Yeleazar Moiseevich Meletinsky (1918–2005) was an outstanding Russian scholar, folklorist, literary critic, semiotician, cultural historian, Doctor of Philological Sciences, academician of the Academy of Humanities, founder of the research school of theoretical folkloristics, author of more than a dozen monographs and numerous articles on the genesis and semantics of myths of various peoples of the world, on mythological archetypes in oral and written literature, on the historical poetics of epic genres from their primitive origins to the literature of the New and Modern times, including such books as "The Hero of the Fairy Tale. The Origin of the Image" (1958), "The Origin of the Heroic Epic. Early Forms and Archaic Monuments" (1963), "The Medieval Romance. Origin and Classical Forms" (1983), "Introduction to the Historical Poetics of Epic and Novel" (1986), "Historical Poetics of the Novella" (1990), "On Literary Archetypes" (1994), "Dostoevsky in the Light of Historical Poetics" (1996), "From Myth to Literature" (2000). The monograph "Poetics of Myth" (1976) brought international fame and wide academic recognition; it has been translated into ten languages and has undergone several reprints in the author's homeland. The book, based on extensive textual material, addresses general questions of the structure of mythological plot and mythological thinking, the history of the study of mythology by various scientific schools, and the various forms of the myth’s existence in culture, folklore, and literature from ancient times to the present.