Friedrich Braun or Fyodor Aleksandrovich Braun (20 July 1862 – 14 June 1942) was a

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

scholar who provided philological and mythological backing for the

Normanist theory Normanism and anti-Normanism are competing groups of theories about the origin of Kievan Rus' that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries concerning the narrative of the Viking Age in Eastern Europe. At the centre of the disagreement is the o ...

. Braun came to study Scandinavian and Germanic epics on the advice of Alexander Veselovsky. He graduated from St. Petersburg University in 1885 (with a gold medal for his thesis on ''Beowulf'') and was a lecturer at the Bestuzhev Courses. He was appointed dean of the university's department of history and philology in 1905. His major writings, including an 1899 monograph on the relations between the Goths and Ancient Slavs, concern the history of Germanic peoples in Eastern Europe. In 1920 Professor Braun was sent on a business trip to Germany, where he decided to remain. He joined the staff of the Leipzig University in 1922 and published a paper in support of the Japhetic theory. He retired from teaching 10 years later.Dictionary of Russian emigres
/ref> Elena Rydzevskaya and Viktor Zhirmunsky were among his disciples. In 1933 Braun signed the ''Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Braun, Fyodor German Germanists Philologists from the Russian Empire German philologists Germanic studies scholars Mythographers 1862 births 1942 deaths Saint Petersburg State University alumni Academic staff of Saint Petersburg State University Immigrants to Germany