This is the last work of V. Ya. Propp on the mythological and ritual basis of folk rituals, fairy tales, and epic. The author applied the structural-typological method for studying the narrative; that method was worked out by him in his research ‘The Morphology of Fairy Tale’; according to that method, all fairy tales were built on one and the same model, from the same structural units. The author noted: ‘It turned out that all the main and big-scale agrarian festivals were built of the same elements, differently designed’. Having studied the constituent elements, he arranged the material on the ritual themes; and it determined the construction of the book, which consists of seven chapters: ‘Commemoration of Deads’, ‘Ritual Food’, ‘Welcoming the Spring’, “Songs of Congratulations and Spells’, ‘Cult of plants, ‘Death and laugh’. There are the main ritual codes in them: food, reproductive, and vegetative.
For researchers of the Slavic Archaic it is especially important, that the author denied the existence of a developed mythology characterized with a systematic pantheon of gods. He argued that such figures as Ivan Kupala, Kostroma, and others were ‘not gods, they did not render cults, there are no signs that temples were erected in their honor’. They symbolized certain ‘forces’; that was typical for archaic cultures. In his work, P. defines the stages of the evolution of cult at the example of the cult of plants. On the P.’s opinion, the main function of agrarian festivals was in the transition of those ‘forces’ through rituals.
He believed that only outlined the main directions for further research in his small book. And indeed, it had a great influence at various tendencies of contemporary interdisciplinary research conducted in the field of the anthropology of religion, as well as in the field of the Slavic archaic.