HARVARD UKRAINIAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE Monograph Series Editorial Board Omeljan Pritsak, Editor-in-Chief Ihor Sevcenko Maxim Tarnawsky (1984) George Mihaychuk (1986), Managing Editor Committee on Ukrainian Studies Stanislaw Baranczak Oleg Grabar George G. Grabowicz Edward Keenan Horace G. Lunt Richard E. Pipes Omeljan Pritsak, Chairman Ihor Sevcenko Adam Ulam Wiktor Weintraub Cambridge, Massachusetts John Fizer Alexander A. Potebnja's Psycholinguistic Theory of Literature: A Metacritical Inquiry Distributed by Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Preface Publication of this volume was made possible by a generous donation Alexander A. Potebnja (1835-1891) was an outstanding from Anna Lewkut and Mykola L. Hromnycky Ukrainian intellectual of the nineteenth century. He not only greatly II fleeted literary and linguistic scholarship in the Russian Empire and later in the Soviet Union, but, arguably, inaugurated formalist and structuralist theories in this century. My initial encounter with his theory, or what in the Soviet Union is generally known as potebnjanstvo (Potebnjanism), came in the 1950s, when I was a grad- nute student at Columbia University. At that time, convinced that psychology was the Grundwissenschaft for both the humanities and the social sciences, I found Potebnja's theory ostensibly psychologis- ts and thus validative of my conviction. Subsequently, as a result of itty acquaintance with Husserl's phenomenology, I altered my view on the epistemological preeminence of psychology and reread Potebnja without psychologistic bias. To my amazement, I found him practi- cally free of conceptual presumptions and, on the contrary, very much committed to the search for demonstrated proof. Historically, Potebnja's views on literary art are definitely inchoate; synchronically, unlike a great many past theories, they retain remarkable cogency. © by the President and Fellows of Harvard College Very little of impartiality has been written about Potebnja. The All rights reserved. limited explication of his theory has been primarily due to the disin- ISBN 0-916458-16-4 terest that modern literary theory, here emulating the exact sciences, Library of Congress Catalogue Number 87 - 80688 has shown in its own past. Rene Wellek's sustained effort to present Printed in the United States of America such a past is an exception rather than a widespread pursuit among literary scholars. In his compendious A History of Modern Criticism Wellek rightly perceived Potebnja's anticipation of Croce and Vossler The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute was established in 1973 as an us well as his pronounced influence on symbolist and formalist integral part of Harvard University. It supports research associates and visit- theories. However, given the limited space of his History, Wellek ing scholars who are engaged in projects concerned with all aspects of could not but limit Potebnja's theory to a reductive precis. Ukrainian studies. The Institute also works in close cooperation with the In the Ukraine, from the early 1920s to the present, Potebnja has Committee on Ukrainian Studies, which supervises and coordinates the teaching of Ukrainian history, language, and literature at Harvard University. been subjected to varied denigrations as well as hagiographic hom- ages, reflecting vacillations in Soviet ideology. My study, then, is the vi Potebnja's Psycholinguistic Theory of Literature first comprehensive analysis of Potebnja's literary theory in its inferentially amplified formulations rather than in its original termino- logical paucity. From the organization of the material to its critical examination and evaluation, I have relied on the ideas, judgments, and methodological apparatus of current theories of literature, particularly those of the late Contents Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden. My sense of the historical con- text of Potebnja's theory was acquired from Wellek's History. To these and the other scholars who directly or intertextually affected my Preface v views, I owe my deep gratitude. Should, however, my study contain Introduction 1 factual inaccuracies or descriptive inaptness, my own inadvertence is to blame. Chapter One: The Essential Being of the Work of Poetic Art 8 I am grateful to the editors of Harvard Ukrainian Studies for per- mission to republish the chapter "The Structure of the Poetic Work of Epistemological Constraints 8 Art," which originally appeared in the journal (HUS 6, no. 1 [March The Work of Poetic Art as Activity 11 1982]: 5-24). My manuscript was scrupulously edited by Irene Fizer The Work of Poetic Art as Narration 14 and Diane Grobman, both formerly of Rutgers University Press, and The Work of Poetic Art as Teleologically Charged Form 16 Uliana Pasicznyk of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. I owe particular thanks to Maxim Tarnawsky, also of HURI, for his profes- The Word as an Analogue of the Work of Poetic Art 19 sional attentiveness to the technical aspects of the manuscript and The Conceptual Ambivalence of Potebnja's Ontology 23 George Mihaychuk for seeing the manuscript through its final techni- Conclusion 26 cal preparation. My secretary, Dagmar Jensen, typed the text patiently and diligently, a task which, considering my often illegible handwrit- Chapter Two: The Structure of the Work of Poetic Art 29 ing, must at times have been arduous. Structural Affinities between Language and the Work of Poetic Art 29 New Brunswick, New Jersey Structural Constituents of the Work of Poetic Art 36 January 1986 The External Form 38 The Internal Form 40 The Content 44 Conclusion 47 Chapter Three: The Modality of Poetic Forms 51 Immanent Forms 51 Intentional Forms 60 The Fable 63 The Proverb 70 viii Contents Fable and Proverb as Exempla of the Work of Poetic Art in General 71 Conclusion 75 Chapter Four: Functional Determination of the Work of Poetic Art 79 Introduction The Teleology of Poetic Images 79 Cognitive Function 82 Alexander A. Potebnja's theory of literature is virtually unknown Expressive Function 91 to Western critics. With the exception of one brief precis in Rene Auxiliary Functions 94 Wcllek's History of Modern Criticism, another in Victor Erlich's Rus- Criticism as a Mode of Cognition 97 sian Formalism, and an outline in my Psychologism and Psycho- aesthetics, very little has been written about it. This inattention is not Conclusion 101 due to a bias against East European criticism—it was caused by Potebnja himself. He did not regard criticism as his main intellectual Chapter Five: Potebnja's Theory: Axiomatic System or concern and focused, instead, on linguistics. His publications in a Set of Observational Propositions 105 literary theory comprise only three works. Only one of the three was his own, formal composition, written while he was a young lecturer at Potebnja versus Potebnjanism 105 Kharkiv University. The other two were his lecture notes, which were Potebnja and the Symbolists 120 posthumously compiled, edited, and published by his students. The The Formalist Response to Potebnja's Theory 124 three works are more compendiums of loosely integrated views and Potebnja and the Vagaries of Soviet Ideology 128 citations from Wilhelm Humboldt, Heymann Steinthal, Hermann I ,otze, and Moritz Lazarus than systematic inquiries into the issues of Conclusion 133 literary criticism. Thus Potebnja's literary theory, given more in ovo Bibliography 141 than in extenso, must be amplified by, and reconstructed from, the Index 161 psycholinguistic formulations presented in his works on language, mythology, and folklore. The reception of Potebnja's theory in the Russian Empire itself was at first constrained. As Erlich commented, the environment was one in which "the view of literature as a mirror of society or preferably as a vehicle for social change, enjoyed a distinct advantage over both the detached psychological curiosity and a systematic concern with the writer's psyche."1 In time, however, Potebnja's theory became to some scholars and critics the exclusive explanation of poetic art, and to others, a major provocation to construct their own. This keen 1 Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1955). 2 Potebnja's Psycholinguistic Theory of Literature Introduction 3 interest was cut short in the early 1930s by Socialist Realism, the poetic creation" (Spitzer), or other similar, metaphorically-defined official Soviet theory of the creative arts. As O. P. Presnjakov entities. Potebnja's linguistic definition of internal form derived from remarked, "from the end of the 1920s and all the way through the his belief that ethnopsychology imparts to linguistic and poetic codes 1950s, Potebnja had not been written about. Only his linguistic legacy the final authority of semiosis. To Croce and the others, this thesis was substantially elucidated, but even that was [done] through isolated was not valid, inasmuch as it prevented these codes from generating and rare articles."2 In the 1960s Potebnja's theory again became "the meaning outside a particular time and place. classical inheritance of philological science" in the Soviet Union. Potebnja's theory continues to command our attention even when This reversal was accompanied by an all-out effort to prove that compared with current critical thought—especially formal/structural Potebnja, in spite of "serious errors [that is, his neo-Kantian position], and phenomenological thought. With the former it shares the notion defended the materialistic comprehension of the world," and was, that on the level of empirical reality, the creative arts in general, and indeed, "a master of dialectical materialism."3 the poetic in particular, are but signifying forms or signs that stand for In the history of Western critical thought Potebnja's theory stands something to someone in some circumstance. This fundamental semi- alongside the theories affected by Wilhelm Humboldt's philosophy of otic notion, similar to one proposed at approximately the same time by language, particularly those of Benedetto Croce, Karl Vossler, Leo Charles Sanders Peirce, was a consequence of Kant's epistemology, to Spitzer, and even Erich Auerbach. For Potebnja, as for these scholars, which both adhered.