Vladimir Propp

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (Russian: Владимир Яковлевич Пропп; 29 April [O.S. 17 April] 1895 – 22 August 1970) was a Russian and Soviet folklorist and scholar who analysed the basic structural elements of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest, irreducible structural units.

Vladimir Propp was born on 29 April 1895 in Saint Petersburg to an assimilated Russian family of German descent. His parents, Yakov Philippovich Propp and Anna-Elizaveta Fridrikhovna Propp (née Beisel), were wealthy Volga German peasants from Saratov Governorate. He attended Saint Petersburg University (1913–1918), majoring in Russian and German philology. Upon graduation, he taught Russian and German at a secondary school and then became a college teacher of German.

His Morphology of the Folktale was published in Russian in 1928. Although it represented a breakthrough in both folkloristics and morphology and influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, it was generally unnoticed in the West until it was translated in 1958. His morphology is used in media education and has been applied to narrative in literature, theatre, film, television series, and games; however, Propp applied it specifically to the wonder tale (or fairy tale).

In 1932, Propp became a member of Leningrad University (formerly St. Petersburg University) faculty. After 1938, he chaired the Department of Folklore until it became part of the Department of Russian Literature. Propp remained a faculty member until his death in 1970.

His main books are:

He also published some articles, the most important are:

First printed in specialized reviews, they were republished in Folklore and Reality (Leningrad 1976).

Two books were published posthumously: