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Fabulotheca — a search collection for folklore and fairy-tale studies

Ask a question about a folk tale, tale type, motif or collector, and get authentic fragments of scholarly sources with exact bibliographic data and the place where the original is held — not a retelling. Most sources are in Russian; some European-language scholarship is included.

What is inside

• Classic collections of Russian folk tales and records: Afanasyev, Zelenin, Onchukov, Azadovsky; tales of Karelia and the Russian North; the journal Zhivaya Starina; expedition and ethnographic materials; publications of the Kizhi Museum-Reserve.
• Research literature: articles and monographs on the fairy tale and folklore, in Russian and European languages.
• Tale-type indexes: the Aarne–Thompson–Uther system (ATU) and the Russian index (SUS, СУС). Search by number, for example “ATU 510A” or “СУС 510В”, or by describing the plot.
• More than 2,000 sources with full text and more than 5,000 works in the catalogue (October 2026).

How it works

1. One query searches everything at once: tale texts and field records, scholarly literature, and type indexes — each result is marked with its source.
2. Search by meaning, not only by words: by type number, motif, image, rite, dialect word, collector’s name or province.
3. Verifiable: every fragment comes with full bibliographic data, so a quotation can always be checked against the original. The decision of what to do with it stays with the researcher.

Two ways to search

On the website — in your personal account, like an ordinary search engine. Or with an AI assistant — the collection connects through the open MCP protocol, so the assistant searches a verified corpus instead of guessing (AI assistants often confuse tale types, misattribute texts and invent references). See how to connect.

Who it is for

Folklorists and tale scholars first of all; also ethnographers, linguists and dialectologists, historians of folklore collecting, religious-studies scholars, teachers and students — anyone who needs the text, not a summary.

Access

The service is in a trial period and is free until 1 January 2027. Access is instant: fill in a short application (who you are, what you work on) and a personal link arrives by email within minutes. The interface and the instructions are in Russian.

Get access · For rights holders · alyzlova@rambler.ru

Coverage, search and rules of use · Terms of Use (English translation)

For librarians and instructors

If you maintain a research guide on Slavic, East European or folklore studies, you are welcome to list Fabulotheca (https://fabulotheca.org/en). We are glad to answer questions and add sources: send us a link to a book or article that is legally available in open access.

Created by folklorist Anastasia Lyzlova (Karelian Research Centre, Russian Academy of Sciences) and Anton, the technical author of the service.