The Kazan school, or the Kazan Linguistic Circle, was a late 19th-century school of linguistics in Kazan, Russia, founded by the Polish linguists Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikołaj Kruszewski. The Kazan school began when Kruszewski arrived at Kazan Imperial University to study as a graduate student under Baoudoin de Courtenay in 1878, and lasted until Baoudouin de Courtenay's departure for Tartu in 1883 and the death of Kruszewski in 1887. As part of the Kazan school, Kruszewski is held to have been the first to formulate the concept of the phoneme in a synchronic context, which was part of a broader theory of alternations. In phonology, the Kazan school distinguished between the concepts of anthropophonics (relating to the physical aspects of speech) and psychophonetics (relating the psychological aspects of speech), which has been considered to prefigure aspects of generative phonology, which became dominant during the mid 20th century. Other notable linguists of the Kazan Linguistic Circle included the linguist Vasily Bogoroditsky and the Turkologist Vasily Radlov, who remained in Kazan after the departure of Baudouin and the death of Kruszewski. The Kazan school also influenced the Russian linguists Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who eventually formed the Prague linguistic circle, and the Polish Indo-Europeanist Jerzy Kuryłowicz. The views of the Kazan school have been frequently compared with those of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who corresponded with the Kazan school and was significantly better known than the Kazan school in the development of linguistics in Western Europe and the United States.
Background
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay
Although Baudouin's family descended from the French aristocracy, they had lived in Poland for several generations when Baudouin was born in 1845 (in Radzymin, near Warsaw). Baudouin felt a great loyalty to Polish cultural and political ideals throughout his career, even though much of his life was spent outside Poland. After finishing the gymnasium, he began university studies in Warsaw, where he received a master of arts degree from the historical-philological faculty in 1866. Like Ferdinand de Saussure, he spent a number of years studying under various prominent Indo-Europeanists of the day, including August Schleicher, August Leskien, Karl Brugmann, and Berthold Delbrück. In 1870, he received a doctorate from Leipzig for work on the nature of analogy, as well as a second master's degree from Saint Petersburg for a study of fourteenth-century Old Polish. His supervisor in Saint Petersburg, Izmail Sreznevsky, arranged a position for him there as docent (assistant professor) of comparative grammar beginning in 1870. In 1872, he did field work on Slovenian dialects in Austria and northern Italy. When it was published in 1875, his study of the phonetic systems of some of these dialects earned him a Russian doctorate. However, his political views and contemptuous attitude toward Srzenevsky prevented him from staying in Saint Petersburg after his initial appointment. In 1875, he went to Kazan as an assistant professor, obtaining full professorship after a year. As a provincial city in central Russia, Kazan was isolated from the rest of the academic world. Baudouin did not enjoy the working conditions of Kazan. Nonetheless, it has sometimes been suggested that this isolation had a liberating and ultimately beneficial effect on his scholarship: if work appearing in Kazan was unlikely to be heard of in the intellectual circles of western Europe, it was correspondingly free of the pressures exerted by the dominant influences in those circles. It was during his years in Kazan that Baudouin was most productive in general linguistics. The arrival of Mikolaj Kruszewski resulted in the formation of the Kazan Linguistic Circle as a forum for the discussion of current linguistic work, and Baudouin quickly developed a very close working relationship with him.
Mikołaj Kruszewski
Kruszewski was born in Poland in 1851. Like Baudouin, he studied in the historical-philological faculty in Warsaw, but spent most of his time there reading philosophy and psychology. He was particularly well trained in English philosophical logic, which is reflected by the later development of his thought on linguistic matters. After submitting an MA thesis in 1875 on a folkloristic topic, he wanted to continue his studies in linguistics, but was financially unable to do so. He had to spend several years teaching Russian language and literature to the daughters of the provincial nobility before he could take the suggestion of one of his advisers to go to Kazan in order to study with Baudouin. After corresponding with Baudouin for some time and announcing his interest in developing a genuinely scientific foundation for linguistics, he arrived in Kazan in 1878 and immediately became an active participant in Baudouin's program of research and teaching. He was awarded a master's degree in 1881 for his thesis on Old Church Slavonic, a work which contained a substantial systematic chapter on the theory of alternations and which Baudouin praised extravagantly in a published review. His 1883 Sketch of the Science of Language earned him a doctorate.
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