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Introduction: Juri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory of History and Cultural Memory

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Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History

Abstract

The central aim of this volume is to introduce the work of Juri Lotman (1922–1993) into contemporary debates on cultural history and cultural memory studies. Lotman is widely read and highly renowned in the fields of semiotics and literary studies, but his innovative ideas about history and memory, formulated mostly in the 1980s and 1990s, remain little known among historians, historical theorists and collective memory scholars, especially in the English-speaking world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Russian speakers are provided with a good survey of Lotman’s life and work by his close friend and longtime colleague Boris Egorov (1999). A rather good systematic English overview of his views on the semiotics of culture is Semenenko 2012. Shukman 1977 remains a valuable introduction of Lotman’s earlier creative period; also worth noting are the interesting discussion of Andrews (2003), and the two edited volumes dedicated to Lotman (Schönle 2006; Frank et al. 2012). The best insight into the beginnings of the cultural semiotics of Tartu-Moscow School is Salupere, Torop, and Kull 2013. For a recent interesting application of Lotman’s cultural semiotics in the framework of political studies, see Makarychev and Yatsyk 2017. Lotman’s short autobiographical sketches are now also available in English (Lotman 2014).

  2. 2.

    Hence also the clearly spatial character of Lotman’s semiotic model of culture—culture (as well as memory and text) is described by him primarily in spatial categories, allowing him, on the one hand, to underline the importance of the boundary as a semiotic mechanism of translation in culture, and, on the other, to see the relations between center and periphery as a mainspring of cultural dynamics. On this point, see Randviir 2007 and Nöth 2014.

  3. 3.

    More specifically, Lotman distinguishes among three types of secondary modeling systems or cultural languages: First, language as a higher sign system (myth, literature, poetry); second, language as metalanguage or part of metalanguage (art, music, dance, etc.; criticism and history); and third, language as a model or analogue (language of film, dance, music, painting, etc.). See Torop 2012, 290–291.

  4. 4.

    But the same idea appears already in 1970: “Above, culture was defined as the sum of nonhereditary information, the shared memory of mankind or a certain more narrowly bounded collective—a nation, a class, etc.” However, Lotman at once specifies: “Memory is understood here in the same sense as that used in information theory and cybernetics: as the ability of certain systems to record and accumulate information.” (Lotman 2000a [1970], 400).

  5. 5.

    Lotman’s concept of “text memory” is, of course, directly influenced by Bakhtin’s earlier idea of “genre memory,” elaborated by him in the book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984 [1963], 106): “A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning. Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary development. Precisely for this reason genre is capable of guaranteeing the unity and uninterrupted continuity of this development.”

  6. 6.

    Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovsky (1868–1932), a Russian Marxist historian, one the most influential historians in Soviet Russia of the 1920s.—M. T.

  7. 7.

    Joseph Brodsky, “Letter to a Roman friend.” (Kline, George L., trans.), in A Part of Speech, 52–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.—M. T.

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Acknowledgments

This introduction draws importantly on ideas from my previous two articles (Tamm 2015, 2017). The work on this introduction and on the volume as a whole was supported by Estonian Research Council Grant IUT18–8. I am also very thankful to Estonian Cultural Endowment for supporting this book project, and to Brian James Baer for his great collaboration.

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Tamm, M. (2019). Introduction: Juri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory of History and Cultural Memory. In: Tamm, M. (eds) Juri Lotman - Culture, Memory and History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14710-5_1

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