Author Biography
Aleksandr Belousov (1946-2023) was born in Riga. In 1980, he defended his PhD thesis Literary Legacy of the Ancient Rus’ on the Popular Literature of Russian Old Residents in the Pribaltika Area, written under the supervision of Iu. Lotman. From 1977 to 1990, he worked at the Department of Russian Literature of the Pedagogical Institute in Tallinn, where he published the manual Learning Materials on the Analysis of Literary Prose Works (1979) with Iu. Sidiakov. He also edited M. Lotman’s Learning Materials on the Analysis of Poetry (1982) and M. Gasparov’s The Russian Verse (1987). His pioneering contributions to the studies on contemporary Russian folklore were of paramount importance, with focuses on such specific branches as children’s folklore, urban folklore and school folklore. From 1996 he worked at the Department of Children’s Literature of the St. Petersburg University of Culture and Arts. While continuing his research on various aspects and key figures of Russian folklore, both traditional and contemporary, he also took an interest in the broad cultural theme of the Russian province (Russian Province: Myth, Text, Reality, 2000). He devoted a significant number of articles to the works of the poets Leonid Dobychin and Evgenii Shesholin.