The central aim of this volume is to introduce the work of Juri Lotman (1922â1993) into contemporary debates on cultural history and cultural memory studies. Lotman is widely read and highly renowned in the fields of semiotics and literary studies, but his innovative ideas about history and memory, formulated mostly in the 1980s and 1990s, remain little known among historians, historical theorists and collective memory scholars, especially in the English-speaking world. Thus, for instance, we do not find Lotmanâs texts included in English anthologies of memory studies or cultural history. Nor can we find contemporary introductions to memory studies or historical theory that enter into dialogue with his thinking. This volume, which offers English translations of some of the most important articles from the late period of Lotmanâs scholarly work, seeks to demonstrate how current discussions in the aforementioned fields would benefit from engaging with Lotmanâs writings.
Juri Lotman: Life and Work
Juri Lotman was born on 28 February 1922 in a family of Russian intelligentsia of Jewish descent in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg).1 In 1939, Lotman enrolled in the Faculty of Philology at Leningrad State University. Among his teachers were such prominent scholars as Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Vladimir Propp, and Grigory Gukovsky. After his first academic year, he was drafted into military service due to the outbreak of the Second World War. During the war, Lotman worked as a signal operator in an artillery regiment and reached Berlin with his regiment. After demobilization in 1946, he resumed his studies at the university and began actively to engage in research.
In 1950, Lotman graduated from Leningrad State University, but because of the Stalinist anti-Semitic campaign, he was unable to continue his doctoral studies or to find an academic position in his hometown. At the suggestion of his friends, he managed to become a lecturer at the Teachersâ Institute in Tartu, Estonia, in a province far enough from the Soviet center to escape the politics of anti-Semitism. He worked at the institute in the years 1950â1956. However, from the very beginning of his time in Estonia, he established close contacts with the University of Tartu, taught courses in the Department of Russian Literature from 1950 to 1953, then became associate professor and in 1963 was promoted to professor of Russian literature.
Lotman began his scholarly life as a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture. His early academic career is marked by a series of important monographs on nineteenth-century Russian literary culture: first, his candidateâs dissertation, defended at Leningrad State University in 1952: A. N. Radishchev in the Struggle with the Social and Political Views and the Bourgeois Aesthetics of N. M. Karamzin (unpublished, for a summary, see Lotman 1951), second, his first monograph, Andrei Sergeevich Kaysarov and the Literary and Social Struggle of His Time, published in Tartu in 1958 (Lotman 1958), and third, his doctoral dissertation defended at Leningrad State University in 1961, Paths of Development of Russian Literature in the Pre-Decembrist Period (unpublished, for a summary, see Lotman 1961).
In 1960, Lotman became the chair of the Department of Russian Literature at the University of Tartu. Two years earlier, he had initiated a new book series, Trudy po russkoi i slavjanskoi filologii (Studies in Russian and Slavic Philology), published by the universityâs press, followed in 1964 by another series, Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Sign Systems Studies). After his predominantly archival and empirical studies of Russian literature, Lotman began, from the late 1950s onward, to pay more and more attention to theoretical and methodological questions related to the study of literature, especially to structuralist linguistics and literary theory. In 1958 he started to lecture on structural poetics and semiotics, publishing in 1964 his first theoretical monograph, Lectures on Structural Poetics, as the opening volume of the series Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Lotman 1994a [1964]). Under the editorship of Lotman, a total of 25 volumes were published in this series, based partly on the papers delivered at the so-called Semiotics Summer Schools that, from 1964, began to be held annually in the Kääriku Sports Centre of the University of Tartu. Thanks to the location of the University of Tartu on the margins of the USSR, Lotman was able to invite to Tartu and to Kääriku all of the most brilliant semiotically minded Soviet scholars, mostly from Moscow, and also to offer them publishing opportunities. This group of scholars, which included Boris Uspenskij, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladimir Toporov, Boris Gasparov, Alexander Piatigorsky, and Isaak Revzin, frequented the semiotics summer schools, and gradually developed what is now known as the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School (see Grishakova and Salupere 2015; Pilshchikov and Trunin 2016). Maxim Waldstein, author of the first history of the Tartu-Moscow School, notes, âUltimately, Tartu and Estonia appeared to be Lotmanâs primary organizational and political resources. An opportunity to meet periodically in a distant place and to publish in a practically uncensored series was more than the Muscovites could wish for at that pointâ (Waldstein 2008, 36).
As a result of their collective work, the Tartu-Moscow scholars established a theoretical framework for the semiotics of culture. In the early 1970s, Lotman published a series of important contributions to the semiotics of literature and culture: The Structure of the Artistic Text (Lotman 1998 [1970], Eng. trans. 1977), Analysis of the Poetic Text (Lotman 1972, Eng. trans. 1976a), Studies in the Typology of Culture (Lotman 2000a [1970]), and Semiotics of Cinema and the Problems of Cinematic Aesthetics (Lotman 1973, Eng. trans. 1976b). However, he never abandoned his historical research on Russian literature, regularly publishing articles on Mikhail Lomonosov, Nikolai Gogol, Pyotr Vyazemsky, Fyodor Tyutchev, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and many others. In the late 1970s, Lotman wrote three consecutive monographs about Alexander Pushkin, his favorite literary figure: Pushkinâs Novel in Verse Eugene Onegin (Lotman 1975a), The Novel Eugene Onegin by A. S. Pushkin: Commentaries (Lotman 1980), and Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin: A Biography (Lotman 1982a). In the 1980s, he devoted himself to the study of Nikolay Karamzin, publishing a new annotated edition of Karamzinâs Letters of a Russian Traveller in 1984 (Karamzin 1984) and a biographical study of Karamzin, Creating Karamzin, in 1987 (Lotman 1987). In 1986, at the invitation of Estonian National Broadcasting, he launched a TV lecture series with the title Conversations about Russian Culture. This consisted of 35 episodes (about 40 minutes each), divided into five thematic units. Lotman later prepared these lectures for print, and the volume appeared shortly after his death in 1994: Conversations about Russian Culture: Life and Traditions of the Russian Nobility (EighteenthâBeginning of the Nineteenth century) (Lotman 1994b).
During the final years of his life, in late 1980s and early 1990s, Lotman immersed himself in elaborating his semiotic theory of culture; some of his most important articles on this subject are made available in English translation in this volume. In 1990, at the request of the publishing house I. B. Tauris, he published an English monograph of his semiotic theory of culture, titled Universe of the Mind (Lotman 1990). But in parallel he was already working on some new book projects, focusing on the dynamic, explosive, and unpredictable mechanisms of culture. In 1992, the last book published during his life, Culture and Explosion (Lotman 1992e, Eng. trans. 2009), appeared; his very last manuscript, The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (written in 1990â1992), was published posthumously only in 2010 (English trans. in 2013). These last books were prepared by dictation, since Lotmanâs eyesight was seriously impaired after 1989. Lotman died in Tartu on 28 October 1993 after a long illness. He was buried in the Raadi cemetery next to his wife Zara Mints.
Lotmanâs written legacy consists of many thousands of pages of academic prose on various topics, including more than 20 books and more than 500 articles. To date, the largest collection of Lotmanâs works in Russian includes the nine thematic volumes of his selected works published in Saint Petersburg in 1994â2003. Only a small, albeit substantial, fraction of Lotmanâs oeuvre is available in English (see Kull 2011; Kull and Gramigna 2014). The present volume comprises a selection of Lotmanâs most important articles in the field of cultural theory, cultural memory studies, and histori...