Trubetskoy was born into an extremely refined environment. His father was a first-rank philosopher whose lineage ascended to the medieval rulers of Lithuania. Having graduated from the Moscow University (1913), Trubetskoy delivered lectures there until the revolution. Thereafter he moved first to the university of Rostov-na-Donu, then to the university of Sofia, and finally took the chair of Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna in 1922. He died from a heart attack attributed to Nazi persecution following his publishing an article highly critical of Hitler's theories.
Trubetskoy's magnum opus, Principles of Phonology, was issued posthumously (in German). In this book he famously defined phoneme as a smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline separate from phonetics. It is sometimes hard to distinguish Trubetskoy's views from those of his friend Roman Jacobson, who should be held responsible for spreading the Prague school views on phonology after Trubetskoy's premature death.
As early as 1923, Trubetzkoy had coined the term of «league of languages» (jazykovoj sojuz), in a theological essay on the plurality of languages («The Tower of Babel and the confusion of Tongues»).
For Trubetzkoy, on the other hand, the evolution of the Slavic languages is totally different : they arose by divergence from a common ancestor, and now their geographical repartition forms the links of a chain (or rather a chain mail).
Trubetzkoy's and Jakobson's structuralism functions in a balanced mouvement backward and forward, it relies on a notion which existed prior to the Neo-Grammarians : organicism, while denying it by saying that linguistics is a social science, and it uses it to jump to the modern notion of structure.
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