About Magical Tales

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (1895–1970) was a Soviet philologist, folklorist, and one of the creators of modern text theory, born in Saint Petersburg into a family of Volga Germans. From 1913 to 1918, he studied initially German and then Russian philology at the philological faculty of Petrograd University, later teaching German at universities in Leningrad, and from 1932, he taught and conducted research at Leningrad University (LGU). Since 1938, he has been a professor at the philological faculty of LGU, initially in the departments of Romance-Germanic philology, folklore, and until 1969, Russian literature; in 1963–1964 he headed the department.

This collection includes two books by Vladimir Yakovlevich — "Morphology of a Tale" (1928) and its continuation "Historical Roots of the Magical Tale" (1946).
"'Morphology' and 'Historical Roots' represent two parts or two volumes of one large work. The second directly follows from the first; the first is a prerequisite for the second. <…> I systematically and methodically transition from the scientific description of phenomena and facts to the explanation of their historical causes as strictly as possible."

"Morphology of a Tale" is the scholar's most famous work; it is a monograph dedicated to the structure of folk tales. In studying folklore, the scholar identified constant and variable elements in tales. He categorized the actions taken by characters to advance the plot and their sequence as constant. The variable elements included the linguistic style of the works, the number of actions and methods of their execution, as well as motivations and attributes of the characters.
The scholar's doctoral dissertation was the manuscript of the book "Historical Roots of the Magical Tale" — a continuation of the previous monograph, which develops the hypothesis formulated by the French folklore specialist Pierre Saintyves (pseudonym of Emil Nourri, 1870–1935). In this work, Propp did not write about the structure of tales but about their origins. He studied the mythology of primitive peoples and explained the origins of the magical tale in tribal initiation rites: their participants also underwent trials, sometimes encountered failures, and later successfully completed tasks and received a "new appearance." Thus, the plot of any tale was explained by the initiation rite, during which children received a new status.

This book is adorned with 70 illustrations and design elements by artists Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin (1876–1942), Alexander Zika (1845–1907), Ivan Konstantinovich Lebedev (1884–1972), Nikolai Nikolaevich Popov (1888−1953), Mohammad Rasim (1896–1975), and Nikolai Alexeyevich Ushin (1898–1942).