The academic of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), literary historian and philologist Francisco Rico died this Saturday morning at the age of 81 in the Barcelona Hospital, after having been admitted urgently ten days ago. Born in 1942 in Barcelona, Rico was the great disseminator of Don Quixote and one of the great specialists of the Golden Age. He dedicated several of his studies and popular works to the universal Cervantes work, among them the most complete critical edition of Don Quixote, which he directed, published in 2015 by the RAE with the contributions of a hundred specialists. In addition, he made his own revision of the adventures of the knight of the sad figure, eliminating what was added in the printing press and that Cervantes never wrote.
Rico, professor of Medieval Hispanic Literatures at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, is also responsible for abundant studies with a special influence on the renewal of the methods of literary historiography and on the knowledge of subjects such as literature in the Middle Ages and Petrarch and the European humanism.
But the weakness of the “last knight errant”, as he has come to be called, was always Don Quixote. “It's a very fun book, very entertaining and very simple,” he said in all the interviews, although in some he even commented that he no longer read Don Quixote because he knew it. He also used to say that one of his favorite passages was when Don Quixote, in the final chapters, returns to the village and hears some children say “you won't see her anymore” referring to a hare, but he believes they are referring to his Dulcinea. , and he becomes very melancholic. Rico believed that the great lesson of Cervantes' work is that he “looks at everything with great understanding and humanity. “He always sees both sides, positive and negative, of each other's point of view,” he noted in an interview.
Of course, the great specialist in the adventures of the old gentleman thought that young people could not be forced to read Don Quixote all at once, but that what had to be done in schools and institutes was “give them Don Quixote in little pieces, and that's how they will end up getting hooked.
Controversies
With a sharp verb and a chain smoker, Rico was the protagonist of curious controversies, such as the one in 2011 in which he ridiculed the tobacco law and said that he did not smoke when he did so “like a chimney.” Years later, in 2016, he engaged in another dialectical duel, this time with his colleague in the RAE Arturo Pérez-Reverte, over whether academics had to get involved in the political and current affairs of the country. Rico also became a literary character in several novels by Javier Marías, a great friend, by the way, of him and Pérez-Reverte.
The philologist was elected academic of the RAE on March 13, 1986 and took office on June 4, 1987 with the speech titled 'Lázaro de Tormes and the place of the novel'. He occupied the small p chair. Fernando Lázaro Carreter responded on behalf of the corporation. In the RAE he was in charge of directing the Classical Library collection, which includes, among its 111 titles, the complete works of Miguel de Cervantes.
The academic was in possession of numerous awards and distinctions. In 2015 he received the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts awarded by the Government; In 2013 he received the Alfonso Reyes Award at the Colegio de México (Colmex); and in 2016 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bologna (Italy). He also had the De Sanctis Prize for his essay I venerdì del Petrarca (Petrarch's Fridays), dedicated to the Italian poet and humanist.
The Cervantist expert, a contributor to El País, was married to the philosopher Victoria Camps, with whom he lived in the house that the couple has on the outskirts of Barcelona.
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