“The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha” — a novel by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616). A financially ruined nobleman from La Mancha, the elderly Alonso Quixano, losing his mind from reading chivalric romances day and night and from the lack of fresh air, decides to become a wandering knight. He takes a new name: Don Quixote. Don Quixote is naive and generous, convinced that knights lived exclusively to help the weak and the dispossessed, and dreaming of repeating the feats of literary heroes—yet he ends up in absurd adventures. The novel was conceived as a parody of chivalric romances.