The motif of "quixotism" in Russian literature of the 19th century

We have considered some of the most important origins of the image of Don Quixote in Russian literature. Cervantes' novel came to Russian soil in the second half of the 18th century thanks to the translation by Vasily Zhukovsky and the works of Mikhail Lomonosov, Gavril Derzhavin, Ivan Krylov, Dmitry Fonvizin, Alexander Sumarokov, Nikolai Karamzin, Alexander Radishchev and some others. From the works of Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky, the motif of quixotism in Russian literature acquires an innovative problematic and plot twist. For example, the article examines the image of the Russian rebel-impostor from Pushkin's novel "The Captain's Daughter" as a variation of Don Quixote's thinking, a comparative analysis of the two characters is carried out. The central link of Pushkin's novel "The Captain's Daughter" is Pugachev's activity, which has both a real-historical and adventurous aspects. This is how the myth of the Russian impostor hero arose, the reflection of which is observed in his distant tribesman – Cervantes’s Don Quixote. In our opinion, some quixotic situations were reinterpreted by Gogol in his poem "Dead Souls" from a completely different angle. Just as Cervantes gave a satire on chivalric novels an exploratory character for the first time in Spanish Renaissance literature, Gogol also recreated a wide panorama of Russian life from an analytical point of view. Gogol's Chichikov resembles the predilections of Don Quixote's squire, Sancho Panza. Dostoevsky created the image of a "positively beautiful man" in the person of Prince Myshkin in "The Idiot". The actions of the two characters, Don Quixote and Lev Myshkin, are inseparable from ethical views. They are trying to transform the world based on the assertion of moral principles.

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