Cervantes’ masterpiece, Don Quixote, goes beyond chivalric satire to capture the contest between human nature, reality, and fantasy. Don Quixote has had a profound impact on literary history, inspiring laughter and reflection throughout the ages.
Cervantes and Don Quixote commentary
Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547, in the Alcalá de Henares, a university town in Madrid, Spain, the son of a poor surgeon. He was a novelist, playwright, and poet. He is best known as the author of a novel (1605) that parodied the Spanish knightly tales of his time, and excelled in characterization, among other works.
His father, a poor surgeon, was deaf, so his income was insufficient, and the family moved between Valladolid, Madrid, and Seville until Cervantes reached adulthood.
As a result, he received little formal schooling, except for a brief stint in a Madrid boarding school in 1569, where he was tutored by the teacher López de Ojos as a “pupil of the secret treasury.
Cervantes traveled to Italy that year, where he became a vassal to Cardinal Akwabiba. In 1570 he joined Diego de Urbina’s infantry in the Spanish army in Italy, and in 1571 he participated in the famous naval battle of Lepanto, where he was wounded in two places in his chest and lost the use of his left hand for life. He said to himself, “I lost my left hand to increase the honor of my right hand. After convalescence, he joined Lope de Figueroa’s infantry in Calderón de Lavarca’s , and participated in the battle of Tunis in 1573. In 1575, after receiving a commendation from Don Juan de Astoria, commander-in-chief of the Spanish navy and brother of the king, and a letter of recommendation from the Duke of Sessa, vice-king of Sicily, he returned home with dreams of a promising career, but was attacked by pirates who were traversing the Mediterranean at the time and taken to Algeria, where he spent five years as a slave to the Ari Mami until 1580. After several attempts to escape and even becoming an organizer of a rebellion, he returned to Madrid as a free man in 1580, thanks to the efforts of Juan Hir Sassi of the Trinity. However, he was not treated well by his countrymen, and in 1584 he married the daughter of a wealthy landowner named Catarina de Paracios, 18 years his junior.
The following year, he published his maiden novel, The Woodman. The royalties from the manuscript and the dowry brought by his wife supported him to some extent. From then until 1587, he is said to have written 20 to 30 plays, but only two, such as and , have survived. The tragedies, in particular, were recognized by Shelley and Goethe during the Romantic period.
However, when this series of works did not receive any response, he stopped writing in 1587 and worked as a simple templar in a grain store in Seville to earn a living.
His uneven life led him to abandon literature and work as an obscure tax collector. When he was dismissed from his job as a ration collector in the naval fleet, he quit and lived in poverty for six or seven years. He became an accountant for a small company, but was accused by the bank that entrusted him with public funds due to a miscalculation and was imprisoned several times.
Then, in 1605, he published the first part of his immortal masterpiece, which was applauded by the world upon publication, but Cervantes remained poor. It is also clear that he was arrested and imprisoned with his family at one point shortly after its publication, accused of being involved in the case of the death of a man. He published a collection of twelve short stories in 1613 and a long poem criticizing his contemporaries in 1614 and 1615, before publishing the second part in 1615.
In his later years, he became religious, joined a religious order, and became active in the literary and artistic organization called the Academia Cervahe, founded by Francisco de Silva in 1611. He died in Madrid on April 23, 1616, the same day as W. Shakespeare. The following year, the novel was published as a posthumous work.
In Madrid, Spain, there is a square built in 1930 to honor the author, with a monument and a statue of Cervantes.
Cervantes and Don Quixote
Cervantes wanted to subvert the fanciful chivalric fiction of his time by creating an outlandish character like Don Quixote. The full name of the work is , and as the author himself stated, it was intended to “overthrow the popularity of the chivalric tales that were in vogue,” and it began as a parody of the chivalric tales popular in Spain at the time.
The centerpiece of the work is the creation of two characters, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The knight’s noble ideals contrast with Sancho Panza’s practical, crass materialism. Yet the two men complement each other, representing two sides of humanity. Their universal humanity transcends nationality, race, age, and gender, making them relatable and relatable to everyone. Cervantes, along with Shakespeare, was one of those rare writers who knew how to create characterization.
If, according to the French philosopher, critic, and sagaist Ifrit Ten (1828-1893), to understand the literature of a nation, one must first identify its national character and analyze the three main influences of race, time, and environment, then Cervantes, who to this day has the second largest readership after the Bible, cannot be excluded from this category.
There are few countries in world history where the history of religion has penetrated so deeply into the psyche of its people, into every corner of their political and literary history, as in Spain.
The Spaniards embraced Christianity in the first century, and by the sixth century, Christianity was the bond that united all the races of the Iberian Peninsula. Then, when the Caliphs, with sword in one hand and sackcloth in the other, pacified the Arabian Peninsula, conquered Syria and Persia, passed through Egypt and into Africa, and finally took possession of the Iberian Peninsula, Spain struggled for the next eight hundred years against the invading infidel races, always uniting the twin ideas of religion and fatherland. The fall of Granada, the last bastion of the Moros (1492), marked the beginning of the rise of a decisively Christian Spain, which defended the Christian faith of the Gurafa with its own theologians and armies, while spreading it around the world through explorers, inventors, and missionaries.
Never before had any Gurappa empire experienced such a dramatic rise. Inwardly, the mystical theology of the Hundred Flowers and the anti-religious revolution of the Jesuits, outwardly, the discovery of the Americas and the establishment of colonial kingdoms, and the expansion of the Gurafa under the control of the Dutch and others, and the conversion of peoples in far-flung lands-indeed, these great events of world history, both within Spain and in the world, took place over a period of nearly half a century, from the arrival of Columbus (1492) to the Council of Trento (1545-1563).
Our own Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, a man of pure Castilian blood, was baptized in 1547 in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Alcalá de Henares, not far from Madrid, during the height of Spain’s prosperity.
His father, Rodrigo de Cervantes Saavedra, was a surgeon, but the family was poor. Just as the lives of many of Spain’s greatest writers resembled adventure stories, Cervantes’ life was one of overcoming the odds (which is why Spanish literature is so much richer in fantasy than French literature, for example).
From 1563 to 1564, he lived with his father in Seville and attended a Jesuit school in the same city. He also seems to have studied at university, but there are no details. In any case, he was in Madrid in 1565, and traveled to Rome as an envoy to the papal envoy Akwabiba.
But he was always ambitious, and in 1570 he joined an infantry regiment under the command of General Marco Antonio Colonna. Finally, the time had come. In 1571, the Saracens, who had already been a threat to the former Gurafa for centuries, made another foray into the Mediterranean, capturing the islands of Cyprus and Malta and then attempting to encroach on Spain’s maritime rights.
In response, King Philip II of Spain, with the help of Pope St. Pius V, who was greatly worried about the navy of Toigi and the pirates he supported, as well as the Venetians and others, concluded the Great Toigi Holy Alliance and led the Great War of Gungeon Ilchak Gungeon Ilchak off Lepanto, Greece, to victory. That was on October 7, 1751 (a feast day in the history of the Catholic Church).
The Grand Admiral of the Allied fleet was the famous Don Juan d´ Austria, half-brother of King Philip II. In fact, the Battle of the Lepanto was one of the great clashes between the East and the West that recurred throughout the ancient and medieval periods, one of the great confrontations of world history, and the decisive battle between Christendom and the Muslim world. At the same time, it was the first time that Christendom defeated the land- and sea-advantaged Toigi army, which permanently lost control of the Mediterranean Sea and went into decline.
Just as the naval battle of Lepanto was a glorious victory that changed the course of world history, it also marked a turning point in Cervantes’ life. He fought as a young man of 24. But not only was he wounded twice in the chest during the battle, but he also lost his left hand, which, in his words, “was lost to increase the honor of his right hand”.
From this point on, his life took a turn for the worse. In September 1575, while sailing home on a ship, he was attacked by pirates, captured, and taken to Algeria. There were already thousands of Christian captives there, and he was enslaved with them for five years, trying to escape or become the leader of a rebellion (the captivity story in Don Quixote was likely inspired by this experience). In 1580, he became a freedman by chance (in 1218, St. Peter Nolasco founded the Merceda- rians Order of Our Lady of Mercy, a slave rescue order. The purpose was to ransom Christians held by the Muslims, or to ransom them themselves, as friars, in exchange for relief. While Cervantes was in captivity, a friar named Juan Gil came to the rescue of an Aragonese named Jerónimo Palafox with five hundred and twenty gold coins, but the amount of money was insufficient to free a man of Palafox’s age, so by a stroke of good fortune, Cervantes was released with the money instead of Palafox.)
He returned to Madrid on December 18, 1580. As he had already received a prize from Admiral Don Juan de Astoria, and a letter of recommendation from the Duque de sessa, viceroy of Naples, Cervantes expected that his country would reward him greatly in the future.
But his country did not reward him with any silverware. His youthful dreams of making a name for himself as a revolutionary soldier were shattered, and the rewards of the profession he had trusted to him were all but lost. He turned to the brush instead of the sword. He finally emerged as a poet and playwright. But the road was by no means smooth.
His wife, Catarina, abandoned him for another man, a soldier of fortune who could not earn a penny. This caused Cervantes to change his mind, and he stopped writing for a while, first taking a job as an aesthetician to earn a living. He became a food collector for the navy, collecting wheat and olive oil for the famous “invincible fleet” centered in Seville, and was imprisoned in 1592 for lunatic behavior. In 1597, he was imprisoned a second time for the bankruptcy of the bank in which he had deposited public funds, and in 1602 he became an English subject.
When he was summoned to Valladolid the following year for public reparations, he was already carrying his manuscripts with him. On his return, he found a publisher in Madrid. As fate would have it, his work was not published until he was 58 years old.
The first part was published in 1605. However, the sequel didn’t appear until 1615, ten years later. This is very different from Cervantes’ sequel to his maiden novel (1584), which was only promised but never finished.
There are no words at the beginning of Don Quixote that foreshadow the sequel. There is only Don Quixote’s tombstone and Dulcinea’s tombstone at the end. The fact that it ends with a single line from Ariosto suggests that Cervantes had no intention of writing a sequel.
The success of the first installment, however, was beyond the author’s wildest dreams. Within a year of its publication, it went through two editions in Madrid, two in Lisbon, and two in Valencia, and was reprinted in Brussels in 1607 and again in Madrid in 1608. The demand for a sequel from readers and publishers must have been high, and the author himself must have been motivated to write it.
In any case, Cervantes enrolled in the Academia de los Nocturnos, founded by Francisco de Silva, in 1611, and, with his life barely under control, he must have picked up his pen again the following year, with his creative juices flowing. Given that his death is dated April 23, 1616, he must have completed the second part in 1615.
What, then, is the significance of this massive work – 52 chapters in the first part and 74 in the second, totaling 126 chapters?
The Divine Comedy was not without its misunderstandings in the West at one time, not to mention the sad reality in the Far East, where the Divine Comedy was dismissed as a mere fool’s play, as we know it as the sublime love poem of Dante and Beatrice. Even the English poet Byron, in his Don Juan Ⅷ, Ⅱ, turned the contribution of the great Spanish writer to tragic consequences: He sang: “Cervantes smiled at Spain’s greatness.
Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away
And therefore have his volumes done such harm
That all their glory, as a composition
Was dearly purchased by his land’s perdition
But did Cervantes really laugh away Spain’s chivalry? Didn’t his country’s decline stem from a variety of political, social, and ethical factors that were inversely proportional to his literary glory? Jorè Orte- ga Y Gasset, a native Spanish philosopher, writer, and politician, said that Cervantes’s work was “God’s work.
Cervantes’ work is the answer to the great question: ‘What, for God’s sake, is Spain?’……. I find here (Cervantes’ work) the fulfillment of Spain……. If we know where the Cervantesan way of approaching his work and thought lies, we will have it all, because in this spiritual peak an unbreakable solidarity reigns, and the poetic style is a combination of philosophy, ethics, science, and politics. If someone were to come along the next day and outline for us the outlines of Cervantes’ style, this would be enough to awaken us to a new life by extending it to the whole range of problems; and then, if we had the courage and the talent, we could make the purest new Spanish attempt.
In this way the Spaniards exalt their treasures, even to the point of scripture, as contributing to their national morality. Is it any wonder, then, that Vicen- te Salvá (1786-1849), an admirer of Cervantes a hundred years ago, said: ‘Cervantes’ purpose was not to ridicule the spirit of chivalry and its fundamental ideas. Rather, it was to rescue it from the realm of absurdity, and hence he added one more book to the must-read list.’ What would Byron say in response to this statement?
Now let’s switch gears for a moment and contrast that with Shakespeare, a great contemporary of Cervantes, who also shared the same date of death (April 23, 1616) as Cervantes.
Anton Chekhov’s letter to his beloved sister Miitsa reads.
Read ……. It’s a great work. It is the work of Cervantes, who should be placed almost in the same league as Shakespeare. I advise my brothers to read Turgenev if they haven’t already.
So how did Turgenev interpret Don Quixote? According to him, what Don Quixote symbolizes above all is faith. Faith in what is eternal, faith in what is true. In other words, it teaches us to have faith in what is true, which is not easily attained and requires constant service and sacrifice. Don Quixote is not afraid to take many hard knocks, and sometimes even his own life, in order to realize this truth on earth. Says Turgenev.
“People say that this ideal is a figment of his imagination, derived from the fantastic world of the knight’s book. We feel the same way, hence the comedic element in Don Quixote. But that doesn’t mean the ideal is tainted by a hair’s breadth. To live for oneself, to think only of oneself, is a disgrace to Don Quixote. There is no trace of egoism in him. …… He is oblivious to self. His whole being is self-sacrifice. …… He believes. …… He believes. He believes unwaveringly, unblinkingly. Therefore, he is fearless, and revels in the untrammeled malice of evil.”
“Hamlet is an egocentri. He is a skeptic, …… suspicious of everything. He doesn’t trust himself. He does not believe in himself, but he has vanity. He does not know what he desires or what he lives for, but he is obsessed with life.”
If Turgenev said that the eternity of righteousness lies in its negative fundamental nature, then the eternity of righteousness lies in its positive fundamental nature. And just as it is a tragedy of despair because it is based on this distorted Christianity, so it can be called a comedy of hope because it is based on the orthodox Christianity of the Golden Age of medieval Spanish literature. Yes, it’s a comedy.
But it is not the same as the so-called Pantagruélisme of F. Rabelais (1494-1559), a contemporary of Cervantes and a representative of the literary revival: “Fay ce que voudras” (Do what you want).
Rabelais’s laughter was the laughter of the revolution; he attacked and laughed at all the past, at Scholasticism, and at the pilgrims. He was a Christian, but he was as much a child of the Renaissance as anything else, and his laughter was therefore a joke, a dirty, filthy laugh that was only possible outside the church.
Cervantes’s laughter, however, is as clear and clean as the skies of southern Spain. And yet it is always optimistic, without forgetting Christian moderation. Moreover, at the end of the book, the frowning knight has been washed away, and the serene smile of heaven beams upon him as he returns as “good Alonso Quijano”.
Don Quixote’s last words on his deathbed are as quiet and beautiful as the glow of the sunset.
“I praise God Almighty. For such great grace hast thou bestowed upon me; thy mercy is without end, and the iniquities of men neither mitigate nor prevent it…….”
He called a priest to receive his confession, then asked Sancho’s forgiveness, and said to the people at his head
“Gentlemen, let us move on. Last year’s bird is not yet in this year’s nest; I was mad, but now my right mind has returned; I was Don Quixote del La Mancha, but now I am, as I said before, ‘good Alonso Quijano’. I hope my remorse and sincerity will return to your understanding of me.Then, notary, go ahead.”
And when he had finished his silent testament, he received the Last Sacrament and closed his eyes.
The notary who was present said that he had never seen a horseman die so serenely, so Christianly, as Don Quixote. Indeed, as his tombstone says, he “lived mad, died awake.
I’d like to end this article with a quote from Dostoevsky. On January 23, 1868, Dostoevsky wrote the following letter to his niece Ivanova
The essential ideal of fiction is to portray an absolutely beautiful human being. There is nothing else in the world that is so difficult. Especially today. All writers, whether they are ours or those of the West, run into a reef when it comes to depicting absolute beauty. It is an impossible task.
Beauty is an ideal. But this ideal, which is also ours and the ideal of civilized Europe, is still far from purified. There is only one absolute beauty in the world, Christ, and therefore the appearance of this infinite being, this supreme beauty, is undoubtedly an eternal miracle (in the sense of the whole of John’s Gospel, where the miracle is manifested in the one and only Incarnation, the one and only manifestation of beauty).
I digress, but the point I’m trying to make is that Don Quixote is the most complete representation of beauty in literature. But at the same time, Don Quixote is only beautiful because he is funny……. When a beautiful figure who doesn’t know his own value is ridiculed, people feel compassion for him, and this creates sympathy for the reader. This is the secret of humor: to awaken compassion.
Don Quixote, so foolishly pursuing a great dream, so hilarious and yet so sad, is Cervantes, Spain in his time, and ourselves without you-our own naked life-so Don Quixote may be our longtime companion through life, fighting with dreams, losing, defeated, and then realizing ourselves.
