Russian literature. A short introduction

see folk tales and folk songs as a source of inspiration for literary endeavour. At first, it was the motifs and plots, rather than the language and structure, of folkloric texts that provided the inspiration. Some of Pushkin’s tales on folklore subjects (skazki), such as ‘The Tale of the Priest and his Worker Balda’ (1830), paraphrased subjects from oral tradition (the poet had himself noted material from informants when staying on his estate at Mikhailovskoe in the late 1820s) and were composed in a genteel approximation of popular speech. But others, such as The Golden Cockerel (1834), were taken from Western European sources, were written in verse rather than prose, and used the vocabulary and inflections of educated conversation. Like his fairy-tale narrative poem Ruslan and Ludmilla (1820), and like verse tales by his contemporaries and successors (for example, Pyotr Ershov’s Little Hunchback Horse, 1834), Pushkin’s skazki had the charming artificiality of Charles Perrault or Jeanne L’Héritier’s reworkings of French folklore, such as The Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast.