Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press.
(1922-1993), scholar, founder of the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School.
Yuri Lotman was a widely cited scholar of Soviet literary semiotics and structuralism. He established the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School at Tartu University in Estonia. This school is famous for its Works on Sign Systems (published in Russian as Trudy po znakovym systemam). Unusually prolific, he published some eight hundred works on a high scholarly level. He is sometimes compared to Mikhail Bakhtin, another well-known Russian scholar.
Lotman began teaching at the University of Tartu in 1954. Starting as a historian of Russian literature, Lotman focused on the work of Radishchev, Karamzin, and Vyazemsky and the writers linked to the Decembrist movement. His later books covered all major literary works, from the Lay of Igor’s Campaign to the classic nineteenth-century authors such as Pushkin and Gogol, to Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Brodsky. From traditional philology Lotman shifted in the early sixties to cultural semiotics. His first key publication of that time, Lectures on Structural Poetics (1964), introduced the abovementioned series Trudy po znakovym sistemam, which was one of the main initiatives of the Tartu-Moscow school.
Lotman’s theory of literature rests upon two closely related sets of fundamental concepts-those of semiotics and structuralism. Semiotics is the science of signs and sign systems, which studies the basic characteristics of all signs and their combinations: the words and word combinations of natural and artificial languages, the metaphors of poetic language, and chemical and mathematical symbols. It also treats systems of signs such as those of artificial logical and machine languages, the languages of various poetic schools, codes, animal communication systems, and so on. Each sign contains: a) the signifying material (perceived by the sense organs), and b) the signified aspect (meaning). For words of natural (ordinary) language, pronunciation or writing is the signifying aspect while content is the signified aspect. The signs of one system (for example, the words of a language) can be the signifying aspect for complex signs of another system (such as that of poetic language) superimposed on them.
Lotman defined structuralism as “the idea of a system: a complete, self-regulating entity that adapts to new conditions by transforming its features while retaining its systematic structure.” He argued that any chosen object of investigation must be viewed as an interrelated, interdependent system composed of units and rules for their possible combinations. He defined culture itself as “the whole of uninherited information and the ways of its organization and storage.” From the point of view of
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semiotics, anything linked with meaning in fact belongs to culture. Since natural language is the central operator of culture, Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow school deemed natural language to be a primary modeling system containing a general picture of the world. Language was the most developed, universal means of communication-the “system of systems.” Lotman took keen interest in the way philosophical ideas, world views, and social values of a given period are enacted in its literature (via language). For Lotman, a period’s literary and ideological consciousness and the aesthetics of its trends and currents have a systemic quality. These categories are not a hodgepodge of convictions about the world and literature, but a hierarchic group of cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic values.
Critics might object to perceived “scientific optimism,” reductionism, and polemics of the Tartu-Moscow School. The ideological pressures within the USSR with which the school coped probably discouraged internal debates and explicit criticism of its own views. See also: BAKHTIN, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH; EDUCATION; ESTONIA AND ESTONIANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lotman, Iu. M.; Ginzburg, Lidiia; et al. (1985). The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History: Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lotman, Iu. M. (2001). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (The Second World), tr. Ann Shuk-man. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Staton, Shirley F. (1987). Literary Theories in Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
The Lovers of Wisdom (Liubomudry), writers based in Moscow during the 1820s, were strongly influenced by Romanticism and set out to explore the philosophical, religious, aesthetic and cultural implications of German Idealist philosophy. The Society for the Love of Wisdom met secretly in the apartment of its president, Vladimir Odoyevsky (ca. 1803-1869) from 1823 to 1825. While the Society formally disbanded following the Decembrist uprising, its members’ works continued to display unity of interest and purpose through the late 1820s. The group’s core consisted of Odoyevsky, Dmitry Venevitinov (1805-1827), Ivan Kireyevsky (1806-1856), Alexander Koshelev (1806-1883), and Nikolai Rozhalin (1805-1834). But the number of people generally considered Lovers of Wisdom is much broader, including Alexei Khomyakov (1804-1860), Stepan Shevyrev (1806-1864), Vladimir Titov (1807-1891), Dmitry Struisky (1806-1856), Nikolai Melgunov (1804-1867), and Mikhail Pogodin (1800-1875).
In secondary literature, the Lovers of Wisdom have long been overshadowed by the Decembrists. While the Decembrists pursued political and military careers in St. Petersburg and allegedly conspired to force political reform, the Lovers of Wisdom bided their time at comfortably undemanding jobs at the Moscow Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They indulged in speculation on the most abstract issues, with a bent toward mysticism. Even their choice of name, “Lovers of Wisdom” as opposed to “philosophers”, or philosophes, is thought to have marked their opposition to the progressive tradition of the radical Enlightenment.
Yet the Lovers of Wisdom thought of themselves as enlighteners in the broader sense. They aimed to reinvigorate Russian high culture by attacking the moral corruption of the nobility and promoting creativity and the pursuit of knowledge. They contrasted the superstition and petty-mindedness of the nobility to the moral purity of the “lover of wisdom,” who often appeared in their satires and oriental tales in the guise of a magus, dervish, brahmin, Greek philosopher, or sculptor, or a misunderstood Russian writer. Whether in short stories, metaphysical poetry, or quasi-philosophical prose works, Odoyevsky, Venevitinov, Khomyakov and Shevyrev emphasized the great spiritual and even religious importance of the young, creative individual, or genius. The special status of such individuals was only highlighted by their apparent moral fragility and vulnerability in a hostile environment.
The group was heavily indebted to Romanticism and to German Idealist philosophy. Admittedly, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s philosophy seems to have appealed in part because it was difficult to understand. As Koyr? (1929) remarked, their Romanticism was characterized by a “slightly puerile desire to feel ‘isolated from the crowd,’ the desire for the esoteric, which is complemented by the possession of a secret, even if that secret consists only in the fact that one possesses one.” (p. 37). But their works also display a genuine
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commitment to principles such as the fundamental unity of matter and ideas, and the notion that these achieve higher synthesis in the absolute, the spirit that guides the world. To them, creating a work of art, or striving for any kind of knowledge, brought the individual into contact with the absolute, lending the artist or intellectual special religious status.
Such views did not accord with Orthodox Christianity. The political authorities did not welcome them either. Yet the Lovers of Wisdom found ways of promoting their views in poetry and prose they published in journals and almanacs, especially in Mnemozina (1824-1825), edited by Odoyevsky with the Decembrist Wilgelm Kyukhelbeker, and Moskovsky vestnik (1827-1830), edited by Pogodin. They also published translations from leading voices of Romanticism such as Goethe, Byron, Tieck and Wackenroder.
The closure of Moskovsky vestnik in 1830 marked the end of the Lovers of Wisdom as a group. But the death of Venevitinov, often considered their most talented member, in 1827, had already dealt them a blow, as did the departure of many key members from Moscow in the late 1820s. In the early 1830s, the group’s members developed in new directions. Some of them, such as Kireyevsky and Khomyakov, eventually became leaders of the Slavophile movement, arguably the most coherent and original strain in nineteenth-century Russian thought. See also: DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION; KHOMYAKOV, ALEXEI STEPANOVICH; KIREYEVSKY, IVAN VASILIEVICH; ODOYEVSKY, VLADIMIR FYODOR-OVICH; POGODIN, MIKHAIL PETROVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
