In “The abandoned park of my existence”. Fernando Santivan, memorialist

Abstract

In his memoirs Fernando Santiván, works with two types of material: the confessions and literary memories, favoring the first ones. He himself says that the report Memoir should be an intimate confession and that its main purpose is “to show the human soul in its mysterious truth,” revealing the variations and contradictions of a human being. This article examines some of the variations of the complex and contradictory Santiván character, according to his own memoirs, the years of young tolstoyan, to maturity, which warns of a certain conservatism in their views. The text also reviews Santiván opinions on memory as a literary genre, and certain problems arising from the construction of the self as a literary character in his memoirs.