Frank Wollman's involvement in Czech and Slovak folklore studies

The paper outlines the approach to folklore pursued by Czech Slavonic scholar and folklorist Frank Wollman (1888–1969). Influenced by his mentor J. Polivka, between 1928–1947 Wollman devised and carried out collection of folk prose in Slovakia. One chapter of his unpublished teaching material entitled Uvedení do methodologie literarněvědné a do theorie literatury (presumably 1949), [An Introduction to the methodology of literary research and the theory of literature] is devoted to folklore and examines the characteristics of oral folklore and the links between oral tradition and morphological principle. Even at the height of Stalinism at the turn of the 1950s, Wollman adhered to the structuralist principles he upheld in the interwar period. Generally, he conceived folklore as a social act, as an expressive (morphological) form which is not determined by originality and "age" but by reception and the manner of individual reproduction, namely communicative aspects. The material confirms that Wollman's interdisciplinary and structuralist approach helped to establish the modern, communicatively semiotic, concept of folklore.