Book

Don Quixote

Name: Don Quixote
Author: Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

PublisherD. Finlayson

Published2025-08-25

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R e v i e w sf r o mO t h e r s

Gustave FlaubertCeleb

3/2/2026

귀스타브 플로베르는 어린 시절부터 돈키호테를 탐독하고 평생에 걸쳐 반복해서 읽었다. 세르반테스의 환상과 현실 사이의 긴장이 보바리 부인의 낭만적 착각과 잔인한 현실 사이의 간극에 직접적 영향을 미쳤다.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gustave-Flaubert

Ivan TurgenevCeleb

3/2/2026

이반 투르게네프는 돈키호테를 햄릿의 대극으로 분석했다. '햄릿과 돈키호테' 에세이에서 돈키호테를 이상에 대한 무조건적 헌신의 상징으로 규정하며, 자기의식에 갇힌 햄릿과 대비시켰다.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Turgenev

Sor Juana Ines de la CruzCeleb

3/2/2026

소르 후아나 이네스 데 라 크루스는 세르반테스의 돈키호테를 탐독했다. 스페인 황금시대 문학의 열렬한 독자로서, 동시대 작가들의 작품을 4000권에 달하는 장서로 수집했다.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juana_In%C3%A9s_de_la_Cruz

Che GuevaraCeleb

3/1/2026

This is a work Che Guevara read voraciously throughout his life and deeply identified with. In his final letter to his parents before departing for Congo in 1965, he compared himself to a modern Don Quixote: "My heels are once again kicking Rosinante's flanks — I set out with my shield." Through these words he declared his path as a revolutionary pursuing an impossible dream. He regarded the book not as mere fiction but as a symbol of unwavering conviction.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/oct/23/featuresreviews.guardianreview11

John AdamsCeleb

3/1/2026

John Adams held Cervantes' insight into human nature in high regard. During the hardships of a journey through Spain in 1779, his son John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary: "We set out like so many Don Quixotes and Sancho Panzas." This novel was one of the eighteen books found on the table beside George Washington's deathbed — which Washington had purchased for twenty-two shillings — and it is one of the few novels that appear repeatedly in the personal library catalogues of the Founding Fathers, including Adams.

Source: https://earlyamericanists.com/2016/09/29/men-of-la-mancha/

Charles DickensCeleb

3/1/2026

This is a work from the list of books Dickens read as a child in his father's library. Cervantes's satirical tradition and techniques for creating comic characters had a lasting influence on Dickens's body of work. Dickens is frequently cited alongside Fielding, Sterne, Flaubert, Melville, and Faulkner as an author who drew inspiration from this novel.

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3836.Don_Quixote

Mary ShelleyCeleb

3/1/2026

Mary Shelley and her husband Percy read Don Quixote aloud together in the evenings. Reading records appear multiple times in her journal. Cervantes's theme of the gap between ideal and reality is transposed in Frankenstein into the gulf between Victor's ambitions and their consequences.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley

George WashingtonCeleb

3/1/2026

On September 17, 1787 — the very day the Constitutional Convention ended and 39 delegates signed the U.S. Constitution — Washington went to a Philadelphia bookshop and purchased Tobias Smollett's translation of Don Quixote for 22 shillings and 6 pence. His curiosity had been sparked days earlier by a conversation about the book with Spanish Ambassador Gardoqui at Benjamin Franklin's home; Franklin had been known to show visitors the volume, praising it as one of the most beautifully printed books in the world. It may seem surprising that the practical farmer, soldier, and statesman would buy a tale of a fantastical knight from 17th-century Spain — yet Don Quixote was widely read among American intellectuals of the day, and New Jersey delegate William Livingston was even nicknamed "the Don Quixote of New Jersey." The story of a knight fighting reality in pursuit of an ideal must have resonated with Washington as he threw himself into the experiment of a newly born republic.

Source: https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/don-quixote

Albert EinsteinCeleb

3/1/2026

Leopold Infeld, a physicist who worked with Einstein, attested in his autobiography Quest that this book was always on Einstein's bedside table, describing it as "his favorite book, which he read for relaxation." The Knight of La Mancha appears as a comic figure who mistakes windmills for giants while pursuing ideals detached from reality — but in that figure Einstein read the courage to never abandon imagination. In the sense that genius is revealed when one rejects the existing order and challenges seemingly impossible goals, Don Quixote's "madness" and the boldness of scientific revolution are kindred spirits.

Source: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/02/5-favorite-books-of-albert-einstein/

Virginia WoolfCeleb

3/1/2026

Virginia Woolf regarded Cervantes' novel as the most important in literary history. The way Don Quixote explores the boundary between illusion and reality influenced her own modernist understanding of what literature could do.

Source: https://noovella.com/virginia-woolfs-favorite-books-behind-her-brilliance/