A series of lectures on Cervantes's celebrated novel Don Quixote, delivered by Vladimir Nabokov, the greatest Russian-American writer of the 20th century, at Harvard University in 1952 and published posthumously as a book in 1983, complements his renowned lecture courses on Russian and foreign literature for students at Wellesley College and Cornell University. A perceptive, meticulous, and defiantly biased scholar who always relishes challenging conventional wisdom and platitudes, Nabokov masterfully subverts (and at the same time convincingly confirms) the cultural reputation of Don Quixote—the 'knight of the sorrowful countenance'—that has developed over four and a half centuries. In his interpretation, Cervantes's work is a 'crude old book' full of 'merciless Spanish cruelty,' and its title character is not only the victim of mockery and humiliation from a hostile world but also the target of the reader's hidden ridicule. At the same time, according to Nabokov, in the perception of subsequent generations, Don Quixote outgrew the role of a pitiful, helpless jester originally assigned to him by the author and became a symbol of sublime and holy madness, the personification of noble solitude, selfless valor, and true humanism. The book itself, meanwhile, became a 'well-behaved and bizarre myth' about the relationship between appearance and reality.