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Literary historian, organizer. Wrote on Russian literature,
legends, and folklore. Afansiev was
born on July 11, 1826 in Voronezh, where he studied at the
gymnasium. Later
Afansiev studied law at Moscow University.
As a student he attended many lectures, and these
included those of Stepan Shevyrev,
Konstantin Kavelin, Timofey Granovsky, and others.
In 1848 Afansiev worked in the archives of the Ministery of
Foreign Affairs. In 1856 he was
made department head, a position he retained until 1862.
In 1860 he published his popular Russian
National Legends. It was
between the 1850s and 1860s that he was published widely,
especially in the esteemed journal The
Contemporary. However in 1862 he was fired because of
his affiliations with political radicals.
Essentially, Afansiev’s career was destroyed, and his
situation became so dire that he had to sell his extensive
library for food.
Afansiev’s work is a towering in Russian folklore – in his
lifetime he was able to collect over 600 tales.
His legendary work was The Poetic Outlook .
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