Language as the blood of nation

The outstanding Ukrainian and Russian linguist, philosopher, ethnographer, and political writer Oleksandr Potebnia (1835–1891) was a true trailblazer of the scholarly thought. His intellectual legacy still remains valuable and conceptually “fresh” at present.

Moreover, it is obvious that if the results of Potebnia’s research had truly become a decisive component of our mentality, Ukrainians would not consider the problems of their native language (such as improving and cleaning it of the hazardous, poisonous “silt”) as something phony, invented, artificial, or second-rate. But the mother tongue is, after all, an integral part and the essence of the people’s soul! And Potebnia’s studies convincingly prove that all these problems produce a direct effect on our future. The fact that Ukraine has not yet properly appreciated the scholar’s achievements is just a glaring display of an acute crisis in national culture, the overall spiritual, intellectual and public indifference, and certain narrowness of social prospects.

Oleksandr Opanasovych Potebnia was born on Sept. 1, 1835, in the village of Havrylivka, Romny district, Poltava gubernia, into a family that was proud of its very old Cossack lineage. He received education mostly in Radom, Poland (he stayed at his maternal uncle’s home for a few years), where he learned very well not only his native Ukrainian and Russian but also the German and Polish languages. (It will be recalled that this part of the country was then under Russian imperial rule.)

In 1851 the 16-year-old youth entered Kharkiv University’s School of Law. As Potebnia reminisced later, the city of Kharkiv itself and the local higher educational institution, established by Vasyl Karazin at the turn of the 19th century and already famous all over Russia, were under a noticeable influence of Ukrainian cultural traditions—they were basically Ukrainian. Under the impact of an active and rather large society of Ukrainophile students to which he belonged Potebnia transferred to the university’s History and Philology School in 1852. This may have been the early awareness of his vocation.

At 25 Potebnia defended his master’s degree thesis On Some Symbols of Slavonic Folk Poetry, and three years later the young researcher was appointed associate professor at Kharkiv University’s Department of Russian Philology. In 1867–1870 the scholar did his in-service training at Berlin University, where he took a special course in comparative linguistics and Sanskrit under the supervision of a well-known academic, Prof. Weber. The 1870s and the 1880s can be called the peak of the prominent Ukrainian researcher’s scholastic output: he published such fundamental works as Thought and Language, Language and Nationality, and From the Notes on Russian Grammar. As early as in 1865 Potebnia was elected full member of the Moscow Archeological Society and, 10 years later, associate member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (with active support from the well-known ethnographer Izmail Sreznevsky whom Potebnia considered his scholarly mentor).

For many years Potebnia conducted research in Ukrainian, Russian, Slavic, and general linguistics, as well as philosophy. He also thoroughly studied—at the world intellectual level—the correlation between language and thought, myth and language, as well as the role of metaphor in thinking. Potebnia never was an armchair cosmopolitan, for he always maintained an unbreakable link with his native land, Ukraine, and was never indifferent to the prospects of its national renaissance, the development of its language and culture.

He once said: “The circumstances of my life dictated that the point of departure in my academic pursuit—perhaps unnoticed by the others—was the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian folklore. Had it not been for this point of departure and had I grown up outside this tradition, I would apparently be doing no scholarly research.” Even if we do not take into account Potebnia’s persistent and keen interest in Ukrainian literature (this is a interesting subject in its own right: the scholar took an active part in the publication of works by Petro Hulak-Artemovsky and Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko), the above quotation alone clearly shows a special role of Ukrainian liberal arts studies in his intellectual pursuits. In all probability, the reference point in Potebnia’s research was the analysis of the most fundamental problem: “What is language? What is language for a specific individual and an entire nation, for their way of thinking, inimitable perception of the surrounding world and spiritual priorities?” (It goes without saying that this remains “the question of questions” even for us today.)

What is more, our great scholar addressed these problems not only as an expert linguist but also as a philosopher, which undoubtedly makes his studies still more valuable. In Potebnia’s opinion, the word is not just a linguistic instrument but also the basic principle of national or, more specifically, linguistic identity, for language displays the multifaceted national view of the real, abstract and mythological world. As Potebnia emphasized, every language of the world is a distinct system of thinking patterns, which makes it inimitable.

This brings forth the following conclusion (proved by the 20th century’s horrible tyrannical practice): whenever a language (even the tiniest one) disappears from the map of the world, it is a catastrophe and an unpardonable crime, which impoverishes and restrains the entire human universe. Importantly, Potebnia introduced the scholarly term ‘denationalization’ back in those remote times. These terms call for more detailed analysis.

Potebnia stressed that this terrible process means a transformation in people’s life when popular traditions, which are largely based on language, are cut short or weakened to such an extent that they become a secondary factor in the nation’s further transformation and progress. Incidentally, the oppressed people are not deprived of property or enslaved: they are just invited (in fact, forced) to send their children to schools that use the oppressor’s language.

Potebnia was convinced that when this kind of school teaches a new language to the oppressed nation’s pupils, it tries to make sure that, “other languages being equal, these pupils will be lower in all respects to those who came here in order not to forget but only to learn, adding school-taught bits to the enormous preschool stock of thoughts.” Further on, “the ethnos that is being absorbed by another one instills the sprouts of disintegration into the latter, which, naturally, produces a political effect. The more numerous and morally stronger the suppressed ethnos is the sooner this will occur—and vice versa.”

Under these circumstances, according to Potebnia, the “natural flow” of events seems to be creating extremely unfavorable conditions for the existence of the denationalized people, which, in fact, makes them intellectually subordinate to the dominant nation in the future. This is why the scholar bitterly condemned bilingual education of children at an early age (we should remember this, although some may not accept this viewpoint): “Knowing two languages at a very early age does not mean having a command of two systems of expressing and communicating the same range of thoughts; this only bifurcates this range and immediately hinders the achievement of an integrated outlook as well as of scientific abstraction.” In other words, a child should first master, once and for all, their native language as fundamentally as they can and only then begin learning other languages. And now, in the conditions of a globalized world, this pattern is of utter necessity.

In Potebnia’s opinion, “the language serves to express an idea (thought) only because it is an instrument for transforming the ancient primordial elements of thoughts and, therefore, they can be regarded as thought-making means.” He adds: “The universal features of languages are determined by the fact that they are systems of symbols that serve the thought (idea).” It is for good reason that the scholar focused so much on studying the system of mythological imaginations among the ancient and contemporary Slavs.

At the same time, Potebnia not only studied “the universal features of languages” but was absolutely aware of the importance and steadfastness of an individual’s national feelings. For the awareness of one’s ethnicity or national identity is a natural result of the natural and innate human “nationalism”—and Potebnia knew this very well and wrote about this more than once.

He fairly clearly expressed this thought in a letter to Ivan Bilyk, a writer and a public figure: “We, too, are part of the generations that generate this national identity.” Potebnia’s overall attitude to this extremely delicate problem can be seen in the following words: “consistent nationalism does not want a government propped up by violence and, hence, is not interested in the preservation of darkness (ignorance) and poverty and in keeping people away from the sources of knowledge.” Just in our day and age, in the times of Potebnia all kinds of pseudo-scholarly “theories” were circulated to justify denationalization, the “dilution” and “absorption” of peoples because it is, you see, “historically inevitable,” ”progressive,” and quite necessary. Potebnia would say to this: “In the same way you can also justify cannibalism.”

The Ukrainian scholar is convinced that a really civilized and humane communication of peoples excludes any assimilation or denationalization: moreover, these are incompatible things. In Potebnia’s view, it is a good idea to follow the world of nature, for example, the relationship between flowers and insects: insects feed off flowers and, at the same time, pollinate the latter. Is this not an attractive picture of international harmony in the humankind of tomorrow? The alternative to this is, the opposite “pole” of ethnic processes, an assimilation which Potebnia believes has always led and will lead to societal disorganization, immorality, degradation, and spiritual “meanness.” This is the natural result of strong-arm tactics on the part of the dominant imperial nation, which cannot produce any good “by definition.”

In the current unsteady and hard times of total market trade in almost all national spiritual and historical values, some people have announced (and will perhaps do it still more actively) for pragmatic, electoral, or political considerations that certain eternal and life-asserting foundations of the very existence of the Ukrainian nation—first of all, the Ukrainian language—are secondary, outdated, and unnecessary. But Potebnia, one of the greatest scholars in the Slavic world, said the following about this: “The only feature by which one can recognize a people—an unchangeable and ultimate feature at that—is the unity of language. National identity is a great historical engine, because it is a link that perpetuates the unity of a given nation. Therefore, the recognition of national identity becomes an incentive for unity inside a certain ethnicity.”

There are natural and significant, virtually symbolic, coincidences in history. Potebnia was not a political fighter—he was a great philosopher and linguist. But is it really coincidental that, exactly 100 years after the scholar’s death (on the same day!), on Dec. 1, 1991, the Ukrainian people voted in favor of Ukraine’s political independence at a nationwide referendum?