A series of lectures on the famous novel by Cervantes “Don Quixote”, read by the greatest Russian-American writer of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov, at Harvard University in 1952 and published posthumously as a separate book in 1983, complements the lecture courses on Russian and foreign literature prepared by them previously for students at Wellesley College and Cornell University. Always happy to challenge conventional wisdom and hackneyed truths, Nabokov the lecturer presented Cervantes's work as a "rough old book" full of "merciless Spanish cruelty," and its title character - not only as a victim of mockery and humiliation from a hostile world, but also as a target for hidden reader ridicule. At the same time, according to Nabokov, in the perception of subsequent generations, Don Quixote outgrew the role of a pathetic, helpless jester, initially assigned to him by the author, and became a symbol of sublime and holy madness, the personification of noble loneliness, selfless valor and true humanism, while the book itself turned into a “well-behaved and a bizarre myth” about the relationship between appearance and reality. An insightful, meticulous and defiantly biased researcher, Nabokov masterfully subverts and at the same time convincingly confirms the cultural reputation of Don Quixote - the “knight of the sad image”, which has developed over four and a half centuries.