Alexander Afanasyev

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Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev (Russian: Александр Николаевич Афанасьев) (11 July 1826 — 23 October 1871) was a Russian folklorist best known for his pioneering study and publication of Russian folktales.

He was educated at a gymnasium in Voronezh and the Moscow university, in which he attended the lectures of Konstantin Kavelin and Timofey Granovsky. His burgeoning career as a professor of history was cut short by denounciation of his work on the part of Sergey Uvarov. He then turned his attention to journalism and brought out a series of articles about leading personalities of the literary life of the previous century, including Nikolay Novikov, Denis Fonvizin, and Antiokh Kantemir.

It was in the 1850s that Afanasiev finally found his vocation in folklore studies. His first scholarly articles - The Wizards and Witches, Sorcery in the Ancient Rus, Pagan Legends about the Buyan Island - drew heavily upon the so-called Mythological school that treated folklore as a mine of information for the study of more ancient pagan mythology. His definitive work on the subject - The Slavs' Poetic Outlook on Nature - was published in three volumes between 1865 and 1869.

In the course of his studies of the Russian folklore Afanasiev amassed a collection of more than 600 Russian folktales - some of them contributed by Vladimir Dahl, others taken from the archives of the Russian Geographical Society and grouped by Afanasiev according to their themes, imagery, and style. He owes his prominent place in the history of Slavonic philology chiefly to Narodnye russkie skazki, eight volumes of these tales that he modelled on the famous collection of the Brothers Grimm and published between 1855 and 1863. Several other volumes, banned by the Russian government due to their profane or blasphemous subject matter, eventually appeared abroad.

Censured by the authorities for his contacts with Herzen and suffering from tuberculosis, Afanasyev ended his life in penury. He died in Moscow aged 45.