It’s been a whole summer (a glorious one) and a bit of a fall (also pretty glorious) since I last posted, and there are too many things to write now, so I’ll need to pace myself.
First, Propp is coming! At last the book is finished and entering the production process at Indiana University Press. It is slated to come out in September 2025. I’ve posted a few times about the process of working on this book (here’s one), and it’s a bit hard to believe that this more-than-decade-long project is nearing completion.
In the process it has turned into what scholars sometimes refer to as “an edition,” which means it has a rather big apparatus and is the definitive version of something. In this case, it’ll be the only full translation of this book into English, comprising ten chapters in six hundred pages or so, with an introduction by me and my two collaborators, Miriam Shrager and Sibelan Forrester, an afterword by folklorist Sergei Nekliudov, over 1,300 notes (some by the author, some by the translators), a full bibliography, and a detailed index. Makes me a bit tired just listing all that.
Next up, however, is a cover. My co-translators and I had some ideas and collected some images, but they turned out to be all too small for use on a book cover, so we’re looking. IU Press has a subscription to Getty Images, so we can get something in that collection as a start for the book designer to work with.
We’re just not sure which way to go. Taking something like a Baba Yaga-looking witch (haven’t found anything that is explicitly Baba Yaga yet) could work, or maybe a dragon, as there are lots of dragons a.k.a. serpents in the book. Or maybe something like Jonah exiting the whale’s mouth (ritual swallowing and spitting out is a theme), or something else that’s basically representational from the topics that are in the book.
Another way to go could be to take something like “roots” from the title and use that as the basis of a design theme, reaching up out of the ground and then rising up (in tendrils?) to the upper parts of the cover. This could work and wouldn’t depend so much on finding the perfect image of a sleeping maiden or pegasus or what have you.
If you have a thought, feel free to comment or drop me a line at russellv at iu dot edu.
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Russell Scott Valentino 