ABSTRACT
Alexander Veselovsky took a very different line than Potebnja, starting not from language and semantics or from the ‘internal form’ of the word, but from ethnology and the study of literary plots, the external form of literary genres. In Historical Poetics Veselovsky was among the first to understand the significance of ethnology for studying the origin of poetry.208 In particular, he elaborates the theory of primitive syncre tism of artistic and poetic genres, a syncretism based on primitive rit ual-on popular games with a ritual flavor, to be more exact. In the same way, Veselovsky links many folklore plots to primitive traditions, institutions, and rituals. Where Potebnja’s approach to folklore uses the mythological school in folklore studies as a point of departure, Veselovsky’s uses the theory of borrowing as well as on classic English anthropology and its associated theories (Tylor, Lang, E.S. Hartland, and especially Frazer).209 He in fact develops a compromise: motifs are formed automatically as a reflection of archaic social life, whereas plots are diffused by means of borrowing.
