Vicente Risco - Early Years

Early Years

The son of a public official, Vicente Risco was born into a well-to-do and highly cultured family. He suffered from bad health as a child. He was a good friend of Ramón Otero Pedrayo. In 1899 he obtained his high school certificate. He studied Law in the University of Santiago, and in 1906 became a public official as his father was.

In these years he participated in social gatherings directed by Marcelo Macías, with other intellectuals, such as Xulio Alonso Cuevillas or Arturo Vázquez Núñez, who would significantly influence Vicente Risco's literary career. He read decadent English and French authors, who exposed him to occultism and orientalism. He also studied Buddhism and became a Theosophist author.

In 1910 he began work for a local newspaper, El Miño, where he wrote philosophical articles under the pseudonyms Rujú Sahib and Polichinela. He became a follower of Rabindranath Tagore, announcing the fact in the intellectual social gatherings of Ourense.

In February 1912 Risco he met Castelao and praised one of his speeches in El Miño, but Risco was still far from the Galicianist movement.

In 1913 he went to Madrid to study Pedagogy. There he was a pupil of José Ortega y Gasset, spoke with Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Luis de Hoyos Sáinz and became attracted to Catholicism.

In 1916 he finished his studies and he returned to Ourense as a professor of history. In 1917 he founded, along with Arturo Noguerol Román, the literary magazine La Centuria, an antecedent of the future nationalist magazine Nós.