(Alcalá de Henares, Spain, 1547 - Madrid, 1616) Spanish writer, author of Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605 and 1615), a masterpiece of world literature. The immense fame of this immortal book, which starts from the parody of the chivalrous genre to draw a wonderful portrait of the ideals and prosaisms that cohabit the human spirit, has made us forget the always precarious and eventful existence of the author, who was not even pulled out of the narrowness of the dazzling success of Don Quixote, composed in the last years of his life.
The fourth son of a modest doctor, Rodrigo de Cervantes, and Leonor de Cortinas, his childhood was marked by the pressing economic problems of his family, who in 1551 moved to Valladolid, at that time the seat of the court, in search of a better fortune. There the young Miguel began his studies, probably in a Jesuit school.
When in 1561 the court returned to Madrid, the Cervantes family did the same, always waiting for a lucrative position. The instability of the family and the eventful ups and downs of his father (who was imprisoned in Valladolid for debt) meant that Miguel de Cervantes' intellectual formation, although extensive, was rather improvised. Even so, it seems likely that he frequented the universities of Alcalá de Henares and Salamanca, since his texts contain copious descriptions of the student picaresque of the time.
In 1569 he left Spain, probably because of some problem with justice, and settled in Rome, where he joined the military, in the company of Don Diego de Urbina, with which he participated in the battle of Lepanto (1571). In this naval combat against the Turks he was wounded by an arquebus in his left hand, which was left with an ankylosis.
When he returned to Spain after several years of garrison life in Sardinia, Lombardy, Naples and Sicily (where he had acquired a great knowledge of Italian literature), the ship in which he was traveling was boarded by Turkish pirates (1575), who seized him and sold him as a slave, together with his brother Rodrigo, in Algiers. There he remained until, in 1580, an emissary of his family managed to pay the ransom demanded by his captors.
Once in Spain, after eleven years of absence, he found his family in an even more difficult situation, so he dedicated himself to carrying out commissions for the court for a few years. In 1584 he married Catalina Salazar de Palacios, and the following year his pastoral novel La Galatea was published. In 1587 he accepted a post as royal commissioner of supplies, which, although it caused him more than one problem with the peasants, allowed him to come into contact with the colorful and picturesque world of the countryside that he would reflect so well in his masterpiece, Don Quixote.
Don Quixote of La Mancha
The first part of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha appeared in 1605; the success of this book was immediate and considerable, but it did not help him to get out of misery. The following year the court moved back to Valladolid, and Cervantes with it, in order to continue begging for favors. While the great poets of the Golden Age, starting with Francisco de Quevedo or Luis de Góngora, enjoyed a solid position or the protection of aristocrats, and the best playwright of the time, Lope de Vega, could even live off his work, the fair fame that the diffusion of Don Quixote had given him only served Cervantes to publish other works he had already written: the moral tales of the Novelas ejemplares, the Viaje del Parnaso and the Comedias y entremeses.
In 1615, months before his death, he sent to the press the second volume of Don Quixote, thus completing the work that places him as one of the greatest writers in history and as the founder of the novel in the modern sense of the word. Based on a corrosive satire of the novels of chivalry, the book builds a tragicomic picture of life and explores the depths of the soul through the adventures of two archetypal and opposing characters, the enlightened Don Quixote and his prosaic squire Sancho Panza.
The two parts of Don Quixote de la Mancha offer, in terms of novelistic technique, notable differences. Of the two, the second (of which an apocryphal version was published in Tarragona, known as Avellaneda's Don Quixote, which Cervantes had time to reject and criticize in writing) is, for many reasons, more perfect than the first, published ten years earlier. Its style reveals greater care, and the comic effect ceases to be sought in the grotesque and is achieved with more refined resources.
The two main characters also acquire greater complexity, as each of them embarks on contradictory paths, leading Don Quixote towards sanity and disillusionment, while Sancho Panza feels noble yearnings for generosity and justice. But the greatness of Don Quixote should not obscure the value of the rest of Cervantes' literary production, among which the itinerant novel The Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda, his true literary testament, stands out.
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