Dostoevsky named Cervantes, along with Shakespeare and Schiller, among the greatest geniuses of world literature, the most valued by him. The images of Don Quixote and Prince Myshkin have been compared many times, but until now there has been no special study devoted to a comparative analysis of the entire creative path of Russian and Spanish writers in the context of the cultural history of Europe. The monograph by Karen Stepanyan, Doctor of Philology, Vice-President of the Russian Dostoevsky Society, fills this gap. The book examines the similarities and differences between Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries. and Russia of the 19th century, the most complex spiritual evolution of both writers, who experienced the horror of waiting for the death penalty and pardon at the last moment, prison, deprivation, lifetime glory and misunderstanding, who confronted the crisis of personality and Christian civilization and unraveled many metaphysical mysteries of existence. The reasons that prompted Dostoevsky and Cervantes to solve a grandiose artistic task are revealed: to create the image of a “positively beautiful” person and to understand whether such a person is capable of defeating world evil on his own.