Literary scholar, folklorist, Candidate of Philological Sciences, Professor of the Faculty of Anthropology of the European University in St. Petersburg. He teaches and gives lectures and reports in Russia, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, USA, Finland, France, Estonia and Japan.
In 1970, he published his first works in the summer school book in Tartu, and a year later he graduated from LSU. He wrote his PhD thesis on linguistic aspects of the Slavic wedding ceremony under the guidance of one of the founders of the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school Vladimir Nikolaevich Toporov. Author of one book and over 350 articles.
Scientific interests: Russian and Slavic folklore, ethnology, poetics, Russian literature, relations between literature and folklore, semiotics, linguistics.
My parents are both Odessans, but they met in Leningrad, LIFLI
. Daddy was a Germanist student, Mom was an Oriental student. Mom's father was a lawyer, a sworn attorney: in 1924 he moved to Leningrad and got an apartment in Basque Lane. By marrying his mother, his father also moved into this apartment. I was born in November 1948, and in February 1949 my father was arrested (for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda"). The investigator told his father: "I can't wrap up the case for a telegraph pole, but I can wrap it up for anyone. And then he added: "Your acuteness is repeated by the whole country. And then the only person in the family who made money was the grandfather. Before Dad's arrest, he had several jobs: afterwards, he managed to hold on to only one job - in the State Committee for Statistics, where he was a legal adviser. His friend, Director of the State Committee for Statistics Sergei Gorsky defended him.
Apparently, we lived quite poor, but I don't remember it. My mother was making some translations from Chinese for the Chamber of Commerce until in 1950 her teacher, the Chinese teacher Vasily Alekseev, went to see Nikolay Vavilov's brother Sergey .He managed to get Mom to translate the book for the "Literary Monuments" series, which was under direct academic control. And so in 1955, the "Tang novellas" were published in my mother's translation.
They wouldn't let me into the yard, not only because of snobbery, but also because of the fact that it might not be safe in our situation. Especially in the 1950s with all the anti-Semitic stories. I was friends with a neighbor who was two years older than me. Now he is a grandmaster, a chess player. The rest of my childhood friends are children of my parents' friends, their colleagues.
About talking about political issues in English and releasing my father
As for political topics, I was holding on to the school's orthodoxy for a long time, up to ten years: the Soviet children's reading was quite disposed to it... When I was very young, Dad's absence was somehow explained to me, and when I came back, my father did not tell me about his arrest. But by the time I was 11-12, I had already realized that he was sitting there. And I knew about many of my parents' acquaintances that they were sitting down.
My parents were very careful not to repeat in public what they said at home. In my presence, they tried not to discuss political topics or switched to English. Although, when there were guests, I could listen. I had some intuition. I remember seeing a cartoon of Doctor Zhivago in the paper and asking what it meant. My parents said that Pasternak had written an anti-Soviet novel (i.e. explained it to me in a rather loyal way to the authorities). At the same time, it was clear that something was wrong: they perceived the attacks on Pasternak very painfully.
For me, the study of folklore began with Propp's Morphology of the Tale. I read it at the age of 18, when I was a freshman - I was just preparing for the exam. In general, the first course is reading OPOYAZ . It was obvious that the "Morphology of Fairy Tales" is an epochal discovery, and folkloristics is a leading field of philology. And that it is simply very interesting.
I haven't been to the lectures of Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (only at special courses in 1968 and 1969) - Irina Mikhailovna Kolesnitskaya read our folklore - but in the spring of 1967 I approached him and asked him to attend the seminar. Vladimir Yakovlevich knew my name, he taught German to my father when he studied at the university.
Propp was a very charming leader. I did not write to him myself, I only showed him my first works, but the way Vladimir Yakovlevich spoke to students, the way he conducted the seminars was an important lesson for me.
Proppa should be read, "Morphology of Fairy Tales" is a perfect book. But with "Historical roots of a fairy tale" there are some difficulties. Probably, if I hadn't read "Historical roots", I wouldn't have done folklore. And I know colleagues who can say the same thing to themselves. But to advise this book as a textbook is risky - the evolutionary prerequisites of the "Historical roots of a fairy tale" from a modern point of view are obviously incorrect . Of course, this book is not limited to evolutionism, but the one who says, "Everything is wrong here," will also be right.