The extensive written estate of the prominent Czech philosopher and mathematician Bernard Bolzano, much of which has yet to be thoroughly explored, followed a remarkably complex path after his death in 1848. While one part eventually found its way into the collections of the National Museum and the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague, a collection consisting mainly of mathematical manuscripts was donated to the Imperial Court Library in Vienna, now the Austrian National Library. The two collections will now gradually be brought together and made accessible through the Bolzano Digital Archive. A breakthrough in the more than century-long history of unsuccessful attempts to bring the Vienna manuscripts back to the Czech lands was achieved by Bolzano scholar Elías Fuentes Guillén and his research team at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
As part of the PragMatika project, Elías Fuentes Guillén and his colleagues at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences study the development of mathematics in Prague and the Czech lands in a broader European context. They examine and reconstruct mathematical practices used in teaching and in the writing of mathematical texts in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. At the centre of their research is the Czech philosopher and mathematician Bernard Bolzano.
Fascination with Bolzano and the beginning of a journey towards a dream fulfilled
“I was immediately struck by the originality of Bolzano’s ideas, including the fact that many of them were not fully appreciated in his own time,” says Elías Fuentes Guillén. His encounter with Bolzano’s work even prompted him, early in his academic career, to change the topic of his doctoral dissertation. Once he became involved with the international community of Bolzano scholars, his future direction was set. It eventually brought him to Prague, where he received a Junior Star grant from the Czech Science Foundation for PragMatika, his research project focused on Bolzano.
Photo: The PragMatika project team, led by Elías Fuentés Guillén from the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Building the Bolzano Archive in Prague
In 2024, Elías’s team signed a cooperation agreement with the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague to gradually build a digital archive of Bolzano’s manuscripts. This part of the collection was assembled by Bolzano’s friend and pupil Michal Josef Fessl, who later bequeathed it to the Museum of the Kingdom of Bohemia. After Fessl’s death in 1864, Bolzano’s papers thus came to Prague. The collection was subsequently expanded by what is now the National Museum and, from 1964 onwards, by the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature.
The digitised materials include drafts of Bolzano’s works, his sermons, mathematical, philosophical and theological notebooks, as well as correspondence, lecture notes and numerous official documents. These include, for example, university certificates, materials relating to his dismissal from his position as professor of religious doctrine, documents connected with ecclesiastical proceedings, and his will.
This year, the researchers successfully completed the first phase of the Bolzano Digital Archive, digitising more than 36,000 pages of Bolzano’s written estate held in the Literary Archive of the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague. This part of the digitised collection will be made available on an open-access basis for non-commercial use by the end of this year. The data will be managed by members of Elías’s PragMatika team. The complete digitised archive based on the Museum of Czech Literature’s holdings is expected to be completed by the end of 2027.
The Vienna challenge and an unexpected breakthrough
Bernard Bolzano’s written estate, however, also has a second major part. During his lifetime, Bolzano entrusted it to Robert Zimmermann, who in 1892 donated the collection, consisting primarily of mathematical writings, to the Imperial Court Library in Vienna, now the Austrian National Library.
Czech efforts to bring these materials back began in the early twentieth century. The first attempts came after the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia, followed by further efforts in the 1920s, when the manuscripts were rediscovered and subjected to scholarly examination for the first time. Neither attempt was successful.
Elías regarded the idea of incorporating the Vienna holdings into the Bolzano Digital Archive as something of a “wildest dream.” He set out to establish cooperation with the Austrian National Library, photographed manuscripts, built contacts and explored ways to move the digitisation of the Vienna materials forward. When it became clear that Bolzano ranked relatively low among the Austrian National Library’s digitisation priorities and that the manuscripts might otherwise wait many more years to be digitised, he began looking for a solution backed by stronger institutional support. He secured support from the Presidium of the Czech Academy of Sciences and from colleagues in Germany and the United Kingdom, while also preparing a detailed case of his own. Then came an unexpected breakthrough.
After more than a year of negotiations, the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the Austrian National Library reached an agreement under which Bolzano’s manuscripts will be moved up the digitisation queue. The costs, which were substantially reduced, will be covered by the Czech side. As a result, approximately another 11,500 pages of Bolzano’s estate held in Vienna will be made available in the gradually expanding Bolzano Digital Archive as public-domain material. They will also be accessible through the Austrian National Library’s website.
For the first time, the two most important collections of Bolzano’s manuscripts, which ended up in different places after his death, will thus be brought together in one place, albeit digitally. This brings to completion a process that Czech scholars had pursued in various forms for more than a century. The manuscripts themselves will, of course, not physically return from Vienna. Digitisation will, however, allow their contents once again to become part of the Czech research environment and to be accessible to anyone wishing to study them.
Photo: Excerpt from the manuscript entitled “Versuch, die Schwierigkeiten, die man bisher in der Erklärung des Phänomens der Aberration gefunden hat, zu heben” (“An Attempt to Overcome the Difficulties Hitherto Encountered in Explaining the Phenomenon of Aberration”), dating from the mid-1840s: Austrian National Library Archives (ÖNB), Cod. Ser. n. 3474 b. The manuscript was digitised by the Austrian National Library in collaboration with the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences through the PragMatika research group (GA ČR grant project 23-06540M). Available under the Public Domain Mark 1.0.
The Bolzano Archive as a new beginning
Among the Vienna materials, Bolzano’s earliest mathematical notebooks are particularly valuable for research. They show, for example, how closely he read the works of contemporary French mathematicians working in higher mathematics in the early nineteenth century—something that was unusual in Prague at the time.
He not only studied their methods but also independently reinterpreted them and applied them to different problems. The prospect of unexpected discoveries is more than hypothetical. Elías points out that scholars studying Bolzano’s manuscripts in the past found that some of his mathematical ideas anticipated later developments by several decades. The manuscripts that have yet to be explored may therefore contain further important passages.
Making the manuscripts available digitally does not mean that all of them will immediately have been read, transcribed and subjected to scholarly analysis. Elías openly acknowledges that, given the sheer volume of material, there are documents that his team has not yet transcribed and, in some cases, has not even read. Yet he sees precisely this as one of the archive’s greatest strengths: it will enable other researchers to access materials that have so far remained unexplored.
The creation of the digital archive is also tied to a broader ambition: to establish the first European centre of its kind dedicated to Bolzano research—one that will not only preserve and provide access to primary sources, but also bring together an international network of scholars around them.
