Vladimir Propp (1895-1970)

Dmitry Olshansky

Literary Critic/ Historian.

Active 1915-1970 in Russia

Vladimir Propp was a Russian philologist and structuralist who analysed the basic plot components of Russian
folktales in order to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements. His research on fairy-tales achieved
world recognition as the first application of structuralism to the humanities and created the foundation for new
disciplines, such as narratology, semiology and structural anthropology. Umberto Eco considers that “Saussure +
Lévi-Strauss + Hjelmslev + Propp drawn up the method, which tried to be integral one, that is know as
structuralism”. (Eco, p. 348). Successors such as Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas and Claude Lévi-Strauss tried to
spread this method and resolve similar tasks, looking for the narrative elements in all contemporary culture:
“from newspaper chronicle to mass novel” (Barthes, Mythologies, 1957), to the semantics of any type of narrative
text (Greimas, Sémantique structurale: Recherche de méthode, 1966) and analysis of primitive peoples and their
elementary structures of kinship (Lévi-Strauss. Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, 1949). Although Propp’s
investigations may appear rather limited (from Russian fairy-tales to agrarian holidays), his method became
significant for a wide range of disciplines and occasioned a methodological turning point in the humanities.

Vladimir Propp was born on April 2, 1895 in St Petersburg, where he lived all his life. From 1914 to 1918 he
studied Russian and German philology at Petrograd (St Petersburg) State University, where he remained until
1969: as lecturer in the Department of Philology (from 1932), as professor (from 1938), and then head of
department (from 1964). He died on August 22, 1970.

Propp is chiefly known as the author of four fundamental books, in both folklore studies and narratology. In his
first and most famous book, Morphology of the Folktale (1928), he argues his most perceptive structuralist ideas
and projects their development and application. Further volumes, The Historical Roots of Fairy-Tale (1946),
Russian Heroic Epics (1958), and Russian Agrarian Feast-days (1963), continued the elaboration and application
of structuralism. Although these books were devoted to divergent areas, Propp developed one and the same
method over the 35 years.

Like Freud, who derives his method from the chemical analysis of the elements, Propp sought the roots of
morphology in biology. Lévi-Strauss also compared Propp’s constant model for the fairy-tale with chemical
formulae. He thus considered morphology to be a doctrine of forms, of relations between the parts and the
whole: i.e. a doctrine about structure. Accordingly, in his research Propp separated variable and constant
elements in different fairy-tales, seeking a wonderful uniformity in the labyrinth of multiplicity. In other words,
he was less interested in the matter than in the structure of the narrative, trying to establish a stable scenario in
the relation between parts and whole in a totality of tales.
The humanities agenda at the time contained what might be termed the ‘unconscious scenario’, which Lévi-
Strauss calls “elementary structure kinship”, Lacan calls “phantasm”, and Propp tags “constant models”. Propp’s
method allows an avoidance of historical, psychological and cultural explanations of the text, so as to turn
literary studies away from research into characters and their motives (as undertaken by A. Veselovsky) to a
search for a structure that arranges the plot in all fairy-tales. Propp considered characters, as variable elements,
not important for his research. According to the first principle of Propp’s morphology, “the constant element of
the fairy-tale is a function, independently of who realizes it” (Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, p. 25).

Propp applies Formalist methodology to the research of narrative structure. According to the Formalists, the
structure of a sentence in narrative could be broken down into analysable elements, i.e. “morphemes”, and Propp
used this method by analogy to analyse folktales. His system includes the modal notions of “prohibition” and
“lack”, which generate stories of transgression and quest respectively. In 1966, his disciple A.J. Greimas
formulates Propp’s idea as a principle of narrative studies: “A modal category takes charge of the content of the
message and organizes it by establishing a certain type of relationship between the constituent linguistic objects”
(Greimas, Sémantique structurale, p. 133).

Barthes argues that structuralism neither reflects the world, nor follows in its traces, but builds it. Therefore
there is no difference between the structural research of Propp and Georges Dumézil and literary composition,
because both construct an object “with the help of arrangement of manifestations and combination of the
elements” (Barthes, L’activité structuraliste, p. 215). Like Freud, Propp rejects any idea of neutrality of
observation and independence from the object of research: structuralism creates its own object, in “field
research” (anthropology) or “neurosis of transference” (psychoanalysis), or “narrative analysis” (Propp). In that
analytic development which discovers new objects and new perspectives for research, it is possible to conclude
that the object appears not as a cause, but as an effect of any research; this is one reason why structuralism looks
like combinatorial composition. The object of analysis should be constructed during the analysis itself, following
anthropological/ clinical/ or literary experience.

Propp’s morphology has effectively done away with the figure of the narrator, and his disciple Roland Barthes
took up and pushed further this idea in his famous thesis on “the death of the author” –i.e. “death” as a
psychological type and a historical personality, not as a textual function. Contrary to previous literary studies
which had seen the author as an external person, whose life was to be investigated as a context of his writing, the
“author”, in this structuralist view, should be understood as a constructed part of the text itself. Both Propp and
Barthes rejected earlier versions of psychologism; but in applying the same methodology, Barthes did not
propose to ignore the author’s function, but rather to use it as an element of narration. For Barthes, the text does
not belong to the author, but rather the author belongs to the text; an author is dead as a person, but he is present
in his text as its function, independently of who realizes it. In other words, an author disappears as a
psychological type, but appears as a symbolic function. As a result, writing belongs not to the individual author,
but to the splintered subject of the unconscious.

Lévi-Strauss also focused on the roles of narratorial changes, borrowing Propp’s idea in his method of the
reconstruction of mythological “rows” – i.e. couples of connected elements repeated in all versions of one tale.
According to Lévi-Strauss, to understand a culture, the anthropologist should look for such an elementary
grammar of mythological thinking. This method was thereafter developed by a wide circle of structural thinkers,
figures such as Althusser, Barthes, Bourdieu, Dumézil, Genette, Metz, Serres, Todorov and others. At the same
time, Lévi-Strauss himself distinguished between Propp’s method of formal research and his own
anthropological structuralism, chiefly in his article “The Structure and the Form” (1960), in which he discussed
the limits of formalism. Although Lévi-Struss shares Propp’s narrative analysis of text in many ways, he doubted
the formalists’ binary opposition between form and content. Instead, the main difference between formalism and
structuralism consists in the matter of the investigation and understanding of structure:
 For structuralism there is no such difference between the form and the content: there is not such a
category as the abstract, on the one hand, and a category of the concrete, on the other. Form and content
have one and the same nature and therefore may both undergo analysis (Lévi-Strauss C. La structure et la
forme, réflexions sur un ouvrage de Vladimir Propp, p. 16).

That content should have its own structure and form is just a result of “structuralisation”. For Lévi-Strauss form
is defined through its content, but there is no form of structure, i.e. structure is not something that could be
reduced to a definite quantity of constant elements. According to Propp “the quantity of the functions is limited”
(Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, p. 25) and “all the functions of the fairy-tale belong to one and the same
narration” (ibid. 26). From this assertion Lévi-Strauss concluded that “formalism destroys its own object.
Formalism drove Propp to a conclusion that there is only one and the same tale” (Lévi-Strauss, La structure et la
forme, p. 17). For Lévi-Strauss’s aim was to deal with the real narration, not with archetypes, whereas Propp
simply ignored those elements of narration which did not correspond to his model; eventually, however, he was
forced to return again to his initial classification, in order to find more functions and refine further models.

In other words, structure in Propp’s analysis comes before experience; it appears like a prior form, which
constitutes the genre of fairy-tales. He believed in a ‘common structure’, which could be expressed and
formalised in a way similar to a chemical formula. Yet while for Propp structure was something to be identified
within texts, for his disciples structure becomes something illusory, even “absent” (as Umberto Eco posits) or an
“empty cell” (as in Lévi-Struss’s introduction to M. Mauss’s “Sociology and Anthropology”), something that
emerges a posteriori, after the experience, in a deferred action of analysis. That is why structure is, for these later
theorists, not a totality of discourse, but rather a changeable effect of discourse.

Unlike Saussure, Propp’s attention was not focused on the meaning of the signifier and its relation to others, but
on the function realized by the signifier within systems of narration. Propp investigated the rules of the
constitution of discourse and offered a constant model in different plots. While Saussure elaborated the
transmission between form and content, Propp sought the repetition of a constant function, i.e. the stagnant tie
between signifier and signified. According to the second principle of Propp’s morphology, “the order of the
function is always one and the same” (Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, p. 25). In other words, Propp supposed
the development of plot to be one and the same in different tales; therefore the appearance of meaning in
narration lay beyond his examination. Propp evaded such questions as how meaning could arise in the narrative,
how meaning could be produced, or who is the subject of the fairy-tale.

Furthermore, Propp was not interested in changeable secondary details, and he does not analyse any single tale as
it is, but looks for plot dynamics in multiple versions of the same tale, in a metalanguage of narrative
(“functions” in Propp; “actants” in his disciple Greimas) common to all tales in one group. Seeking a general
mythic structure, he takes several versions of the same tale, tracing changes and development in those versions.
Propp thus tries to arrive at a typology of narrative structure. By analysing types of character and action in a
hundred traditional Russian folktales, Propp concluded that there were thirty-one generic “narratemes”. While
not all are present in every tale, he found that all the tales he analysed displayed the functions in unvarying
sequence: “Not every fairy tale containing a theft produces this construction. If this construction does not follow,
subsequent patterns, however similar, cannot be compared, for they are heteronymous [i.e. of different types]”
(Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, p. 152).

Like the early Lacan, in his search for the phallic signifier arranging and supporting a patient’s symptom, Propp
deals with an invariable and repeated model, which constitutes the plot of all fairy-tales. In his seminar
“L’identification” (1961-62), Lacan argues for the phallic function as an organizer of discourse, consisting in a
morphological differentiation of language. That phallic signifier is really absent, and thus creates a place for
further linguistic supplementation and the development of desire. Both theorists were looking for the ‘cause’ of
discourse, seeking a reconstruction of the code of psychical structure (Lacan) or genre structure (Propp).
In so far as the discourse of the unconscious belongs to the Other, Lacan criticized those techniques which
focused on the self with its psychological type and which operated on principles of historical reductionism. Such
criticism of the psychology of the self in early Lacan is very similar to Propp’s doubt about the historical method
in literary studies and the absence of interest in the position of the author. However, while for Lacan the
symptom uncovers the place of the subject in the field of the Other, and is one possible way to address
enjoyment (jouissance), Propp does not explore narration as a message, nor does he research either the
subjective or the Other’s position in it. Trying to work with pure structure only, Propp does not pay sufficient
attention to structure as message and its appearance in relation to the Other.

While Lacan relied on an ex-centered mechanism of discourse, seeking the dynamics of subject-Other relations,
Propp enunciated just one quite static form of that relationship, reduced to a finite number of patterns in
narration. He thus remained firmly within the ‘logic of presence’, attempting to objectify and calculate the code
of structure. He discounted not only the desire of the subject who creates the tale, but also the materiality of the
speech act – a primary object of psychoanalysis, for instance. His morphological method appears rather rigidly
scholastic, being based on an analysis of structure without subject and without act; his view withdraws time from
narration, despite the fact that structure is always a presupposed form of time. In actual fact, narration does not
equal text, because it includes such important elements as time and voice, which themselves create structure out
of narration and define its function. When investigating tales, Propp works with symbolic order only, rather than
with a transmission between the orders of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, and their mutual effects,
which is one reason why his work was more significant for semiology than for psychoanalysis. In his search for
form, he passed over the subjectivity of that form and considered structure to be derived from the text only,
basing his conclusions on common and major details only.

In 1975, Greimas wrote about Propp’s methodological legacy:

Today, though its heuristic value is diminished somewhat and even though this stance is not very original,
we are still tempted to follow Propp’s example and, by virtue of the principle of proceeding from the
known to the unknown, from the simpler to the more complex, move from oral literature to written
literature, from folk tale to the literary, take in our quest to confirm the partial theoretical models at hand
and even to recalcitrant facts which would enable us to increase our knowledge about narrative and
discursive organization. (Greimas, Maupassant: The Semiotics of the Text, p. xxiv)

Although Propp kept to the Formalist heritage, with its belief in a pure and immovable text removed from
subject, dynamics and time, his obvious merit lies in his creation and development of a method of morphology,
which became central for the humanities in the twentieth century and provided a point of departure for further
post-structuralist research.

Works cited

Barthes R. L’activité structuraliste. Essais critique. Paris: Seuil, 1964, pp. 213-220.
- - -. De la science à la littérature. Le bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 1984, pp. 13-20.
Eco, U. La structura assente. Introduzione alla ricerca semiologica. Milan: Bompiani, 1968.
Greimas A.-J. Maupassant: La sémiotique du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1976 [English version: Greimas A.-J.
Maupassant: The Semiotics of the Text. Trans. Paul Perron. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamin, 1988]
- - -. Sémantique structurale: Recherche de méthode. Paris: Larousse, 1966.
Lacan J. Le Séminaire, Livre VI: Le désir et son interprétation (1958/59). Document interne à l'Association
freudienne internationale.
- - -. Le Séminaire, Livre IX: L’identification (1961/62). Document interne à l’Association freudienne
internationale.
Lévi-Strauss C. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon, 1958.
 - - -. L’analyse morphologique des contes russes. In International Journal of Slavic Poetics and Linguistics. vol. 3,
La Haye, 1960, pp. 122-149.
- - -. La structure et la forme, réflexions sur un ouvrage de Vladimir Propp. In Cahiers de l’Institut de science
écomonique appliquée, No. 7, 1960, pp. 1-36.
Propp V. Morphology of the Folktale. Leningrad, 1928 [English version: The Hague: Mouton, 1958; Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1968].
- - -. Theory and History of Folklore. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
- - -. Russian Heroic Epos. Moscow, 1958.
- - -. Theory of Literature. Moscow, 1965.

Citation: Olshansky, Dmitry. "Vladimir Propp". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 May 2008
[https://www.litencyc.com, accessed 19 January 2020.]

This article is copyright to © The Literary Encyclopedia.

All entries, data and software copyright © The Literary Dictionary Company Limited

ISSN 1747-678X

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)