, until his recent retirement.

This institution guards the collection of manuscripts of the wealthy publisher José Lázaro Galdiano (1862-1947), including several texts by Echegaray, written in the same handwriting and on the same lined paper as

.

In the digital catalogs of international libraries there is only one other manuscript titled the same and attributed to Echegaray, at Vanderbilt University, in the US city of Nashville.

The librarian Paula Covington, responsible for the collections of Spanish literature, rushes to the dusty folder and solves the enigma.

Her institution keeps a copy of the original —written in a different handwriting, perhaps for an actor— which in its day probably formed part of the Spanish literature collection of John McMurry Hill, an American Hispanist who visited Madrid in 1914.

The comedy does not appear in the main bibliographies of Echegaray, such as the one prepared by the National Library of Spain.

Even the main biographer of the mathematician, José Manuel Sánchez Ron, acknowledges that he was unaware of the existence of this lost work, although he stresses that he has dealt mainly with the character's scientific activity.

"It is no secret that Echegaray's theater grew old quickly, being considered anachronistic by the new generations of writers," he states in the introduction to the mathematician's memoirs, reissued in 2016. When Echegaray won the Nobel Prize and a national tribute was organized, a group of young men of letters came out in a rush to oppose it with a public manifesto.

It was signed by, among others, Azorín, Pío Baroja, Rubén Darío, Miguel de Unamuno, Antonio Machado and Ramón María del Valle-Inclán.

Nevertheless,

Azorín was the most ruthless writer with his veteran colleague.

“Echegaray's theater is an illogical, deformed theater.

His characters look like cardboard figures that move with exaggerated movements and gesticulate violently.

They lack naturalness, they speak without reflecting, they act like children”, he already published in 1895. “Echegaray was not born for the theater.

His bursts of outdated progressive lyric from the sixties or so, which he wants to pass off as the most exquisite poetry;

his lack of attentive and serene observation, his rushed and yearning way of writing;

all this makes it incompatible with dramatic art, ”he declared.

The jury for the Nobel Prize in Literature, on the other hand, praised Echegaray for "the numerous and brilliant compositions that, in an original way, have revived the great traditions of Spanish drama."

The Swedish Academy highlighted "the exalted romanticism" of works such as

(1881), a drama about a love triangle with a duel to the death included.

Echegaray beat out writers like Leo Tolstoy, Anatole France, Rudyard Kipling and Henrik Ibsen, who were also Nobel nominees in 1904.

Few specialists claim Echegaray today.

One of them is Jorge Urrutia, Emeritus Professor of Spanish Literature at the Carlos III University of Madrid.

"The worst thing that can be in Spain is a Nobel Prize in Literature," he laments sarcastically, recalling that all the winners —Jacinto Benavente, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Vicente Aleixandre and Camilo José Cela, as well as the mathematician— received corrosive criticism in their own country.

“It was said about Echegaray that he was terrible, that it was a shame, but that was what the Generation of 98 said, who killed his father.

He's still in disrepute, so no one cares.

A manuscript by Echegaray passes without pain or glory ”, reflects the professor.

Urrutia argues that the playwright scientist brought to the stage the concerns of the new capitalist bourgeoisie, which explains his success inside and outside Spain in the 19th century.

“Echegaray's big problem is that he was an amateur.

He was a mathematician, an engineer.

He liked to write in verse, but he didn't know how to write in verse.

His works in Spanish are terrifying, full of rubble, ”says Urrutia.

He gives a real example: "Understand, by Beelzebub, that you have to give it to me."

“In Spanish it is horrible, but his verses were translated into prose into all the languages ​​of Europe.

His dialogues in his prose are good.

That is why he has the Nobel, ”says the professor.

Echegaray sounds better in Swedish than in Spanish.

José Echegaray, in 1904, the year in which he wrote 'Don Fernando the summons' and won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kaulak

Echegaray was "the best Spanish mathematician of the 19th century", in the words of Sánchez Ron, but he was not so for creating an original work, but for introducing into Spain the best theories that were circulating in Europe, such as those of the Frenchman Évariste Galois, who revolutionized math before dying in a pistol duel at age 20.

Echegaray, however, was never able to dedicate himself to his true passion.

Of his first scientific book,

(1858), he only sold a dozen copies the first year.

"I have an inexhaustible love for Science: there is no wasted time or moment of rest that does not consecrate it, and I prefer it to Literature in general, and dramatic Literature, which has sustained me for forty years," he proclaimed in his memoirs .

“Discovering a new and fruitful theorem, forging a theory that no one would have thought of, solving a problem not yet solved, this is a supreme pleasure in the intellectual order.

[...] On the other hand, a drama is thought of in one night and written in fifteen days, and, supposing it goes wrong, it provides the author with a few thousand reais”, acknowledged Echegaray.

His 96-page manuscript of

has been collecting dust for two decades without anyone taking an interest in it.

The antique dealer Marta Micaela Fernández de Navarrete, after speaking with this newspaper, has revalued the work and has raised the price to 2,200 euros.

The end of the document's story is yet to be written.

Echegaray himself confessed in his memories that he liked bitter endings: "It is in my nature, and I cannot control myself: I like dramas to end sadly."

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