Don Quixote. In Two Books.

translated from Spanish by Nikolai Lyubimov
poems translated by Yuri Korneev

Four centuries ago, a prisoner from the Seville prison experienced a strange vision. Through the prison bars, he saw two lonely travelers: one was very thin, on a bony nag, the... other was fat, on a grey donkey. The prisoner began to closely observe their astonishing adventures and write them down with his surviving hand… The most incomprehensible aspect of this story remains the fact that the comic duo created in the mind of the Seville prisoner has become close to everyone living on our planet. As if they actually live alongside us, somewhere very, very near.

Cervantes’ novel “Don Quixote” remains one of the most published books in the world, and in terms of the number of languages into which it has been translated, the novel is second only to the Bible.

In the late 1960s, the artist Savva Brodsky took on, as he expressed it, the thousandth variation of illustrating the novel and began to wash the great book again in his heart, like gold-bearing sand (the artist started drawing the characters of Cervantes while still in school). What is important and extraordinarily valuable — Brodsky did not divide the world, as is usually done, into Don Quixotes and Sancho Panzas. In his illustrative version, one Don Quixote or one Sancho cannot exist, just as only one side of a coin cannot exist. The exalted knight is inexorably followed by the astute squire: one embodies the idea, the other — its practical use.
But Brodsky's illustrations also include a third active character — the cracked earth, stretching into the ruthless distance. In this desert of humanity, the bright faith of Don Quixote in the truth that demands service and sacrifice was born...


The book contains images of works from the collections of the Government Cultural Institution of the Moscow Region “Serpukhov Historical and Art Museum”

Additional materials
Svetlana Piskunova. Comments
Svetlana Piskunova. Cervantes and his novel
Savva Brodsky. If there were no Don Quixotes, humanity would never have emerged from the caves.