Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions

1. Dante, Florenskii, Lotman: Journeying Then and Now through Medieval Space

Given his interest in complex semiotic structures and in a “semiosphere” whose ever ramifying interactions model the vast physical cosmos, it is not surprising that Yuri Lotman paused in his writings to discuss the most elaborate of all texts, the worlds within worlds of Dante’s La Divina Commedia. Indeed, these two authors seem almost made for each other, for their passion for meaning (and meaning making) against a moving backdrop of epistemology and geo- and astrophysics are uncannily similar . In Universe of the Mind Lotman juxtaposes the vertical journey of Dante the pilgrim and the horizontal journey of the curious, courageous, yet “morally indifferent” Ulysses as symbolic of the seam separating the medieval and the Renaissance worldview. Homer’s “wily king of Ithaca,” argues Lotman, “becomes in Dante the man of the Renaissance , the first discoverer and the traveller. This image appeals to Dante by its integrity and its strength, but repels him by its moral indifference. But in this image of the heroic adventurer of his time . . . Dante discerned something else, not just the features of the immediate future, the scientific mind and cultural attitudes of the modern age; he saw the coming separation of knowledge from morality, of discovery from its results, 41 1 Dante, Florenskii, Lotman Journeying Then and Now through Medieval Space   of science from the human personality” (Universe of the Mind, 184). Lotman ’s key point is that Ulysses’ journey—in Dante, if not in Homer—is only over space per se (however new and mysterious), that is, it embraces the notion of pure contiguity, whereas Dante the pilgrim’s journey is down and up symbolic space, which is to say, space that is perceived as attached to meaning every step of the way and that is embodied textually through the logic of metaphor and transference. Thus Ulysses and his crew can see what eventually becomes Mount Purgatory before their shipwreck in the Southern Hemisphere but have no idea what it is (what it means—i.e., this place where there is supposedly no landfall) and will be unable to make their way to it. Hence, Dante the pilgrim and Ulysses the pagan traveler are “doubles” and “antipodes,” just as their respective journeys are, in Lotman’s reading, symmetrical yet antithetical (183–85). Curiously, however, Lotman does not come alone to his analysis of these two quintessential journeys in the Commedia. He too has a double and an antipode, as it were: the priest, philosopher, and mathematician Pavel Florenskii, whose remarks in Imaginary Spaces in Geometry Lotman takes as his point of departure.1 Of all the possible commentators on Dante’s work, Lotman singles out Florenskii and his unique way of incorporating issues of faith and spatial poetics in a post-Einsteinian world as his initial and, as it turns out, only interlocutor in this section of Universe of the Mind (177–85). After citing at length a crucial passage from Imaginary Spaces in which Dante and Virgil are described as experiencing something like the “bending” of space as they climb the bulge of Lucifer’s haunch in the Inferno, Lotman concludes that “Florensky in his eagerness to show how much closer to the twentieth century is the medieval mind than the mechanistic ideology of the Renaissance gets somewhat carried away (for instance the return of Dante to earth [Paradiso , I, 5–6] is only hinted at and there are no grounds for assuming that he travelled in a straight line); but the problem of the contradiction in the Commedia between real-everyday space and cosmic-transcendental space, which he highlights, is a crucial one, although the solution to this contradiction has to be sought in another direction” (179). In other words, Florenskii appears to have the correct conceptual instincts but has lost his bearings, so to speak, with the result that the “solution . . . has to be sought in another direction.” We might say then, if we agree with Lotman, that the philosopher-priest is, despite his piety and heroic life, a kind of Ulysses (but ironically, a faith-based, Christian one) of Dante 42 :        studies—a bold but misguided traveler.2 In this essay I expand on this dialogue between Lotman and Florenskii about the meaning of spatial poetics in the Commedia and try to ascertain how Lotman’s and Florenskii ’s different readings of the Dantesque viaggio provide insights into their respective views of Russian culture. I will suggest...