Vladimir Propp (St Petersburg, April 29, 1895 - Leningrad August 22, 1970) was a Russian structuralist scholar who analysed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements. His Morphology of the Folk Tale was published in Russian in 1928; although it influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, it was generally unnoticed in the West until it was translated in the 1950s.
Propp extended the Russian Formalist approach to the study of narrative structure. In the Formalist approach, sentence structures in narrative had been broken down into analysable elements, or "morphemes". Propp used this method by analogy to analyse folk tales. Ignoring narrative tone or mood, or extraneous decorative detail, and breaking down a large number of Russian folk tales into their smallest narrative units, which he called functions, and some of his modern followers like to call "narratemes", Propp was able to arrive at a typology of narrative structures. By analysing types of characters and kinds of action in a hundred tales, Propp was able to arrive at the conclusion that there were just thirty-one generic "narratemes" in the traditional Russian folk tale. While not all are present in every tale, he found that all the tales he analysed displayed the functions in unvarying sequence.
An interesting on-line computer project, "digital Propp" (see link) has randomly generated folk tales employing selected functions of Propp's. As the project's organizers conclude, "The randomly generated fairy tale demonstrates that it is necessary to consider several other elements besides plot components in order to create a cohesive and well-written tale."
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