Don Juans today are called many men, often not fully understanding the meaning of this word. Don Juan, meanwhile, thanks to which it appeared, is the eternal hero of world literature and cinema. What is his real story and what is the correct spelling of this name?
Who is this Don Juan?
First of all, it is worth deciding on the meaning of the common word "Don Juan", derived from the name of Don Juan. The meaning of this term is a man who is constantly looking for love adventures.
In a broader sense, this name means a charming person who loves, and most importantly knows how to seduce women. That was exactly what the legendary Spanish nobleman Don Giovanni was like.
The meaning of a phraseological unit and its synonyms
The most common synonym is a womanizer. True, it is not always appropriate, because a womanizer is a person who loves female attention and wants to seduce the fair sex. However, this was not the real Don Juan.
The meaning of the phraseological unit derived from this name is a man who is eager to conquer not only the body of a woman, but also her soul. But in return, he does not at all seek to give her his heart.
In fact, Don Juan is a kind of hunter, for whom a woman is a game, representing only a sporting interest. While a womanizer is a person who is not able to be faithful to one woman, at the same time he may well sincerely love each of his passions.
World history knows other lovers of breaking women's hearts, whose names eventually turned from proper nouns into common nouns, which are synonymous with the word "Don Juan".
This is the hero of Samuel Richardson's book "Clarissa" - Robert Lovelace and an adventurer-writer from Italy - Giacomo Casanova. All these words, derived from these names: “lovelace”, “casanova” and “don juan” - have a similar meaning. In rare cases, the names themselves - Lovelace, Casanova and Don Juan - are synonyms.
There are also other terms with similar meanings - "lady's man", "rake" and newfangled "playboy".
Don Juanism
This is the name of the male psychological state in honor of the legendary figure named Don Juan.
The definition of Don Juanism is as follows: this is the clinical condition of a man when he strives for a constant change of women and is unable to see anything more than the satisfaction of his sexual desires in a relationship with them.
From the point of view of modern psychology, Don Juanism is no longer a sign of a full-fledged life for a man, as it was considered in the past, but, on the contrary, a deviation from the norm that does not allow him to build normal relationships.
Historical prototype
The common noun "Don Juan" came from the name of the Spanish nobleman don Juan (Guan) Tenorio, who lived in the XIV century. and extremely promiscuous.
As one of the most brilliant gentlemen in Seville, he not only dishonored countless women, but also became famous for participating in numerous duels and fights, from which he often managed to emerge victorious.
Despite the active indignation of the public, the hero avoided the deserved punishment, because he was patronized by the King of Castile - Pedro I the Cruel. Moreover, evil tongues claimed that the monarch himself often became a participant in Tenorio's amorous pastimes.
Once the king and his friend kidnapped the daughter of the respected Commodore de Ulloa, killing her father, who tried to stop them. This event was the last straw, and the Seville monks took justice into their own hands. They lured don Juan to the grave of the murdered commander and de alt with him. And in order to avoid punishment, they started a rumor that God's punishment allegedly befell the scoundrel, and the ghost of de Ulloa de alt with his killer.
Seville legend
However, not only don Juan Tenorio was the prototype of the world-famous literary hero. For the people of Seville, Don Juan is also Don Miguel de Manara.
This caballero, according to legend, sold his soul, but over time he realized his sinfulness, repented and atoned for his sins with good deeds.
Gradually the legends of the two dons merged intoone that formed the basis of most subsequent literary works.
It is worth noting that over the centuries the character of Don Juan has changed. From a voracious dishonorable voluptuary, he has become a love-seeker with graceful manners, who is noble in nature and true to his word, even in the face of death. Also, such an unattractive detail as the fact of the rape of the kidnapped beautiful donna was gradually forgotten.
Literary history of the character
The first work of fiction in which a hero named Don Giovanni appears is Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra. The author took the classic legend of Don Juan Tenorio as its basis, but embellished it, turning the dishonest King Pedro I into a just ruler seeking to punish the insidious seducer and murderer.
The play by Tirso de Molina enjoyed great success on the stage, but gradually underwent changes. Since the audience was bored listening to the author's moralizing, they were thrown out of the text, and the plot itself was supplemented with a mass of very piquant witticisms.
Slowly the popularity of the Don Juan plays reached France. The first major change in the image of the insidious seducer has undergone in Moliere's play Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre. Her events were transferred from the past to the contemporary time for the writer, and the hero himself turned from a Spaniard into a Frenchman.
Several centuries later, another French writer, Prosper Mérimée, dedicated the novel Souls of Purgatory to the legendary playboy. In it, he departed from the canon and retainedthe main character and life, and his soul.
In Germany, the most striking adaptation of the legend of the Spanish seducer was written by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, it was simply called: Don Juan. For the first time, Hoffmann depicts the hero not as a seeker of carnal pleasures, but as a person who yearns for true love and seeks meaning in life.
The British most famous poem by Byron, dedicated to this Don Juan. In addition to the excellent Byronian style, the author did not add anything particularly remarkable to the image of his hero. In general terms, he tells a familiar story, but his character, in the fashion of the time, languishes with longing, like most of Byron's heroes.
Don Juan in Russian and Ukrainian literature
Many Russian writers dedicated their works to this hero. Among them were Pushkin, and Alexei Tolstoy, and Alexander Ivolgin, and Samuil Alyoshin.
Apart from all these authors is Leonid Zhukhovitsky, who dedicated the play “The Last Woman of Senor Juan” to the legendary Spaniard. Everything supernatural has been removed from it, and it is very close in plot to the original legend, except that the main character is still the same Hoffmannian romantic looking for love and understanding.
In Ukrainian literature, the most striking work dedicated to Don Juan is Lesya Ukrainka's play "The Stone Lord". Based on the plot of Pushkin's drama, the writer shifted the focus, turning the hero into a victim of the ambitions of his beloved Anna.
Don Juan at the movies
With the advent of cinema, the story of a dissolute seducer who suffered a well-deserved punishment from God was filmed. This happened for the first time back in 1898 in Mexico. The painting was called "Don Juan Tenorio".
In total, more than twenty films are dedicated to Don Juan, most of which were filmed in France.
The role of the insidious seducer was played by such world movie stars as Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Jean Rochefort, Vladimir Vysotsky, Jacques Weber and Johnny Depp.
How to spell "Don Juan"
This phrase, despite its frequent use in speech, in writing becomes the cause of frequent errors. The most common ones are: "Don Juan" is a hyphenated spelling of the term and "don Juan" is a confusion with capital letters.
To figure out how to write this word correctly, you need to understand what meaning it is used in.
- The correct spelling of the name Don Juan is both capitalized when it comes to the hero of legends, books and movies.
- The phrase "Don Juan" is written together and with a small letter when it is used in a common sense and it can be replaced by the term "womanizer". For example: “He is such a Don Juan (womanizer), I just won’t save him, although he is still very far from the legendary Don Juan from Seville.”
- If we are talking about some other person named Juan, and the word "don" plays the role of a title, then it is written with a small letter. For example: “This Don Juan de Pantalone is a creepy bungler, not at all likethe real Don Juan.”
Now you know the meaning of Don Juan.
