Culture as Dynamite

Culture and Explosion is the English translation of Kul'tura i vzryv (1992). Juri Lotman (1922-1993) was one of the leaders in the field of interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies. Despite the exile of Estonia by the Communist Soviet Union, and despite the cultural collision of the Iron Curtain dividing Western and Eastern Europe, Lotman's "new look" made him a world-renowned semiotician and culturologist (with the help of some Western confreres). Culture and Explosion is his last book, and is a noble effort to gain cross-linguistic and cross-cultural insights in Russian and general culturology. The book prophesies the idea of cultural (political, ideological, informative, etc.) explosion. Though the central part of the book is Lotman's twenty shorter essays (174 pages), fully seventy pages of this volume are devoted to the introduction, foreword, afterword, and index, written by Lotman's associates. The chapters are abundantly illustrated with examples, mainly from the rich legacy of Russian culture. Reading the book, one feels inspired to imagine non-Russian examples from mythological and biblical figures, including figures from real life.

As a young Russian of Jewish origin, Lotman was a creative intellectual in St. Petersburg. Ambitious to publish the secret societies of the Decembrist Revolt in Tsarist Russia (1825), his "culture as text" strategy was new historical criticism. Yet in the Stalinist era, he was regarded as a liberal element and seemed to become a political threat, getting involved in what the Russian authorities called conspiracy and revolution. The policy of oppression forced Lotman in 1950 to leave Russia; he was exiled to a provincial town in the Baltics: Tartu, Estonia. (The Russians had pressured Estonia to sign a "mutual assistance" pact that allowed the Red Army to occupy the country.) Discontent with the stronghold of autocracy, Lotman stood firm in (not against) the Russian policy. He became the founder of the Tartu-Moscow School, editor-in-chief of the journal Sign Systems Studies (flourishing today in Tartu). He was the so-called almus pater of the University of Tartu, and late in his life, he became an advocate of Estonian independence.

Lotman's own standing as an eminent scholar of Russian culture was established in broader dimensions: the global and diachronic dimensions of a whole culture or a cultural period, genre, or author. His earlier book, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (1990, introduced by Umberto Eco), had turned Lotman into the official channel of communication between aesthetics, poetics, semiotic theory, the history of culture, mythology, and cinema. Linguistic culturology was for Lotman both a personal and a social concept-in-change, or better a concept-in-exile. His cultural criticism was not to resituate the cultural identity and the social biases of his unfortunate political situation, but rather to situate the "semiosphere" of cultural events in time and space. Cultural beliefs and knowledge energize our human activities all over the world. Lotman wrote that culture could be destructive and chaotic, but also opened up creative explosions bursting into beauty and perfection. Lotman's own metaphor stood out in the negative polarity of technology and nature: "A minefield with unexpected explosive points and a river in spring with its powerful but directed stream."

Culture transforms into all kinds of explosive substances, dynamizing the world and making us respond in life and art. Culture and Explosion polarized between gradual patterns and explosive ones. Not seen as separate or loose moments, but rather as events in their cultural context. Cultural events can in the past and future become burnt, withered, vitalized, destroyed, overlooked, rejected, stressed, disappeared, replaced, distorted, translated, changed, and exchanged. For example, the statues of victorious political figures highlight national symbols. Some statues of leaders remain in place, such as Emperor Augustus, Peter I the Great of Russia, and Kim Il-sung. The statues of Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, and Benito Mussolini have disappeared, no longer of good standing. Those of Valdimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin are on the way out...