Harvard University Press for Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1988. — 164 р. — (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Monograph Series). — ISBN 0-916456-16-4The work of Alexander A. Potebnja, a leading Ukrainian linguist of the nineteenth century, has significantly influenced modern literary critisism, particularly Russian formalism and stucturalism. Potebnja's theory, known as potebnjanstvo (Potebnjanism), flourished in the Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. It attracted scores of adherents and gave rise to an influential literary journal and a formal critical school at Kharkiv. Yet despite his remarkable achievement in linguistics and literary theory, Potebnja's work was officially renounced in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and in the West he remains virtually unknown.
In his study, John Fizer carefully reconstructs Potebnja's theory of literature from psychological formulations found in his works on language, mythology, and folklore. Elaborating Potebnja's concept of internal form, energeia, polysemy and the semiosis of poetic discourse, Fizer develops the central tenets of Potebnja's theory with regard to their philosophical, psychological, and and linguistic bases. Largely influenced by Kant and Humboldt's philosophy of language, Potebnja conceived of language and the verbal acts as conterminous phenomena. He indentified the internal form with the etymon of the word, which he considered the preeminent locus in the structure of poetic art. He insisted on dynamic role of the Self in poetic creation and perception but, unlike many of his contemporaries, he believed that the diachronic depth of the signifers was ethnic and had measureable limits. According to Potebnja, this depth (or internal form) reveals itself as a semantically multivalent image that induces self-knowledge and transforms the primary data of consciousness into syntagmatic wholes.
A great deal of Potebnja's theory shares similarities with the work of Benedetto Croce, Leo Spitzer, and Charles S. Pence. it anticipated modern literary criticism, and as the author convincingly argues, retains existantial and epistemological cogency even today. Fizer's Potebnja's literary theory, and his insightful analysis restores Potebnja to his rightful place in the history of literary criticism.
John Fizer, professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. During 1954-60 he taught Russian literature and Russian intelectual history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of "Psychologism and Psychoaesthetics: A Historical and Critical View of Their Relations" (1981) and numerous contributions to books and scholarly journals here and abroad. Currently he teaches literary theory in the graduate program of the Comparative Literature Department at Rutgers University.
