Vladimir Propp

• 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.

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

What he did

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.

Why is he important?

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 Proto-Narratologie: 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.