Trubetskoi, Nikolai

Trubetskoi, Nikolai or Trubetzkoy [Трубецкой, Николай; Trubeckoj], b 28 April 1890 in Moscow, d 25 June 1938 in Vienna. Russian philologist. He taught at Moscow University (1915–17), Rostov-na-Donu University (1918–19), and Sofia University (1920–2). From 1923 he was the professor of Slavic philology at Vienna University. A cofounder of the Prague Linguistic Circle and an ideologist of Eurasianism, he wrote the linguistic classic Grundzüge der Phonologie (1939; English translation: Principles of Phonology, 1969, with his autobiographical notes and bibliography), in which he included many Ukrainian examples. A proponent of a ‘Common Russian’ literary language (eg, in his book on the problem of Russian self-awareness, 1929; repr 1977), he nonetheless studied modern Ukrainian phonology as an independent phenomenon. In his lectures on Old Russian literature (1925–8; repr 1973) he confused Old Ukrainian and Middle Russian literature.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]