Vladimir Propp, born at St. Petersburg, was a structuralist scholar who concentrated his scholarship on the Russian folktale. Working in Stalinist Russian, it took considerable time for his research, carried out in the 1920s and 1930s, to reach the West.

It was not until the 1950s that his work was translated. Propp's studies inspired such prominent scholars as Claude Levy-Strauss and Alan Dundes, to name a few. He discovered that all Russian magic tales had a similar structure and contained the same elements in the same order, though no single folktale contain all the elements.

The fact that all magic tales contain these same elements, but that no single tale contain all the Propp detected 31 different plot elements, which he called functions, that can be found in the magic tale. He died in Leningrad (how St. Petersburg was then called).