Yuri Lotman

Works

• 1970The Structure of the Artistic Text

  Treats literature as a “secondary modelling system” built on natural language, in which every element of a text carries meaning.

• 1984On the Semiosphere

  Introduces the semiosphere: the whole space of sign systems in a culture, with a centre, a periphery and boundaries that translate the foreign.

Position

Lotman began with structural poetics: a literary text is a “secondary modelling system” built on natural language, in which rhythm, rhyme and composition themselves carry meaning, so that a poem is a densely organised model of the world. From the late 1960s he extended the approach to culture as a whole – behaviour, everyday life, ritual, the image of space – which he described as a hierarchy of sign systems and as the non-hereditary memory of a community. His studies of the “poetics of everyday behaviour” of the Russian nobility and, with Boris Uspensky, of dual models in Russian culture (1977) became classics of cultural history. In 1984 he introduced the semiosphere, modelled on Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere: meaning exists only within a semiotic space whose boundaries filter and translate the foreign. His last book, “Culture and Explosion” (1992), distinguishes gradual from explosive, unpredictable change. Umberto Eco introduced the English collection “Universe of the Mind” (1990), and Lotman’s work became a reference point of cultural semiotics, memory studies and translation theory. Critics have objected that the binary oppositions of his models are schematic, that the dual model of Russian culture flattens its history, and that the semiosphere remains a metaphor that is hard to make operational.

Life & context

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman was born on 28 February 1922 in Petrograd into a Jewish family of the intelligentsia. He began studying Russian philology at Leningrad University in 1939, was drafted into the Red Army in 1940 and served in the artillery throughout the Second World War. After graduating in 1950 he found no post in Leningrad during the campaign against “cosmopolitans” and went to Tartu in the Estonian SSR: first to the teachers’ institute, from 1954 to the university, where he headed the chair of Russian literature from 1960 to 1977. With his wife, the literary scholar Zara Mints, he worked on Karamzin, Pushkin and the Decembrists. From 1964 he organised the summer schools on “secondary modelling systems” at Kääriku and edited the series “Trudy po znakovym sistemam” (Sign Systems Studies), the centre of the Tartu–Moscow School with Boris Uspensky, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov. For many years he was refused permission to travel abroad, and in 1970 his flat was searched by the KGB. In the late 1980s he gave a television series of lectures on Russian culture. He died in Tartu on 28 October 1993.

Further main works

• Lectures on Structural Poetics (Lektsii po struktural’noi poetike, 1964)
• Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin: Biography of the Writer (Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. Biografiia pisatelia, 1981)
• Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (English collection, 1990)
• Culture and Explosion (Kul’tura i vzryv, 1992)