Don Quixote. In Two Books

Four centuries ago, a prisoner in a Seville jail was visited by 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 gray donkey. The prisoner began to observe their astonishing adventures closely and record them with his surviving hand. The most incomprehensible aspect of this story remains the fact that the comedic pair, born in the mind of the Seville prisoner, became close to everyone living on our planet. As if they actually live with us, somewhere very, very close.

Cervantes' novel "Don Quixote" remains one of the most published books in the world, surpassed only by the Bible in the number of languages it has been translated into.

In the late 1960s, artist Savva Brodsky took on, as he put it, the thousandth variation of illustrating the novel and once again began to wash the great book in his heart, like gold-bearing sand (the artist started drawing Cervantes' characters while still in school). What is important and extraordinarily valuable is that Brodsky did not divide the world, as is customary, into Don Quixotes and Sancho Panzas. According to 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 unavoidably followed by the clever squire: one embodies the idea, the other - its practical application. But in Brodsky's illustrations, there is a third character - the cracked earth, stretching into the merciless distance. In this desert of humanity, the bright faith of Don Quixote in the truth, which demands service and sacrifice, was born...