Prefazione a La fiaba russa

Vladimir Jakovlevič Propp was born in St Petersburg on 17 April 1895 and died in Leningrad on 22 August 1970. As if to say that, although he always stayed in the same city, history passed him passed in front of him, and those places took on a different meaning in the course of (his) time an entirely different sense and flavour. Of course, for a folklorist like him, used to reflecting on the distance of centuries, if not not millennia, those seventy-five years of the 20th century must have been trifles. The fact remains, however, that the heavy epochal changes he witnessed - the Russian revolution and the long Soviet political and cultural regime that followed - have weighed heavily on his work, which is nothing short of genius.