Alexander Afanasyev

Alexander Afanasyev (1826–1871) was a Russian archivist and scholar who brought his country’s folk tales together in one great collection. Russian Folk Tales, published in eight parts between 1855 and 1863, earned him the name of the Russian Grimm, and it is the book through which Baba Yaga, Vasilisa the Beautiful, the Firebird and the Frog Princess reached readers far beyond Russia.

He was born in Boguchar, in the Voronezh Governorate, and grew up in nearby Bobrov, reading widely in his grandfather’s library. He studied law at Moscow University and hoped to teach there, but the minister of education, Count Uvarov, attacked his final essay. From 1849 he worked at the Moscow Main Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Most of the tales came from other people’s notes. The Russian Geographical Society gave him the stories it had gathered over about ten years, and he added the large collection of the lexicographer Vladimir Dal and tales from his own Voronezh region. He recorded where each tale had been told, and when he had several tellings of one story, he printed them side by side instead of merging them into a single version.

In 1862 his flat was searched on suspicion of ties to the exiled Alexander Herzen. Nothing was found, but he lost his post at the archive, and he later sold his library to support his family. In 1870 he published a selection of the tales for children. He died of tuberculosis in Moscow the following year, at the age of forty-five.