Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (Владимир Яковлевич Пропп) was a Russian philologist and folklorist who ranks among the most penetrating, original and influential of modern narrative theoreticians. His 1928 work Morphology of the Folk Tale laid the groundwork for many important developments in later narratology, from the formalist/structuralist movements mainly active in Eastern Europe during the pre-World War II period to the heyday of French Structuralism in the 1960s. Propp’s approach was rigorously formal, highly systematic and based on the well-tried analytical techniques of segmentation and recomposition derived from structural phonetics.