1 republic of uzbekistan ministry of higher and secondary specialised education

Alexander 
Potebnja
(Russian: 
Алекса́ндр 
Афана́сьевич 
Потебня́;Ukrainian: 
Олекса́ндр 
Опана́сович Потебня́) was a Russian 
Imperial 
and 
Ukrainian 
linguist, 
philosopher and panslavist, who was a 
professor of linguistics at the Imperial 
University of Kharkov. He is well known as 
a specialist in the evolution of Russian 
phonetics. 
He constructed a theory of language 
and consciousness that later influenced the 
thinking 
of 
his 
countryman 
the 
Psychologist Lev Vygotsky. His main work was Language and Thought 
(Russian: Мысль и язык) (1862). He also publisched a number of 
works on Russian Grammar, on the History of the Sounds in the Russian 
Language and on Slavic folk poetry, furthermore he translated a short 
fragment of Homer's Odyssey into Ukrainian. Potebnja was a 
corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the 
foremost academic institution in the Russian Empire. 
Alexander Potebnja was born into a noble family in 1835 on his 
family's estate in Manev, near the village of Gavrilovka near Romny, 

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Government of Poltava, then part of the Russian Empire, now Ukraine. 
He received his primary education in the Polish school of the city of 
Radom. He studied law, history, and philology at the Imperial 
University of Kharkov (PhD in Philology, 1874). 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 thesis Certain characters in the Slavic folk poetry 
(Russian: О некоторых символах в славянской народной поэзии), 
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 (Russian: Заметки о русской грамматике). In 
1875, he became a professor at the Imperial University of Kharkov. He 
also presided over the Kharkov Historical-Philological Society (1877–
90) and was a member of the Bohemian Society of Sciences (from 
1887).