Tamm, Marek , and Peeter Torop , ed. The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture.

London: Bloomsbury
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CHAPTER 7
LOTMAN IN TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXT
Igor Pilshchikov

The intellectual lineage of Juri Lotman’s legacy can best be understood in a broader
European and global context. The methodological impetus gained from Baudouinian
and Saussurean linguistics and the conceptual transfer of the paragons of fin-de-siècle
German formal art criticism to Russia created the formalist breakthrough of the 1910s.
The theory of literature and poetic language developed by Russian formalists in the
1920s revolutionized twentieth-century humanities. The Russian Formalist School did
not possess internal methodological unity and did not manage to create a new scientific
paradigm (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense of this word). From the Kuhnian standpoint,
formalism, as Peter Steiner pointed out, ‘can be termed an “interparadigmatic stage” in
the evolution of Slavic literary scholarship’ (Steiner 1984: 269). In 1926, Roman Jakobson,
ex-president of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and a former member of OPOIaZ (the two
foremost formalist associations in Russia), co-founded a new linguistic circle in Prague.
An innovative scientific paradigm was established by the Prague Linguistic Circle in
the mid-1930s when its leaders, including Jakobson and Jan Mukařovský, proposed a
programme that integrated structural linguistic and semiotic methods for the study
of Slavic languages, literatures and cultures. Hence, formalism and its successor,
structuralism, started to spread across Europe and America (after Jakobson’s emigration
to the United States).
An encounter between Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss in the New York-based École
Libre des Hautes Études (ELHE) in 1942 resulted in Lévi-Strauss’s transfer of structuralist
methods to anthropology. In New York, Jakobson collaborated with the Czechoslovak
government in exile and positioned himself, in his own words, as a representative of
‘the Prague school of linguistics and literary history’ (Toman 1995: 247). On the other
hand, ELHE was a sui generis French ‘university in exile’ supported by the Rockefeller
Foundation and Charles de Gaulle’s France Libre (Rutkoff and Scott 1983). ELHE
employed prominent scholars who left France and Belgium under threat of persecution –
some of them, like Lévi-Strauss, due to their Jewish origin. Lévi-Strauss’s subsequent
return to France prompted the formation and development of French structuralism and
semiotics. Jakobson was also a paternal figure for the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics
(henceforward referred to as TMS), as is confirmed by interviews with the members of
the School taken by Kalevi Kull and Ekaterina Velmezova (Velmezova and Kull 2011:
300–1; 2017: 413–5; Kull and Velmezova 2018: 186).
A distinctive feature of the TMS was the combination of structuralist and semiotic
approaches to culture. This synthesis originates in Prague, from which it came to Tartu
primarily via Jakobson (Pilshchikov and Trunin 2016: 377–8). Moreover, Jakobson and
The Companion to Juri Lotman

his lifelong friend Petr Bogatyrev not only were among the founders of the Moscow and
Prague Linguistic Circles but also participated in the Kääriku/Tartu Summer School on
Semiotics. The seventh volume of the University of Tartu periodical Trudy po znakovym
sistemam was dedicated to the memory of Bogatyrev and included an obituary authored
by Lotman. In it, he characterized Bogatyrev as ‘the living history of semiotic research’
and recalled ‘a memorable evening by the fireplace’ at the Second Semiotic School held
in Kääriku in 1966, ‘during which P. G. Bogatyrev and R. O. Jakobson shared their
memories of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the first steps of semiotic research in
Moscow, Petrograd and Prague’ (Lotman 1975: 5–6).
Contemporary cultural mobility studies emphasize the importance of academic
mobility – either voluntary or involuntary – for the development of scientific theories.
Emigration, exile or retreat function as ‘a meeting place’ where important transfers
and encounters happen. Edward Said maintains that ‘the point of theory [. . .] is to
travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in
exile. [. . .] This movement suggests the possibility of actively different locales, sites,
situations for theory, without facile universalism or over-general totalizing’ (Said 2000:
451–2). Referring to Said’s ‘Travelling Theory’, Galin Tihanov emphasizes ‘the enormous
importance of exile and emigration for the birth of modern literary theory in Eastern
and Central Europe’ (Tihanov 2019: 12). Tellingly, of the six representative biographies
Tihanov mentions (the lives of Georg Lukács, Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson,
Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Petr Bogatyrev and René Wellek), four belong to former members
of the Prague Circle and four belong to scholars of Russian origin.
In a 1934 article titled ‘About the Premises of the Prague Linguistic School’, Jakobson
described the Prague School as a ‘symbiosis of Czech and Russian thought’ (Jakobson
1934: 8). He did not mention German thought as its third constituent (obviously for
political reasons), but vaguely indicated other Western influences. This definition is
confirmed by the origins of the core members of the Prague Linguistic Circle, which
included not only local Czechs and Germans but also Russian émigré scholars of both
Russian and Jewish backgrounds (Toman 1995: 103–35; Pilshchikov 2019a). The Prague
School was polygenetic because it elaborated on both the Russian formalist tradition and
the Czech version of Herbartian aesthetics (Steiner 1982b).
Jakobson posited that the wide-ranging national and cultural origins of its members
contributed to the symbiotic nature of the Prague School: ‘The School’s originality is
manifested in the selection of new ideas and their connection into a systematic whole.
Czechoslovakia lies at the crossroads of various cultures, and its distinctive character
consists [. . .] in the creative merging of streams whose sources are at some distance
from one another’ (Jakobson 1934: 8). In another article of the Prague period, he
made polygeneticism into a principle for a school of thought: ‘[O]nly bidirectional
wholes create cultural movements distinguished by significant [literally: far-reaching]
export values’ (Jakobson 1938: 233). For Jakobson, structuralist theory developed for
the advancement of Slavic Studies was ‘a systematically organized creation [. . .] of
cultural export’, aimed for particular ‘markets of cultural retail’ (Jakobson 1929: 637; see
Avtonomova and Gasparov 1997).

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Interwar Prague was one of the places open for transcultural contact, ‘the “free
market of ideas”’ (Steiner 1982b: 179) or – in terms of Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Mobility
Studies Manifesto’ – ‘a “contact zone” where cultural goods were exchanged’ (Greenblatt
2009: 251), ‘contact zone’ being Mary Louise Pratt’s concept that refers to ‘social spaces
where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly
asymmetrical relations of power’ (Pratt 1999: 34). Prague – a remnant of the collapsed
Austrian-Hungarian Empire, a nexus for the construction of a new cultural and political
Central European identity, and an asylum for émigrés from the collapsed Russian
Empire – provided fertile ground for literary and cultural theory that ‘developed at
the intersection between national enthusiasms and a cultural cosmopolitanism that
transcended local encapsulation and monoglossia’ (Tihanov 2019: 11–2).
Lotman described the same phenomenon in an unpublished article of the early 1970s
entitled ‘Nekotorye problemy sravnitel’nogo izucheniia khudozhestvennykh tekstov’
(‘Issues in the Comparative Study of Artistic Texts’), in which he elaborated on the theory
of ‘cultural areals’ formed under the influence of Jakobson’s and Trubetzkoy’s theory of
Sprachbünde. Lotman wrote:

An aggregate of cultures with certain common codes forms a cultural areal. An

intra-areal exchange is always more intensive. Of special interest for comparative
studies, in this respect, are those geographic regions where cultures of different
types have co-existed and found themselves in close spatial communication
for a long time. Examples of such regions are Transcaucasia, the Baltic countries,
the Mediterranean, and Central Europe. (Lotman 1971: 16)

Lotman’s Estonia, home to the Tartu School, can likewise be characterized as a place
open for intercultural contact, Pratt’s and Greenblatt’s ‘contact zone’. The regime of
transcultural displacement and forced academic mobility was also relevant for the birth
of the TMS. First and foremost, Lotman himself moved to Estonia in 1950 because he
was unable to find а job in his native Leningrad due to the Soviet ‘anti-cosmopolitan’
(i.e. anti-Semitic) campaign of 1949 and the anti-Semitic policy that followed. But
the Moscow branch had a similar start. In 1959, Vyacheslav Ivanov, then an associate
professor at Moscow State University, was expelled from his alma mater for the
‘antipatriotic actions and behaviour’ manifested in his defence of the ‘anti-Soviet’
poet and novelist Boris Pasternak and the ‘renegade’ and ‘US citizen’ Roman Jakobson
(quoted in Vroon and Pilshchikov 2018: 165–6). Jakobson, whom Ivanov met in person
for the first time in 1956 (when Jakobson came to Moscow for preparation of the Fourth
Congress of Slavists), became a ‘model’ scholar for him. Ivanov accepted Jakobson’s
research programme of developing a single methodology for the multifarious study
of languages, literatures, arts, folklore, myths and other constituents of traditional and
modern cultures in the framework of structural and semiotic approaches (Krylov 2007;
Pilshchikov and Vroon 2018). Ivanov accompanied Jakobson on his academic trips to
the Soviet Union, including a visit to Tallinn, Tartu and Kääriku in 1966 (Ivanov 1995:
171–3; [1995] 2010; 1999).

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In 1961, Ivanov was invited to join the newly founded Structural Typology Sector of
the Institute of Slavic Studies in Moscow, and in 1963 he was appointed head of the Sector.
His predecessor in this position was Vladimir Toporov, his college friend in the recent
past and co-author in the nearest future. In 1962, Ivanov and Toporov organized the
Moscow Symposium on the Structural Analysis of Sign Systems. This event is generally
acknowledged to be the symbolic birthday of ‘Soviet’ semiotics (Baran 1976: xi; Seyffert
1985: 14, 164–71; Poselyagin 2011). The Symposium consistently sought to develop a
unified semiotic approach to different disciplines within the humanities. For the ruling
orthodox Marxists, the Symposium was so uninhibited and unusual in its methods that
the academic establishment in Moscow reacted with unanticipated severity. Semiotic
research was persecuted and largely suppressed, and the semioticians’ regular meetings
were moved, of necessity, to Estonia. As Ivanov testifies in his later memoir, in the early
1970s semiotics was ‘semi-forbidden in Moscow [. . .] and only permitted as an import
from Tartu’ (Ivanov 1998: 10).
Lotman and Ivanov got to know each other in 1963 (Ivanov 1995: 173). In 1964,
Lotman published his first major book of literary theory, Lektsii po struktural’noi poetike
(Lectures on Structural Poetics), which was also the first issue of Trudy po znakovym
sistemam (Lotman 1964). Ivanov joined the editorial board of Trudy po znakovym
sistemam, and a semi-official association was formed that became known as the Tartu-
Moscow or Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics. The general consensus was that the
Tartu branch was headed by Lotman, and the Moscow branch by Ivanov and Toporov.
Therefore, Ivanov’s expulsion from Moscow University became the first step towards the
self-organization of what would become known as ‘Soviet’ structuralism and semiotics.
The attribute ‘Soviet’ is used in scare quotes here because the TMS was never fully
accepted by the official academic authorities in the USSR and remained a semi-formal
(although not completely prohibited) movement in the humanities.
In the perspective of the ‘Travelling Theory’ concept, the School’s forced move to
Tartu is significant. Beginning in 1964, Ivanov, Toporov and several other linguists
and semioticians from Moscow (including Boris Uspenskij, soon to become Lotman’s
collaborator and co-author) became regular participants in the Summer School of
Semiotics. The meetings took place in Kääriku near Tartu in 1964, 1966, 1968 and
1970 (see Chapter 6). The next meeting was to be held in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1972, or
Kääriku in 1973, but was suppressed, and in 1973 only a Collection of Essays on Secondary
Modelling Systems was published. In winter 1974, the All-Union Symposium for the
Study of Secondary Modelling Systems was held in Tartu. Each venue was followed by
publications of Synopses or Materials, most of them edited by Lotman.
On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 1965,
Jakobson published an article with a long descriptive title: ‘An Example of Migratory
Terms and Institutional Models’ (Jakobson [1965] 1971). Here he pointed out the fact
that the Moscow Linguistic Circle served as an institutional model for both the Prague
Linguistic Circle and another important centre of European structuralism, the Linguistic
Circle of Copenhagen. Both circles were even intentionally named to recall their Moscow
predecessor. An important feature of the Prague Linguistic Circle, however, was its

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combination of the features of two Russian formalist associations – the Society for the
Study of Poetic Language (OPOIaZ), based in Petrograd/Leningrad, and the Moscow
Linguistic Circle (MLC). The Prague Circle combined the MLC-type organizational
structure with regular meetings with OPOIaZ-type self-promotion based on the Circle’s
periodical, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague, published from 1929 to 1939.
Ten years later, in 1975, Vyacheslav Ivanov published an article entitled ‘Sign Systems
of Academic Behaviour’, in which he developed Jakobson’s typology of semi-formal
academic communities and traced the organizational structure of the TMS back to the
Prague School and its kernel, the Prague Linguistic Circle, and even further back to the
Moscow Linguistic Circle (Ivanov 1975). Ivanov classified the TMS in the same taxon as
the Prague Circle:

A necessary condition for the fruitfulness of periodic meetings of scientific groups,

the members of which are usually separated in space (these meetings excepted),
is a preliminary distribution of written synopses of keynote presentations.
This is, in particular, exemplified by the experience of the summer school of
semiotics periodically organized by Prof. Ju. M. Lotman in Tartu since 1964. [. . .]
International recognition and sober critical assessment of the achievements of
the Tartu School, as well as the Prague Linguistic Circle, were made possible only
thanks to their publications. (Ivanov 1975: 4)

From this point of view, the role of Tartu periodicals, proceedings and collected essays
is hard to overestimate – in relation to both the international standing of the TMS and
its self-organization.
Lotman and Uspenskij considered the Moscow Linguistic Circle and OPOIaZ, as
well as their traditions preserved in Moscow and Leningrad Universities, as the main
predecessors of the TMS. In the paper ‘The Problem of the Genesis of the Tartu-Moscow
School of Semiotics’, Uspenskij stated that the School ‘unifies two traditions: the Moscow
linguistic tradition with the Leningrad literary-historical [literaturovedcheskaia]
tradition, which mutually enrich each other. This symbiosis has proven extraordinarily
fruitful for both traditions’ (Uspenskij 1987: 21). Uspenskij’s paper was first delivered
as a talk at the Institute of Language and Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the
GDR in Berlin in 1981. The next year, in a paper entitled ‘Universitet – nauka – kul’tura’
(‘University – Science – Culture’), which remained unpublished until recently, Lotman
described the genesis of the TMS in a similar way, but added the University of Tartu with
its ‘Europeanness’:

The alumni of Moscow University and Leningrad University formed the Soviet
school of semiotics as a synthesis of these two traditions in the humanities. To
them, a third tradition was added: the University of Tartu. This was no accident:
the University of Tartu had its own, well-established linguistic school, and,
moreover, was always typified by a high spirit of academic tolerance and openness
to European-wide cultural trends. (Lotman [1982] 2016: 684–5)

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Linguistic and cultural polyglotism are indispensable fundamentals in Lotman’s concept

of the semiosphere (Lotman [1984] 2005). Moreover, ‘no semiotic mechanism can
function as an isolated system within a vacuum’, as Lotman put it in ‘Culture as a Subject
and Its Own Object’. He emphasized that meaning-making ‘assumes the introduction of
texts from outside the system and their specific, unpredictable transformation between
the time they enter and leave the system’ (Lotman [1989] 2019: 86, 85). It should be
noted in this context that the term ‘Tartu School’ itself came ‘from the outside’: it was
first used by the Czech scholar Miroslav Drozda in an article published in a Yugoslav
journal (Drozda 1969).
The TMS was an open, multicultural and interlingual phenomenon in terms both of
its external relations and its internal social structure, which unified scholars of Estonian,
Russian and Jewish origins (Pilshchikov and Trunin 2016). The TMS members not only
had different cultural and linguistic affiliations; they also came from overlapping, but
different academic communities. The school was not a single homogeneous institution,
but a translinguistic, transnational, transinstitutional, transdisciplinary association,
otherwise known as an ‘invisible college’ as Igor Chernov and Peeter Torop suggested
(Chernov 1988: 8; Torop 1995: 233), using a term introduced by Diana Crane (Crane
1972; cf. Vihalemm and Müürsepp 2007: 174). This ‘invisible college’ spanned all manner
of borders, identities and domains: ‘Estonian’, ‘Russian’, ‘Soviet’, ‘émigré’, ‘Orientalist’,
‘Slavist’, ‘linguist’, ‘philosopher’, ‘historian’, ‘critic’ and so on.
The question of the ‘geographical territorialization’ of Lotman’s theory can also
be approached from a different angle. It is not unusual today to describe French
structuralism and post-structuralism as ‘French Theory’, although it has been argued
that ‘French Theory’ is, ironically, ‘a peculiarly American construct that can only be
understood as the product of the blinkered enthusiasm of Anglo-Saxon academics
for a range of thought they have not properly understood’ (Baring 2011: 1). The early
ancestors of the ‘French Theory’ – Russian formalism and the Bakhtin circle – as well
as their continuation in the TMS have sometimes been called ‘Russian theory’ (Zenkin
2004; Zenkine 2006; Depretto 2010; Torop 2017, 2019) despite this theory’s apparently
German and partly Polish roots (Jakobson [1943] 1971; Romand and Tchougounnikov
2009; Dmitrieva, Zemskov and Espagne 2009; Dmitriev 2010; Espagne 2014). Similarly,
the research programme developed by the Prague Linguistic Circle in the 1920s and
1930s, and its extension, the Prague School, earned the name ‘Czech theory’ (Gvoždiak
2016; Velmezova 2016), despite Jakobson’s description of its symbiotic transnational
nature. The unique combination of (post)-Lotmanian cultural-semiotics and (post)-
Uexküllian biosemiotics developed in Tartu has been referred to as ‘Estonian theory’
(Tamm and Kull 2015; 2020), despite its mixed German-Russian origins (Torop 2000;
Kull et al. 2011; Deely 2012; Kull and Peng 2013). It becomes clear from this brief
overview that historians of ideas include Jakobson in both the ‘Russian’ and ‘Czech’
theories, and Lotman is likewise included in both the ‘Russian’ and ‘Estonian’ theories.
At first glance, postulating the existence of geographically, culturally and nationally
specific theories seems to contradict the notion of the international and universal nature
of human knowledge. However, these terms have gained a foothold in the history of

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the humanities for delineating ‘a particular historico-geographical crystallization’ of a

wider methodology (Steiner 1982a: xi), a specific culturally and geographically located
‘condensation of theories within the heterogeneous network of cultural communication’
accompanied by ‘the evolution of certain local peculiarities which then lend support to
the thinkers’ pursuits and form a mental atmosphere, powerfully shaping the ideas and
questions raised by those participating in it’ (Tamm and Kull 2016: 76; my emphasis in
both quotations). Therefore, terms such as ‘Russian theory’ or ‘Estonian theory’ should
be understood as descriptions of open systems of ideas favoured in particular cultures
and societies, rather than generated by those cultures and societies ‘independently’ from
others. The same can be applied to definitions such as the ‘Prague School’ or the ‘Tartu-
Moscow School’. A ‘school’ can be considered an emergent property of certain persons
interacting with each other (Sutrop 2015). This also involves places of interaction
(countries and cities, universities, research institutes, private homes, etc.) and means
of interaction (correspondence, conferences, collaboration, and so on). Although all
interactions are embedded in a cultural and historical context, a school’s borders cannot
be clear-cut: as Margus Ott remarked (private communication), every ‘school’ extends
to infinity (cf. Sooväli and Ott 2020). At the same time, this infinity is not homogeneous,
and interactions between its heterogeneous parts (‘crystallizations’ or ‘condensations’)
are important stages in the development of human knowledge. Therefore, different
theories ‘can easily have some parts in common, and many scholars may well belong to
both, or several, at once’ (Tamm and Kull 2016: 77; 2020: 30–1).
A transnational approach to the study of the typology and history of literary and
cultural theories can help us to outline several cross-cultural transfers of theoretical
concepts and research tools from linguistics to literary theory and structural anthropology
and further to semiotics and cultural studies. The global ‘transcultural trajectory’ of
this process (Tamm 2020: 143–4) can be schematically divided into the following five
stages of ex-, de- and re-territorialization (Pilshchikov 2019b: 224): (1) the transfer
and transfiguration of formalist ideas (‘Russian theory’) from Russia to Europe with
the formation of Prague structuralism; (2) the export of Central European structuralist
and semiotic concepts (‘Czech theory’) to the United States and then to France; (3)
their re-importation to the USSR (‘Soviet’ literary structuralism and semiotics); (4) the
subsequent post-structuralist reaction in France – exported soon to the United States as
‘French Theory’; and (5) the post-Soviet elaboration of the legacy of structuralism and
semiotics (‘Estonian theory’).
This outline is not only schematic but also incomplete. Firstly, each stage is, in effect,
polygenetic, so it can be easily built into the indigenous histories of territorialized
national traditions as well. Secondly, the scheme does not include quite a few important
phenomena such as Danish glossematics, or Italian structuralism and semiotics, or
Polish formalism, structuralism and semiotics. Thirdly, we should take into account the
parallel development and mutual awareness of different schools.
This reciprocity explains bidirectional processes, such as the numerous translations
of Lotman into Italian and the growing interest in the theoretical works of Umberto
Eco in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. It also sheds new light on the simultaneity of

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such events as Lotman’s postscript to the Russian edition of Eco’s The Name of the Rose
(Lotman 1989) and Eco’s introduction to the Anglophone edition of Lotman’s Universe
of the Mind (Eco 1990), which played a crucial role in establishing the international
reputation of Lotman’s theories.
A telling example is a reciprocal interest of Lotman and Maria-Renata Mayenowa,
the indisputable leader of Polish studies in poetics and semiotics. Mayenowa was a
disciple of Manfred Kridl, founder of the Polish Formalist School. Polish formalists
were highly indebted to Russian formalism and at the same time leaned upon their
native Polish philosophical tradition (Pomorska 1968: 13; Karcz 2002; Mrugalski 2018).
Later, Mayenowa organized and headed what now is known as the Department of
Theoretical Poetics of the Institute of Literary Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences
in Warsaw. Mayenowa contributed a lot to our understanding of Lotman. She published
a review of the first four volumes of Trudy po znakovym sistemam and Lotman’s The
Structure of the Artistic Text (1970) in the Amsterdam-based journal Russian Literature
(Mayenowa 1972),1 and contributed a paper, ‘Lotman as a Historian of Literature’, to
a special issue of Russian Literature devoted to Lotman (Mayenowa 1977). Mayenowa
and Lotman discussed various scientific and organizational questions in their vast
correspondence, which is preserved in archives at Tartu, Tallinn and Warsaw. A planned
annotated publication of these letters will hopefully enable us to demonstrate how Polish
scholars, however specific their approach to culture may have been (see Mayenowa 1983;
Łebkowska 2012; Kola and Ulicka 2015), contributed to the general development of
semiotics and cultural theory.
Another evidence of Lotman’s transnational horizon is his interest in similar,
sometimes interrelated, developments of structural poetics and cultural semiotics in
(the now former) Czechoslovakia and the (now former) Soviet Union. In the October
1968 issue of the most authoritative Estonian linguistic and literary journal Keel ja
Kirjandus (‘Language and Literature’), Lotman published an article in Estonian under
the title ‘Kunsti semiootilise uurimise tulemusi tänapäeval’ (‘Recent Achievements in
the Semiotic Study of Art’) (Lotman 1968). The article places Soviet semiotics in an
international context – primarily Czechoslovak, Polish and French. However, an extensive
section devoted to structuralist and semiotic research in Czechoslovakia was entirely
excluded from the published text. It was most likely censored after the suppression of the
‘Prague Spring’ and the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia in August
1968. This section discussed the works of the Prague School and, in particular, the
theoretical achievements of Mukařovský and his followers. Lotman was very impressed
by a Festschrift prepared by Mukařovský’s disciples on the occasion of his seventy-fifth
birthday (Jankovič, Pešat and Vodička 1966), calling it ‘the summa of contemporary
Czech structural literary studies’ (Lotman [1968] 2018: 183).2
In the late 1960s, together with his friend Oleg Malevich, a prominent Russian scholar
of Czech culture, and Malevich’s wife Viktoria Kamenskaia, a leading translator from
Czech and Slovak, Lotman started working on a two-volume edition of Mukařovský’s
works on structural poetics and aesthetics. The manuscript, which opens with
Lotman’s introductory article ‘Jan Mukařovský – teoretik iskusstva’ (‘Jan Mukařovský

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as Art Theorist’) and concludes with meticulous annotations compiled by Lotman and
Malevich, was submitted to the Moscow-based publishing house Iskusstvo in summer
1969. The mid-1960s was the most important stage in the history of the reception of
the Prague School by the Tartu and Moscow structuralists. The Russian edition of Josef
Vachek’s Dictionnaire de linguistique de l’École de Prague appeared in 1964 (Vachek
[1960] 1964), and a collection of Russian translations of the most important linguistic
works of the Prague Linguistic Circle was published three years later (Kondrashov 1967).
A book representing Mukařovský’s works on literary theory and semiotic aesthetics was
slated to be next in this series. However, it was banned – presumably as a reaction to the
Prague events of 19683 – and the two volumes edited by Malevich and Lotman saw the
light of day only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as two separate books printed by
different publishers (Mukařovský 1994; 1996).
Of special importance for the evolution of the TMS were ‘Theses on the Semiotic
Study of Cultures’, a collective manifesto presented at the Seventh International
Congress of Slavists held in Warsaw in 1973. A precedent text and generic model for this
important self-statement were the collective ‘Thèses du Cercle Linguistique de Prague’,
which had been presented at the First International Congress of Slavists in Prague in
1929. In the 1973 ‘Theses’, Lotman and his co-authors described semiotic research as
both self-cognition of Slavic culture(s) and a transnational effort:

[Semiotic] investigation is not only an instrument for the study of culture but is
also part of its object. Scientific texts, being metatexts of the culture, may at the
same time be regarded as its texts. Therefore any significant scientific idea may
be regarded both as an attempt to cognize culture and as a fact of its life [. . .].
From this point of view we might raise the question of modern structural-semiotic
studies as phenomena of Slavic culture (the role of the Czech, Slovak, Polish,
Russian, and other traditions). (Lotman et al. [1973] 2013: 77)

A single, homogeneous history of semiotics and cultural theory would be both an

empirical and a theoretical dead-end: these systems are polygenetic in origin, and
their development is multidirectional. Recent methodological advances in histoire
croisée (‘entangled history’), which describes intellectual evolution as a transcultural
and multilateral process, encourage investigating the relationships between scholars
of different cultural, national and ethnic backgrounds in terms of reciprocity and
reversibility (Werner and Zimmermann 2006).
The research of these relations can clarify the heretofore underestimated role of the
TMS as a synthesis between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ intellectual traditions. From the
1960s to 1990s, the TMS served, despite the Iron Curtain, as an intermediary between
Western and Eastern academic communities from France and Italy to Czechoslovakia
and Poland, and from Russia to China and Japan. It comes as no surprise, then, that
Lotman’s archives in Tartu and Tallinn contain a great deal of documentation of the TMS’s
international connections. In particular, the archives contain Lotman’s correspondence
with Estonia’s and Russia’s leading intellectuals, as well as prominent structuralists and

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semioticians worldwide. Tallinn University Press has started publishing these materials
in the Bibliotheca Lotmaniana book series. These publications will substantially enrich
and complicate our present picture of how the TMS fits into the history of structuralism
and semiotics writ large. This approach does not aspire to regularize the past, reconcile
conflicts and produce a unified (hi)story. Rather, on the narrative level an ‘histoire
croisée’ research project will result in an ensemble of mutually complementing histories
of Lotmanian semiotics.
The schools of semiotics that emerged from Tartu over the last sixty years have
had an outsized global impact, fundamentally affecting humanistic inquiry not just in
Europe, but the world over. In the 1970s, many representatives of the TMS emigrated
to Israel, Western Europe and North America. The evolution of the former members of
the TMS, including Lotman’s former mentees, who continued to work in new cultural
and linguistic contexts, has not yet been written. A separate branch is now developing in
independent Estonia and is known as ‘New Tartu Semiotics’ (Torop 2000).
Although the first English-language monograph on Lotman was published long ago
(Shukman 1977) and ‘Lotman’s work has been gradually generating interest in English-
language cultural studies for several years’ now (Ibrus and Torop 2015: 5), in the English-
speaking world he remains insufficiently known among literary and cultural theorists
outside Slavistics (Blaim 1998; Winner 2002; Shukman 2005; Schönle and Shine 2006:
6; Todd 2006; Platt 2008: 321; Kull 2011a: 344–5). The reception of Lotmanian semiotics
in Slavic countries, France, Italy and Germany has in general been more positive than
the Anglo-American reaction, but also diverse. In terms of their political ideology, these
European interpreters of Lotman were either left-wing or conservative thinkers. In terms
of institutional classification, they were either academic scholars (e.g. in Poland, Italy
and West Germany; see Żyłko 2012; Faryno 2020; De Michiel 1995; Eimermacher 1995)
or members of avant-garde groups (for example, Tel Quel in France; see also Chapter 23).
In contrast, more recent Lotmanian studies that have emerged in Latin America4
and China5 are quite a departure from what we are accustomed to seeing. The question
of why and how Lotman’s semiotics is understood and applied in other cultural-
linguistic contexts, especially non-Western ones, is very interesting but remains largely
unanswered. This research is yet to be done.6

Notes

1. See also Lotman’s important but not widely known reply: Lotman 1974.
2. The full text of the article was published only recently with our annotations (Lotman [1968]
2018). The title of the Russian original is, in fact, ‘Sovremennye perspektivy semioticheskogo
izucheniia iskusstva’ (‘Contemporary Perspectives on the Semiotic Study of Art’).
3. See our detailed reconstruction of the history of this unrealized edition based on numerous
archival documents (Pilshchikov and Trunin 2018).
4. See Arán and Barei 2006; Barei and Gómez Ponce 2018; Machado and Barei 2019.
5. See Kull 2011b; Chang, Han and Wu 2014; Peng and Jiang 2014; Kull and Magnus 2014.

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6. This chapter was written with the support of the Estonian Research Council (PRG319). I
am grateful to Ainsley Morse, who provided generous feedback as well as thorough and
thoughtful copyediting.

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