This article examines the autobiographical quotations of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra that are corroborated directly and indirectly by both old and newly discovered documents which contain references to the writer and his relatives. It is worth bearing in mind that some of that evidence was for long ignored, or allowed to fade into oblivion, or, sometimes, misinterpreted. Even some 20th-century scholars acclaimed for their richly documented biographies of the author of Don Quixote, appear not to have taken account of that resource, while insisting that there are still many unsolved enigmas in Cervantes' life. Undoubtedly, his life, like that of any genius, continues to exert an irresistible fascination even though its exploration is fraught with countless hazards, not least because of the complex interrelationships between his own texts and all kinds of documentary evidence supplied by historical research. The latter, the article claims, constitutes not only an invaluable treasure for any pursuit of the truth about Cervantes but also a solid base for a comprehensive account of his life and work.

The problem of freedom features prominently in many great novels, and Don Quixote, as any attentive reader will know, is no exception. Cervantes was deeply concerned with that issue, and, what is also known, he had an abiding interest in Erasmianism, a set of beliefs and attitudes espoused by his tutor Juan López de Hoyos. The Erasmian connect-ion can be traced back not to the writer's biography but also to various points in his work. This article examines Cervantes' handling of the theme of freedom in Don Quixote in such a way that each of the issues can be taken up for further, in-depth analysis. They range from religion and society in Renaissance Spain, the role of women and their pursuit of emancipation, the vogue for transgression of literary norms and conventions, excessive wealth and social inequalities to the Erasmian affirmation of free will. All of these problems are presented here just in outline. Detailed and exhaustive analyses will, hope-fully, follow in the future.

The story of Princess Antonomasia is one of the relatively autonomous tales interpolated into the string of adventures centered round the title character of Don Quixote. The fact that the Princess is named after the rhetorical device of antonomasia ( pronominatio), well known from ancient and early modern textbooks (Cicero, Quintilian, Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, Cypriano de Soarez), is also one of the many signals alerting the reader to the multilevel significance of names and naming in Cervantes’ fictional world. So, in this case, Antonomasia functions as a regular proper name and, once its figurative potential is factored in, as an alias, hiding or replacing the Princess’s real name.
In Don Quixote Cervantes uses antonomasia, i.e. the trope of calling a person by a descriptive tag different from his or her given name, not only to multiply new, straightforwardly appropriate epithets, but also to open to metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, irony or paradox.

This article contains an analysis of a short passage about Don Quixote from Michel Serres’ philosophical dialogue entitled La Légende des Anges. He claims that the generally accepted view of the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa as a binary, hierarchical pairing is an illusion. In fact, Cervantes deconstructs the familiar opposi-tions of the carer and his subordinate in need of care, the rational thinker and the dreamer, the main character and his associate. As the two protagonists continually ex-change their roles, theirs is a story of creating and upholding new kind of bond. In describing the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, Serres alludes to the figure of the parasite (from his 1980 book Le Parasite), i.e. a third party or position, an (invisible) go-between or middle ground that makes the relationship possible but also messes things up. Serres acknowledges the dynamics of this configuration on the formal level and makes it the structural axis of his text, which is just a piece of dialogue between a nurse and an air traffic controller. Their interaction seems to be fully inscribed in the binary model, yet, he insists, there is more to it. This may well be the case with the pair of characters in Cervantes’ novel.

Don Quichotte, an opera by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Henri Cain first performed in 1910, is one of the most suggestive examples of a transposition of a literary theme to musical theatre and of a creative adaptation of a literary source-text into an operatic libretto. This article explores the manner in which the opera creates a musical portrait of the main character and presents an interpretation of the opera’s narrative. The analysis is conducted on two levels, textual (the libretto) and musical (the score). The conclusion, apart from its summarizing function, offers an answer to the question about the attractiveness of the Don Quixote theme for musical adaptations.

This article draws on the refined techniques of literary interpretation brought to the Cervantes studies by John J. Allen's Don Quixote: Hero or Fool (1969), but refocuses its attention from the problem of Quixote's character to ‘bizarreness’ – an aesthetic category that can be found at the root of the confused, incongruous perception of reality in the fictions of Cervantes and the contemporary Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. In Chapter 18 of Part Two of Don Quixote Don Lorenzo calls the knight errant ‘ loco bizarro’. The translations of this phrase reveal a striking polyvalence of the Spanish adjective bizarro when compared to bizzarro (in Italian) and bizarre (in both French and English). A close analysis of the following chapter shows that the author contextualizes the preceding events within a narrative perspective marked by empathy and understanding rather than authoritative categorization, i.e. a type of narration discussed by Olga Tokarczuk in her 2019 Nobel Lecture “The Tender Narrator” and identified as ‘bizarreness’ in her Opowiadania bizarne [ Bizarre Stories].

This article looks at the characters and types of narration in Michał Czajkowski's Dziwne życia Polaków i Polek [ Strange Lives of Poles and Polish Women]. Published in 1865, the book is a collection of biographical essays recounting in vivid detail the real-life stories of Polish noblemen from the Ukraine caught in the power games of the Ottoman and the Russian Empire in the early 19th-century. Czajkowski makes no direct references to Cervantes, but at one point calls his bunch knight errants, insisting that Poland produced more of them than any country in the world. Elsewhere he counterpoints earthy realism and (mock)epic decorum, fact and literary invention ('dzieje bajeczne') because they both make up the life of Antoni Iliński vel Iskender Pasha. Inspired by Joachim Lelewel's 1820 comparative study Historyczna paralela Hiszpanii z Polską w wieku XVI, XVII, XVIII [ A Historical Parallel between Spain and Poland in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Century] the article tries to trace such covert links or echoes of Cervantes in Czajkowski's handling of his maverick heroes.

This article is divided into two parts. Part I presents the origins and the research objectives of the authorial project Don Kichot Open Gallery/Don Quijote – galeria abierta. Its first product is a book titled identically to the project and published in collaboration with the POSET Foundation. It contains Miguel de Unamuno’s essay ‘El caballero de la triste figura’ (1896), translated into Polish by Carlos Marrodán Casas, and quality repro-ductions of nearly fifty artworks on the theme of Don Quixote (some of them shown for the first time) produced over a period of over 250 years. The album features the work of thirty Polish artists. Part II presents an interpretation of Marian Nowiński's painting ‘Don K[ichot] trwa dalej. W cieniu 2’ (Don K[Quixote] is still going on: In the shadow 2). A closer examination of this picture reveals a wealth of creative references to the Euro-pean and Polish tradition (Andrea Mantegna, Annibale Carracci, Orazio Borgianni and Jacek Malczewski respectively) and an artistic affinity for the cinema of Grigori Kozints-cev, Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam. The fusion of two aesthetics (painting and film) and diverse styles of painting (Renaissance, Baroque, twentieth-century symbolism) is testi-mony to both Nowiński's erudition and the boldness of his artistic ambition.

The Strange Adventures of Don Quixote Retold by Wiktor Woroszylski is a book that has been consistently mislabelled since its publication in 1983. It is described as an abbreviated version of Don Quixote for young readers, probably because of its publisher Nasza Księgarnia specializes in children's books. In fact, however, Woroszylski's the book plays a sophisticated literary game with the original using a whole bag of postmodernist tricks. Like Foucault, Woroszylski does not believe in Quixote's deathbed renunciation of chivalry and conversion to common sense. Nor does he go with the narrator's account of the knight errant's death. In this and many other instances he blames the original author for ignorance. As a result, he takes over and retells the story from a diametrically opposite point of view. Woroszylski's text is thus a supplement and a corrective of the original. The article examines the techniques used to by him to achieve his goals. It also tries to shed more light on his decision to stand up to Cervantes and to position this novel in Woroszylski's oeuvre. Finally, the article considers the effect the reassessment of this novel would have for the history of contemporary Polish fiction.

This article examines the position of Cervantes' Don Quixote in the intertextual network of Juliusz Słowacki' digressive poems, closely bound up with Schlegel's conception of Romantic irony. The article analyzes in turn direct references to Don Quixote; the use by the Polish poet, often with an ironic twist, of Cervantes' narrative strategies; the influence of Cervantes on the creation of the world of the poems (not least their central characters) and on Słowacki's extensive use of parabasis in all its varieties – from authorial commentaries and addresses to the reader, through characters who step out of their role to speak to the reader, to the foregrounding of the problems involved in the act of reading – to highlight and disrupt the illusion of fictional truth. The analysis shows that the Spanish classic was in many ways Słowacki's literary model and an aesthetic inspiration.

In his article titled ‘Rzut oka na ścieżkę, którą poszedłem’ [A look back at the path I have taken], published in 1832, the twenty-year old Józef Ignacy Kraszewski named a few novelists he thought worth imitating. Among them was the author of Don Quixote, “a man with an intimate knowledge of the human heart, a great investigator, and an exquisite painter”. His masterpiece was “a small collection of essays”, a treasure house of major literary forms for all European writers that came after him. Unexpectedly, however, in the last paragraph of his feuilleton Kraszewski declares he is not interested in following Cervantes because in his writing practice he makes a point of not imitating anybody. “Good or bad”, he concludes, “I am content with myself and with what I write.” I am doing my myself. Yet, if the article is put side by side with some extracts from Don Quixote shows that his demonstrative rejection of literary models does not include the legacy of Cervantes. So, in the end, it is no more than a tongue-in-cheek declaration by a young writer. After all, the novel entitled Pan Walery he is about to write, as it is announced in the article, will be a Cervantes throwback. Its unconventional form (what with interleaved, contrapuntal narrative technique, fragmentary narratives, experiment-ing with hybridity and improvisation) is in fact a literary game with Don Quixote and an ironic appendix to Cervantes' inquiry into the nature of imitatio.

This article examines the appropriation of the pair Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa by Jacek Kaczmarski and Francesco Guccini, two iconic late twentieth-century songwriters (each had more strings to his bow) who were fascinated by Cervantes’ novel. While, traditionally, Don Quixote is seen as the dominant character and Sancho the subordinate one, in Kaczmarski's and Guccini’s songs Sancho is placed on an equal footing the errant knight. This striking revaluation was in a way conditioned by the medium, the twentieth--century art song with its aspirations to be alive to the concerns of the time. For singers and songwriters committed to the cause of social justice, in tune with the prevailing egalitarian, leftist ways of thinking, it was only natural to deconstruct the master/servant nexus at the heart of Cervantes’ novel. However, as the political systems of their home countries differed widely, the social activism pursued by the Polish and that of the Italian author is hardly comparable. While Guccini’s texts resonate with themes of social justice, Kaczmarski builds more bridges to Cervantes (not least in the sphere of poetry) in his song cycle. Despite all their differences, the work of the Polish bard and of the Italian cantautore demonstrates that the mindset and the social realities of the twentieth century mindset made it impossible to bring back Don Quixote without allowing room to Sancho Pansa.

This study is an exploration of formal-aesthetic correspondences between presenta-tion strategies and techniques of transforming traditional literary and musical genre conventions in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. It takes as its bottom line William J. Entwistle’s distinction between re-creation and recreation (he used it in his appreciation of Don Quixote and so did Erich Auerbach) and his under-standing of art as an act of reproduction (re-creation) obliged to please (recreation). Seen from that perspective, both Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Berg’s opera “suffer” from ex-cess – overmuchness and surfeit with a tangible residue of melancholy. But it is because of these surpluses that these two works are regarded as masterpieces with continuing universal appeal.

The article corresponds to the 400th death annniversary of two famous European writers – Cervantes and Shakespeare – celebrated all around the world. The author tells about their lifes and takes into consideration the possiblility of their meeting together in Vailladolid. Besides, the author emphasizes on the qualities that are in common for Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’ works – among others the universality (their readers were both educated as well as simple), the ability to create symbolic figures and the application of colloquial language.

Józef Szajna – as director and set designer – staged Cervantes’ Don Quixote on three occasions, twice in Poland (i.e. at Teatr Ludowy in Nowa Huta, 1965, and at Teatr Studio in Warszawa, 1976) and once in Spain (Alcalá de Henares, 1993). His creative approach characterized by the blurring of the boundary between the human world and the world of things, or the objectification of human beings and the animation of mere objects, enabled him to lay bare the contradictions at the heart of Cervantes’ novel. In Szajna’s spectacles the circus show and fun fair theatricals interacted with scenes that stirred up memories of war and the Holocaust. Drawing on a broad range of materials including reviews, photos, the text of Lidia Zamkow’s stage adaptation of Cervantes’ novel, the film version of the play Cervantes and Szajna's own statements the article tries to get a grip on the key aspects of his Polish dramatic adaptations of Don Quixote and Cervantes’ biogra-phy and to assess what insights they may contribute to the interpretation of the novel and its central character, the iconic knight-errant.

The goal of this article is to show the interdependence of the reception of Don Quixote and the concept of identity. The argument is founded on the rejection of Don Quixote perceived as an invented character from the world of fiction and treating him instead as a Cartesian subject, in possession of the cogito faculty and defined by the truth. The Cartesian project, though, comes under pressure when the cogito constitutes itself by telling a story about itself. Cartesianism, a philosophy of consciousness, contains an embryo of a new reflection about subjectivity. With the new approach comes a positive reappraisal of the figure of Don Quixote and an acknowledgement of the key role of fiction in the process of becoming human. The liberation of identity from the tyranny of substantialism and the foundation of the subject on action has paved the way for treating the goals of action as originals produced by the subject rather than copies or reproductions.

Analyzing Don Quixote from the perspective of the main character's madness has a long history backed by a well-entrenched critical tradition. The latter was recently revisited by Marcin Rychter in his article 'Don Kichote i szaleństwo' [Don Quixote and madness] ( Przegląd Filozoficzny, N.S., 2017 (2), pp. 121–133). Although Rychter eschews psychiatric terminology in his descriptions of Don Quixote's state of mind, he cannot help using the term 'psychosis' and assumes that the reactions of Cervantes' protagonist are delusions and hallucinations. This article steers clear of any psychoanalytical or psychiatric interpretations of Don Quixote and suggests instead that he represents a metaphorical projection of self-estrangement which has reached the point of not being able to interact with the outside world. The very creation of such a character dramatizes the problem of incongruity between self-expression and the rules of communication with other people and the basic assumptions which make understanding and being understood possible. In effect Don Quixote may be seen as an exemplary figure typifying both autism and cognitive distortions. He personifies the Other, i.e. someone who is separate and estranged from the community and its norms and, at the same time, valiantly grapples with that condition trying again and again to transcend it.

This article traces two lines of philosophical interpretations of the character of Don Quixote. Common to both is the view that Don Quixote should be treated as a paragon of directness, i.e. a subject that strives to attain his ideals – a sphere of sense that is general – without any mediation (in the sense of Vermittlung). For the existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, who in this respect follows Kierkegaard, the individual cannot constitute himself unless he rejects mediation, Quixote is a knight of faith, whose every intervention is an act of heroism analogous to Abraham's leap of faith. For the Hegelian Constantin Noica the opposite is true: any attempt to move from the particular to the general without mediation is a symptom of an existential and ontological disorder. Taking his cue from Hegel’s Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit ( Phenomenology of Spirit), Noica repudiates Quixote’s unswerving commitment as insane folly. These two diametrically opposed assessments – one inspired by Kirkegaard, the other by Hegel – show the significance of Don Quixote as a focus of the modern debate about mediation and its dilemmas.

The article opens with a brief history of a genre of literary works that blend both tragic and comic elements, the latter of which seem to have been increasingly more prominent in European culture in general. This article examines various functions of the tragic and comic combination in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, some scenes from Shakespeare’s King Lear, and two modern narrative fictions, where the main character is simultaneously heroic and comic, Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote and Sławomir Mrożek’s short story The Last Hussar.

The discussion in this article is based on the assumption that the sociocultural dynamics of quixotism is common to many cultures and, as a consequence, each of them should produce its own version of the emblematic Don Quixote. The formula of this concept of quixotism comes from Magdalena Barbaruk’s studies in the field of theory and cultural practice, in which she probes into vast stretches of history, including the centuries after the publication of Cervantes’ novel as well as the epochs that preceded it. Accordingly, the circle of Quixote-like figures should include Ignatius Loyola, Saint James, Christopher Columbus, the Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki and Prince Myshkin from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot. The principal criterion for inclusion in this category is “to be a reader who walked out of the library so as to act in accordance with the books” (Magdalena Bodnaruk, ‘Don Kichote w naukach o kulturze’ [Don Quixote in Cultural Studies], in: Wieczna krucjata. Szkice o Don Kichocie [The Eternal Wandering: Essays on Don Quixote], Poznań 2016, p. 164). Taking that step results, as a matter of necessity, in a clash with the generally accepted rules and conventions. Moreover, while doing so the quixotic individual has to face the risk of having his heroism held up to ridicule or dismissed as folly.
This article puts up some additional candidates to Barbaruk’s short list of ‘Quixotes’ and considers the way in which their distinctive qualities may modify her quixotic formula. The first is the protagonist of the 1955 stage/screen adaptation of Cervantes’ novel by the Soviet Russian author Evgeny Schwartz. His Quixote is a knight errant who knows all too well that he defies people’s routines and expectations and yet remains true to himself and his ideals. He is aware that to ‘save the world’ he has to live and act in the boundary area between the profanum and the sacred, or the real world and a kind of fairyland. Therefore, what marks the timeless Quixote is the deliberate overstepping of a role sanctioned by the ruling consensus, and making a stand against the powers that be. The Middle Ages certainly produced many figures cast in that mould, among them Saint Gerald of Aurillac (whose Vita was written by Odo of Cluny). If a sharp, uncompromising view of reality is a distinct character trait of a quixotic personality, another figure that need to be added to the short list of is Buono, the good alter ego of Viscount Medardo, the protagonist of Italo Calvino’s novel The Cloven Viscount (1952). Finally, the article argues that a character who sets off on a journey (quest) which gives him the opportunity to perform noble (chivalric) deeds represents another version of a Quixotic knight errant. The case in point is Tristran from Neil Gaiman’s fairy tale fantasy Stardust.