Down with admirable idealism! - Rated 
"I remember with delight," said Nabokov, "tearing apart Don Quixote, a crude and cruel old book, before six hundred students, much to the horror of some of my more conservative colleagues." In Nabokov's opinion criticism of the Quixote had been far too sentimental, far too comfortable, leaving the word `quixotic' to mean anything but it's original sense of "hallucinated, self-hypnotised or play-in-collision-with-reality." In the same way that the noble Don's world was populated with brave knights, bountiful princesses and terrible foes, whilst the real Spain about him was all petty criminals and traffic, so Nabokov urged his students to see the real cruelty of 16th/17th century Spain with its dark, violent humour. Cervantes was writing with an eye for an audience which laughed at beatings, burnings, scrapes and general nastiness; unable to find similar amusement ourselves we read in a moral tale, we recreate the chivalry Cervantes himself was sending up, we romanticise our Don into a hero. Don't fall into the trap.
Fittingly then, the lectures are painfully text-based; no room for waffle or airy theorising here. In fact, the second half, Text & Commentary, is almost entirely a summary of the book chapter by chapter, with little real commentary at all. The first half divides into chapters on character portraits, structure, types of torture and cruelty, the chronicler Cid Hamete Benengeli, and then, finally, a tally of victories and defeats (which Nabokov counts at 20-20). There are some gems here; sardonic quips on comparisons to Shakespeare, the genuine disbelief that a masterpiece could ever have a scene involving reciprocal vomiting, and Nabokov's own alternative ending, excusing Cervantes' tiredness in old age.
Generally though I didn't find a great deal of depth here. I got the impression that whilst at one moment Nabokov berates critics for not having read the book, at the same time he assumes that none of his students have either, leaving much of the lectures recounting episodes and quoting long passages just to provide a context for assertions which any reader could easily place for themself. But anyway, Nabokov's sense of humour and obvious disdain for given opinion on the Quixote will keep a smirk on most faces. Read these lectures if you like, if you don't, you won't be missing a great deal.
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