Alexander Brückner. (On His 70th Birthday)Author(s): R. DyboskiSource: The Slavonic Review, Vol. 4, No. 12 (Mar., 1926), pp. 686-689Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4202002 .

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ALEXANDER BRUCKNER. (ON HIS 70Tii BIRTHDAY.)

ON 29 January, I926, one of the oldest and most widely knowvn Slavonic scholars of our time celebrated his 70th birthday. Fifty years of most fruitful research work in various fields of Slavonic study lie behind Professor Alexander Bruckner, for more than forty years the honoured occupant of the chair of Slavonic in the University of Berlin. And still hardly a month elapses without a new contribution of his to philology or litera- ture, whether it be a piece of creative criticism in a monthly review, or a new edition of some older classic.

Bruckner, a Pole by birth in spite of his German name, was educated in the Polish University of Lwow (Lemberg) and began his career as a Slavonic philologist by a German treatise " On Slavonic Loan-words in Lithuanian" (I878). To survey, even in barest outline, the prodigious amount of multifarious research work which since that time has been pouring in ceaseless flow from his untiring hand, it is necessary simply to survey almost all the domains of Slavonic scholarship; and whoever does so, must conclude, in words like those of Johnson on Goldsmith: nullun fere scribenidi genus non tetigit; nullum, quod tetigit, non ornoavit. Bruckner's interests range far beyond the traditional ones of language and literature; he has taken the whole field of Slavonic civilisation for his province, and a vivid attention to folklore and custom, to the history of religion and of ideas, of public life and private manners, of daily objects and daily doings, lends rich colour to his treatment of all the problems that occupy the philological specialist. From the dimness of prehistoric Slav mythology to the ferments of new Slavonic literary schools in the making in these post-war days, nothing in the whole course of Slavdom through the ages has been alien to his powerful mind. Profoundly human in his manner of envisaging hIis subject, he irresistibly reminds the English philo- logist of a great figure in English scholarship, the late Dr. Furni- vall, who, like him, cared more for the fun of " living in the past" than for formal scientific accuracy, like him discovered large countries yet unknown in the history of language and literature, and like him remained fiery in speech and temper, as well as inexhaustibly active, in his hale and hearty old age.

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ALEXANDER BRUCKNER. t87

Slavonic origins, and especially primitive Slavonic religion, occupied Bruckner in the essay on " Religious Beliefs and Family Relations among the Slavs," which he contributed in i91i to the great Polish Encyclofcadia, published by the Cracow Academy of Sciences. He returned to the subject in his post-war books on Slavonic Mythology (I9I8) and on Polish Mythology (I924). A vigorous destroyer of old-established legends in these matters, he was even more of an iconoclast in his treatment of the two Byzantine monks famous for their missionary work among the Slavs: in a sensational German book Die Wahrheit fiber die Slaven-Apbostel (I9II) he showed up the close connection betw-een religious and political aims in the activities of SS. Cyril and Methodius

In the sphere of language, Bruckner's most interestinig historical work was concerned with the influences of commun- ities on each other as illustrated by the migrations of words, and with the relations between words and things. In hiis eagerness to throw light from the facts of language on those of general culture, he often lightly leaps over the barriers of recog- nised " language laws " in the airy pursuit of fascinating hypo- theses; and in his rapt absorption in the enchanted wilderness of fact, he even sometimes tends altogether to lose sight of the scholar's true aim and purpose, namely, the search for general truths governing the variety of events. At any rate, books of his like Civilisation and Language (1904), or, more especiall, The History of the Polish Language (I907) carry no less imagina- tive appeal, and hold the reader's attention no less spellbound than the more widely known books of the great Dane Otto Jespersen on the life of language, and on the story of English speech. And the two-volume Etymological Dictiontary of the Polish Language, now passing through the press at Cracow, besides being the first etymological dictionary any Slavonic nation will be able to boast of, bids fair to become as rich a mine of curious realia as any of Bruckner's works.

Bruckner's pioneer work as a great discoverer of unsuspected masses of fact, was done chiefly in investigating the early centuries of Polish literature-the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the U7th century For the considerable amount of medieval Polish prose and verse which has come to light since the old days of Nehring's Altpolnische Sprachdenkmdler (I886), we are indebted very largely to Bruckner's researches, embodied in an elaborate three-volume work on The Religious Literature of M1edieval Poland (I902-4); and his three famous essays on

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688 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW.

" The Latin Poetry of Poland in the Aliddle Ages " (published in the Transactions of the Cracow Academv) were nothing less. than a revelation.

In the large field of Renaissance literature-the " golden age" of independent Poland-Briickner's merit lies mainly in having been the first to lav proper stress on the life-giving influence of the Reformation on literary production in the vernacular. Studies of his like Polish Dissentt or The Literature of Arianism in Poland opened up vistas into unknown literary and historical material, which have since been eagerly explored by such younger scholars as T. Grabowski and S. Kot. He is thoroughly at home among such outstanding personalities of i6th century Polish Literature as the great poets Rey and Kochanowski, whose works he has edited and studied again and again at various periods of his life; and even the quaint, racy, full-blooded Polish which Bruckner wTrites, bears distinct traces of his constant occupation with these " Polish Elizabethans."

The I7th century, formerly known chiefly as a period of Poland's heroic struggles against huge floods of foreign invasion, has yielded up to Bruckner the secret of its amazingly large literary output, of which much lay hidden away in manuscript, owing to the severities of Roman Catholic censorship; and one distinguished poet at least, XV. Potocki, has only taken his due rank as one of Poland's very greatest writers simply owing to the fact that Bruckner literally discovered a number of his most important works.

The immense labour bestowed on thus re-shaping our know- ledge of the earlier periods of Polish Literature has never pre- vented Bruckner from diligent, thorough, and entirely up-to- date studies in the modern literature of his country; he deals with works and writers of the i8th, igth, and 2oth centuries in numberless essays, magazine articles, and reviews, in which assured and balanced judgment is refreshingly mingled with a singularly trenchant style of criticism, but also with an astounding capacity for catholic sympathy wvith the literary endeavours of the young and the youngest on the part of the old scholar.

Following the venerable example of the great poet Mickie wicz's celebrated Paris lectures on Slav, Literatures in the 'forties, Bruckner was the first Pole in our own days to present the history of Polish literature in a MVestern-European language1; the bulky volume of his German Geschichte der poltischen Litera-

1 W. Spasowicz, before him, w-rote a history of Polish literature in Russian.

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ALEXANDER BRUCKNER. 689

tur (Ist ed., I90I; 2nd ed., I922) opened a valuable series of Literaturen des Ostens in Einzeldarstellungen (Leipzig: Amelang). In Polish, he summed up his life's work on all periods of Poland's literary annals in a monumental two-volume History of Polish Literature (Ist ed., I902; 2nd ed., I908); and this, in its post- war third edition (I924) is actually the best comprehensive and complete account of Polish literary history that is, so far, at the disposal of the reading public in the new Polish State.

In the same series which he opened with his German book on Polish Literature, Bruckner also published a manual of Russian literary history. This has been made accessible to the English reader in a translation by Dr. E. H. Minns. Bruickner himself has retold the story for his own countrymen in more elaborate form in a two-volume Polish work (I922), which carries Russia's literary record down to the days of the World War. Side by side with the Polish literary history, it is the outstanding monu- ment of the veteran's truly stupendous productive vigour and ever-active literary sensibility in the hard post-war days.

Bruckner, wielding a pen always wonderfully quick and often strenuously aggressive, has waged many a bitter literary feud on philological problems with the distinguished modern Cracow group of language scholars (Log, Nitsch, and Rozwa- dowski). The more fitting is it that, on an occasion like the present, public homage should be done to him by one who also belongs to Cracow, who has modestly followed in his footsteps by attempting to write on Polish Literature for foreign readers, and who, in doing so, has freely and thankfully drawn on the riches accumulated in the adinirable works of this pastor and master of all living Polish literary historians.

R DYBOSKI

Xx

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