XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Alexander Afanasyevich Potebnya was born on September 22, 1835 in the village Gavrilovka in Poltava province. Potebnya was a prominent Russian philologist, cultural critic, and philosopher. He graduated from the historical and philological faculty of Kharkov University. He was taught in Germany, he visited a number of Slavic countries to collect materials on the history of language and folklore. In 1874, he defended his doctoral thesis "From notes on Russian grammar» Since 1875 he was Professor of Kharkov University. In two years he became the corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. [5, p. 302]

His indefatigable working life, and perhaps some other circumstances, had aged him beyond his years. With almost every mild cold, his bronchitis resumed. From the autumn of 1890 Potebnya felt very ill and could hardly leave the house; however, he did not want to deprive students of their lectures, he invited them to his house and read from the 3rd part of his "Notes on Russian grammar", although reading already noticeably tired him. A trip to Italy, where he spent two summer months in 1891, helped him somewhat and, returning to Kharkov, in September, he began to lecture at the University, but on November 29, 1891, he died. [1]

Scientific work

In studying the history of language and thought, he relied on Wilhelm Humboldt’s ideas. He considered the people to be the creator of the language and at the same time the subject of reverse impact. Ethnos forms language, the latter is the most important means of spiritual growth of the nation. He collected a big amount of folklore and historical and cultural material of the Ukrainian and Russian ethnos, proved their deep affinity.[5, p. 302]

Potebnya's main scientific interest laid in the study of the relationship between language and mentality. According to Potebnya, "language is a means not to express a ready-made thought, but to create it", i.e., thought can only be carried out within the language. In its structure, the word is a unity of articulate sound, internal form of the word and abstract meaning. The inner form of a word is associated with its closest etymological meaning and serves as a representation, a channel of communication between the sensory image and the abstract meaning. A word with its internal form is a means of "passing from the image of an object to a concept". Many of these thoughts and ideas formed the foundation stone of modern areas of humanities knowledge.

Potebnya stands at the origins of historical grammar, historical dialectology, semiotics, sociolinguistics, and ethnopsychology. The philosophical and linguistic approach allowed him to recognise various symbolic systems derived from language in myth, folklore, and literature. So, myth does not exist outside the word. The decisive factor of appearing of the myths is the internal form of the word, which acts as a mediator between what is explained in the myth and what it explains. Myth is an act of "explaining the unknown” with the help of a set of previously given attributes, united and brought to consciousness by a word or image. [3, p. 493-494]

Potebnya built a fuller picture of the development of the East Slavic phonetic system from the earliest period to the middle of the XIX century. He studied the nature of the Slavic accent. He laid the foundations of Eastern Slavic dialectology. Potebnya considered Russian as a combination of Great Russian and Little Russian dialects, and considered it a common language of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. [6]

The book "About some symbols in Slavic folk poetry" is devoted to Ukrainian and Serbian songs, which are researched on the basis of the vocabulary of Slavic languages, describing the emotional world of a person. A. A. Potebnya studied figurativeness and aesthetics of language and comprehended it as an active creative force that determines a person's perception of the world. The scientist examined the symbols of hunger, thirst, love, sadness, joy, anger, and others. He managed to describe specific symbolic meanings attributed to many phenomena in folk poetry: rain, cloud, water, sun, and light.

In the work "From notes on Russian grammar", A. A. Potebnya wrote: "A word consists of articulate sounds and meaning in a broad sense that includes representation and meaning. Therefore, the entire aspect of language is most naturally divided into phonetics, whose subject is an external form of a word, sounds, assuming their significance, and theory of meaning. The meaning of words can be called their internal form, in contrast to the external sound. From this point of view, there is nothing in the language except the external and internal form. But widely-spread languages, in the domain of their internal form, make a distinction between the representation of content and the representation of the form in which it is thought. This corresponds to the theory of meaning in a close sense, or to the theory of a real meaning, and the theory of grammatical forms. Each of these two divisions can be considered from two points: etymological and syntactic" [4 p. 47].

Potebnya created the psychology of perception and interpretation of artistic works, he worked out a detailed theory of the creative process, the study of the role of imagination in it, and so on. As a result of his psychological and linguistic reflections, Potebnya came to a conclusion as worthy as the phenomenology that appeared later in Europe and many other literary and philosophical theories. One literary text exists simultaneously in several forms — in the way the writer understands it, in the way the reader understands it, and so on. In other words, a work of art has many interpretations. The whole point, again, is in the ambiguity of the word, in its impact on thinking, in the images that it evokes due to its internal form. [2]

Potebnya’s works have been had a significant influence on the development of Russian historical linguistics, ethnopsychology, semiotics, and symbolist poetics.

List of references:

Академик

https://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc_biography/103543/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%B1%D0%BD%D1%8F

Карнацевич В. Л. -100 знаменитых харьковчан, изд. Фолио, Харьков, 2007

Маслина М.А., Апрышко П.П., Поляков А.П. - Русская философия. Энциклопедия. Изд. второе, доработанное и дополненное – М., 2014, с. 493-494.

Потебня, А. А. Из записок по русской грамматике: в 4 т. / А. А. Потебня. — М.: Государственное учебно-педагогическое издательство, 1958. — Т. I—II.

Степин В.С., Гусейнов А.А., Семигин Г.Ю. - Новая философская энциклопедия. В четырех томах. / Ин-т философии РАН, 2010, т. III, Н – С, с. 302.

Энциклопедия Всемирная история

https://w.histrf.ru/articles/article/show/potiebnia_alieksandr_afanasievich