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Which literary styles did Aleksandr Pushkin parody in Ruslan and Lyudmila?
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Aleksandr Pushkin
Aleksandr Pushkin, oil on canvas by Vasily Tropinin, 1827; in the National Pushkin Museum, St. Petersburg.
In his 1820 narrative poem Ruslan and Lyudmila, Aleksandr Pushkin employed a spirit of play to parody several established literary forms and conventions. Specifically, the work parodies the following styles:
- Epic1
- Folk tale1
- Literary ballad1
- Romance1
While the poem was influenced by the narrative styles of Ludovico Ariosto and Voltaire, it intentionally flouted the accepted rules and genres of the time, drawing sharp criticism from the established Russian literary schools of classicism and sentimentalism.23