Don Quixote innovation
Of course, the novel has always been known and always read, but it does not mean that it has always been perceived in the same way. Each generation understands the book, based on their tastes, literary and ideological views. At the same time, it is quite natural that each next era in some sense complicates the understanding of the novel. It is no coincidence that Borges, the adherent of the idea of the infinite multi-denomination of great books, insisted in his story "Pierre Menard, author of" Don Quixote ", that the modern" Don Quixote " is much deeper and more complex than the text of the XVII century.
Generally speaking, the word "innovation", if you try to apply this concept to the "Don Quixote", is not quite accurate. This word is for writers and literary critics of the following eras. And for the readers of the XVII century, there was not much new, that is, unknown before, was not so much. All the moves, all the situations, all the types of heroes were largely borrowed from a knightly novel. The hero himself - a parody of a very common ideal of Spanish culture of the Golden Age, "the man of the pen and sword". Therefore, for that society, the new consisted primarily in mocking the old literary tradition. Apparently, both writers and readers of the XVII century, more appreciated the humor and the characters themselves, and those, too, were not so new to the Spanish tradition, because the couple - a knight and his squire - appears before, for example, in the "Book of Knight Siphara", the first Spanish knightly novel of the XIV century.
Contemporaries undoubtedly had to evaluate the author's treatment of the language. It is not easy to explain to the modern reader the language innovations in full, but they can be formulated as follows. Cervantes did not write the text of the novel in literary cliches, but in lively, natural language. The natural language is not necessarily a low style language, but a living language in the modern state. It can be sublime, pathetic, rude, a collection of proverbs or maximal and at the same time very easy everyday dialogue. While the bad novels of chivalry that Cervantes fought against were written in an emaciated, artificial language, with a lot of cliches. In the chapter on Don Quichotte's library, the author can be said to be reviewing all his contemporary books. And this revision gives him a man of high literary flair and impeccable literary taste, because he mistakenly defines the literary needs and saves from the fire just those books that will then be considered masterpieces of Spanish literature. For example, the same "Amadis of Gali".
In terms of language Cervantes, indeed, is partly close to Pushkin, to the role he played in the development of Russian literary language. This is partly similar to what Pushkin did in "Belkin's Announcements", when absolutely classic literary subjects suddenly found some very human and natural sounding.
As already mentioned, the awareness of literary value and innovation of the novel Cervantes came in the XVIII century. English novel of the XVIII century, in particular Fielding and Stern, fully grows from the new narrative of Cervantes. They take from him a conversation with the reader, a free composition, heroes who look at the world, based on their own ideas and beliefs.