Culture and Semiotics: Notes on Lotman's Conception of Culture

Yuri Lotman (1922-1993) started as a historian of Russian literature. The main focus of his interest in this phase of his career, after he started teaching at the University of Tartu in 1954, was the work of Alexander Radishchev, Nikolai Karamzin, and Peter Vyazemsky at the end of the eighteenth century, and the writers associated with the Decembrist movement. At this time he mastered all skills necessary for a research philologist: archival and detective techniques for tracing unknown or missing manuscripts, as well as textual and editorial activities. A considerable part of his time was taken up with biographical studies concerning the aforementioned writers. He remained faithful to his interest in biography in the subsequent period, when he became the leading figure in the Moscow-Tartu structural-semiotic school in the sixties.

Even in Lotman's work of the fifties, his studies of the history of literature displayed an enormous range of subjects. From the outset, his books and essays covered the Lay of Igor's Campaign as well as classic nineteenth-century authors after (and especially including) Pushkin and Gogol; eventually he also turned to Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Brodsky. As to method in these studies: abundant facts give rise to broad typological generalizations, detailed empiricism is accompanied by abstract scientific thinking, and the focus on form and content does not clash with the interest in historical context. He assigns special significance to the philosophy and history of social thought. Lotman was particularly interested in the way philosophical ideas, worldviews, and social values of a given period are enacted in its literature. For Lotman, a period's literary and ideological consciousness, worldview, and the aesthetics of its trends and currents, have a systemic quality. These categories are not a loose conglomerate of various convictions concerning the world and literature, but a hierarchic group of cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic values. Lotman's analysis of the artistic text related both text and author to the supraindividual public sphere of a given period.

The structural semiotics stage in Lotman's career started at the beginning of the sixties. Lectures on Structural Poetics (1964) was the first significant publication of that period. It introduced the renowned series Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Works on sign systems), one of the main initiatives of the Moscow-Tartu group. This shift from traditional philology to cultural semiotics manifested itself in a change of descriptive language, namely the adoption of more unified and disciplined descriptive metalanguage. On the one hand, the new, more exact language was invented to help researchers of different humanistic specialties communicate; on the other hand it made possible comparisons between various domains of human reality. There were, of course, other reasons for the change in the context of a totalitarian Soviet state: the unspoken wish to purify the humanities of socialist-realist ideological constraints, and the expressed need to give the accuracy and prestige of objective science to humanistic discourse.

In this process of creating a new descriptive language, there had been of course both Russian and foreign predecessors. The most important sources were structural linguistics (Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy), the Russian formalist school (Yuri Tynjanov), the works of the Bakhtin circle, folklore studies (Vladimir Propp, Peter Bogatyrev), psychology (Lev Vygotsky), and film technique (Eisenstein). With such a variety of sources, the new language of the humanities devised by the Moscow-Tartu group was not without some degree of eclecticism, even of impurity. Unlike the other classic semiotic systems produced by Louis Hjelmslev or Algirdas Julian Greimas, the one which was forming in Tartu failed to produce a consistent formal network of ideas for the study of human sign-making. Although the Russian and Estonian scholars use the notions of sign, meaning, and language, they avoid detailed metasemiotic discussions. The variety of subjects taken up was to compensate for the relative scarcity of philosophical and methodological considerations.

Apart from their aversion to abstract speculations on the logical and philosophical foundations...