Folklore and Reality

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp is a prominent domestic philologist, professor at Leningrad University, one of the founders of the structural-typological approach in folklore studies, which later found wide application in literary studies. The works of V. Ya. Propp on the study of folklore ("Morphology of the Fairy Tale", 1928; "Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale", 1946; "Russian Heroic Epic", 1958; "Russian Agrarian Holidays", 1963) have entered the golden fund of world science of the 20th century.
This edition includes selected articles by the scholar from various years, which nevertheless reveal a close interconnection. "Folklore and Reality" is the name of one of the articles in this collection, which gives the entire book its title. The definition of the specificity of folklore as an object of study, the patterns of its development, the establishment of the origins of well-known genres, plots, images, and motifs—these and other questions are addressed by V.Ya. Propp using material from not only Russian but also world folklore: for example, in articles about the variability of the motif of miraculous birth, the problem of the authenticity of the text of the "Kalevala", and the folklore origins of the myth of Oedipus. Attention to different aspects of folklore study, combined with erudition and methodological soundness, opened new and new perspectives for scientific exploration. The works of V. Ya. Propp have not lost their relevance to this day, having largely anticipated their time.