Folktale, Morphology

Abstract

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was born in St. Petersburg on April 17, 1895 and died in Leningrad on August 22, 1970. Despite remaining in the same city, the events of history caused those places, over the course of (his) time, to take on a whole new meaning and a very different flavor. Of course, to a folklorist like Propp, used to reflecting on the distance of millennia, those seventy-five years will have been nothing. Though the fact remains that the monumental epochal shifts he witnessed (the Russian Revolution and the long cultural and political Soviet regime that followed) feature heavily in his brilliant work.