Читать книгу Recently Discovered Letters of George Santayana. Cartas recién descubiertas de George Santayana онлайн

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But as he started receiving letters, Cory’s anxieties were mostly assuaged. Admittedly, the volume of correspondence would be enormous, and everything would have to be sorted in order to eliminate «polite» or banal letters. On the other issues, however, there was nothing to worry about. As Cory wrote: «this large collection of letters soon proved a fresh and exciting adventure. They are essential as a revelation of his life and mind, and a further confirmation of his literary power.»⁴

Although the critical edition of The Letters of George Santayana aimed painstakingly at comprehensiveness (the editors sent letters of inquiry to sixty-three institutions reported as holding Santayana manuscripts, they ran advertisements in leading literary publications and contacted more than fifty individuals who were potential recipients of Santayana’s letters, and as a result were able to add over two thousand more letters to Cory’s initial set of about a thousand) the ideal of absolute completeness was clearly out of reach: not only because, as we know, Santayana himself destroyed his letters to his mother, but because the editors were unable to locate many letters whose existence could be inferred from Santayana’s or his correspondents’ allusions. Thus, at the end of the editorial appendix of the critical edition, there is a «List of Unlocated Letters» comprising almost one hundred entries. It should be noted that these unlocated letters do not include those, recently discovered, which we are pleased to present in this volume.