The Origin of the Greek Lyric

O. M. Freidenberg (1890-1955), a professor at Leningrad University, in 1932 organized the first Soviet faculty of classical philology, which she headed for many years. She is the author of a large number of works that not only are still relevant today but also are of great general theoretical interest. The most significant of the many works Freidenberg published is the famous book Poetika siuzheta i zhanra. Period antichnoi literatury (Leningrad, 1935). This work, like the majority of the others (including unpublished ones), goes far beyond the limits of classical philology. Using the data of folklore, ethnography, the history of religion, etc., Freidenberg has investigated the mechanism of the transformation of "nonliterature" into literature.