Before it's gone, a tilt to Quixote's quartocentennial: For those who haven't noticed this year marks the 400th anniversary, the quartocentennial of the publication in 1605 of Miguel de Cervante's masterpiece, The History of Don Quixote.

In the early pages Cervantes admits to some uncertainties as to the good gentleman's exact spelling of his name and his precise origin, but soon he settles on the name by which the fool-errant had himself knighted: Don Quixote, a gentleman of La Mancha.

Much is available of the Internet about Quixote, although comparatively little about the Quixote Quarto.

The Russians, of course, are far ahead of us on it. The Cervantes Institute in Moscow has assembled a small collection of Russian tributes in a single basement room. How fitting to the man. Here is an excerpt from a review that pauses to contemplate the mystic of the dreaming Don:

To date, no one can agree exactly what Don Quixote represents, hero or fool. Most famous for tilting at windmills, he stands in for every man who has devoted himself to a lost cause, a fate grander and nobler than what his time and place have allotted him. Of course, perhaps Don Quixote was simply a deluded fool, and perhaps the quest for the grand and noble life was never as lovely as medieval myths would have us believe. Certainly by the time Cervantes wrote, the ideals of chivalry had been flattened into romantic cliches, and the author poked red-hot fun at outmoded concepts such as chivalry, chastity and valor.

The novel that flowed from his pen, however, did more to secure immortality for these fine anachronisms than all the hackneyed prose of his contemporaries in 17th-century Spain. It was precisely Cervantes' concept of grandeur cloaked in ridicule that appealed so much in Russia -- the nation that forgives, indeed, valorizes fools like nowhere else on earth.

Over the years, Don Quixote captured the attention of Russia's best and brightest. Dostoevsky was especially enamored of the Knight of la Mancha, ranking him second behind Christ as the personification of perfect literary beauty. He was working on his own variation of the "Christ as Don Quixote" or "Christ Ridiculous" theme, Prince Myshkin of "The Idiot," when he wrote:

"I'd only mention that of all the beautiful individuals in Christian literature, one stands out as the most perfect, Don Quixote. But he is beautiful only because he is ridiculous. Wherever compassion toward ridiculed and ingenious beauty is presented, the reader's sympathy is aroused. The mystery of humor lies in this excitation of compassion." MoscowTimes

Every community theater should have scheduled a performance of Man of La Mancha in this anniversary, but few seem to.

Perhaps that failing, too, can be redeemed.

In any event, Escapade & Scandal, the hapless news guys lost in a bar at the far end of time -- as featured on Bird Street's -- sometimes evoke thoughts of Quixote, although so elegantly as Cervantes, of course.