Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions

Introduction

I Yuri Lotman (1922–93) is arguably one of the most prominent and influential Russian scholars of the twentieth century. A cofounder of the 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. He advanced highly sustained theories on structural poetics, culture and artificial intelligence , and the relationship between semiotics and neurology; 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 causal connections in a semiotic series to the role of dolls in the 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 3 Introduction   and   situation of women and their contributions to culture (“Zhenskii mir,” “Zhenskoe obrazovanie”). 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 was adept at studying 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: his biography of A. S. Pushkin, which demonstrates how the poet designed his social behavior as a work of art (Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin), and his article on the ways in which the Decembrists plotted their lives according to codes derived from drama (“Decembrist in Daily Life”), along with several other articles, spawned a series of studies on various instances of theatricality and zhiznetvorchestvo (life creation) by Russian and American scholars of all stripes.1 This conception took hold not least because it resonated with Russian culture’s perennial valorization of art as an existential project. 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 adducing 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 enliven 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 Nikolai Karamzin) smack of overreading. Yet, to his credit, 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 offers a palimpsest of his times. After serving six years in the army, including four in combat during World 4  War II, Lotman came back a decorated soldier, one of an estimated 5 percent of the enlisted men born in 1922 to survive the war.2 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.3 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. The fifteenth Soviet republic, annexed in 1940, 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...