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European thought and Ukrainian Theories of the ‘Expressive Word’ (From Potebnja to Shevelov)

Alexander Dmitriev
p. 163-175

Résumés

Cet article a pour objectif de décrire comment les linguistes et philologues ukrainiens ont intégré les théories européennes des xixe et xxe siècles. Ces chercheurs ont travaillé sous l’Empire russe, au début de l’Union soviétique ou en exil ; cependant, leurs approches et leurs objets de recherche permettent de parler d’une tradition ukrainienne cohérente (bien que généralement implicite). Au sein de cette tradition, l’influence initiale est venue des idées de Humboldt et de l’idéalisme allemand, bien qu’“équilibrées” par le positivisme, une forme particulière d’historicisme, puis surtout par les approches de Saussure.

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Notes de la rédaction

This study was conducted as part of the project (Un)Disciplined: Pluralizing Ukrainian Studies – Understanding the War in Ukraine (UNDIPUS), funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Texte intégral

1Since the end of the nineteenth century, Alexander Afanasyevich Potebnja (Олександр Опанасович Потебня) has been considered the most significant Ukrainian linguist. It is no coincidence that his figure marks the beginning of a distinction between ‘imperial’ and ‘national’ philology, which is not just due to the liminal peculiarities of his own biography and general historical condition (Remy 2017; Danylenko & Naienko 2019)—caught between Great Russia on the one hand and Little Russia/Slobozhanshchina (to use the terminology of his contemporaries within the Russian Empire) on the other (Bocadorova 2000; Dmitriev 2016a). His own creative evolution unfolded as a transition from his early works on the philosophy of language in the spirit of Humboldt and Lotze to more scientistic and conventional historical-linguistic studies, positivist in nature and similar to the Junggrammatiker. Potebnja also worked within the general philological field, without any rigid separation of linguistic and literary studies (Dmitriev 2016b). For him, the most significant tradition was that of Humboldt, and his discovery of the ‘inner form of the word’; accordingly, literature was understood as the realization of language’s creative potential (Kerecuk 2000).

2Heymann Steinthal and Moritz Lazarus were the German scholars that most influenced Potebnja in both theory and methodology; valuable separate pieces of research have already been written on these intellectual relationships (Bartschat 1987; Trautmann-Waller 2006; Wakoulenko 2016). My own focus is on how, by even the twentieth century, German and European influence was reproduced in different generations of Ukrainian philological schools. Another important question is how and why the topic of Potebnja’s German influence gained significance and was discussed in Ukraine in the mid-1920s. In the historiography (except for the works of Jurij Ševel’ov), the uncomfortable question of the decline of the Potebnja school and the reasons for it are usually avoided, or discussed in the most general of terms (Ermen 1995; see more affirmative vision of this school in Cheremska 2020). After Potebnja’s death, during the first two decades of the twentieth century his direct students in Kharkiv—Boris Lezin (1880–1942), Alexey Vetuchov / Olexa Vetukhiv [Vetuchiv] (1869-1941), Vasil’ Khartsiev (1866-1937)—quickly expanded the field of his research towards the psychology of creative activity, but were little interested in modern European or German linguistics. In Kharkiv from 1907 to 1923, there were a regularly published ‘Potebnian’ almanacs, ‘Questions of Theory and the Psychology of Creativity’, which went beyond the boundaries of pure philology into related fields. Dmitry Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky, the most famous of Potebnja’s followers, became popular primarily because of his works on the history of Russian literature (rather than linguistic research), which were also, in fact, oriented towards psychology (Simonato 2005). Slavist Boris Lyapunov, after leaving for Odesa, became the publisher of a new collection of Potebnja’s writings (1913) and his early and overtly Humboldtian book ‘Thought and Language’ (1862). This gave a new impetus to the reception of Potebnja’s theory in the 1910s (both for theorist of Symbolism and poet Andrei Bely, and for formalist Viktor Shklovsky, who was just beginning his career) (Goering 1991; Flack 2016; Pilshchikov 2017).

3The peak for the discussion of German theories in Ukraine came in the mid-1920s, during the period of federative relations between the Soviet republics. We will highlight four of the most characteristic cases of this reception that involved Potebnja’s legacy.

41. The first concerned a direct response to the theoretical challenge of initial Russian formalism, and is connected with the works of the authoritative Kharkiv philologist Olexander Biletsky / Alexander Beletsky (1884-1961). Soon after the end of the civil war, in Kharkiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine, he became one of the heads of the Special Committee for the Study of Potebnja’s works (the first issue of a very interesting bulletin was published containing one of his articles). A year later, Richard Müller-Freienfels’ ‘Poetics’ (Müller-Freienfels 1921) was published in a translation by Biletsky’s junior associates, Isaac Kaganov and Esther Papernaya. In his detailed and programmatic preface to the book, Biletsky drew attention to the universal interest in ‘poetics’: ‘The term has suddenly become current: not just in academic centres, but in once remote corners circles have formed for the study of poetics and poetic language, reports have been read, and discoveries made’ (Beletsky 1964: 42). He also gave a brief overview of recent studies on the theory of literature, primarily in German and French. Biletsky emphasized that Müller-Freienfels’ work should be considered within the framework of a psychological approach to the study of literature. It is thanks to this alliance with psychology, according to the researcher, that poetics ‘acquired some scientism, which over time has increasingly turned to a genuine science’ (see also about similar kind of ‘scientization’: Reinert 2020).

Be that as it may, we direct the reader’s attention to psychological poetics (Biletsky’s italics, here and throughout.—A.D.), as if not taking into account the fact that many Russian readers who have recently developed an interest in poetics are looking, primarily, for works on formal poetics. We are aware of this; but while we are sympathetic to these formal-stylistic studies (as long, however, as they do not carry over into naive statistics and a simplified mechanization of study), we do not think that they have exhausted the task of studying poetic creativity. V. Shklovsky’s lively and fervent articles (‘Collections on the Theory of Poetic Language’) are, of course, easier to read than Müller-Freienfels’ book, which requires concentrated attention and reflection in many places. But we can guarantee that this attention will not be spent in vain, that at the end of this reflection, the reader will come to something greater than admiration for the wit and giftedness of the author (Beletsky 1964: 49).

5The publication of Müller-Freienfels’ book, however, remained primarily an episode in the history of European-Soviet cultural ties, newly re-established after the interval from 1914 to the 1920s. Perhaps Biletsky or the publishers chose to translate this particular book (rather than the more widely recognized works on the psychology of art by Johannes Volkelt or Theodor Lipps, for example) left the space for the independent completion of the theory of the ‘expressive word’ within the framework of the cognitive approach—as in Potebnja’s case in the 1860s, when he chose Humboldt or Lotze as his benchmarks, rather than European philologists of the same period. During the second half of the 1920s in Moscow, and in Russia more broadly, a more anti-psychological orientation tended to prevail, influenced by Shpet and Husserl (Plotnikov 2023). A small manual by Müller-Freienfels was lost among Russian original works (for example, Boris Tomashevsky’s book ‘Poetics. A Theory of Literature’, was first published in 1925, then several more times before 1931), as well as a series of similar Ukrainian works. The wager on Müller-Freinfels proved, in fact, to have been unwarranted, not to have ‘worked’ (Fizer 1981; Salgaro 2021), unlike the attempts of Viktor Zhirmunsky. At the radical members of OPOYAZ’s (Shklovsky and Eichenbaum) peak, Zhirmunsky sought to bring German literary critics themselves to the fore in the processes of German-Russian reception: first Oskar Walzel (1923), then morphologists like Wilhelm Dibelius, or the moderate literary sociology of Leon Schücking (1927–1928) (Tchougounnikov 2003, Comtet 2011). The pervasive and declarative anti-psychologism of the OPOYAZ after Shklovsky’s article on Potebnja (Shklovsky 1919) was accompanied by the ‘technical’ borrowing of a number of important ideas from psychological aesthetics (Merrill 2022)—for example, when defining the parameters of prosody, as in Tynianov’s theoretical book of 1924 (Sini 2024).

  • 1  My analysis of these publications from here onwards relies on the work of Galina Babak from our co (...)

62. The second case of indirect German influence in the humanities during the 1920s is the views of ‘neo-Potebnian’ Boris Navrotsky, author of a prominent ‘synthetic’ book as one in a line of numerous Ukrainian textbooks for would-be writers and poets1. Among them (and covering only standalone editions) the works by actual writers themselves stand out: Mike Johansen’s textbook ‘Elementary Laws of Versification (Prosody)’ (1921), Valerian Polishchuk’s practical manual ‘How to Write Poetry’ (1921), and Dmytro Zagul’s work ‘Poetics. Textbook on the Theory of Poetry’ (1923).

7It is important to briefly indicate the genre of the above works. Almost all of them are called ‘practical manuals’, of an applied nature. Unlike the works of OPOYAZ (or Tomashevsky’s books), which were mostly theoretical, Ukrainian poetics was practical (or prescriptive) in nature, like the long-standing traditional European textbooks. References to foreign research in them were also minimal. Their main goal was to teach young Ukrainian authors ‘how to write poetry’, and thus to raise the level of national literature, and in doing so, to modernise it. The basis for Johansen’s small book is Potebnja’s linguistic approach; Johansen references Potebnja’s ‘Thought and Language’. He identifies the ‘image’ as the main category of poetry, and therefore advises young authors to learn their native language more thoroughly, as it is a source of new images.

  • 2  Ustinov & Babak 2022. This book was commendably reviewed by strict connoisseur Boris Tomashevsky ( (...)

8This was the context in which Boris Navrotsky’s theoretical work ‘Language and Poetry. An essay on the theory of poetry’ (1925), similar to the small book by Kyiv neoclassicist Boris Yakubsky ‘The Science of Poetry’ (1925), situated itself.2 Boris Navrotsky (1894-1943?), like Yakubsky, graduated from the History and Philology Faculty of St. Vladimir University in Kyiv (1917), after which he worked at the renamed university (the Institute of People’s Education) in its Department of Russian Literature. He later became the head of the Department of Ukrainian Literature there and the head of the Kyiv branch of the Taras Shevchenko Institute. He was best known as a Shevchenko’s researcher, as well as a specialist in music theory. The modern Kyiv researcher Oleksiy Sinchenko, who has looked at his legacy in detail, pointed out that as well as Potebnja’s ideas, the methodological basis for Navrotsky’s theoretical searches included the intuitivism of B. Croce and the relativism of K. Vossler, and the linguistic theories of F. Fortunatov and J. Baudouin de Courtenay (Sinchenko 2016).

9The book consists of nine chapters, in each of which the author consistently defends the most important Potebnian principle: in a work of art, each element receives meaning only due to the conditionality of its internal/inner form. At the same time, the researcher expands the concept of ‘internal form’ and introduces the term ‘grammatical form’: the meaning of a word depends ‘on its different manners of arrangement’ (122), that is, the meaning of the word is influenced by neighbouring words and their grammatical forms and meaning. Thus, Navrotsky reduces the concept of imageness’ (obraznosti) to the word’s semantics and an associative game (similarity based on proximity).

10Navrotsky proposes ‘bidding farewell to this useless term’—form—and turning to the study of the semantics and phonetics of language, for, in his opinion, ‘the artistry of the poetic work is built on sounds’ (37). Navrotsky did not agree with his Russian colleagues that estrangement / defamiliarization (ostranenie) is the main goal of art (as Shklovsky has it); he sees the emphasis on estrangement as a continuation of Kantian aesthetics. Much like Lev Vygotsky, or Bakhtin’s colleague Pavel Medvedev, he criticized such formalist hedonism’ (Vygotsky 1986, 73). Navrotsky pointed out that the effect of novelty is created by ‘the sum of technical utterance devices’ (61), which in themselves do not constitute a ‘form’, but only ‘modes of utterance’: ‘In both art and science, what matters is precisely the inner content that is revealed by modes of utterance’ (62). There was a clear distinction between this and the approach taken by Biletsky in the 1920s, which was theoretically oriented to the subjective aspects of artistic perception. According to Navrotsky, aesthetics ‘should not be interested in the perception of a work of art, but in the work of art itself’ (49), i.e., the ‘word-image’ in the broader sense of the term.

11He recognized the initial impetus of Humboldt in his excursions on the origin of the metaphor, which will be discussed below in connection with his Kyiv colleague Viktor Petrov. Like Navrotsky, Petrov was a prolific philologist and folklorist close to the Kyiv circle of neoclassicist writers during the national revolution of 1917–1920 (Mykola Zerov); Petrov is characterized by philosophical interests of two kinds—Russian metaphysics, like Florensky, and Husserlian epistemology.

123. A third approach to German theories as discussed through Potebnja’s legacy was developed by same Viktor Petrov, linking Potebnja to the legacy of the German philosopher Hermann Lotze. He pointed out that the Ukrainian writer’s above-mentioned debut work ‘Thought and Language’ (1862) contains extensive fragments that are textually close to Lotze’s works (Petrov 1923; Petrov 1926). Potebnja’s disciples in Kharkiv saw this as an accusation of plagiarism (Lezin 1925; Vetuchiv 1956; Khartsiev 1927). In fact, Petrov wanted to emphasize the connection Potebnja’s ideas had with the German context of nineteenth century thought (see also Morel 2023). Petrov criticized the Potebnja school for their inability and unwillingness to see an important continuity in their teacher’s work, not only from Humboldt or Steinthal, but from the metaphysics of Lotze and, finally, the Baroque worldview (Petrov also discussed in the same period Hryhorii Skovoroda and his platonic metaphysics). For innovators in Ukrainian philology, the ‘outmoded’ romanticism and even metaphysics became allies in the fight against obsolete positivism (or more precisely, evolutionism) (Gasparov 1994; Rudenko & Prokopenko 1995).

13Nor can we forget about the hidden confrontation between Ukraine’s two university centres, Kyiv and Kharkiv. Petrov had also studied at the University of St. Vladimir in Kyiv with opponents of the Potebnians—the Kyiv linguist Mykola Hrunsky and ethnographer Andrii Loboda. Hrunsky pointed out the importance of Saussure’s work quite early on and treated Potebnya’s legacy with respect, but from a distance (not sharing the negativism of earlier Moscow critics of Potebnya in the early twentieth century, such as Nikolai Sokolov) (Sokolov 1903; Hrunsky 1929; Glushchenko 2017). Petrov points to the one-sidedness and excessively global claims of the cognitive approach in a rather benevolent and detailed 1927 review of Navrotsky’s ‘Language and Poetry’. Petrov criticizes Navrotsky for building a universal theory of creativity (both artistic and scientific) at the expense of the specific questions raised by literary criticism (Petrov 1927). Petrov’s review is printed next to a detailed and quite positive response by Navrotsky himself to a book by Heinz Werner (‘Die Ursprünge der Lyrik: Eine entwicklungspsychologische Untersuchung’ Munich, 1923), a psychologist whose work focused on the ideas of Wilhelm Wundt (Ostler 2016). Both Petrov and Navrotsky were clearly interested by ancient, elemental origins of the cultural / poetic creativity’s. The difference was that, where Petrov preferred detailed source analysis (although he avoided positivism), Navrotsky—with his musicological training—sought a large-scale interdisciplinary vision (closer to modern cultural studies).

  • 3  See also general overview: Wiemer & Seržant 2014.

144. Finally, the fourth, rather ‘separate’ case in the reception of Potebnia and the German tradition in Ukraine is the activity of Petr Buzuk (1981–1938), pupil of above-mentioned Boris Lyapunov. At the end of the First World War and in the mid-1920s, Buzuk managed to publish two books on general linguistics, which were focused on the development of Potebnja’s early psychological ideas; he especially emphasized Potebnja’s processing of Humboldt’s ideas through Steinthal (Buzuk 1918: 126). In the mid-1920s, Buzuk took an active part in Belarusian cultural and linguistic building and also in several dialectological expeditions. In his research (also that presented at the First Congress of Slavists in Prague in 1929) he refers to the recent achievements of French linguistic cartography (Buzuk 1932)3. He tries to connect German Humboldtian tradition and historical questions in the development of East Slavic languages, and deviates from what was then the generally accepted scheme of Alexei Shakhmatov, and his thesis of a ‘single ancient [oral] language of the Rus’ (Buzuk 1926). But very soon after, Buzuk and Navrotsky, as well as other Ukrainian linguists (like Vsevolod Hantsov) were subjected to repression (Brandist 2006; Seriot 2017). As early as July 1931, Roman Jakobson wrote to Antoine Meillet (in Russian), asking him to meet him at the Geneva Congress: ‘our Russian colleagues asked me to tell you that the situation of their researchers, especially the linguists, is at present such that, alas, there is no possibility of participating in the work of your commission on linguistic atlases, not for Hantsov, who has been deported, nor for Buzuk, who is in prison and nervously ill, nor finally for our Moscow friends.’ (Chevalier 1997: 39).

15In the 1930s, with the collapse of scientific ties with Europe, former themes—for example, relations with German psychologism or ‘idealistic’ philosophy in general—appear in altered or disguised forms, beyond overt recognition. Biletsky busied himself with translating, studying the views of Marx and Engels on literature, or studying only ‘progressive’ (according to the new doctrine) Ukrainian writers. But in his synthetic work ‘Problems of Synthesis in Literary Criticism’ (1940), his former emphasis on the problems of cognitivism, and the perception of reality (with emphasis on the first word) as the basis of art, is distinctly evident. Navrotsky left for Rostov and Moscow in 1934, but there the repressive Stalinist machine caught up with him, as it did with Buzuk in Minsk some earlier.

16In the 1930s, Petrov largely left folklore studies for archaeology. In an article about ‘bourgeois alternatives’ to the theory of stages of language development of Nikolai Marr, Petrov gives an ideologically exaggerated criticism of Shklovsky’s former views, as well as Vladimir Propp’s morphological theories of the folk tale. Writing in the new ideological language, he once again distanced himself from the Schiller-Kant ‘hedonistic’ attitude to art:

But what is the obsolescence of reception? Shklovsky refers to B. Christiansen. The dilapidated device no longer has any effect on the reader’s emotionalism... Alas, psychologism, banished in some cases, has made it through in others. As we can see, emotionalism is illogically made the final link in the chain of formalistic aesthetics.

[...] The ideology of bourgeois democracy defended its connections with reality, although it understood this reality as a strictly delimited thing – as ‘everyday life’ (byt) and ‘environment’. In formalistic phenomenology, the bourgeoisie goes to the Canossa of metaphysics and scholasticism (Petrov 2013a : 565).

17In the mid-1940s, having found himself in territory occupied by the Germans and therefore outside Soviet influence, Petrov (much like Yakubsky in Kyiv after the autumn of 1941) resumed his previous scientific and ideological studies of the 1920s. In one retrospective report on the evolution of Ukrainian literary criticism, he directly approached his exiled contemporary Dmytro Chizhevsky’s concept of historical epochs (Chizhevsky 1948). Chizhevsky highly appreciated Petrov’s work on Skovoroda, adding a comparative interest in the literature of German pietism to early modern studies. Looking back at the first half of the 1920s, Petrov claimed: “Within the circle [of the Neoclassicists], they explained the immediate connection between the concept of “the epoch” and the concept of “historical antithetism”, the function of denial, of direct contraposition, which marks the foundations of the formation of successive historical worldviews” (Andreyev 2019). Petrov emphasizes the ‘circle’s thesis about the development of “philosophemes from mythologemes”, which for the members of the circle meant a clear awareness of the folkloric foundations of their literary and historiosophical concepts... Even the messianic belief in the “Ukrainian cultural renaissance” was only the final link in a process that revealed the concept of “the epoch” as a literary category’ (Petrov 2013b : 824).

  • 4  This refers to the passage from the poem ‘Chumaki’ (1924) by the famous poet Maksym Rylsky, a clos (...)

18It is worth noting that in the 1910s, former Kyiv scholar Nikolai Berdyaev wrote a lot about the ‘mythologeme’ and ‘philosopheme’4—but that should not give us cause to see a prophecy of irrationalism here. This attention to the internal specifics of each antithetical epoch could, incidentally, be influenced by Spengler’s morphology of culture, among other things (in the report Petrov mentions him alongside Fyodor/Fedir Schmit, who, after Kharkiv and Kyiv, spent the second half of the 1920s leading the Leningrad Institute of Art History—the ‘nest’ of formalism) (Demchuk 2025). One very obvious influence on Schmit, Chizhevsky and Petrov are the ideas of the Heinrich Wölfflin, the luminary of German art history, especially concerning the specifics of the Baroque, and style as a particular cultural epoch. This allowed Petrov and then Chizhevsky to see a continuity in the evolution of Ukrainian thought from the scholarship of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy of the XVII century up to Skovoroda, and from the European reflections of Pantelejmon Kuliš from the 1840s–1870s right up to the neoclassicists themselves.

19After the end of the 1930s, linguistic ideas with influenced by European discoveries were developed in emigration by Vasil’ Simovyč in Prague (as a member of the famous Prague linguistic circle, and notably by former Kharkiv attendee, and junior colleague of Biletsky, Jurij / George Shevelov (1908-2002). Simovyč (1880-1944) was a pupil of Professor Roman Smal-Stotsky at the University of Chernivtsi in the 1910s, and gravitated toward the Austrian ideological tradition while also recognising the importance of Potebnja’s legacy (Simovyč 1935; Simovyč 2005). Shevelov, who during the Second World War had ample and productive discussions with Simovyč in Lviv (until the latter’s death in 1944) and then with Petrov in the initial period of emigration, did a lot to restore the history of repressed Ukrainian linguistics (Ševel’ov 1944; Ševel’ov 1991). Shevelov’s works were reconstructing the history of the humanities in Ukraine far exceeds the more cautious publications of Biletsky, who had survived the death of Stalin and Petrov (the latter was clearly returned to Soviet Ukraine against his own will in the spring of 1949 as an NKVD agent). Shevelov worked a lot on the legacy of the generation of linguists from the 1920s (drawing special attention to the ideas of Petr Buzuk), and by the 1980s he was also writing detailed and balanced pieces about Potebnja’s legacy and its connections with the Ukrainian intellectual tradition (Karunyk 2014; Karunyk 2023). It was Shevelov, with his European and American ideas about phonology and the significance of Saussure’s thought (after the forced provincialization of Ukrainian philology in the USSR), who set new horizons for the development of linguistics in post-independence Ukraine (Ševel’ov 1989; Moser 2016).

20By the end of the twentieth century the Humboldt tradition, against the backdrop of the achievements of the Geneva School and Prague structuralism, clearly disappeared from focus in most modern linguistic theories, but it still remained of significant historical interest (Trabant 1992; Jay 1996; Aumüller 2014). The idea of expressiveness and verbal creativity developed more within the framework of phenomenology (and its influence on linguistics) than orthodox structuralism (Flack 2023). Following the work of Biletsky, Navrotsky and Petrov in the 1920s, the German context for the development of Potebnja’s ideas from the 1860s to the early 1890s (associated both with Romantic philosophy and Platonism or, on the contrary, with psychologism), albeit with some necessary critical adjustments, rightly reappear in the relevant studies in Ukraine and Europe (Aumüller 2014; Tripiccione 2019).

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Notes

1  My analysis of these publications from here onwards relies on the work of Galina Babak from our common book (Babak & Dmitriev 2021).

2  Ustinov & Babak 2022. This book was commendably reviewed by strict connoisseur Boris Tomashevsky (Dmitriev 2021).

3  See also general overview: Wiemer & Seržant 2014.

4  This refers to the passage from the poem ‘Chumaki’ (1924) by the famous poet Maksym Rylsky, a close acquaintance of Petrov.

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Alexander Dmitriev, « European thought and Ukrainian Theories of the ‘Expressive Word’ (From Potebnja to Shevelov) »Histoire Épistémologie Langage, 47-2 | 2026, 163-175.

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Alexander Dmitriev, « European thought and Ukrainian Theories of the ‘Expressive Word’ (From Potebnja to Shevelov) »Histoire Épistémologie Langage [En ligne], 47-2 | 2026, mis en ligne le 22 janvier 2026, consulté le 13 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/hel/9031 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15jtn

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Alexander Dmitriev

The University of Greifswald (Germany) & Charles University (Czech Republic)

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