Professor of a fairy-tale science. A scholarly biography of D. N. Medrish: A monograph

Abstract

The review considers the scholarly legacy of D. Medrish, a doyen of folklore and literature studies, and the book dedicated to him. Both the monograph and the review discuss the scholar’s main areas of research: interaction between folklore and literature as subsystems of a comprehensive metasystem of artistic language and the study of the folklore dimension that exists in works of A. Pushkin, A. Chekhov, and others. The reviewer praises the biography as a valuable contribution to contemporary philology. Among Medrish’s most important postulates are those of debunking the enduring belief that folklore should be contrasted with literature and proving their typological and structural kinship. Medrish viewed folklore and literature as two subsystems of a single metasystem which is the Russian artistic language: interpreting one through the other helps to reveal substantial new meanings.