ANDREI NIKOLAEVICH VLASOV

This is a study of the main aspects of the scholarly activities of Andrei Nikolaevich Vlasov (1955–2023), a famous archaeographer and folklorist, who was Head of the Department of Russian Folklore of the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The article focuses on Vlasov’s lifelong activities: his textual analysis of the hagiographies of northern Russian saints, his collection and publication of folklore sources and manuscripts, and his study of works by local historians. Vlasov considered the hagiographic texts from the Ustiug region in the context of the book and manuscript tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries. This approach allowed him to discern the historical and literary peculiarities of these hagiographic texts, to inquire about their origin, and to highlight the problem of the formation of regional literature. In the expeditions to the Russian North that Vlasov organized, he carried out both archaeographic and folklore studies. As a result of this field work, Vlasov and his colleagues published collections of folklore texts. After many years of studying local cultural traditions, the scholar became aware of the importance of all “written manifestations” produced by local residents and therefore began collecting them even more thoroughly. The authors of this article pay special attention to Vlasov’s work on the Svod russkogo folklora (Corpus of Russian Folklore) series.