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Fabulotheca: coverage, search and rules of use

Fabulotheca is a search service over 2,126 full-text sources on folk tales and folklore, with 5,334 works catalogued in total. A query returns verbatim passages with exact bibliographic data and the place where the original is held, not summaries. Figures are as of October 2026.

It was created by folklorist Anastasia Lyzlova (Karelian Research Centre, Russian Academy of Sciences). You can search it in a web account, like an ordinary search engine, with no AI at all, or connect it to an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT through the open MCP protocol.

What is inside

The searchable core is 2,126 sources (about 1.58 million indexed text fragments). Another 3,208 works are catalogued without text, so that you can see that they exist.

Kind of source	Full-text sources
Research (articles, monographs, proceedings)	1,410
Texts (tale collections, field records)	506
Mixed (texts and research together)	161
Indexes and catalogues of tale types	49

• Collections and records: classic Russian collections (Afanasyev, Zelenin, Onchukov, Azadovsky and others), tales and field records from Karelia and the Russian North, expedition and ethnographic materials, publications of the Kizhi Museum-Reserve, and the journal Zhivaya Starina (71 items).
• Research literature: Russian periodicals such as Traditsionnaya kultura (112 items) and Russkiy folklor (78), and international scholarship, for example Estudis de Literatura Oral Popular, Boletín de Literatura Oral, Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore, Fabula, Journal of American Folklore. About half of the full-text sources have non-Cyrillic titles, so the collection is not only Russian-language.
• Periods (publication date of the full-text sources): before 1900 — 260; 1900–1929 — 232; 1930–1969 — 132; 1970–1999 — 182; 2000–2009 — 125; 2010–2019 — 429; 2020–2026 — 609; undated — 66. The oldest items are from the 1780s. Pre-revolutionary editions and recent scholarship are the strongest parts; the mid-20th century is thinner.

Two ways to search

1. In your web account (no AI needed). After a short application you get a personal page with a search box. One query searches tale texts, field records, scholarly literature and type indexes together, and every hit is labelled with its source. You can search by a type number (“ATU 510A”, “СУС 510В”), a plot described in plain words, a motif, image, rite, dialect word, collector’s name or historical province. English queries work too. Ticked results can be opened together, up to ten at a time.
2. With an AI assistant (optional). The same collection connects to Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants that support MCP, through a personal connector link (instructions). The assistant searches, shows the list, and on request opens the chosen passages verbatim. It does not paraphrase the text it quotes.

A result contains the passage (up to 1,000 characters), author, title, edition, page, a link to the book and where the original is held. Searching, paging, checking a type number and retrieving source links are free of charge.

Tale-type pages

The collection includes 49 tale-type indexes and catalogues and works with both the Aarne–Thompson–Uther (ATU) and the Russian (SUS) numbering. For 2,077 type codes it records where they occur. Each named type has an open page, for example ATU 510A, listing the works that mention it, ranked by number of passages. These pages are bibliographies, not tale texts, and a mention of a number does not mean that a work is a study of that type. All named types: index.

Why it matters for Slavic studies

• One query across languages and genres. A plain English query (“a stepdaughter sent to the witch’s hut in the forest”) returned, ranked by closeness of meaning, tale texts in English translation, Russian and comparative research, and an index entry, all in one list, each labelled by kind. You do not need to know the SUS number or the Russian plot name first.
• Russian-language scholarship becomes reachable for readers outside Russia: regional journals, conference proceedings and Karelian and Northern field publications are searchable by content, and every passage comes with its edition and page.
• Verifiable quotation: passages are verbatim, with page and a link to the book (but see the warning below).
• Comparison by tale type across the whole corpus, and 260 full-text sources published before 1900 for the history of folklore studies.

Rules of use in brief

This is a short summary. The full English translations are available: Terms of Use, personal data processing policy and consent form; the binding text is the Russian Terms of Use, and if the two differ, the Russian text applies. The Service stores personal data (name, e-mail, research topic, technical logs) on a server in the Russian Federation and does not transfer it abroad; details are in the policy.

• The service is for personal research and educational use only.
• It provides passages with attribution only. It does not supply files or full texts of sources.
• How much to quote, and whether the quotation is justified in your work, is decided by you, the user, and the copyright rules of your country apply to it.
• You must not pass your access link to others, obtain several links to get around the limits, harvest the index automatically or copy it, or use the passages to build datasets, train models or resell them.
• Protective limits apply to every account: at present up to 80 searches (20 per hour) and 25 openings of passages per day, up to 10 passages per opening.
• Rights holders who object to the indexing of a work can write to us (see For rights holders).
• The service is free until 1 January 2027. Prices for the period after that date will be published in the Terms at least 7 days before the trial ends; the Terms also provide for 5 free requests per calendar month after the trial.

Access and contact

Fill in a short application (who you are and what you work on) and a personal link arrives by email within minutes. The interface and the instructions are in Russian.

Get access · How to connect an AI assistant · alyzlova@rambler.ru

Suggested reference to the service: Fabulotheca. Search collection for folklore and fairy-tale studies. https://fabulotheca.org (accessed [date]).