Leyendas

Las Leyendas, which make up volume 97 of the BCRAE, are a set of short stories that were published loosely between 1860 and 1864 in the Madrid political press or in magazines for cultural dissemination. Bécquer addressed them to a wide audience, and for this reason they are written in journalistic prose, of a medium cultural level, with a classic and direct structure, without digressions or great narrative artifices. In them, he abandons the rhetoricism of the romantic generation and explores the possibilities of legendary traditionalism, with a generic historical support, almost always medieval, without lacking resources such as poetic prose, psychological terror, descriptions of musical pieces or refined eroticism. in pages that are among the best in Spanish literature. Born as ephemeral texts, the Legends transcended that condition to stand as a work of high literary quality, in which traditional themes, integrated into the European cultural heritage of their time, express concerns and existential conflicts of the human being.