The ARCA Foundation wishes to warn that the dissemination of the content of the stolen autobiographical novel is forbidden, respecting the will of the writer who never wanted its dissemination, since its content affects the privacy of the writer himself and the people who revolved around him, others writers of Modernism.
According to Law 16/1985, of June 25, of the Spanish Historical Heritage the missing manuscript is included in Chapter 1 (Of the Documentary and Bibliographic Heritage) that in point 4 declares: "Documentary Heritage also includes documents with an antiquity greater than one hundred years generated, conserved or reunited by any other private entities or individuals. "It is also covered by said Act upon the initiation of a declaration procedure of BIC before the Community of Madrid, as the Law declares in Article 11 "The initiation of a file for the declaration of a cultural interest property shall determine, in relation to the affected property, the provisional application of the same protection regime established for those declared of cultural interest."
Description:
• The manuscript is from 1905. It is a youth novel that mixes fiction with facts and real characters.
• Its format is a landscape sheet of about 20 cm wide x 15 cm high. It is handwritten in the author's handwriting in landscape, on the longest side.
• The paper is very aged and yellowish in color. It has very little grammage.
• It consists of 172 handwritten sheets on one side in black pen ink.
• It is signed by the author on the last page. It can be signed as "Rafael Cansinos Assens" or "Rafael Cansino Assens" (Cansino, without "s", which is his original surname, modified at this time to "Cansinos").
• Below the signature could be a date close to 1905. It could also have a Hebrew word at the end.
• It is not transcribed or digitized. It was stolen before being digitized. It is completely unpublished.
• It is a complete work that could be titled "Memorias incompletas".
• The manuscript on the last page, before the signature, ends with this text: “Aquí terminan estas memorias incompletas, que sólo tienen el mérito de su sinceridad. El hombre que las escribió cometió realmente esos delitos. Fue, con efecto, ladrón, sátiro y asesino, después de haber sido, durante cincuenta años, un hombre honrado. Los jueces desconcertados por este contraste sorprendente ante dos partes tan desproporcionadas de una vida, no hicieron cuenta de sus alardes de consciente cinismo, y recelando en él un trastorno mental, lo condenaron solamente a cadena perpetua. Según parece los médicos observaron en él asimetrías y estrabismos que confirmaban un estado de locura razonada.” (This fragment has been preserved thanks to the fact that one researcher, Francisco Fuentes Florido, made a doctoral thesis in 1978 and referred to the manuscript, copying the final paragraph of it. Fuentes Florido, Francisco: Rafael Cansinos Assens : novelista, poeta, crítico, ensayista y traductor.Doctoral thesis under the direction of the professor Francisco Ynduráin Hernández. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Filosofía, Madrid, october, 1978.)