Four centuries ago, a prisoner in a Seville prison experienced a strange vision. Through the prison bars, he saw two lonely travelers: one very thin, riding a bony nag, the other fat, riding a gray donkey. The prisoner began to watch their astonishing adventures intently, writing everything down with his remaining hand. The most incomprehensible thing about this story is that the comical pair that arose in the mind of the Seville prisoner has become close to everyone on our planet. It's as if they actually live with us, somewhere very, very close. Cervantes' novel Don Quixote remains one of the most published books in the world; in terms of the number of languages ​​into which it has been translated, it is second only to the Bible. In the late 1960s, the artist Savva Brodsky took on, as he himself put it, the thousandth iteration of illustrating the novel, once again dredging the great book within his heart like gold dust (he had begun drawing Cervantes's heroes as a schoolboy). Importantly and incredibly valuable, Brodsky did not divide the world, as is customary, into Don Quixotes and Sancho Panzas. In his pictorial version, there cannot be only one Don Quixote or one Sancho, just as there cannot be only one side of a coin. The exalted knight is relentlessly followed by a shrewd squire: one personifies the idea, the other its practical application. But Brodsky's illustrations also contain a third character—the cracked earth, receding into the merciless distance. In this human desert, Don Quixote's radiant faith in a truth that demands service and sacrifice was born.