Russian Heroic Epic

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp is a prominent domestic philologist, one of the founders of the structural-typological approach in folkloristics, which later found wide application in literary studies. His works on the study of folklore ("Morphology of the Tale", "Historical Roots of the Fairytale", "Russian Heroic Epic", "Russian Agrarian Holidays", etc.) have become part of the gold fund of world science in the 20th century.

The book "Russian Heroic Epic" (1955) turned out to be the first and still the only fundamental study devoted to bylinas. V. Ya. Propp undertook a plot-thematic and poetic analysis of them. This scholar's work serves as a kind of reference book on the Russian epic - from the first bylina hero Volkha Vseslavyevich to the well-known Ilya Muromets, Dobrynya, Vasily Buslaevich, and others. The abundance of factual material and the systematic analysis make this book interesting not only for folklore specialists but also for all connoisseurs of folk culture. In many ways ahead of its time, V. Ya. Propp's works have become classics of humanitarian research and still retain their relevance.