She is one of those who know what to do with their life and what to do in this life to fill it with meaning and content.
Literaturologist and folklorist Zoya Samdan is not a desk scholar. She has spent thirty-seven years collecting oral Tuvan folk art - tales and myths.
And Tuvan story-tellers, speaking in their native language and in Russian, have added their voices to members of other nations in the multi-volume series "Monuments of Folklore of Peoples of Siberia and Far East" - a huge project of Russian scholars from various republics that was begun in 1983 and continues to this day.
The epic connected with her work on two volumes of this series - "Tuvan folk tales" and "Myths, legends and traditions of Tuvans" - she considers a gift of fate.
And she is confident that this immense labor was not in vain; the folklore collected in the books of the series will be relevant forever.
Because it comes from the people and returns to them.
