Alexander Afanasyev

Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev (1826 to 1871) was a Russian Slavist and ethnographer, best known for publishing nearly 600 East Slavic and Russian fairy and folk tales, among the largest folklore collections in the world. The collection reached beyond Great Russia to tales from what are now Ukraine and Belarus, and its first edition appeared in eight volumes between 1855 and 1867, earning him a reputation as the Russian counterpart of the Brothers Grimm. He also wrote a large theoretical work, The Poetic Outlook of the Slavs on Nature, which belongs to the mythological school that read folk tales as survivals of older pagan myth. He died in Moscow of tuberculosis at the age of 45.