Russian Heroic Epic

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp is an outstanding domestic philologist, one of the founders of the structural-typological approach in folklore studies, which later found wide application in literary studies. His works on the study of folklore ("Morphology of the Fairy Tale", "Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale", "Russian Heroic Epic", "Russian Agrarian Holidays", etc.) are included in the golden fund of world science of the 20th century.

The book "Russian Heroic Epic" (1955) turned out to be the first and still the only fundamental study dedicated to bylina. V. Ya. Propp conducted a 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 nature of the analysis make this book interesting not only for folklore specialists but also for all admirers of folk culture. Having largely anticipated his time, the works of V. Ya. Propp have become classics of humanitarian studies and have not lost their relevance to this day.