Genealogy of A.Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmila and its Comparison with Four Persian Romantic Poems Based on V.Propp’s Theory of Morphology

Ruslan and Ludmila is an epic-romantic poem, written by Russia’s prominent poet, Alexander Pushkin. This poem brought Pushkin fame, as it was inspired by Russian folklore fairy tales and revealed his impeccable ability to combine a serious theme with humor. His writing style was remarkably different from the eighteenth-century Russian literature. This narrative poem has not been completely translated into Persian so far; however, there are some occasional references to its general ideas and events in Persian sources. Therefore, Persian readers find it hard to trace the genealogy of the poem. Some scholars believe it is inspired by Shahnameh or One Thousand and One Nights. This study aims to challenge these patriotic but unscientific approaches towards Pushkin’s masterpiece. The research proposed two questions: is Ruslan and Ludmila rooted in Eastern literary trends? If yes, to which (Persian or Arabic) story is it related? To answer the aforesaid questions, a comparative-analytic study was carried out on this narrative poem and four Persian romantic poems (Bahram o Golandam, Jamshid o Khorshid, Gol o Norouz, and Sam o Paridokht). The paper provides the similarities between these poems have to be justified by the literary essence of the fairytale genre and does not indicate their influence on each other.