The Companion to Juri Lotman

A Semiotic Theory of Culture

Marek Tamm, Peeter Torop, Marek Tamm, Peeter Torop

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350181632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Juri Lotman (1922–1993), the Jewish-Russian-Estonian historian, literary scholar and semiotician, was one of the most original and important cultural theorists of the 20th century, as well as a co-founder of the well-known Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics. This is the first authoritative volume in any language to explore the main facets of Lotman's work and discuss his main ideas in the context of contemporary scholarship. Boasting an interdisciplinary cast of contributing academics from across mainland Europe, as well as the USA, the UK, Australia, Argentina and Brazil, The Companion to Juri Lotman is the definitive text about Lotman's intellectual legacy. The book is structured into three main sections – Context, Concepts and Dialogue – which simultaneously provide ease of navigation and intriguing prisms through which to view his various scholarly contributions. Saussure, Bakhtin, Language, Memory, Space, Cultural History, New Historicism, Literary Studies and Political Theory are just some of the thinkers, themes and approaches examined in relation to Lotman, while the introduction and thematic Lotman bibliography that frame the main essays provide valuable background knowledge and useful information for further research. The book foregrounds how Lotman's insights have been especially influential in conceptualizing meaning making practices in culture and society, and how they, in turn, have inspired the work of a diverse group of scholars. The Companion to Juri Lotman shines a light on a hugely significant and all-too often neglected figure in 20th-century intellectual history.

Chapter 1
Lotman’s life and work

Tatyana Kuzovkina

Juri Lotman was born in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) on 28 February 1922 into a family of Russian intelligentsia of Jewish descent. His parents, who came from Odessa, were the first generation to live in Saint Petersburg. His father was a lawyer who specialized in copyright matters. His mother was a dentist. They tried their best to give their children a well-rounded education by enrolling them in one of the best schools in the city, Petrischule. The children took music lessons at home as well as regularly visiting museums and the theatre. As a family, you could often find them reading out loud, drawing and publishing handwritten magazines. His older sister, Inna, became a composer, musicologist and teacher. His middle sister, Lidia, was a famous literary scholar who specialized in literature of the nineteenth century. His youngest sister, Victoria, became a cardiologist. In 1939 he graduated with a gold medal (first-class honours) and was admitted to the Faculty of Philology at Leningrad State University without having to take an entrance exam. In his first year he was drawn to the area of folklore. He attended the lectures of Mark Azadovsky and presented at a seminar of Vladimir Propp. Apart from this, he studied at one of Grigory Gukovsky’s seminars on eighteenth-century Russian literature (1995a; 1995b ¹ ).

In October 1940, while Lotman was in his second year of university, he was called to serve in the military. During the Second World War he served as a signal operator in the artillery regiment. He was awarded three military orders and four medals. In 1986, in a letter to his close friend and colleague Boris Egorov, Lotman retrospectively penned his life motto: ‘I have always considered circumstances unworthy of being blamed. Circumstances can break or destroy a great person, but they cannot become the defining factor of his life’ (1997a: 348). During the war, he actively engaged in self-education: he studied French, read textbooks, articles and monographs on philosophy, the history of literature and Russian history and was interested in the era of Ivan Grozny. In letters to his sister, Lidia, in 1943, he had already begun to write statements about the need to look at culture as a whole, distinguishing between synchronic and diachronic levels. Judging by the letters, these perspectives were probably formed through the influence of Oswald Spengler’s book The Decline of the West, upon which he happened to stumble (Kuzovkina 2020; Kuzovkina et al. 2021). After the war, Lotman completed another year and a half of mandatory service in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. He worked as an artist in the regimental theatre. During his trips to Berlin, he would attend exhibitions and performances. Throughout his life he exercised his talent as a sketch artist, making random sketches during meetings and giving his cartoon drawings to friends (Kuzovkina and Daniel 2016).

Having returned to Leningrad in December 1946, Lotman resumed his studies at the university. He attended the lectures of Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Arkady Dolinin and Viktor Zhirmunsky. During a seminar of Nikolay Mordovchenko he learned about literature, journalism, the movement of freemasonry in Russia during the eighteenth century and analysed Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. In the archives of the freemason Maksim Nevzorov, Lotman discovered the original Russian pamphlet entitled Short Instructions for Russian Knights by Matvey Dmitriev-Mamonov. The publication of this document was Lotman’s very first scholarly article (1949), which became a significant piece in the study of the movement of social thought in Russia. Two articles that he had gathered to be published in a volume dedicated to the eighteenth century were given to Gukovsky but disappeared after his arrest. One of them referred to the French sources of Karamzin’s articles in The European Herald (1995a: 34). The second appeared to be a correspondence with commentary between freemasons Aleksey Kutuzov and Ivan Turgenev (published in 1963). In addition to this, Lotman decided on the topic of his dissertation, which was actually written while he was still an undergraduate student (1995a: 40).

Lotman’s final years at the university coincided with the Stalinist anti-Semitic campaign. From March to April 1949, during party meetings at Leningrad State University, the ‘cosmopolitans’ were exposed. Lotman’s professors (Azadovsky, Zhirmunsky, Gukovsky, Eikhenbaum) were accused of ‘servility to the West’. At a meeting at the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), a question was raised about Lotman’s sister, Lidia, a student of Eikhenbaum who was ‘infected with the ideology of cosmopolitanism and formalism’ (Druzhinin 2012: 297–8). Lotman graduated from university with flying colours in 1950, but as a Jew he was not accepted into graduate school and was unable to find a job in Leningrad. He somehow heard that there was a need for lecturers at the Teachers Institute in Tartu and called the director, who decided to hire him regardless of his personal identity as a Jew. In Estonia, antisemitism was not as strong as it was in Moscow or Leningrad as the government’s efforts were primarily aimed at combating ‘bourgeois nationalism’. In the spring of 1949, there were mass deportations of the locals and ‘purges’ of the intelligentsia. Lotman later wrote that ‘not knowing the language and circumstances’ prevented him from seeing the tragedy of the situation in which he found himself (1995a: 40). Once he became a ‘Russifier’, Lotman behaved like an intellectual whose actions contributed to the establishment of a cultural dialogue. He studied Russian-Estonian literature and cultural connections (1958a; 1987a; Lotman and Isakov 1961), and wrote a literary textbook for Estonian schools (Lotman and Neverdinova 1982), a methodological guide for teachers (Lotman and Neverdinova 1984) and a textbook on Russian literature in Estonian (1982). Lotman worked for five years at the Teachers’ Institute (1950–5), becoming a lecturer and the head of the department of Russian Language and Literature in 1952.

Simultaneously, starting in September 1950, he gave lectures on the history of Russian literature, criticism and journalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the University of Tartu. In June 1954, he officially accepted a full-time position as associate professor in the Department of Russian Literature. During his time working at the university, in addition to teaching courses on the history of literature, Lotman gave lectures on linguistics, semiotics, analysis of literary texts, methods of teaching literature in schools and many specialized courses on the works of Karamzin, Pushkin, Lermontov, Baratynsky, Gogol, Tyutchev, the poetics of everyday behaviour, the history of the salons in Europe and Russia, film theory, the theory of prose and structural poetics. ‘Until the mid 1980s, he taught at least ten hours a week, while in the 1960–70s [. . .] he taught 12–14 hours a week.’ A total of eighty-four theses were defended with the guidance of Lotman (Kiseleva 1996: 7).

In 1951, Lotman was married to Zara Mints (1927–90), who was a graduate of Leningrad State University and a student of the leading specialist of the Silver Age, Dmitry Maksimov. After going to Tartu, she also initially worked at the Teachers’ Institute; then in 1956, she became a senior lecturer in the Department of Russian Literature at the University of Tartu (from 1964 she worked as a lecturer and from 1979 a professor). Zara Mints headed the Silver Age study of Russian Literature in the department, was editor of the department’s publications and assisted Lotman in preparing his works for publication.

Figure 1.1 Juri Lotman in 1950s. © Juri Lotman Semiotics Repository, Tallinn University.

In 1952, Lotman successfully defended his candidate’s dissertation entitled Alexander Radishchev in the Struggle with the Social and Political Views and the Bourgeois Aesthetics of Nikolay Karamzin. Beginning in 1955, he started to cooperate with a newly formed group by studying the eighteenth century in the Pushkin House. Strict historicism, the study of literature as part of the movement of social thought, ‘a thorough analysis of the breadth and depth of that era’s cultural life’ (1973a: 206, 210) is how Lotman characterized the method of his teacher, Nikolay Mordovchenko, whom Lotman followed. The end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s saw, in addition to the works of Karamzin and Radishchev, the advent of articles on subjects such as Russian–German literary ties (1959), the semiotics of everyday behaviour (1958b), the problems of cultural interpretation and the reception of the ideas of the Russian Enlightenment (1958c; 1967a).

From 1954 to 1960, the first steps towards the creation of a world-famous philological centre were made under the leadership of Lotman and Egorov, who was head of the department at that time. In many ways, the rector of the University of Tartu, physicist Fyodor Klement, made a large contribution to this initiative. At the Fourth International Congress of Slavists (Moscow 1958), Studies on Russian and Slavic Philology in the series Acta Universitatis Tartuensis were presented, with Lotman opening with a monograph on Andrei Kaysarov, a professor of Russian language and literature at the University of Tartu in the nineteenth century (1958). In 1959, Lotman received his first international invitation to the Schiller conference in the German Democratic Republic, although the trip did not take place due to the ‘late submission of documents’ (the official version). In 1961, at the University of Leningrad, Lotman successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, entitled Paths of Development of Russian Literature in the Pre-Decemberist Period. The subject was the development of literature in the pre-Pushkin period and the revised, traditional assessments of literary associations of that time, considering the overall historical and cultural background and clarifying their stylistic and ideological positions.

In the second half of the 1950s, Lotman carefully followed new methodological research initiatives in the humanities. He and his colleagues discussed Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics and Society (Egorov 1999: 91–2) and different points of view on structural linguistics in the journal Voprosy iazykoznaniia. In 1960, Egorov moved to Leningrad, and Lotman became the professor and chair of the Department of Russian Literature (1963a).

Lotman’s academic work cannot be divided into historical-literary and semiotic periods as his empirical and theoretical research go hand in hand, contributing to one another. With both of these academic streams, his research method continued to develop in a spiralling motion: at each new turn, he would gather new material, go into greater depth and complement that which had been discussed earlier. In September 1960, Lotman started to teach a course called ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’. ² The ideas for the course (e.g. comparing the writer as thinker to the writer as artist, or the need for a new scientific language) formed the basis of his first monograph on structural poetics. In lectures he stated that a work of art is structural and that it has a purpose and a design. Its primary artistic structures (style and manner of writing) and its secondary artistic structures (subject, plot, composition, direct notes from the author) interact with each other in a complex way. In 1962, his first article was published on the problem of similarities between art and life. While relying on the definition of ‘opposition’ given in Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s Fundamentals of Phonology, Lotman focused on the stages of aesthetic perception in particular, contrasting ‘depicted ones with non-depicted ones’ and concluding that ‘differences in perception are relative, not objective’ (1962a: 97). His second article discussed the difference between linguistic and literary concepts of structure. Lotman described both the text and underlying reality as a complex ‘multi-level structure’ (1963b: 48): ‘both the sys...