Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was an outstanding Russian philologist and professor at Leningrad University. He was one of the founders of the structural-typological approach to folklore studies, which later found wide application in literary criticism. Propp's works on folklore ('Morphology of the Fairy Tale,' 'Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale,' 'Russian Heroic Epic,' and 'Russian Agricultural Holidays') have become part of the golden fund of 20th-century world scholarship.
The book 'Russian Agricultural Holidays' is one of the classic works devoted to East Slavic calendar rituals. It develops a comprehensive scientific concept of the annual cycle of holidays, oriented, on the one hand, toward the agricultural calendar, on the other, toward the church calendar. Many holidays we know today, rooted in ancient times, combined elements of pagan and Orthodox culture in their rituals, but at the same time, they largely lost their original meaning. V. Ya. Propp's book, published in a limited edition in 1963, became a landmark, setting a new direction for folklore, ethnography, and cultural studies.
