Pushkin’s ‘Ruslan and Liudmila’ and the Traditions of the Mock-Epic Poem

Abstract

In 1844 Belinsky wrote in article six of the famous cycle ‘Articles on Pushkin’ in regard to ‘Ruslan and Liudmila’:

there isn’t anything Russian in it, apart from the names … there isn’t a glimmer of Romanticism in it either … Pushkin’s poem should have been a triumph for the Pseudo-Classicist party [that is, the adherents of Classicism] of that time. … the so-called Classicists of that time should have celebrated the appearance of ‘Ruslan and Liudmila’as their victory over the then so-called Romanticists.¹

More than a hundred years later, one of the most brilliant and authoritative Pushkinists of our time, Tomashevsky, remarked: ‘Pushkin’s poem does not have a long genealogy, although the history of comic poems offers very many different examples of the genre … It must be decisively said that “Ruslan and Liudmila” was a poem addressed not to the past, but to the future’.²