Morphology of the Fairy Tale. Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale. Russian Fairy Tale

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp is an outstanding domestic philologist, folklorist, the founder of the comparative-typological method in folkloristics, and one of the creators of modern text theory. The works of V. Y. Propp are recognized as classics of philological science.This book... collects the works of the philologist dedicated to the genre of the fairy tale: "Morphology of the Fairy Tale", "Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale", and "Russian Fairy Tale". The first of these, the monograph "Morphology of the Fairy Tale", published in 1928, examines the structure of fairy tales in detail. It analyzes the roles of characters and their sequence, as well as the ways these roles are performed, motivations, and attributes of the characters based on tales from the collection "Folk Russian Tales" by A. N. Afanasyev. The second work, "Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale", first published in 1946, is dedicated to the sources of the fairy tale; here the author shows how archetypes, various settings, and meanings are realized in the text of the fairy tale and its structure. The last monograph by Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp, "Russian Fairy Tale", published for the first time after his death in 1984, summarizes the theses presented in the two previous works and provides detailed information about the history of fairy tale studies in Europe and Russia, notable storytellers who presented established cultural plots, and varieties of the fairy tale genre.