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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 studied law at the Moscow university ^[1], 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 such an interpretation, he regarded the fairy tale Vasilissa the Beautiful as depicting the conflict between the sunlight (Vasilissa), the storm (her stepmother), and dark clouds (her stepsisters).^[2]

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 (Russian Fairy Tales), eight volumes of these tales that he modelled on the famous collection of the Brothers Grimm and published between 1855 and 1863.

Afanasyev wrote other editions which included: Russian Fairy Tales for Children which included animal, magic and humorous tales from his collection that were suitable to children, Russian Folk Legends which was banned due to the harsh censorship in Tsarist Russia (the church thought the collection was blaphemous), and Russian Forbiden Tales which were the unprintable tales from Russia that were anonomously published in Switzerland. ^[3]

Censured by the authorities for his contacts with Herzen and suffering from tuberculosis, Afanasyev ended his life in penury, forced to sell his library to enable himself to eat.^[4] He died in Moscow aged 45.

1. ^ Zipes, Jack. Afanasyev, Aleksander. "The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.,
2. ^ Maria Tatar, p 334, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, ISBN 0-393-05163-3
3. ^ Zipes, Jack. Afanasyev, Aleksander. "The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.,
4. ^ Maria Tatar, p 335, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, ISBN 0-393-05163-3

• This article is based on material from the public domain 1906 Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary.