Foreword
Foreword

Summary/Abstract: The monograph you are holding would definitely never have been written if I had not happened upon some notes made of the lectures given by Juri Lotman in the late autumn of 1967 (these notes have now been published, in a complete form and for the first time, in the Appendix to this book). Although the notes are declarative, and even occasionally incomplete (as notes always are), the ideas from these guided my curiosity throughout many decades, and helped to eventually find the answer to the question that arose for me as a university student during the study of magic tales: why do children not tire of listening to the same magic tale, over and over again? How can this particular interest by children towards fairytales as a genre be explained? No satisfactory answer to this question was forthcoming from the study of folklore at the end of the 1960s.

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