About the book: 2013 / The central theme of the book is the fate of the “Cervantes-type” novel in Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries. By a novel of the “Cervantes type,” the author of the book understands the model of a new European “novel of consciousness” created by Cervantes in “Don Quixote,” which in one form or another exploits the so-called “quixotic situation.” Having already become the “memory of the genre” of the modern European novel, Don Quixote was included in complex multi-genre configurations. Therefore, the reader will find chapters in the book that also deal with the picaresque (the so-called “picaresque novel”), the baroque allegorical “epic in prose,” the new European utopia, the epistolary novel, the German “novel of education,” and the French psychological novel. The modernist “novel of consciousness” of the 20th century, represented in the West by the works of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Unamuno, in pre-revolutionary Russia by the prose of Andrei Bely, in post-revolutionary Russia by the dystopias of Zamyatin and Platonov, and the prose of A. Bitov, clearly demonstrates the ability of the genre created by Cervantes to make cardinal changes. transformations. The book is addressed to critics and literary scholars, everyone interested in the theory and historical poetics of the novel, the Russian novel in the Western European literary context.