1. • Vladimir Propp was a Soviet scholar who analysed and separated the
basic plot components of Russian folktales.
• He was born on April 17th 1895 in St. Petersburg.
• He attended St. Petersburg university majoring in Russian and
German philology.
2. What he did
Vladimir Propp broke up fairy tales into sections.
Through these sections he was able to define the tale into
a series of sequences that occurred within the Russian
fairy-tale.
He separated the tales he read into 31 functions.
An example of a few of these is;
Struggle: Hero and villain join in direct combat
Pursuit: Hero is pursued by villain
Punishment: Villain is punished
Vladimir Propp used this method to decipher Russian
folklore and fairy tales
3. Why is he important?
Propp's work was translated into English in the
1950s, by which time it had become core to the ideas
of theorists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland
Barthes, and was used in literary studies,
anthropology and semiology. Other narrative
analysts extended Propp's thinking on patterns in
myth, most notably Joseph Campbell, whose The
Hero With A Thousand Faces has become a
blueprint for Hollywood film-makers when it comes
to constructing a narrative.
4.
Works
Propp, Vladimir. Morfologija skazky. 2nd ed.
Leningrad: Nauka, 1968.
Morphology of the Folktale. 1st. ed., trans. Laurence
Scott, introd. Svatava Pirkova-Jakobson. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1958.
Morphology of the Folk Tale. Trans. Laurence Scott.
2nd. ed., rev. and ed. Louis A. Wagner, introd. Alan
Dundes. Austin: U of Texas P, 1968. 1988.
"Morphology of the Folktale." In Literary Theory: An
Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed.
Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
From Morphology of the Folktale. In The Novel: An
Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000. Ed.
Dorothy J. Hale. Blackwell, 2006. 54-64.*
Morphologie du conte. Paris: Seuil, 1970. (Rpt.:
Points).
Morfologia della fiaba. With an answer to Lévi-Strauss.
Trans. Gian Luigi Bravo. Turin: Einaudi, 1966.
"Morphologie des Märchens." Extract. Trans. Christel
Wendt, ed. Christiane Hauschild. In Russische ProtoNarratologie: Texte in kommentierten Übersetzungen.
Ed. Wolf Schmid. Berlin and New York: Walter de
Gruyter, 2009. 131-61.*
Morfología del cuento. In Propp, Morfología del
cuento: Seguida de Las transformaciones de los
cuentos maravillosos. E. Mélétinski El estudio
estructural y tipológico del cuento. Trans. (from the
French versions) Lourdes Ortiz. 3rd ed. Madrid:
Fundamentos, 1977.*
Morfología del cuento. Madrid: Akal, 1985.
"Transformacii volshebnykh skazok." Poetika 4
(1928): 70-89.
