Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was a distinguished Russian philologist, professor at Leningrad University, and one of the founders of the structural-typological approach to folklore studies, which later found widespread application in literary criticism. Propp's works on folklore ("Morphology of the Fairy Tale," 1928; "The Historical Roots of the Fairy Tale," 1946; "The Russian Heroic Epic," 1958; "Russian Agrarian Holidays," 1963) have become a treasure trove of 20th-century world scholarship.
This edition includes selected articles by the scholar from various years, which nevertheless reveal a close interrelationship. "Folklore and Reality" is the title of one of the articles in this collection, which gives the book its title. Defining the specifics of folklore as a subject of study, the patterns of its development, and establishing the origins of well-known genres, plots, images, and motifs—V. Ya. Propp addresses these and other questions using material from not only Russian but also global folklore: for example, in articles on the variability of the miraculous birth motif, the problem of the authenticity of the Kalevala text, and the folkloric origins of the Oedipus myth. His attention to various aspects of folklore studies, combined with erudition and methodological soundness, opened up new avenues for scholarly inquiry. Propp's works remain relevant to this day, in many ways being ahead of their time.