Author Biography
Evgenii Kostiukhin (1938-2006) was a Russian ethnographer, literary critic and folklorist. He graduated from the Philological Faculty of the Lomonosov Moscow State University where he made his first steps in folklore studies during various ethnographical expeditions. His dissertation for the first doctoral degree (1969) focused on the folklore and literary tradition about Alexander the Great. In 1988 he defended his second doctoral degree dissertation entitled Types and Forms of the Animal Epics, which was based on a wide range of materials coming from different ethnic groups. He published also on contemporary urban folklore and children’s folklore. At the beginning of his career, he taught courses in Kazakhstan and Poland, and then moved to Leningrad in 1983, where he held his professorship till 1989. For the last 27 years, he carried on his research at the Institute of Russian Literature. For the book Lektsii po russkomu fol’kloru [Lessons of Russian Folklore, 2004] he was given The Giuseppe Pitrè – Salvatore Salomone Marino International Prize for Ethnohistory, one of the oldest and most distinguished awards in the field of Cultural Anthropology.