Spear of Don Quixote

Miguel Cervantes da Saavedra was born 470 years ago. “Renaissance and Enlightenment knocked with the spear of Don Quixote on the rough stones of the Middle Ages,” Valeria Novodvorskaya wrote about him 5 years ago

“You must be proud, like a banner; you must be sharp as a sword; like Dante, the underground flame should burn your cheeks. It was not Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra who wrote this, but Valery Bryusov, but knights-errant are not too different from poets, whose challenge to the world is like a battle with windmills, protection is often no stronger than a copper basin, and retribution often consists of kicks, cracks and insults. And Cervantes, a poor and honest warrior, who was born on September 29, 1547 and gave us an occasion on the occasion of his 465th birthday to talk about sacred madness and boring and vile common sense, and his and our beloved hero Don Quixote of La Mancha, Knight of the Sorrowful Image, and part-time - Lvov, were poets. “They are crippled, humpbacked, hungry and half-dressed. Their eyes are full of sunset. Their hearts are full of dawn." The knight and poet Joseph Brodsky, who wrote these lines, has dealt with evil wizards from the KGB all his life, but he did not lay down his spears in front of them.

Little is known about the life of Cervantes himself. Dry land of La Mancha; the monks, the inquisition, the rich duke who entertained himself with the impulses of Don Quixote; poor but proud peasants like Sancho Panza; convicts, swindlers; and already a completely “leaving nature”: Moors, beautiful Moorish women, not yet expelled from their homeland, and two idealists seeking exploits.

Biographers of Cervantes have great differences. Either he studied in Salamanca, or he wandered. They agree on one thing: he was poor, lived all his life from olya to lentil stew, fought under Philip II, lost his arm in the battle of Lepanto, wandered, was captured, overtook his age by three hundred years and could be considered the first Spanish intellectual and such nonconformist, which is unclear how he escaped the fire. However, the same Bryusov said: "Let your virtue be your readiness to go to the stake." The army, poverty and remoteness from the capitals saved him from the dangerous attention of the emperor and the Church.

But at the age of 58 he published the first volume of Don Quixote, and at 68, a year before his death, the second volume.

DON QUIXOTE'S SPEAR ON THE ROUGH STONES OF THE MIDDLE AGES KNOCKED REVIVAL AND ENLIGHTENMENT, AND DON QUIXOTE'S ATTEMPT TO HELP SANCHO PANZA IN HIS FIRST GOVERNOR'S STEPS IS NOTHING ELSE AS THE STATEMENT OF THE RIGHTS OF THE FUTURE THIRD ESTATE

Beginning in 1604, idealists from all over the world gather under the banner of Don Quixote of La Mancha, the novel becomes their turnout, and the name of the hero is their password. First of all, the novel is translated into French and English. Heine asked for advice from the sad knight at the "fatal crossroads." Byron wrote that "the virtues of Don Quixote are the cause of his madness." After all, even the peasant Sancho Panso eventually understood his lord: "He is not mad, he is bold."

Don Quixote's spear knocked against the rough stones of the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Enlightenment, and Don Quixote's attempt to help Sancho Panza in his first steps as governor is nothing more than an assertion of the rights of the future third estate.

And in 1769, Cervantes was translated into Russian, and for many decades (well, if not forever) he became the leader of Russian freethinkers. Turgenev says that Don Quixote "lives outside of himself, for others, for his brothers, to resist oppressors." Dostoevsky, having conceived his "Idiot" and Prince Myshkin, wrote in his diaries about Don Quixote.

In front of me is Cervantes' orange two-volume book. 1955, even before the 20th Congress. The secret Westerner and freethinker Ilya Ehrenburg writes a preface and finds this quote: "Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious bounties that heaven pours out on people." But Vissarion Belinsky, the first wave of the sixties, said best of all: “Don Quixotes have been possible since human societies appeared, and will be possible until people scatter through the forests.”

Forward, Rosinante! The mill wings of the evil wizard again appeared above the horizon.

First published in NT in No. 32 (259) of October 8, 2012 .