"Don Quixote" and romanticism
With the beginning of XIX century the novel begins a new life in terms of deductible and invested in it meanings. "Don Quixote" is in the field of vision of romantics, who begin to perceive the content of the novel much deeper than their predecessors, to distinguish it from such artistic innovations that either did not see or did not consider important contemporaries. For example, contemporary playwrights Tirso de Molina or Calderon, of course, knew the novel well and wrote plays on the subjects taken from it. However, there is no evidence that they were attracted by the complexity of the text - rather, its parody and popularity.
It is romantics who become those who begin to emphasize the complexity and ideological grandeur of the novel, to invest in the interpretation of the text of many ideas inherent in their time. Romantic interpretations glorified Don Quixote, translated it from the category of funny figures into tragic ones. For Heine, for example, the main feeling that we experience when reading a novel is bitterness. Bitterness from how tragic a man is in his opposition to the world, how all his dreams crumble about the obstacles of cruel reality. Of course, this is an interpretation in the spirit of the ideas of Heine himself, cultivated by a romantic worldview. In the novel itself, it is rather about something else: a certain elderly hero, who read to the fool of knightly novels and tries to implement the ideal of knightly, which he is so inspired, in real life. And it is quite natural that his consciousness, raised on a book, is not very appropriate in the eyes of other people. It's not about the conflict with life, the most important thing here - it's the gap that is formed between how the world sees Don Quixote, and how to see his other characters of the novel, which, we note, too, are very heterogeneous. Of course, there are a lot of things in this gap - funny, bitter and sad.
In my opinion, one of the greatest things in Cervantes' work is this very plurality of points of view on the same things, objects, events that did not exist in literature before. There is practically no what we call the objective course of the narration, everything is given through the point of view of either Don Quixote, or Sancho Panza, or other characters of the novel. Besides, it is not only Don Quixote who lives with book consciousness - there are also heroes of pastoral novels, adventurous novels, who also live by their own vision of the world. And throughout the work of their worlds constantly collide with each other. On the complex perception of the novel in the history of European and Russian culture wrote a lot of Piskunov and VE Bagno.
With whom can we compare the main character of "Don Quixote" on the impact and influence on world literature? In my opinion, this impact is unique. There are not many such heroes in literature. I would compare it to Hamlet, Don Juan (Don Juan in Spanish) and Faust. Hamlet is close to the Knight of the Sad Image by his motivation to reflect, to reflect on the world and himself, by his strange madness - funny, sad, or genuine, or played, and sometimes very dangerous to others. Hamlet is as much a replica of the passing century as Don Quixote is of the ongoing and future changes. It is no coincidence that Hamlet and Don Quixote often go along in their influence on certain characters - it is enough to remember Prince Myshkin. With two other characters Don Quixote is comparable in scale and number of interpretations. Both Faust and Don Giovanni and Don Quixote appear as archetypes, matrices, in which any, sometimes opposite, content is poured. Only in the first two cases the plot remains almost unchanged, but the motivations of the characters change, and in the case of Don Quixote, the epochs, names and circumstances change easily, but the essence of the hero, or rather a pair of heroes, namely Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, their desire to act according to the laws of their own fictional world remains almost unchanged.
And yet Don Quixote is a special hero. The power of his influence on the reader is not comparable to anything. Perhaps because he became the first hero, whose perfectly ordinary and ridiculous figure reminded people of their own and gave hope for the right to build a life of their own choice and reasoning, despite all the circumstances