Józef Szajna – as director and set designer – staged Cervantes’ Don Quixote on three occasions, twice in Poland (i.e. at Teatr Ludowy in Nowa Huta, 1965, and at Teatr Studio in Warszawa, 1976) and once in Spain (Alcalá de Henares, 1993). His creative approach characterized by the blurring of the boundary between the human world and the world of things, or the objectification of human beings and the animation of mere objects, enabled him to lay bare the contradictions at the heart of Cervantes’ novel. In Szajna’s spectacles the circus show and fun fair theatricals interacted with scenes that stirred up memories of war and the Holocaust. Drawing on a broad range of materials including reviews, photos, the text of Lidia Zamkow’s stage adaptation of Cervantes’ novel, the film version of the play Cervantes and Szajna's own statements the article tries to get a grip on the key aspects of his Polish dramatic adaptations of Don Quixote and Cervantes’ biogra-phy and to assess what insights they may contribute to the interpretation of the novel and its central character, the iconic knight-errant.