Aleksander Brückner

Brückner was born in Brzeżany (Berezhany) in Galicia, Austrian Empire, to an Austro-Polish family who had moved there from Stryj three generations earlier. He graduated at the German Gymnasium in Lemberg (Lwów) under Omelian Ohonovsky, in Vienna under Franc Miklošič, and in Berlin under Vatroslav Jagić. Brückner first taught at Lemberg (Lwów University). In 1876 he received a doctorate at the University of Vienna, and in 1878 his habilitation for a study on Slavic settlements around Magdeburg (Die slawischen Aussiedlungen in der Altmark und im Magdeburgischen). In 1881 he received professorship at the Berlin Universary, where he long held (1881–1924) the chair in Slavic Philology. He received funds for travel and studies from his University and he resided in Berlin continuously for 58 years until his death. He was a member of many learned societies, including the Polish Academy of Learning in Kraków, the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lemberg, and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, as well as academies in Prague and Belgrade.

Brückner wrote extensively in both Polish and German on the history of the Slavic languages and literatures, especially Polish, on folklore, ancient Slavic and Baltic mythology, and on the history of Polish and Russian literature. His most important works include a history of the Polish language (Lemberg, 1906), several histories of Polish literature in Polish and German, a history of Russian literature, an etymological dictionary of the Polish language (Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego, 1927), works on Slavic and Baltic mythology, an encyclopedia of Old Poland, and a 4-volume history of Polish culture (Kraków, 1930–46). Brückner was a specialist on the older periods of Polish and Slavic culture and was the discoverer, interpreter, and publisher of the oldest known manuscript in Polish, the Holy Cross Sermons. He had an incomparable knowledge of medieval Polish literature, which he knew from the original manuscripts, and was an expert on Renaissance and early modern Polish literature.

In general, Brückner, tried to raise the prestige of old Slavic culture both in the eyes of the Germans among whom he worked and in the eyes of the Poles with whom he sympathized. He was critical of the Russian autocracy and the centralized Russian state of his time, including the Russian liberals (Kadets) who supported a centralized state and opposed either federalism or national autonomy for the non-Russian peoples of the Russian Empire. During the First World War, he favored the Central Powers but opposed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which he believed was largely directed against a resurgent Poland and, moreover, made deep concessions to the Ukrainians in his native eastern Galicia. It was, however, scholarship, not politics, which always remained his main concern.

On the most central questions of Slavic scholarship, he believed that in ancient times the Slavic and Baltic languages had a common ancestor and he always stressed this common Balto-Slavic bond. He placed the original homeland of the Slavs farther west than most Slavists, on the territory of today's Poland. He believed that the apostles to the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius, had originated the idea of their mission on their own, and he played down the invitation from Moravia; and finally, in a polemic with the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, he took a Normanist position on the origins of the Rus', stressing the linguistic and historical evidence for a Scandinavian connection.

After World War I, that is, in 1924, he retired from the university and spent most of his time writing concise histories of Polish culture and language, especially of the Old Polish period. After his death in Berlin, his final book, a short German-language synthetic history of Polish culture, went unpublished.