Alexandra Barkova (known in the Tolkienist subculture under the name Alvdis N. Ruthien) is a Russian researcher of mythology, folklorist, Buddhologist, writer, translator, and collector of kimono. She holds a Candidate of Philological Sciences degree. She is one of the authors of the Encyclopedia for Children, the Encyclopedia of Literary Works, the Encyclopedia of World Literature, the Encyclopedia of Sacred Geography, the Mythological Encyclopedia, and the Children’s Encyclopedia.

She was born on 13 October 1970 in Moscow. She is a native Muscovite in the fifth generation. Her mother, Elena Pavlovna Barkova, comes from a family of Old Believer merchants and works at the Nauka publishing house. Her father, Leonid Aronovich Yakovenko, was an architect and the author of the design of the Y. A. Orlov Paleontological Museum; he was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation for 1993.

She graduated from Secondary School No. 625 and Art School No. 3 in Moscow.

She graduated with honors from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University named after M. V. Lomonosov, defending, at the Department of General and Comparative Historical Linguistics, a diploma thesis on the mythological cliché in Russian bylinas. She was a student of N. I. Tolstoy. She took part in many ethnolinguistic and folklore expeditions and also led Buddhological expeditions to Buryatia.

In 1990–1993 she taught at the School of Young Philologists, where she delivered a lecture course titled “Nicholas Roerich. Spiritual Quest.”

In 1993–2017 she taught world mythology at the Institute of Cultural History UNIK, where she was a professor and head of the Department of Cultural Studies. Her main lecture courses are devoted to world mythology and universals, Slavic mythology and bylinas, Buddhism, Russian literature, and Japanese culture. A distinctive feature of her lectures is their vivid expressiveness and active use of colloquial style (for example, the course on the history of Russian literature is called “Russian Literature from the Old-School Nestor to the Not-So-Old Oldi”).

In 1993–1999 she was a senior