Re-reading Quixote: Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has instructed his government to print a million copies of Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote and distribute them for free in his country. Partly he's commemorating the 400th anniversary of the novel, partly he wants to feed his people's "spirit with this fighter who came out to get rid of injustice and fix the world." At first blush, it's an odd choice, considering Chavez has been accused of being an unrealistic idealist mired, at times, in illusion. After all, in the book, Don Quixote lived a life of "calamitous idealism" and obliviousness to failure, all the way to the end of the novel, when he finally renounces optimistic fantasy for grim reality, and dies.

But Prospect magazine's essay on the novel has a more nuanced take. In modern times we admire Don Quixote, writes Julian Evans, because we realize "his madness, not his reason, enables him to transcend the world of things and believe in a world of value."

"Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity," Kant wrote in 1784, 180 years after the first publication of the Quixote. "The motto of Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence." On the knight's 400th anniversary we can see that this was the courage that Don Quixote has bequeathed us. His own misguided intelligence, bound to an immaturity that leads to folly, takes him on an epic of discovery in which he finally leads the reader out of his or her own immaturity. Frequently evoked as picaresque, the Quixote is more accurately seen as a Bildungsroman [a coming-of-age novel]. It takes its Bildung in two directions, the one in which Don Quixote is shown his own folly, and the other in which the reader is invited to understand the difference between appearance and reality.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)