Pavel Nikolaevich Rybnikov

Born Nov. 24 (Dec. 6), 1831, in Moscow; died Nov. 17 (29), 1885, in Kalish, present-day Kalisz, now part of Poland. Russian folklorist and ethnographer.

After graduating from Moscow University in 1858, Rybni-kov began recording the songs he found in Old Believer settlements in Chernigov Province. Arrested on suspicion of spreading revolutionary propaganda, he was exiled in 1859 to Petrozavodsk, where he worked for the provincial government. During service-related trips to Kizhi, Pudoga, Kenozero, Kar-gopol’, and other places, he recorded the byliny (folk epics), stories, songs, and ballads that he heard from the peasants. These materials, published in four volumes over the period 1861–67 as Songs Collected by P. N. Rybnikov, opened the way for extensive research in ethnography. The collection is among the best of its kind because of the importance of its content; it is also distinguished by its accuracy. Rybnikov also benefited scholarship and folk culture by discovering such remarkable tellers of byliny as T. G. Riabinin, A. P. Sorokin, and I. P. Sivtsev-Poromskii. Rybnikov provided a description of the epic traditions of northern Russia in his Notes of a Collector (1864).