The historical roots of a fairy tale. Propp V.

The fundamental work of the great scientist, Russian philologist with world recognition of Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp “The Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale” is dedicated to the search for the origins of a fairy tale in historical reality. After analyzing a huge amount of material, he came to the conclusion that "the reason for the unity of the fairy tale lies in the field of early history, the stage of development of human society, which is studied by ethnography and ethnology." That is, all the texts that have reached us from distant times are built on the same material (with small variations) and reflect the similar stages of the development of mankind as a whole. The author gives a large number of examples from folklore of different peoples of the world, the material is set out in sufficient detail and reads with great interest.

The book “Historical roots of a fairy tale” logically continues “Morphology of a fairy tale”; According to V.Ya. Proppa, they “represent as it were... two volumes of one big work. The second flows directly from the first. "