Anna Astakhova

Anna Mikhaylovna Astakhova (, – 30 April 1971 ) was a Soviet scholar notable for her studies of the folklore (primarily bylinas) of the Russian North.

Astakhova was born in Kronstadt, close to Saint-Petersburg, in 1886, and graduated from the Women Pedagogical Institute in 1908. Until 1931, she worked as a schoolteacher, from 1931 as a researcher at the Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography. Astakhova then worked as a researcher at the Institute of Russian Literature in Leningrad between 1935 and 1965. She earned the degree of a Doktor nauk (philology) in 1945. Astakhova was a professor at the Pokrovsky Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad (now Saint-Petersburg) between 1945 and 1950. She published academic editions of bylinas, put forward a theory of the development of the genre, and classified the bylinas into types. She also was the first scholar to present a literary analysis of the Northern folklore, in particular, by Marfa Kryukova.

Selected works