Ruslan and Ludmila is an 1820 poem written by alexander pushkin, considered one of the great writers of Russian literature of all time. The poem is written as if it were a fairy tale with epic overtones and is composed of six songs and an epilogue.
The story recreates the kidnapping of Ludmila, the prince's daughter Vladimir of Kiev, at the hands of a powerful black sorcerer and the journey of the knight Ruslan to rescue her.
Pushkin began writing the poem in 1817 while attending the Tsarskoye Selo Imperial Lyceum. He was inspired by different traditional narratives that he had heard during his childhood and had some problems publishing the poem since when it originally came out in 1820 he had been in exile in the south of the country due to his expression of political ideas as in the ode Libertad.
In 1828 a retouched version of the text was published that was the most popular. The importance of Ruslan and Ludmila in Russia has generated important works such as the homonymous opera by Mikhail Glinka (1842), a film produced by the Soviet Union in 1972, and a film based on Glinka's opera, to name a few examples.