Alexander Potebnja was born into a noble family in 1835 on his family's estate in Manev, near the village of Gavrilovka near Romny, Government of Poltava, then part of the Russian Empire, now Ukraine. He received his primary education in the Polish school of the city ofRadom. He studied law, history, and philology at the Imperial University of Kharkov. In the early 1860s he was known as an active ethnographer, he took part in folklore expeditions in Poltava and Okhtyrka counties. His teachers were the brothers Peter Lavrov and Nikolai Lavrov and Professor Ambrose Metlinsky. He graduated from the University in 1856, served briefly a teacher of literature at a school in Kharkov, and then in 1861 he defended his master thesisCertain characters in the Slavic folk poetry, before beginning to lecture at the Imperial University of Kharkov. In 1862 he published his most important work Thought and Language, and in the same year he went on a trip abroad. He attended lectures at the University of Berlin, he studied Sanskrit and visited several Slavic countries. In 1874 he defended his doctoral dissertation entitled Notes on Russian Grammar. In 1875, he became a professor at the Imperial University of Kharkov. He also presided over the Kharkov Historical-Philological Society and was a member of the Bohemian Society of Sciences.
Work
As a linguist Potebnja specialized in four areas: the philosophy of language, the historical phonetics of the East Slavic languages, etymology, and Slavic historical syntax. His major works on the philosophy of language are Thought and Language ; On the Relation among Some Representations in Language ; his doctoral dissertation, From Notes on Russian Grammar ; and the posthumously published Language and Nationality. He was particularly interested in the relations among language, thought, and reality. Language for him was primarily the means by which the mind ordered the influx of impressions and stimuli. Words carry not only a meaning, but also the past experience of the individual and the nation, through which all new experience is filtered. Thus a word usually has three aspects: an external form, a meaning, and an internal form. It is through the internal form that the objective world is subjectivized. In many cases the internal form is rooted in myth and, hence, acts as a bridge between language and folklore. These ideas constitute the framework of Potebnja's master's thesis, On Some Symbols in Slavic Folk Poetry, and his monumental work Obiasneniia malorusskikh i srodnykh narodnykh pesen (Explanations of Little Russian and Related Folk Songslang\-\|Из лекции по теории словесности. Басня, пословица, поговоркаlang\-\|Из записок по теории словесности: Поэзия и проза, тропы и фигуры, мышление поэтическое и мифическое, приложенияlang\-\|Черновые записки о Л. H. Толстом и Ф. М. Достоевскомcitation needed|date=December 2012
