Lectures on Don Quixote

The cycle of lectures on the famous novel by Cervantes Don Quixote, read by the largest Russian-American writer of the twentieth century Vladimir Nabokov at Harvard University in 1952 and published posthumously with a separate book in 1983, complements his well-known lecture courses on college students for college students Welley and Cornell University. An insightful, meticulous and defiantly biased researcher, always with pleasure disputed the generally accepted opinions and beaten truths, nabokov virtuiously inhibits (and at the same time convincingly confirms) the cultural reputation of Don Quixote - the “knight of a sad image”, which has developed over the four and half centuries. In his interpretation, the work of Cervantes is a “rude old book”, full of “ruthless Spanish cruelty”, and its title hero is not only a victim of mockery and humiliations from the hostile world, but also a target for hidden readership. At the same time, according to Nabokov, in the perception of subsequent generations of Don Quixote, the role of a miserable, helpless jester, originally allotted to him by the author, became a symbol of the sublime and holy madness, the personification of noble loneliness, disinterested valor and true humanism, the book itself turned into “Blagodly And a bizarre myth ”about the ratio of visibility and reality