Culture and Communication. Yuri Lotman

       Introduction

      ANDREAS SCHÖNLE

      Yuri Lotman (1922–1993) is one of the most prominent and influential Russian scholars of the twentieth century.¹ A cofounder of the so-called Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, he applied his mind to a wide array of disciplines, from aesthetics to literary and cultural history, narrative theory to intellectual history, cinema to mythology, not to speak of cybernetics. He advanced highly sustained theories on structural poetics, culture, and artificial intelligence, as well as the relationship between semiotics and neurology;² he proposed sweeping typological generalizations, such as his opposition between Russian and Western cultures; and he excavated layer after layer of Russian literary, cultural, and intellectual history. His interests ranged from how causal connections work in a semiotic series to the role of dolls in a system of culture. He touched on Freud, Charlie Chaplin, and Lenin. His semiotic analyses of Russian culture included studies of dueling, card-playing, and the theatricality of polite society. Considered groundbreaking in the context of Soviet disdain for the nobility, his thick description of aristocratic culture devoted appreciable attention to the situation of women and their contributions to culture (his long description of “A Woman’s World” is translated in this volume for the first time). Along with numerous studies of Russian high literature from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, he investigated the semiotics of St. Petersburg, the role of architecture in culture, and the symbolic construction of space. In a path-breaking interdisciplinary vein, he studied the interrelationship among various kinds of art, be it the impact of theater on painting or of landscape design on poetry. Perhaps his most influential ideas concerned the interpenetration of the arts and everyday life: along with several other articles, his biography of Alexander Pushkin, which demonstrated how the poet designed his social behavior as a work of art (Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin: A Writer’s Biography) and his article on the ways in which the Decembrists plotted their lives according to codes derived from drama (“The Decembrist in Daily Life”) spawned a series of studies on various cases of theatricality and “life-creation” [zhiznetvorchestvo] by Russian and American scholars of all stripes.³ This conception took hold not the least because it resonated with Russian culture’s recurrent valorization of art as an existential project, the notion that art formulates not only aesthetic values, but also desirable ways of living.

      Lotman was both a theorist and a historian. His uncanny command of Russian print culture not only enabled him to introduce substantial revisions to Russia’s historiographic paradigms, transforming the ways in which his readers thought of Russia’s identity, but also stoked one of his most endearing talents—his knack for pointing to unexpected, poorly known facts of Russian and, sometimes, world culture in support of a theoretical position. Indeed, perhaps his greatest asset was the ability to underpin history with theory and substantiate theory with history, casting a new light on everything he touched. He was a daring and imaginative thinker. He did not shy away from speculation and sometimes was prone to confusing his erudition with a license to conjecture. His skill at finding patterns and subtexts, honed on the practice of literary analysis, served him less well when applied to social behavior: some of his last historiographic ventures (for example, his richly contextual biography of Nikolay Karamzin) smack of overreading. Yet, his theoretical investigation of the role of chance and unpredictability in history and culture, which he presented in his last theoretical book, Culture and Explosion [Kul′tura i vzryv], tempered this penchant for overdetermination. He died before he could consider how this new premise would transform his interpretations of distinct episodes of Russian literature and culture.

      In many ways his career offered a palimpsest of his times. After serving six years in the army, including four in combat during World War II, Lotman came back a decorated soldier, one of an estimated five percent of the enlisted men born in 1922 to survive the war.⁴ He enrolled in Leningrad State University to finish his undergraduate studies, but despite his brilliant performance and glowing recommendation from the army, he could not be admitted to graduate school on account of his Jewish background.⁵ For the same reason, he experienced difficulties finding a job, until he landed a position as teacher of Russian literature in a two-year pedagogical institute in Tartu, Estonia. Annexed in 1940, the fifteenth Soviet republic needed russification, and local authorities did not deem Lotman’s ethnicity a liability. Becoming a resident of Estonia proved to be a blessing in disguise. Lotman quickly began to teach classes in the Department of Russian Literature at Tartu University. In 1952, he finally was able to defend his dissertation at Leningrad University. By 1954, he was a regular faculty member at Tartu University. While ostensibly marginalized by this displacement from the two capitals, Lotman took advantage of the comparatively more relaxed atmosphere of Estonian intellectual life and progressively built the Department of Russian Literature into a pioneering theoretical and historical powerhouse.

      In the 1950s Lotman worked on a reconceptualization of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century intellectual and literary history. Inspired by the emergence of structuralism in Moscow, he began publishing on theoretical issues in 1962 and the following year made contacts with Moscow colleagues.⁶ The institution of biannual summer schools on “secondary modeling systems”⁷ near Tartu helped establish intellectual and personal links with Moscow scholars, which enabled the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics to coalesce.⁸ In the 1950s and 1960s, Lotman’s scholarship was first published in scientific journals at Tartu University, although Lotman was never completely barred from mainstream publication in Moscow or Leningrad. Despite small runs and poor distribution, his articles on semiotics drew the attention of elite intellectual circles in Moscow and Leningrad, and, subsequently, abroad. Starting in 1964, translations of his articles began to appear in various Western European countries, the United States, and Japan.⁹ His reputation steadily grew over the years, and by 1988 he had become a TV star, presenting his study of the culture of the nobility in a series of televised lectures. When he died on October 28, 1993, Estonian president Lennart Meri interrupted his state visit to Germany to deliver an oration after the funeral: the Jewish scholar who had been hired to assist in russifying the Republic had become a pillar of Estonian national pride.¹⁰

      Since then, Estonian and Russian academic circles have engaged in a lively and spirited reevaluation of Lotman’s legacy. While his colleagues and former students at Tartu continued to work broadly within his conceptual frameworks, two different lines of succession coalesced institutionally and methodologically. Work on semiotics proceeded apace in the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu, while work on Russian cultural history was carried forward in the Department of Slavic Studies. This division reflected a breakdown of the unique synthesis between history and theory Lotman had attempted, as literary and cultural historians in the 1990s and 2000s in Russia engaged in much more empiricist, text- and archive-based, and theory-adverse studies. Lotman’s semiotic legacy found a home on the pages of Sign Systems Studies, a journal Lotman had founded in 1964 under the title of Trudy po znakovym systemam and which was rebranded as an English-language semiotics journal in 1998.¹¹ The work in literary and cultural history by Lotman’s former students and colleagues was dispersed across various journals, but came together in the four thick issues of the Lotman Volume [Lotmanovskii sbornik].¹² Meanwhile, the history of the Tartu-Moscow