spoof = 'literary imitation'

[Jonathan Lighter]

>From a blog, 2011:


"According to Russian literary historian D. S. Mirsky, Tolstoy's story 'The
Prisoner of the Caucasus' was a kind of spoof on a Byronic poem of the same
name, written by Aleksandr Pushkin in 1822."

OK, the blogger understands that Pushkin's poem is lushly Romantic and
Tolstoy's story, written fifty years later, is sober and realistic.
Undoubtedly Tolstoy's choice of title suggests that *his* tale is a kind of
contrastive commentary on Pushkin. The plots   are quite similar.

But it is neither a parody nor a send-up nor a burlesque nor a counterfeit
nor anything else that I associate with a "spoof."

JL

--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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