Understanding Brückner: Slavs and War from a 21st century perspective

Abstract

More than a hundred years have passed since the Polish-German Slavist Aleksander Brückner (1856-1939) published his collection of essays under the unremarkable title “Die Slaven und der Weltkrieg” (“Slavs and War”). The luminary of European Slavic studies, a scholar who had always shunned politics and even near-political debates, suddenly turned to the most acute themes of interethnic relations, exacerbated by the First World War. Then the book went unnoticed and got lost in the hundreds of other titles in Aleksander Brückner's extensive bibliography. However, from the perspective of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, Brückner's publicistic essays collected under one cover read like predictions. Even then, the scholar warned his contemporaries about the inability of Russian culture to engage in dialogue, to coexist with other, weaker cultures. In his opinion, Russia's Byzantine-soaked culture was capable only of expansion, subjugation and absorption. Brückner questioned all possible myths of Slavic brotherhood and unity. Brückner's unapologetic and insistent texts cast doubt on the scholar's reputation and turned him into a puppet of Prussian militarism – so the rumour said at the end of the war. The proposed article offers a new interpretation of the texts of the collection “Slavs and War” – as a document of its time, a synthesis of the experience of a Slavist of international renown and a warning to future generations. We will pay attention not only to the analysis of Brückner's texts, but also to the context in which they were written, the reaction they produced in society, and the need for a revised and critical edition of this important monument of social and political thought of the first quarter of the 20th century. Special attention is paid to other works by the scholar devoted to the interpretation of Russian culture, its history and connections with Western cultures.