Critique of Potebnia in Boris Engelhardt’s works

Boris Mikhailovich Engelhardt (ou Engelgardt, 1887–1942) wrote two long articles which were aimed at methodological revision of Alexander Potebnia’s theory in 1920s; they were published only after the author’s demise in 2005. With respect to Potebnia, Engelhardt developed four moves: 1) he localized him on the methodological map of philology (as a representative of the «gnoseological psychologism»; 2) he substituted the Potebnia’s psychological no-tion of «image» by «symbol», which has explicit expression and serves to the com-municative and cognitive aims; 3) in the theory of poetical work, he distinguished the notions of thinking and cognition, which were confounded by Potebnia, and characterized poetry as a self-sufficient and non-cognitive form of thinking; 4) he revised Potebnia’s historical typology of verbal culture and pointed out an increase (and not weakening) of poeticism of language while the latter provides a fund of non-poetic, terminological words.