IN MEMORY OF

MIKHAIL ABRAMOVICH VALDSHTEIN

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

ix
xi

1. The History of the Tartu School in Focus: Issues, Theories, Methods

The Tartu School: Toward Understanding Its History and Significance
Approaching Soviet Science: Knowledge and Power
Methodology, Data and Organization of the Book

1
2
8
12

2. Soviet Science and Academic Autonomy: The Structuralist Sturm und Drang
Stalinist Science and Its Legacy
Cybernetics, Structuralism and the Reform Movement in Soviet Human Sciences
From Moscow to Tartu: Yuri Lotman and the New Beginnings

15
16
17
32

3. The Making of Parallel Science: The Tartu School and the Public Sphere
Networks, Institutions and Parallel Science
The Tartu-Moscow School (1964-1974): Playing the Glass-Bead Game
The Tartu Discourse of Archaism
The Tartu School as Lotmans School (1975-1986)
Politics and the Academic Intelligentsia during the Perestroika (1986-1991)
Parallel Science and the Public Sphere in the Soviet Union

39
40
46
59
64
74
77

4. Toward a Global History of Structuralism: Roman Jakobson in the Center

Structuralism and Semiotics in the West: Guidelines and Frontlines
Poetics and Communication
Western and Eastern European Structuralism on Evolution and History
A Short History of the Reception of the Tartu School in the West

84
85
90
93
98

5. From Rules to Texts: The Idioms of Soviet Structuralism

The Applied Semiotics of Modeling Systems
Mythology and Folklore: A Mythopoetic Paradigm
Text, Art, Human Nature: The Dialectics of Emergence
Textocentrism as Cultural Politics

103
104
111
120
133

6. Thinking Culturologically: Tartu Perspectives on Culture

The Cultural Turn and Russian Culturology
Of Culturology: Competing Paradigms
Tartu Culturology and Imperial Semiotics

137
138
144
161

vii

7. Playful Self-Fashioning: A Neo-Historicist Theory of (Russian) Modernity

Life into Theater: A History of Modern Personhood
Playing Modern is Being Modern
Theatricality and Modernity: The Prospects
Conclusion
Appendix A: Members and Associates of the Tartu School
Appendix B: Personal Interviews
Appendix C: The University of Tartu: A Historical Note
Bibliography
Index

viii

166
166
171
179
183
188
191
193
194
217

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book is not intended as a final word in its field but as an invitation to a conversation. I
issue this invitation to both those who are personally familiar with the subject matter of this
book and those who have never given a thought to its major concerns. In particular, I invite
the members, students, associates and admirers of the Tartu (or Tartu-Moscow) School to
engage with my discussion of the ideas of Yuri Lotman and his colleagues, and with my use of
the School as a case study to explore such issues as the role of science and the intelligentsia in
late Soviet society. I challenge them to support, from the academic positions many of them
occupy in the major world universities, further research in these issues, to be conducted from
a variety of disciplinary and ideological perspectives. The kind of recent history this book
explores is not too early to be written or too political to be written objectively, as I have
often heard. I am certain that any intellectual pursuit is perspective-bound but this does not
disqualify it automatically. I am also certain that any historical distance from the subject
matter can bear the fruits of knowledge. This is especially true with respect to the sunken
Leviathan of the former Soviet Union, the traces of whichfrom living actors to enormous
amounts of perishable textsare still with us but not for much longer. They cry out for our
efforts to make sense of them. This is for a good reason: without delving deeply in the
empirical thick of things just recently passed, we cannot even hope to start understanding the
transformations that contemporary Russian and postsocialist societies are undergoing.
Furthermore, I challenge Western humanists and social scientists to be more
intellectually curious. One does not have to be an area studies specialist on Russia, Asia
and Latin America to realize that there are inhabitable worlds outside of American and French
cultural and social theory. The residents of these worlds may speak different national and
conceptual languages, and they may have somewhat different concerns. Yet, these languages
are by no means incommensurable and the efforts of translation between them are worthy of
the investments of time and mental power. This book is an attempt of such translation. As
such, it addresses not only the convertedwho have interest in Russian society and culture
and for whom the importance of Russian cultural theory is a factbut also those whose
research interests and intellectual pursuits lie elsewhere.
Many people have already made an effort to meet these challenges. Over the years,
the scholars from various disciplines and countries have responded to my invitation to
contribute to this project by their recollections, observations, and comments (see Appendix
B). I am immensely grateful to all of them for their time and attention. In addition, I would
like to give my special thanks to those of my interviewees and conversants who are no longer
with us, especially such Russian scholars of the highest caliber as Vladimir Toporov and
Mikhail Gasparov. To Boris Gasparov, Elena Pogosian, and Andrei Zorin, among others, I

ix

am grateful for the opportunity to stay in touch after our initial encounter and to continue our
conversations on the Tartu School and its social context.
This project has benefited immensely from the comments and encouragements of my
professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and my older colleagues at the
University of Pennsylvania: Andrew Pickering, Mark Steinberg, John Lie, Zsuzsa Gille, Jan
Nederveen Pieterse, Randall Collins, Benjamin Nathans, Kevin Platt, Mark Adams, Nathan
Sivin and many others. I am also grateful to critical comments and suggestions on the
previous versions of this text that were provided by Slava Gerovitch, Bruce Grant, Alexei
Kojevnikov, and Yuri Slezkine. To implement all their constructive suggestions is a long-term
project, which goes far beyond this book.
The International Dissertation Research Fellowship provided by the Social Science
Research Council made possible the research on which this study is based. Several Centers
and institutions provided their support at various stages of this project: the University of
Tartu departments of Russian literature and semiotics, the University of Tartu library and
archives, the MIT Archive, the Harriman Institute, and the major Russian archival collections:
ARAN, RGALI and RGANI. The journal Kritika and the Duke University Press have
published two pieces that are based on my research that led to this book (Waldstein 2007;
forthcoming). These pieces only marginally intersect with this text; they compliment it and
further develop some of its ideas.
I am grateful to my alma mater, the Faculty of Philosophy of the Moscow State
University, for helping me to gain access to Russian archives (this would be harder for a
researcher armed only with a letter of introduction from a Western institution). I am deeply
indebted to Lyubov Kiseleva and Roman Leibov of the University of Tartu for helping me to
make my research trip to Tartu, Estonia, in 2001 possible and worthwhile. Finally, my
thanks go to VMD Verlag Dr. Muller, which has agreed to publish this study.
My special thanks go to my high school teacher of Russian literature, Margarita
Viktorovna Korolevaa student of Petr Bogatyrev (a great Russian ethnographer and a coauthor of Roman Jakobson)who was instrumental in fostering my early interest in literary
culture and intellectual history.
Last but not least, my gratitude extends to my family and especially to Aya Ezawa,
whose partnership has always been intellectually stimulating and who has been patient with
me at the moments of exhaustion and frustration. To my grandfather, to whose memory this
book is dedicated, I am thankful for what he was and still is for me.

List of Abbreviations

AN
ARAN
BSE
CPSU
EA
IMLI
ISB
JC
LC
NLO
RAN
RGANI
RGALI
TRSF
TZS
VTsIOM

Akademiia Nauk SSSR (The USSR Academy of Sciences), 1925-1991

(see also RAN)
Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk (The Archive of the Russian
Academy of Sciences), Moscow
Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (The Great Soviet Encyclopedia)
Kommunisticheskaia partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza (The Communist
Party of the Soviet Union)
Eesti Ajalooarchiiv (The Estonian State Archive), Tartu, Estonia
Institut mirovoi literatury im. Maksima Gorkogo (Maksim Gorky
Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences)
Institut slavianovedeniia i balkanistiki (Institute of Slavic and Balkan
Studies of the Academy of Sciences)
Jakobsons Collection, or manuscript collection MC 72, the Institute
Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA
Lotmans Collection, or collections 135 and 136, the Personal
Collections Department of the University of Tartu Library
Novoe Literaturnoe obozrenie (New Literary Review).
Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk (Russian Academy of Sciences), since
1991 (see also AN)
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii, b. Arkhiv TsK
KPSS (The Russian State Archive of the Newest History, former
Archive of the CPSU Central Committee), Moscow
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstv (The Russian
State Archive of Literature and Arts), Moscow
Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii (Works on Russian and Slavic
Philology);
Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Works on Sign Systems) = Smeiotik.
Vserossiiskii tsentr issledovanii obshchestvennogo mneniia (The
Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion)

xi

The following abbreviations are used in Russian and Estonian archival collections:
f.
op.
d.
l.
F
N
s.
l.

fond (collection, in Russian)

opis (inventory, in Russian)
delo (folder, in Russian)
list (sheet, page, in Russian)
fondi (collection, in Estonian)
nimitsu (inventory, in Estonian)
siliku (folder, in Estonian)
leht, leheklk (sheet, page, in Estonian)

The Library of Congress transliteration system for Russian is used, except those proper
names that are customarily used in English in other forms. All translations, unless
otherwise noted, are the authors.

xii

Chapter One
THE HISTORY OF THE TARTU SCHOOL IN FOCUS:
Issues, Theories, Methods

September 1991. It is a warm and sunny day at the Sparrow (former Lenin) Hills in Moscow.
About three hundred people are gathered in a large lecture hall in one of the buildings of
Moscow State University. The hall is packed with professors and students, filling all the
seats, leaning on the walls and sitting on the stairs between the seats and on the windowsills.
People are desperately trying to find a place by walking almost over the heads of their
colleagues. It is getting stuffy and misty. A corpulent professor hobbles to the podium: he has
a lame leg since childhood. This is Viacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, a polyglot and a
student of Roman Jakobson. He introduces the speaker from the small university town of
Tartu in Estonia. (A former Soviet republic, Estonia has just, in the aftermath of the August
coup, acquired its full independence.) A squall of applause follows this announcement: the
crowd has gathered for the sake of this speaker. His name is Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman. He
is a grey-haired man with an uncommon mustache and a remarkable resemblance to Einstein.
He speaks with a slight stutter and sometimes mumbles the words into his mustache. Yet his
speech is overall clear as well as rich with intonations and imagery. He sounds at once like an
old-fashioned professor and an elegant gentleman telling a story at the fireplace. He is talking
about art as a window to human mind, culture as a dynamic process, history as an
irreversible, non-linear and unpredictable process. A Soviet soldier during the Second World
War, he draws a picture on the blackboard, a picture of a hill, a cannon and a target. How to
hit a target if there is a hill in the way? He asks with a rhetorical gesture. The answer is that
we have to establish at least two observation points on the sides of the hill and determine the
coordinates of the target by tinkering with the data of both observations. The moral of the
story is that every observation is situated and limited; it brings the fruit of knowledge only in
cooperation and contestation with other observations. Culture the main category and
concern of Lotman and the school of thought associated with his name is an interplay and a
dialogue of multiple, distinct and not-fully-translatable languages and perspectives. There
is no more any place for the singular scientific worldview on which Soviet Marxism
claimed monopoly. Against the background of the recent failure of the Communist coup,
Lotmans speech sounds like a farewell to an entire epoch in world history.
Although, for a few years before this event, I was intermittently watching the series of
Yuri Lotmans TV lectures on the history of Russian everyday life (byt), only on this day in
the fall 1991 did I become aware of the existence and significance of the Tartu School of
Semiotics, which Lotman chaired.1 Although their presence in the limelight of the media and
the public sphere proved to be short-lived, Lotman and his School, which were particularly
1

Depending on the participants and the observers historical, geographical and ideological
perspective, this School has also been called Tartu-Moscow, and Moscow-Tartu School. At
times, I also use these designations, when absolutely necessary. Yet, the term Tartu School is
sufficient in terms of brevity and recognizability.

active in the 1960s-80s, continue to enjoy a considerable presence in the collective memory
and academic practice of many students of literature and culture in Russia, Eastern Europe
and even select segments of Western academia. Over the last ten years, a number of articles
and books have been written, which reconstruct and discuss the intellectual paradigm of the
School. Definitely a part of this trend, this book is, however, not just another brick in the
steadily growing Lotman/Tartu Industry. It is an attempt to break out of the narrow
disciplinary limits of much of the existing literature on the School, as well as the constraints
imposed by the traditional genre of the history of ideas. By considering Tartu semiotics as a
party in the dialogue with better known academic trends like structuralism, poststructuralism
and cultural studies, I introduce the ideas and research findings of Lotman and his colleagues
to a broader public of cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and literary scholars, who are not
specialists on Russia or the intricacies of the semiotic vocabulary. Furthermore, this book
goes beyond the internal reconstruction of ideas and academic traditions in order to explore
the emergence of these ideas in the historically changing contexts of institutional and
disciplinary practices, and social and political engagements of the Soviet intellectuals. By
relying not only on published texts but also on life history interviews, participant observation,
and original archival research, I read the results of my research for, simultaneously, what they
tell us about a particular academic school and about the world in which its representatives
lived and worked. In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss the conceptual and
methodological contributions of this book in more detail.
The Tartu School: Toward Understanding its History and Significance
The Tartu School of Semiotics is a shorthand designation for a circle of scholars active in
the 1960s through 1980s, and clustered around periodic gatherings known as Kriku and
Tartu summer schools as well as a number of semiotic and philological periodicals
published by the University of Tartu (see Appendix C).2 The work of the School has been
vastly influential in the fields of linguistics as well as cultural, narrative and Slavic studies far
beyond Russia and the Soviet Union. Its key representatives, Yuri Lotman and Viacheslav
Ivanov, were among the formally recognized leaders of such international scientific
movements as structuralism and semiotics.3 Yuri Lotman was a leading theorist and
researcher in Russian cultural and literary history. As creators of what they called cultural
semiotics, Tartu scholars were among the founding fathers of the discipline of
culturology, which was formally established in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Most unexpectedlyfrom a Western perspectivefor Soviet academia, especially for human
2

I admit that such titles as the Tartu-Moscow or Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics reflect the nature
of the phenomenon better. I use the term the Tartu School of Semiotics because it is shorter and
because choosing another name would mean taking a stand in the debate between Lotmans students
and Moscow semioticians about priority. When I use one of the double city names in this book, I
refer specifically to the period of the summer schools (1964-1974). The Tartu School studied here
should not be confused with the group of scholars who are affiliated with the contemporary
University of Tartus Department of Semiotics and who use the same name (see Torop 2000a).
3
According to Umberto Ecos classical definition, semiotics is concerned with everything that can
be taken as a sign (1976, 7). Although semiotic ideas are present already in Plato and Seneca, the
contemporary science of semiotics goes back to the independent proposals by Ferdinand de Saussure
(1857-1913) and Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914). As a separate discipline, semiotics was not
established until the 1960s, when the International Semiotic Association (IASS) was founded on the
initiative of Umberto Eco (b. 1932), Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), Julia Kristeva (b.1941) and
others. Although Lotman, Ivanov and Toporov were unable to attend the IASS congresses, they
served as the vice-presidents of the Association in 1968-1985.

sciences, the conceptual framework of the Tartu School was self-consciously non-Marxist
(Flier 1997).4 Yet, far from being simply defined by this negativity, the Schools legacy is
presently attracting the characterizations like the Tartu School is an indispensable canon and
the Golden Age of the Russian humanities (Zorin 1998, 42). Whether as a model or as a
point of departure, the oeuvre of the School serves as a yardstick for the current attempts to
redefine the place of the humanities and intellectual culture in post-communist Russia.5
Finally, associates and students of Lotman and his colleagues currently constitute an
enormous global academic network, which spreads from Moscow and Tartu to New York,
Berkley, Los-Angeles, Jerusalem, Naples, Bremen and Edmonton, Alberta, and includes
some of the leading Russian culture specialists in the world. The Tartu-related or inspired
work continues to be Russias major intellectual export at the time when Russia has almost
disappeared from most intellectual maps all over the planet.
The importance of Lotman and the Tartu School in Russia and in some Western
academic circles is hardly surprising, considering the breadth of topics covered by the
members of the School, and the conceptual sophistication of their studies. Although Tartu
semiotics emerged as an outgrowth of the international structuralist movement, the work of
Tartu scholars is limited neither to linguistics nor to structuralism. Thematically, Tartu
studies span the fields of linguistics, poetics, cultural anthropology and cultural history.
Myth, ritual, folklore, film, ancient texts, modern literature, visual arts and everyday behavior
are centerpieces of the Tartu Universitys Trudy po znakovym sistemam (TZS, Works on Sign
Systems, or Smeiotik), a series initiated by Yuri Lotman in 1964. These and other
publications present a variety of perspectives, from classical structuralist studies of phonemic
and metric structures of poetic texts to a non- or post-structuralist focus on the production and
reception of literary and other texts in historically emergent social contexts. Some of the most
distinctive projects associated with the Tartu School include Viacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir
Toporovs reconstructions of mythological mentality and its recapitulations in modern
literature and culture; Boris Uspenskys studies of space, time and perspective in the
composition of visual and verbal arts; Eliazar Meletinsky and his groups models of the
narrative structure of fairytales and its transformations in modern culture; Lotman and
Uspenskys semiotics of Russian culture along with Yuri Lotmans path-breaking theories
of textual and cultural polyglottism.6 Since the early 1970s, cultural semiotics became the
Schools brand-name: Lotman and his colleagues formulated a far-reaching program of
studies based on the idea of, simultaneously, autonomy and heterogeneity of culture, which
was defined as the aggregate of all non-inherited information and the means for organizing
and preserving it (Lotman 1976a, 215). This doctrine summarized some of the main
intellectual insights behind much of the Tartu literary and linguistic scholarship: the idea of
irreducibility, robustness and the emancipatory power of literary texts and other cultural
formations. About the remarkable ability of cultural texts to withstand the passage of time
and the assault of hostilee.g. politicalenvironment, Lotman remarked once that if such
forces were applied in order to demolish a tank, it would immediately turn into sand (2003,
293). On various levels, these insights transpire through Lotmans controversial but
provocative body of work in which he developed his original cultural history of modern postPetrine Russia along with his grounded theories of theatricality and the poetics of everyday
4

In the Soviet Union and Russia, sciences (nauka) are differentiated into natural and human sciences.
Social sciences are conventionally regarded as a part of human sciences (gumanitarnye nauki).
5
See, for instance, publications in the excellent intellectual and academic review, Novoe Literaturnoe
Obozrenie (NLO), founded in 1992 in Moscow.
6
In English, see the collections of translations in Baran (1976), Lucid (1977), Lotman and Uspenskij
(1984), Lotman et al. (1985), and Lotman (1990).

life (poetika byta) in the culture of the late 18thearly 19th-century Russian noble men and
women.7
In this book, I am discussing these and other aspects of the Tartu research and
intellectual paradigm in more detail. In doing this, I build on a long tradition of insider
reflections on, and analytical reconstructions of, the Tartu intellectual paradigm.8
Simultaneously, this book interrogates and problematizes a few habits of thought that are
implicit in most of the writings on Russian humanities and intellectual culture, and proposes
alternative ways of thinking.
For instance, most of the intellectual reconstructions of the Tartu oeuvre suffer from
certain disciplinary narrowness: they appeal to the audiences deeply familiar with the issues
discussed within the fields of Russian literary history and/or semiotics. This is, in part, a
result of the comparatively narrow overall reception of the Schools works, at least in the
West. In North America, Soviet structuralists and semioticians have been extensively cited
by the specialists in Russian literature, especially Roman Jakobsons students, as well as
some culture and media theorists (see, for instance, Eagleton 1996, 88-9; Eco 1976, 136-9;
Jameson 1988, 165-173; Kristeva 1969; Portis-Winner 1987; Scholes 1982).9 Yet, even in
comparison with other Russians who made a splash in the Westprimarily Mikhail Bakhtin
and Lev Vygotsky10Tartu scholarship is almost unknown outside of the narrow circle of
the initiates.11 To outline the reasons for this narrowness is one of my major goals. Yet,
7

For classical manifestos of Tartu cultural semiotics, see the Theses on the Semiotic Study of
Cultures (Ivanov et al. 1973), Russian Semantic Poetics as A Potential Cultural Paradigm (Levin et
al. 1974), and numerous papers and books by Yuri Lotman (especially 1970a; 1973d; 1976a; 1977b;
1978b; 1980; 1987; 1990; 1992). Post-Petrine Russia refers here to the period after the early 18thcentury Westernizing reforms introduced by the Tsar Peter the Great.
8
The Russian historiography of the School can be divided into a few stages: (1) an initial stream of
descriptive, critical and praiseful literature produced in the 1960s and 1970s (see survey in Seyffert
1983), (2) the samizdat (underground self-publishing) polemics and the attempts of self-reflection
in the 1970s-80s (e.g. B.Gasparov 1994a; Panchenko 1995), and (3) the stream of published memoirs,
new criticisms and first properly historical and analytical studies produced after 1991 (see
Cherednichenko 2001; Egorov 1999; Kim 2003; Koshelev 1994; Nekliudov 1994; Pocheptsov 1998;
Stdtke 2002). Western (American, in particular) literature can be classified according to a number
successive waves of the Schools reception: extensive translations, reprints, reviews and a few
analytical monographs in the 1970s (Kristeva 1968; Segal 1974; Shukman 1977), close attention to
Lotman and Uspenskys semiotics of Russian culture in the 1980s, a new wave of reviews after the
publication of the collection of Lotmans works with Umberto Ecos (1990) preface, and, most
recently, a series of attempts to position the School and especially Lotman in the context of Western
scholarship (see Andrews 2003; Schnle 2006).
9
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (1896-1982) was a leader of the Moscow Linguistic Circle in 19151924, and later a co-founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle. After settling in the USA, he taught at
Harvard and MIT. Jakobson is an essential figure for the history of both Russian Formalism and
Western structuralism. His theories of distinctive features, the poetic function, metaphor and
metonymy, and his communication model are key points of departure and contention for the
contemporary humanities, and for the Tartu School, in particular (see chapter four for detailed
analysis).
10
Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895-1975) is an author of the philosophy of dialogism, which has left an
imprint on such trends as poststructuralism, cultural studies and new historicism. Lev S. Vygotsky
(1896-1934) laid the foundation for the activity theory, which dominated Soviet psychology in the
1950-80s. His social-cultural developmental psychology is a major reference for Western
psychologists who oppose the dominant paradigms in cognitive science (Wertsch 1985).
11
This is based on my informal survey of American scholars in the humanities and social sciences.
The data contained at the ISI Web of Science in the Internet only partially supports my findings. The

already at this point, I can say that one such reason is the narrow disciplinary scope of the
existing historiography of the School. In effort to break the vicious circle of narrow-scope
reception begets narrow scope historiography and vice versa, this book explicitly addresses
the broader audience of scholars interested in cultural theory, history and anthropology, even
if they are not Russia specialists and semiotics is not part of their active conceptual toolkit.
Furthermore, by considering the Tartu School not only with respect to its Russian Formalist
and other national roots but also with respect to its interactions and (dis)similarities with
Western structuralism and poststructuralism, I wish to attract to Tartu the attention of the
larger academic community.
Furthermore, most of the existing literature on the Tartu School focuses on the
internal reconstruction of the ideas of its members. If political, institutional and broader
cultural context of their work is mentioned, this is usually either to eulogize or to criticize,
even dismiss, the Schools research. For instance, in his attempt to write Yuri Lotmans first
biography, his long-time colleague Boris Egorov creates a heroic image of Lotman-the-truescholar, whose world-class scholarship stood out against the Soviet environment, which
was composed of mediocre ideologists, opportunists and outright scoundrels (1999). Popular
among members and associates of the School, this kind of heroic narrative takes for
granted the binary vision of science vs. society, scientific knowledge vs. ideology,
and universal science vs. national historiosophy. Paradoxically, the same approach is
taken by the critics of Lotman and his group, with the exception that the School is placed
firmly within its local social and historical context and thus denied the right to be true
science (or, at least, this status is questioned in Hymes 1978 and B.Gasparov 1994a). Both
perspectives presume that scientific knowledge is, as it were, free from social, historical and
local context. That is, they tend to consider the development of scientific knowledge outside
or despite this context; otherwise, ideas in question are anything but knowledge: they may
be opinions, myths, or ideologies. This traditional scientism is overlaid in these
narratives with the Cold War belief that Soviet political, institutional and cultural
environment could only be an obstacle for developing world-class ideas and perspectives.
This book is based on a more nuanced approach to the nature of scientific knowledge.
I start with a simple point: just like any other ideas, scientific ideas are products of human
social practices. This statement does not imply social determinism because both science
and society are viewed here as products of these practices. Science and society can neither
be reduced to the other, nor separated and treated according to radically different
methodologies. Instead, they co-evolve, each constituting the other, bringing it into
existence and maintaining it (Harding 1998, 3). This idea is in the core of the principle of
symmetry, which is advocated within the sociology of scientific knowledge and science
studies (Bloor 1976; Latour 1987; 1988; 1993). The symmetry between science and society
maintains that no aspect of their composition is removed from the interaction at the outset.
That is, not only externalities but even the most abstract scientific ideas and procedures can
be fundamentally affected by the interaction. The same applies to the personal lives of
academics, the dynamics of their intellectual networks and institutions, and the intellectual
search results for Social Sciences and Humanities since 1965 show that the citation index of the
Schools leader, Yuri Lotman, is only slightly lower then the one of Bakhtin, 2182 and 2576 hits
correspondingly. These scores are significantly lower than the ones of Foucault, Bourdieu or Barthes
(8294, 4638, 4582) but higher than the scores of other leading Russian scholars, Lev Vygotsky and
Alexander Luria included (1644 and 1426). Other key members of the Tartu School score even lower:
Ivanov (756), Toporov (528), Meletinsky (129) (see ISI Web of Science, contacted in April 2004). I
attribute the discrepancy between my findings and these figures to the fact that, unlike Bakhtin,
Lotman is intensively cited within a number of relatively narrow academic fields.

politics and culture of the time and place in question (see Collins 1998, 51). Thus, the history
of ideas should not be separated from the history of intellectuals and the social/institutional
history of their institutions and networks. This book is an attempt to write such an integral
history.
The main benefit of thisintegral and symmetricalapproach to knowledge and
society is that it allows us to break through to the third realm, the realm of practices that are
both intellectual and social, as well as discursive and material, and which produce both
objects to be known and subjects who know (cf. Foucault 1971). This perspective forces us to
refocus our attention from the finished products to processes, from accomplished theories to
micro-practices in which scientific research and theorizing is embedded: the practices of
writing, discussing and publishing academic papers; selecting and dismissing certain sources,
issues and intellectual interlocutors; procuring financial support for research projects;
proposing and defending teaching curricula; negotiating with officials; mobilizing
professional and wider public opinion; (not) signing letters of protest; inviting selected
people to academic meetings; and networking and selling yourself on the international
stage.
While employing the symmetrical perspective outlined above, this book examines
how the Tartu oeuvre was emerging over time, between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, in
the course of the interactionscooperative and conflictualbetween and among academics,
officials, and students within changing institutional arrangements, shifting discursive
formations and the cycles of thaws and freezes in national and international political
contexts. This focus on emergence, or becoming, implies that I do not take for granted any
historical or post factum definitions of what the Tartu School is truly all about (including
the meanings of the terms used in its very name). All these definitionsthat the School was
all about making true science despite the hostile environment, or that it was just a product
of some academics accommodation to the Soviet regime, or that it did not exist at all,
beyond a club of friends in search of fancy symbols of social distinctionare at stake. I
study their competition as an aspect of the historical process in which the Tartu School and
its ideas established themselves.
One of the most consequential implications of this anti-essentialist perspective is the
idea that every course of action, analyzed in this book, has a strategic aspect. Both Lotman
and his opponents were engaged in strategic action, that is in the relationships of power, at
every single point (Bourdieu 1988; 1991). This idea is at odds with the more traditional
view, which separates strategizing, manipulation, self-positioning and self-promotion from
pure intellectual and scientific action, which is presumably motivated solely by the noble
values of accumulating knowledge and contributing to the progress of the humanity. The
fusion of these oppositions is usually attributed to bad science, which is motivated by
group or individual power aspirations.12 Yet, in fact, the distinction between pure scholars
and manipulators is at best a matter of degree. Every most selfless intellectual still seeks
recognition and authority in, at least, her field. When she states and practices her political
neutrality or lack of career ambition, she still positions herself within the academic field in a
particular way, that is she behaves as a strategist of sorts. An action does not have to be
intentionally manipulative to have a strategic and tactical aspect. To point this out is not, in
and of itself, necessarily to doubt the sincerity of proclaimed beliefs or the scientific nature

12

The paradigmatic example here is Lysenkos agrobiology. Trofim D. Lysenko (1898-1976)

rejected genetics, or Mendelism, as a bourgeois science and put forward his own neo-Lamarckian
theory of inherited characteristics which was supported by the Stalinist authorities in the 1940s and
1950s (see Joravsky 1970).

of the ideas in question. This is, rather, to go beyond the self-serving binary thinking, which
attributes to us pure quest for truth and to them ruthless pursuit of profit.
This concept of academic/intellectual action as strategic action has far-reaching
methodological implications. To study practices, which constitute such objects as the Tartu
School, is to look for a number of persistent patterns, or strategies, that run across various
fields of action in which Tartu intellectuals were involved. 13 These strategies have different
scope, lifetime, intellectual precedents and social preconditions. They may divide the Tartu
community or oppose it to various outside groups. In short, instead of assuming what the
Tartu School is really, or essentially, all about, I analyze it as a historically changeable
field that is dominated and/or contested by a number of intellectual-cum-social strategies of
action, the interaction of which underlines specific intellectual and social achievements of the
members of the Tartu community.
Based on this perspective, I argue that the history of Soviet semiotics was not the one
of continuous accumulation of knowledge and working out of the shared stock of ideas.
Rather, this history was characterized by the struggle between different visions of how Soviet
human scientists should position themselves within national and international academic and
other social fields. In particular, I talk about the epistemic break between early strong
science-oriented program of structuralism, which was preserved by the minority of the
original members of the circle, and the later culturalist and humanistic projects variously
characterized as either structuralism with a human face or a form of poststructuralism (see
Stolovich 1998). I argue that this shift in intellectual strategies was paralleled by the shift in
the social strategies, which were favored by the Soviet structuralists and semioticians at
different historical periods: from the struggle for institutional establishment and even
hegemony in the 1950s-early 1960s to the withdrawal into the domain of what I call parallel
science, or the parallel academic public sphere, in the 1960s through 1980s. Throughout
the chapters of the book, I develop the ideal-typical opposition that, I argue, can capture the
character of this evolution of Soviet structuralism and semiotics: the Rule Idiom vs. the
Text Idiom. I consider these idioms to be both models of Soviet structuralists intellectual
paradigms in, roughly, the 1950s and the 1970s, and exemplars of social and political
strategies employed by elite Soviet intellectuals in the corresponding historical periods.
I further argue that the research projects and theoretical statements developed within
the Text Idiom fall into two major categories, what might be called diachronic
structuralism and neo-historicism, that is two paradigms roughly associated with the
works of the Ivanov-Toporov duo and Lotman respectively. I demonstrate that both of these
perspectives strongly correlate with different strategies of constructing the realm of parallel
science under the conditions of late Soviet socialism.
Despite this and other minor breaks and splits, I argue that the mature Tartu idiom
was stabilized through the pervasive discourse of archaism, a form of cultural conservatism
aimed at reviving, restoring, and reconstructingrather than deconstructingthe multilayered complexity of culturalnational and globaltradition. This discourse is reflected in
Tartu methodology of research (for example, the focus on the reconstruction of archaic,
traditional and classical subtexts within contemporary cultural texts), in specific thematic
choices (the preference for the high culture of the past) and in such projects as the
rehabilitation of the scholarship and art that was excluded from the official Soviet canon.
I further show that this archaism provides a clue for understanding the peculiarly
aristocratic and imperial idioms of culture developed by Yuri Lotman and his colleagues.
I demonstrate that these idioms distinguish the Tartu School from most French structuralists
13

See Ann Swidlers definition of strategy: a general way of organizing action that might allow
one to reach several different life goals (1986, 277).

and poststructuralists, as well as the representatives of contemporary cultural studies,

postcolonial studies and other new fields. In a way, Roland Barthes term the empire of
sings is more in accord with the Tartu paradigm then with French theories of text and
discourse, which Barthes described as democratic and republican (1982; 1988).
Finally, despite the strong non-conformist motives in both wider structuralist and
specifically Tartu intellectual agendas, the whole Soviet semiotic enterprise was
characterized by the discourse of depolitizationor anti-politics, to use George Konrads
(1984) termwhich was shared by Soviet semioticians with a large segment of the Soviet
post-Stalinist intelligentsia. That is, in contrast to the transition from structuralism to
poststructuralism in the West, the evolution from the early strong program to mature Tartu
cultural semiotics was taking place within the framework of anti-political social and
intellectual strategies. These strategies were based on emphasizing the stark distinction
between culture and politics, science and power, as well as intellectuals and authorities (cf.
Marx-Scouras 1996).
Overall, I describe the history of Soviet structuralism and the Tartu School in terms of
the succession and interplay between a number of intellectual-cum-social strategies and
stances. Considered as intellectual stances, the idioms outlined above allow me to provide an
overall and consistent picture of the development of Soviet semiotics and cultural theory in
time. Considered as strategies of social action, they shed light on the social world in which
Soviet structuralists and semioticians lived and worked. In the next section, I would like to
briefly overview the nature of these insights and consider them against the background of the
literature on Soviet science, knowledge and intellectuals in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.
Approaching Soviet Science: Knowledge and Power
There was once time when Soviet science studies (naukovedenie) and Soviet science itself
served as major inspirations for the attempts of the sociological understanding of scientific
knowledge in the West. It is not a secret that Boris Hessens 1932 Marxist analysis of
Newtonian physics was a major influence on Robert Merton (1957). The development of
Soviet science was itself a vivid case of the transparency of science to social structures and
processes, right up to the very content of science (1957, 534). Yet, in recent decades,
Soviet science lost its centrality. This is partially due to the overall decline in interest in
things Russian after the end of the Communist experiment. Another reason is remarkable
resistance, which the field of Soviet studies exhibits with respect to the visions of science and
knowledge outlined above: the principle of symmetry, it seems, does not work for Russia
(Graham 1998, 5). In this book, I am trying to provide some conceptual, methodological and
empirical resources for breaking this resistance.
At one level, this resistance is strange. Robert Merton argued that the linkage between
social structure and the development of science was most apparent in the totalitarian states
(1957). In these states, he argued, academic prestige and political power, ideological
orthodoxy and scientific consensus are fused so well that the researcher simply cannot treat
science and society separately. However, Merton presumed that this was an abnormal state
of affairs. In contrast, he contended, Western democracy provided adequate conditions in
which science could fully adhere to its distinctive universalistic ethos. In effect, the
proponents of the totalitarian theory of Soviet society both in the West and in Russia
applied externalist explanations to bad science like Trofim Lysenkos agrobiology and
attributed the incidents of good science under socialism to the progressive development of
international [usually Western] science during the periods of the weakened
political/ideological control (Graham 1972; Medvedev 1972; Turchin 1981; Vucinich 1984).

This scholarship presumed the inherent hostility of ideology to science on the model of the
supposed hostility of organized religion to free thought. According to this logic, the only
situation when science could profit from the Soviet regime was when utilitarian
considerations were winning over ideological ones among Soviet leaders. Finally, the key
assumption behind these theories was a totalitarian image of Soviet society where deeply
unpopular but powerful state keeps its subjects under its thumb by inciting fear and thus
forcing them to either collaborate or passively accept their fate (e.g. Pipes 1994).
Undoubtedly, this perspective has immense intuitive validity because it is based not
only on traditional representations of the nature of science but also on the binary, us vs. them,
renditions of their situation by many Soviet intellectuals themselves. Yet, the point of
analysis is, among other things, to explain these renditions, not to simply take them for
granted as some kind of natural framework. To understand why Soviet conditions fostered
these binary perceptions, we have to go beyond them. By pointing to the social, institutional
and cultural complexity of Soviet societies, many Soviet studies specialists criticized both the
totalitarianism theory and the binary perspective already in the 1960s (see Fitzpatrick 2007).
Yet, the implications of this criticism for the history and sociology of sciences started to be
felt on massive scale only by the 1990s. In what follows, I outline some of the trends in posttotalitarian theories of Soviet science and society, the trends most essential for my
exploration of the history of the Tartu School.
One trend challenges the opposition between ideological and utilitarian considerations
as well as, as it were, ideology and science. As David Joravsky (1983) argues, pragmatism
was already a part of ideology: the Partys support for Lysenko was as ideological, as it was
utilitarian. Furthermore, Loren Graham (1972; 1998) demonstrates that scientists often
genuinely engaged with officially sanctioned ideas. Such scholars as Evald Ilyenkov, Andrei
Kolmogorov or Alexander Luria often used Marxist dialectics and materialism to produce
excellent results.14 In short, good science was developed in the Soviet Union not only despite
the regime, as it is often believed, but also due to both strengths and failings of the Soviet
institutions and polices.
The criticism of the opposition between ideology and science further leads to the
realization that Marxist-Leninist scientific ideology was by no means a coherent system of
ideas. In fact, it was nothing more than a name for a multiplicity of different practices
(Walker 1989, 163). A combination of Marxist ideas with the tropes of, among other things,
nationalist and technocratic discourses, and Soviet ideology was more a floating signifier
than an all-encompassing worldview. Its robustness was largely due to its highly clichd
vocabulary, which took its shape by the 1950s and hardly changed since then until the very
end of the regime (Epstein 1995; Oushakine 2001; Yurchak 2006).
Furthermore, as the studies of Stalinist science demonstrate, the ambiguity of Soviet
ideology was, to an extent, in the vested interests of both the nomenklatura (the Soviet
Party-state elite) and the scholars. Due to this ambiguity, the Party authorities could reserve
to themselves the final word in any contention and safeguard themselves from final
commitments (Epstein 1995; Krementsov 1997; Urban 1985). Simultaneously, academics
often managed to emasculate the attempts of state control by ritualizing political campaigns
and thus reestablishing their own authority over their endeavors (Kojevnikov 2004;
Krementsov 1997). Thus, the inconsistency of the Soviet official discourse had similarly
14

Evald Ilyenkov (1924-1979) was arguably the most important Soviet Marxist philosopher. Andrei
Kolmogorov (1903-1987) was a leading Soviet mathematician, the founder of algorithmic complexity
theory that has been applied to many fields, including the analysis of language and texts. Alexander
Luria (1902-1977) is particularly famous for his work in cognitive psychology (see Bakhurst 1991;
Luria 1976; V.Uspensky 1997).

contradictory effect on science and scientists. Yet, in the long term, it fostered the sense of
injustice and thus contributed to the deterioration of the legitimacy of the Soviet regime
among intellectuals.
Another trend in revising the totalitarian model of Soviet science consists in
arguing for its normality, rather then exceptionality. This is not an assertion of the essential
conformity of Soviet science to Western standards but rather a call for a symmetrical
perspective on Western and non-Western science as partners in interactions and as subjects to
the same questions and research methods. One implication is that, for example, cybernetics
was not just an American science transferred to the Soviet Union. Rather it was a
constantly revised project across national borders (Gerovitch 2002). In what follows, I
argue that the history of structuralism and semiotics provides a particularly revealing case of
the dialectics between the local and the global in the human sciences.
As a study of scientific and academic practices, this book is concerned as much with
science as it is with scientists, academics and intellectuals at large. Like the studies of Soviet
science and academia, the reflections over the predicament of Soviet intellectuals have
routinely been structured around the binary model. Intellectuals vs. bureaucracy, or the
apostles of critical thought and true knowledge vs. ideologists and careerists this is a typical
rendition of the major conflicts in Soviet society by many Soviet intellectuals and Western
critics of totalitarianism (see Kagarlitsky 1988; Pipes 1994; Shlapentokh 1990). Yet, this
image of the intelligentsia as victim and/or heroic resister totally neglects the actual status of
intellectuals in Soviet society and obscures the complexity of the borderlines between social
positions and ideologies among intellectuals and bureaucrats.
As Zygmunt Bauman (1987, 178) put it, by sharing with intelligentsia a legitimacy
resting on claims to knowledge and by creating a stratum of knowledge-empowered persons,
the Party reinforces a privileged situation for intellectuals. Konrad and Szelenyi (1979) even
go so far as to argue for the elective affinity between socialism and the class interests of
intellectuals. We do not have to buy the argument about intellectuals on the road to class
power under socialism to agree that highly educated professionals, especially academics,
constituted a privileged status group in socialist societies (see Fitzpatrick 1999; Verdery
1991). Despite lingering anti-intellectualism among both the nomenklatura and the lower
classes, the intelligentsias distinctive capitalknowledge and cultureenjoyed
considerable prestige within society and among political elites. One of the reasons the
nomenklatura did not become the hereditary elite status group like aristocracy is that its
children did not want their fathers occupations; they aspired for the occupations of
intellectuals and highly-educated professionals (Churchward 1973; Faraday 2000; Lovell
2000). This was because, under socialism, education and culture were the most significant,
along with political power, means of social promotion and distinction. Expert and general
knowledge were essential in modernizing the country and in the competition with the West.
In effect, intellectuals were not only subjects of control and persecution by the Party and
security authorities. Their privileged status as experts and bearers of culturedness
(kulturnost) gave intellectuals considerable bargaining power in competition for centrally
allocated resources in the context of the economy of shortages, rank-order society and
informal mutual favors networks (Ledeneva 1998; Lovell 2000; Verdery 1991).
All these things are important to keep in mind when we analyze the public debates
and under-carpet struggles among intellectuals in the Soviet Union. These were not binary
struggles of true intellectuals against educated sell-outs and semi-educated ideologists.
There were lots of mixed social positions and alliances built across these and similar
categorical distinctions. The Soviet intellectual field was not composed of two camps, of
decent and indecent people. It was composed of multiple competing centers of authority

10

and influence, with their distinctive visions of what science, the intelligentsia, and
intellectual autonomy signify. Furthermore, such strategies as patronage, nepotism, and
exchange of favors were not employed just by opportunists and sell-outs. In Slava
Gerovitchs apt summary, depending on the position of their Party and government patrons,
competing groups of scientists constantly shifted the knowledge/ideology boundary back and
forth, trying either to invite or to prevent the authorities interventions (2002, 20). There is a
considerable amount of self-denial and double standard involved in the popular distinctions
between justifiable friendship and mutual help, on the one hand, and illegitimate
patronage and blat, on the other.15 All intellectuals made more or less frequent use of all of
these strategies, and we should learn to refer to them with neither moral scorn nor admiration.
I do not call for proclaiming that all cats are grey and there is no distinction
between a Party bureaucrat in a high academic position, a world-renown scholar, and a
dissident intellectual, unable to publish in the Soviet Union. The contestants in the Soviet
intellectual field were differentiated by the amount and proportion of cultural, social and
political capitals at their disposal (Faraday 2000; cf. Bourdieu 1984; 1988).16 Some
academics had more to offer in terms of their academic pedigree then others; some had more
political credentials then academic ones; some were connected by kinship and friendship ties
to more influential people within Soviet academia, state leadership or in the West.
Furthermore, Soviet science was particularly famous for considerable and, with time,
widening gap between prestige and authority within institutional establishments and informal
networks of peers (Adams 2000). This situation served in the 1960s as a basis for the
establishment of what I describe in chapters 2 and 3 as parallel science. Yet, neither peer
networks nor even parallel science was monolithic and necessarily oppositional to the
formal institutions. Most academics, except those who chose to immigrate to the West,
occupied more or less prominent positions within both realms, and their actual allegiances
crossed the borderline between the formal and the informal at many points.
In this book, I explore the validity and implications of these ideas and observations
with respect to Soviet humanistic academia. By considering the Tartu School as a player in
the Soviet academic field and itself as field of forces, I examine the strategies used by various
relevant groups of intellectuals to establish the value of their resources (knowledge, in
particular) and legitimize their privileged access to them. In particular, I focus on the
strategies of depolitization and archaism which, I argue, served as a bridgehead between
the intellectual enterprises associated with the Tartu School and the preoccupations of the
Schools members as intellectuals, academics, Russians, Jews and representatives of other
social categories.
I further argue that the particular ways in which these strategies were reflected and
refracted in the Tartu mode of cultural research have a lot to do with the forms of intellectual
and personal communication established among Soviet intellectuals in the post-WWII period.
More specifically, my argument is that the Tartu intellectual paradigm, as it emerged by the
1970s, had a number of strong affinities with the ways in which Tartu academics forged their
15

Blat is an informal system of quasi-market exchange of favors of access to scarce resources, the
system which symbiotically coexisted with the formal socialist distribution system. Alena Ledeneva
treats the distinction friendship and blat as a mechanism of misrecognition inherent in the nature of
this system (1998, 60).
16
Pierre Bourdieu defines capitals as unequally shared and inherently scarce resources that yield
power (e.g. 1984, 113). In this book, I will mention political capital (apparatus of administration and
coercion), social capital (group membership and networks of influence and support) and cultural
capital, or mastery one has of the cultural practices which a society recognizes as legitimate (Bourdieu
and Passeron 1977).

11

collective identity. At this period, they presented themselves as a moral community of

high and non-official culture-bearing intellectuals whose primary allegiance was not to the
formal framework of Soviet academic institutions but to parallel science, which emerged in
the 1960s as a sign of the increasing disengagement of academic intellectuals from the goals
and meanings of the Communist regime. By pursuing this thesis in detail through the
Schools intellectual and social history, I contribute not only to the historical account of
Soviet human sciences but also to the studies of the Soviet public sphere and the culture of
intellectual circles.
Overall, by drawing on the critical perspectives outlined above, I conceptualize Soviet
science without reverting to the oppositions of science vs. ideology and intellectuals vs. the
totalitarian state, that is the key oppositions in the foundation of Cold War narratives that
have so long cloistered studies of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, by focusing on postStalinist history, this work responds to the scarcity of research on this period. In this way, this
study contributes to the young but growing field of cultural and science studies of the late
Soviet society (see, for example, Derluguian 2005; Lahusen and Kuperman 1993; Yurchak
2004).
Methodology, Data and Organization of the Book
This dissertation is at once the work of intellectual history and historical sociology. The
model of interpretation developed here aims at capturing both the historical particularity of
the Tartu School and its place within the larger framework of social and cultural processes.
Therefore, the sources of my research are not limited to the published academic studies and
statements by the members of the School and their rivals. I have also conducted extensive
research in the major archives of Moscow, Tartu and in the USA.17 In these archives, I
examined official institutional documents as well as private correspondence among Soviet
academics and with such prominent Western intellectuals as Umberto Eco, Roman Jakobson,
Julia Kristeva, and Claude Levi-Strauss. This research allowed me to place the writings of
Lotman and his colleagues within the context of Soviet institutional politics and transnational
intellectual networks. Since most of these collections have not been fully accessible until
recently, my book brings to the attention of the academic community large amounts of new
data on the social history of Soviet science.
Yet, the sources of my findings are not limited to texts of various kinds. In search for
an adequate picture of human practices, I engaged myself in a series of close encounters with
participants of the story I am recounting. In particular, during my year and a half long field
research in 2001-2002, I have collected 26 formal open-ended interviews, mostly with Yuri
Lotmans colleagues, students, opponents and other leaders of contemporary Russian
humanities and social sciences (see Appendix B). The encounters in Tartu and Moscow
involved not only formal interviews but also informal conversations and participant
observation during classes and conventions, PhD defenses and friendly gatherings, one-toone lunches and communal outings. In my formal interviews, I consciously took a long-term
perspective on the interviewees lives in effort to locate their personal and intellectual
experiences in the experiences of the corresponding generations, as well as their social and
ethnic groups. These narratives provided my project with invaluable insiders comments on
historical documents and gave me a sense of the evolution of the participants reflexivity well
into the post-Soviet period. Furthermore, my research proved to be very timely: since the
17

In the US, I consulted the Roman Jakobsons Collection (JC) at the MIT Archives, Cambridge,
Massachusetts in the spring 2002.

12

early 2000s, when most interviews were conducted, two of the interviewees and a few of my
other interlocutors died.
The course of the interviews and participant observations made me acutely aware of
the epistemological issues involved in studying intellectuals. The complexities of entering a
conversation with an interlocutor and keeping it going brought my study to the fundamental
issues of the relationship between the researcher and his or her subjects (e.g. Bourdieu 1977;
Geertz 1973). The fact that these subjects were other intellectuals with competence and
culture comparable to mine has contributed to the complexity of my research situation (e.g.
Bourdieu 1988; Coser 1970; Geertz 1973; Latour 1987). With respect to my subjects, I
cannot even claim the privilege of hindsight knowledge: most of them areor were at the
time of my researchacademically active and in good health. Therefore, I had no other
choice but to orchestrate my performances in such a way that we, my subjects and I, engage
in a dialogue of mutually interested colleagues. That is, I could never take my distance and
objectivity for granted; my own location and identity was as much at stake in these dialogues
as the issues I sought to discuss. In a word, the study of scientists and intellectuals is indeed
the most immediate realization of the ancient injunction to know thyself.
In particular, during these research deliberations, I learned that my insider/outsider
location with respect to my interlocutors granted me with a uniquely advantageous position
for both conducting research and interpreting its results. Whereas previous researchers were
mostly Russian or Western literary scholars, I was both Russian and American (as a
graduate student at an American university), both a disciplinary outsider (a sociologist) and a
sufficiently informed and favorable observer (a person who attended lectures of the leaders of
the Tartu School, especially V.V.Ivanov, at Moscow University). For instance, the fact of my
academic outsidedness put me outside of the intra-disciplinary group politics and granted
me with the expertise (sociology) that most of my interlocutors did not claim to possess. At
the same time, being a Russian person and a Moscow University graduate, I was trusted to
have certain empathy and cultural knowledge that a pure American would not be
expected to possess.
This intermediary position between national and academic cultures made it easier for
me to adopt the working principle of uncertainty according to which the researcher does
not [claim to] know [in advance] the nature of the society under study, nor where to draw the
boundaries between the realms of technical, social, scientific and so on (Latour and Woolgar
1986, 279). Following this principle, I have tried to avoid the dangers of identifying with my
subjects and imposing my own assumptions on them. This being said, I also admit that
Lotmans personality and cultural studies have been not only objects of my study but also
among the sources of my inspiration.
In this book, I differentiate four major periods in the history of Soviet semiotics. The
central episode of this history is the period of Kriku /Tartu summer schools, i.e. 1964-1974.
This is the period of what might be called Moscow-Tartu (or Tartu-Moscow) school per se.
During this period, the School proved to be one of the centers of openly non-Marxist
theorizing of myth, art and culture in the Soviet Union. Before 1964, one can talk about the
broad structuralist movement associated with what may be called the reform movement in
Soviet academia (1955-1964). At this stage, structuralists made most definite attempts to
institutionalize semiotics as a separate science or a universal science, the mathematics
of human sciences. After 1974, the relatively robust school-like network gradually
disintegrated into a number of often hardly related projects and social contacts loosely
connected by Lotman-dominated semiotic and philological periodicals. Still, one can speak
about the persisting specter of the Tartu Schoolas a center of parallel scholarship in

13

Soviet literary and cultural studiesuntil late 1980s when it clearly turned into not much
more than an empty label and a site of cultural memory.
The text of the book is divided into two main parts. The first part consists of three
chapters, in addition to this introductory chapter. In this part, I discuss social, cultural and
intellectual history and prehistory of the School. The second part, which also consists of three
chapters, integrates this history with a number of critical analyses and case studies of the
Schools research and theory.
Chapters 2 and 3 provide an analytical overview of the history of the Tartu School
and pay particular attention to its changing (self-) definitions, thematic foci, patterns of
association as well as strategies of participating in Soviet academic wars. In chapter 2, I
explore the evolution of Soviet structuralist and semiotic movement from Stalins death to the
emergence of the Tartu-Moscow School proper. By examining the Schools research and
theorizing in mythology, art and culture, chapter 3 demonstrates the significant
transformation of the intellectual idiom of Soviet Semiotics since the 1950s. I connect this
idiomatic shift with the formation of the self-conscious parallel public sphere, the social
space in which the Tartu network figured prominently. In effect, by analyzing friendship,
colleagueship and patronage networks, as well as the rituals of belonging to close-knit
communities, this chapter contributes to our theoretical understanding of Soviet science and
the public sphere under socialism. Finally, in chapter 4, I turn to the major intellectual trends
within international academic movements known as structuralism and semiotics. Apart from
providing the conceptual and thematic background for consecutive chapters, this study
challenges major precepts behind mainstream historical accounts of these movements and
science in general. Based on this analysis, I discuss the reception of the Schools work in the
West.
In the following three chapters, I turn to specific theoretical contributions of the
representatives of the School to communication and narrative theories as well as the theories
of art and culture. In chapter 5, I trace in more detail the evolution of the School from the
Rule Idiom to the Text Idiom as major organizing principles of the Schools theorizing and
research. By considering interactions, similarities and contrasts with comparable Western
perspectives, I define the distinctive approaches of the School to the major issues of cultural
analysis and connect my findings to other aspects of the Schools history discussed earlier. In
chapter 6, I delve deeper into Lotmans both abstract and grounded theorizing on culture
considered against the background of the cultural turn in the West and the Soviet
culturological movement since the 1960s. This chapter also explores the tense coexistence
between two different, structuralist and neo-historicist, frameworks within Lotmans work.
Chapter 7 analyzes Lotmans studies in early modern Russian culture. Far from being just an
illustration of the previous sections, this chapter reconstructs the grounded theory of the
Russian gentrys theatricality as a significant contribution to the contemporary theories of
human agency and modern subjectivity.
In the concluding chapter, I summarize the findings and contributions of the book to
the historiography of the Tartu School, to the reconstruction of its paradigm, and to the theory
and history of late Soviet science and intellectual culture.

14

Chapter Two
SOVIET SCIENCE AND ACADEMIC AUTONOMY:
The Structuralist Sturm und Drang

As in the West, the late 1950s and the 1960s in the Soviet Union were, for human scientists,
the epoch of structuralism (cf. Marx-Scouras 1996; Pavel 1989). Structuralism was
originally a theory of language that shifted the attention of linguists from the materiality of
sounds and other elements of human language to the deep structures of relations, which
appeared to determine the properties of these elements. Inaugurated by the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the structuralist academic movement reached its highest
point in the 1960s, when its linguistic models were modified and applied to a variety of other
fields, such as the study of myth, ritual, literature, and communication. This process was
taking place in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and in the Soviet Union.
Yet, despite being a transnational movement, structuralism developed along different
trajectories in different national contexts. For instance, in 1940s France, structuralism was
basically an external import without deep national intellectual roots (Pavel 1989, 125-132).
On the contrary, Eastern Europe and Russia gave the world such related trends as Russian
Formalism and the Prague School structuralism already in the 1920s.1 Yet, in the 1930s and
1940s, the center of the world structuralist movement shifted to the United States. At the
same time, in Soviet academia and the arts, everything that smacked of formalism, that is
the emphasis on the autonomy of linguistic and artistic form from the ideological
content, was suppressed. Given this massive gap in the Russian intellectual history, all the
more surprising is the impressive neo-formalist revival, which took place in the Soviet
Union after Stalins death in 1953. In this chapter, I explore the institutional, discursive and
political aspects of this revival by focusing on the Moscow-centered structuralist movement. I
examine the ups and downs of this movement, and the strategies of action, which were
adopted by its members in the Soviet academic wars for legitimacy and influence. I
explain the reasons for its sudden emergence in mid-1950s and its sudden decline around
1963. This picture leads to the conclusion that the Tartu-Moscow School, inaugurated in
1964, was not simply a continuation of the structuralist movement but, in many respects, a
new beginning, which was characterized by different social strategies and, eventually, by the
new intellectual idiom.

The term Russian Formalism usually embraces the intellectual production of the Moscow
Linguistic Circle (1915-24), headed by Roman Jakobson, and the Opoyaz (OPOIaZ), the Society of
Poetic Language, which was established in 1916 and was active throughout the 1920s. The Prague
School, active since 1928 to the 1940s, included both Czech scholars (Vilm Mathesius, Jan
Mukaovsk, Ren Wellek) and Russian migrs (Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetskoi) (see
Erlich 1981; Merquior 1986; Steiner 1984).

15

Stalinist Science and Its Legacy

Without necessarily falling into the trap of Russian exceptionalism, one can state that Soviet
academic system, as it existed by the mid-1950s, was quite a unique phenomenon. Highly
centralized and hierarchical, concentrated in a number of urban centers, fully funded by the
state, and institutionally split into fundamental (basic, or theoretical) and applied research
as well as research and teaching, Soviet science was a magnificent experiment in coalescing
knowledge and power in the massive apparatus of the empire of knowledge (see
Krementsov 1997; Vucinich 1984). Far from being just a product of the one-way imposition
by the socialist state, this apparatus was, at different points in time, an outcome of the
compromises between conflicting objectives within the politics of socialist modernization
and the interests of the groups that were supposed to implement this politics, academic
intellectuals in particular. In the early 1930s, when the Soviet scientific system acquired its
distinctive shape, this settlement was a result of the tradeoff between various projects
including Marxist materialism, socialist collectivism, technocratic rationalism, meritocratic
ideology, anti-Western nationalism and anti-ideological academism. This tradeoff was
achieved at the expense of more radical visions of proletarian science, which tried to abolish
the distance between experts and the masses (Buck-Morss 2002; Vucinich 1984; Graham
2002; Kojevnikov 2004).
Yet, this symbiosis of power and knowledge was inherently unstable. The
communist authorities were torn between attempts to base their political legitimacy on
knowledge claims and on the claims for egalitarian representation. On the one hand, the
authorities needed intellectuals as specialists in modernization, or transmission belts
between them and the masses (Bauman 1987; Dubin 2001). Therefore, Stalins government
granted academics, especially researchers of the Academy of Sciences and professors of a
number of elite universities, with high official prestige and remuneration, as well as with
multiple privileges approximating the ones of the nomenklatura (Fitzpatrick 1999; Vucinich
1984). The beneficiaries included many older generation academics that were previously
vilified as the bourgeois intelligentsia. Yet the more privileged as a social category
intellectuals were, the more personally secure they felt, especially during the purges of the
late 1930s and late 1940s-early 1950s. Furthermore, the Party continued to promote lower
class cadres to the academic positions, especially the positions in university education and
human sciences. This politics threatened to undermine the considerable social distinction of
academic professionals, which was inherited from the imperial period and reinforced in the
late 1930s and 1940s. Also, these upwardly mobile promotees (vydvizhentsy), often more
competent in the ideological newspeak than in their disciplines, frequently served as
vehicles of the politicized and ideologized atmosphere characteristic for Stalinist science
(Krementsov 1997). Indeed, the late 1930s and 1940s were full of outbreaks of highly
politicized debates often accompanied by spasmodic interventions by the Party officials and
Stalin himself (e.g. his personal support for Lysenkos Michurinist biology as well as his
overturn of Marrist linguistics (see Krementsov 1997; Slezkine 1996)).2 The result was
uncertain and nervous atmosphere of what the classical philologist Olga Freidenberg (18901955) called a squabble:
2

See, for instance, his personal support for Lysenkos Michurinist biology as well as his criticism of
Marrist linguistics (see Krementsov 1997; Slezkine 1996). Academician Nikolai Ia. Marr (18641934) was the founder of the new theory of language, which was considered the basis for Marxist
linguistics in the 1930s-40s and was officially supported as such by the authorities. Yet, in his 1950
article, Marxism and the Questions of Linguistics, Stalin rejected Marrism and thus put an end to its
domination in Soviet linguistics.

16

Everywhere, in all organizations and homes, a nasty squabble (skloka) is raging, a

poisoned fruit of our order. Squabbling is a natural state for people who are rubbing
against each other in a dungeon, helpless to resist the dehumanization they have been
subjected to (Freidenberg and Pasternak [1956]1981).
In effect, academics were torn between, for one thing, their appreciation ofor rather
increasingly taking for grantedthe social distinction and prestige in Soviet society and, for
another, their irritationand often deeply seated fearcaused by the states and the Partys
infringements on the personal and corporate autonomy of academics and academia. Indeed,
on the one hand, Stalinist science provided academics with the security of tenure, shielded
from the instability of student and public demand, and promised enormous opportunities
for conducting long-term expensive research. The regime also allowed academics to widen
their institutional base and resources. By the late 1950s, the Soviet Academy of Sciences was
a corporation as close to a state within a state as one can be, with its own share of socialist
property, its own labs, plants, planes, ships, spas, dachas, and expensive equipment
(Vucinich 1984). At the same time, intellectuals felt highly vulnerable in the atmosphere of
unpredictability nourished by the Stalinist policies of the permanent revolution. Their
institutional position, professional competence and personal security were in constant danger.
This was particularly true to the situation of educators and specialists in human sciences,
where knowledge seemed to be more transparent to the authorities and thus more vulnerable
to their interventions.
In response to these challenges, academics tried to translate their particular agendas
into the Party lingo, as well as to enter the patronage relationships with the members of the
Central Committee. They often succeeded in emasculating the attempts at the Party control
by ritualizing political campaigns and thus reestablishing their own authority over their
endeavors (Krementsov 1997, 192). Yet, in the years of terror, personal links to leaders
proved to be increasingly dangerous (a patron could appear to be an hidden enemy!). The
problem with the acquisition of the Party ideology was that its content was deeply ambiguous
or, one might say, flexible, to the extent that only the Party itself could, at any particular
moment, pin down its correct reading (Gerovitch 2002; Epstein 1995; Walker 1989). In this
situation, even the most vehement proclamations of ones Marxism could have been used
against academics: Stalins denunciation of the previously officially endorsed new linguistic
theory of Nikolai Marr is the case in point particularly relevant here. This significance of
language and the question who controls language? explains the focus of the 1950s reform
movement in Soviet science on reforming the language of science. In this context, the
centrality of linguistics and semiotics, the science of signification and communication, in this
movement is also not a big surprise.
Cybernetics, Structuralism and the Reform Movement in Soviet Human Sciences
It is good to be a structural linguist:
everything immediately falls into place
- The Strugatsky Brothers, Escape Attempt
After Stalins death, Soviet science immediately found itself in the state of flux. The Stalinist
pact between intellectuals and authorities immediately came under attack. Frequent jerky
alternations of official policies and preferences under Stalin satisfied neither the government
nor the academic establishment. Under the conditions of the Cold War, scientists, especially
physicists and mathematicians, accumulated sufficient political capital and social status to
push for a major reform in organization and management of science (K.Ivanov 2002, 318).
17

Their demands included the domination of fundamental, or pure, science over applied
science, and the guarantees of the experts authority over their expertise, as well as over the
terms of its translation into practice (2002, 334).
This reform movement proved to be quite successful, at least in the short term and
especially within natural sciences. Scientists indeed managed to impose their agenda on the
Communist leaders. They achieved particularly striking successes in rehabilitating and even
institutionalizing some of the scientific fields and traditions, which were suppressed under
Stalin. From genetics and cybernetics to structuralism and Vygotskys psychologythese
are some of the success stories. The remarkable career of the new science of cybernetics
from the bourgeois pseudo-science to the science in the service of communism is
particularly important for understanding the history of Soviet structuralism (Gerovitch 2002).
Cybernetics (from a Greek work for steering and government) is a the
interdisciplinary study of complex systems, especially communication processes, and the
mechanisms of control and feedback. Proposed in the late 1940s by Norbert Wiener (18941964), the idea of the science of cybernetics immediately attracted the attention of Russian
scholars, of whom Andrei N. Kolmogorov (1903-87) was one of the most important. Among
other things, cybernetics appealed to Kolmogorov as a method of diminishing the entropy in
the scientific community by reformulating scientific knowledge in exact terms of control,
communication and information. As such, cybernetics provided the academic reform
movement with its grammar and vocabulary, something that Slava Gerovitch recently called
cyberspeak, as opposed the newspeak of the official politicized discourse (Gerovitch
2002; V.Uspensky 1997).
Obviously, linguists could not stay aside from the work of working out of this
ideologically neutral language. Soviet structural linguistics emerged in the mid-1950s
under the auspice of recently rehabilitated and very popular cybernetics. Structuralists and
cyberneticians shared the common belief in the possibility of the universal method of
problem solving, provided that problems are formulated in the right language. Following the
logical positivist Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) and the linguist Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965),
they declared that, before deciding whether a certain problem can or cannot be solved
scientifically, it is necessary first of all to formulate this problem clearly in some strict
terms, for example, to pose it as a mathematical problem (Revzin and Rozentsveig 1963,
34). Whatever does not survive the reformulation into this kind of cyberspeak would have
to be expunged from the body of science. This hygienic concern constituted a key frame
for the reception of the newly available Western achievements in what was known as
structural linguistics, that is American descriptive linguistics, transformational-generative
grammar and Roman Jakobsons phonology and poetics.
Although there were different views on the nature of the universal method and ways
of achieving it, there was a widely shared consensus on the fact that language, including the
language of science, is as it were independent of the political and economic conditions of its
usage. This view had been vilified in Soviet literature as formalist since the campaigns
against the formal method in linguistics and literary studies in the 1920s. Ironically, Stalin
himself played a pivotal role in dispelling the exclusively accusatory usage of this label. In
his explosive series of articles on linguistics and Marxism, he employed his crown move of
distancing from the excesses of previously endorsed policies and accused the supporters of
Nikolai Marr of inventing formalism to facilitate their struggle against their opponents in
linguistics (Stalin 1950, 87). Stalin proclaimed that language is not a part of the
superstructure, that it is not determined by the economic basis and that it manifests stability
over time. That is, he not only dismantled the Marrist hegemony; he also de facto legitimized

18

the formalist idea of the autonomy of language and, whatever inadvertently, opened up the
field of linguistics for academic debate. 3
Clandestine structuralists immediately jumped into the opening created by Stalin.
Already in 1952, the young linguist Sebastian Shaumian published a paper, in which he
advocated the interest in Western linguistic structuralism (see Seyffert 1983, 86-87).4 He
argued that this interest is not a sign of kowtowing to the imperialist West but a way to
assimilate the best in the Russian national academic tradition. Already 3-4 years later, these
kinds of obvious references to Soviet ideological and nationalistic newspeak disappeared
from the papers on structuralism. The academic reform movement, the 1956 Khrushchevs
speech and the rehabilitation of cybernetics made it possible to not only advocate but also
practice the ideological neutrality of language. For instance, structuralists could argue for
the autonomy of their methods and perspectives by invoking such ideas as Sebastian
Shaumians principle of homogeneity: scientific explanation within a certain theory
cannot be built on facts lying outside the subject-matter of this theory (1957, 44).5
According to Viacheslav Ivanovs (1995: 3, 167) reminiscences of this period, we were tired
of the phraseology of the official philosophy. We wanted to deal with precisely defined
concepts and with terms that were defined through rigorously described operations.
The alliance with cybernetics seemed to offer a prospect of implementing this
program. Ivanov and his colleagues were intrigued by Roman Jakobsons (1971c) translation
of thermodynamic and information-theoretical parlance of information, redundancy,
codes and messages into linguistics. The alliance with hard sciences, especially
cybernetics and information theory, was perceived as a panacea against ideology and a
recipe for the transformation of linguistics and other human sciences into true sciences.
This alliance with natural sciences was enshrined institutionally and discursively in
the multitude of labs (e.g. the Machine Translation Lab), which mushroomed in the late
1950s, and in the establishment of the Linguistic Section of the Academys Council on
Cybernetics, established in 1959.6 The scientization of human sciences was achieved
through the introduction of mathematical methods (statistical probability analysis, formal
modeling, topology, game theory and more) and information theory in linguistic and later
cultural studies. By associating themselves with prestigious and powerful natural scientists,
Soviet structuralists established a distance between their conceptual language and their field
of research, on the one hand, and the competence of other human scientists and philosophers,
on the other. In response to this strategy, structuralists were accused of indulging in
terminological redundancies and being plain arrogant. To this they had a ready made
3

This was not the only result of Stalins intervention. Vladimir Toporov recalls that, before 1950,
there were very few opportunities for academic advancement for Moscow University students who
specialized in comparative and theoretical linguistics. Yet, after the discussion [initiated by Stalin],
everything changed. Before, the ratio of the places for linguists and literary critics available in the
graduate school (aspirantura) [of the Philology Faculty] was 5 to 35. After the discussion, they let in
everyone who wished to study linguistics on the graduate level, 11 persons altogether, Toporov
included (Toporov, Vladimir. Interview by author. Moscow, July 2002).
4
Sebastian K. Shaumian (1916-2007) was a relative of a famous Bolshevik hero, Stepan Shaumian
(1878-1918), and a leader of Soviet structural linguistics. Ivanov (1995 (3), 166) writes that Shaumian
used his connections in the Central Committee [of the Soviet Communist Party] to rehabilitate
structural linguistics. In 1975, Shaumian immigrated to the US, where he joined the faculty of Yale
University.
5
Targeted against the expansionism of official Marxist philosophy, this principle omitted the fact
that structural linguistics own methodology was based on translating the methodology of hard
sciences, i.e. sciences built on non-linguistic facts.
6
ARAN, f. 1807, op.1, d.110, l.29.

19

answer: those who do not understand [what we say] cannot accuse [us] of arrogance; it is as
if they would attend the symposium on astrophysics.7
The alliance with cybernetics not only provided means for protecting the disciplinary
autonomy of structuralism-dominated linguistics with respect to ideology but also justified
the expansion of structuralism into other domains of human sciences. As Geoff Bowker
(1993) demonstrated, cyberneticians were fashioning themselves as specialists in
generalities, or practitioners of the universal discipline. In contrast to a traditional
disciplinary strategy of obligatory passage point, they forged their discipline as a
distributed passage point (1993, 122-123; cf. Latour 1988). That is, instead of advocating
the distinct status of their field, they posited cybernetics everywhere you went, i.e. as a
universal mediator between different academic and social domains. If ordinary disciplines
underlined their novelty with respect to the scientific tradition, the universal discipline, to
quote Andrei Kolmogorov, faced a grandiose task of including in its worldview the whole
heritage of human culture which has developed, so far, in forms alien to it [cybernetics],
including religious forms (see V.Uspensky 1997, 242).
Structural linguists fashioned themselves in a similar manner. They turned around
Jakobsons dictum that every language is a code into any code is a language (Ivanov and
Shaumian 1961, 220). Thus a specific cyberspeak of structural linguistics was conceived as a
universal language of science and a recapitulation of the secondary modeling systems of
art, myth and religion.8 Such expansionist aspirations took the shape of the project of
semiotics, or a science aimed at the study of any sign system in human society (Ivanov
1962, 3). Being defined this way, semiotics claimed the foundational significance of its
methods for adjacent disciplines in the humanities, the significance similar to the one of
mathematics for natural sciences (1962, 8). Hence, as semioticians, linguists and other
humanists could claim not only to control their specialized vocabulary but also to be a
universal translator and an arbiter of the meaningful academic discourse.
The rhetoric of exactness and universality implied a particular vision of
interdisciplinarity opposed to the one institutionalized in Soviet academia. Soviet MarxistLeninist philosophy was supposed to be the ultimate theory of nature, society and science and
thus the super-disciplinary analyzer, coordinator and initiator of disciplinary research. In
these respects, Soviet academia was an heir to the German Humboldtian model of the
university in which philosophy played meta-territorial role (e.g. Collins 1998, 618-688).
Yet, under the Soviet conditions, this role of philosophy did not guarantee the autonomy of
science. On the contrary, philosophers were often perceived as agents of the Party state
within academia. Indeed, the periodic interventions of Soviet Marxist philosophers into
scientific debates were often ways of exercising the Partys control over science (Kojevnikov
2004; Krementsov 1997).
In practice, this model of interdisciplinarity implied the duplication of the
philosophers newspeak on the disciplinary level and the ossification of local orthodoxies
with their own founding fathers and classics, like physiologist Pavlov, biologist Michurin
or linguist Marr (Krementsov 1997, 50). Simultaneously, the threat of philosophers
interventions led specialists to sink into extreme disciplinary empiricism, often highly

The mathematician Vladimir Uspensky at the Symposium on the Structural Studies in Sign Systems,
1962, Moscow (ARAN, f.1965, op.1, d.285, ll. 179, 186).
8
These systems of cultural symbols are secondary in the sense that they are superimposed on the
foundation of natural language, which supplies them with primary material and resources for further
symbolization (Ivanov et al. 1973; Zalizniak et al. 1962). This is the early Tartu formula of the
culture-language relationship.

20

sophisticated but accompanied by nothing more then highly specialized theorizing. 9 It is by

immersing themselves in the narrowly disciplinary mattersfor example, commenting on
classical texts or discussing the principles of text attributionthat some of the leaders and
allies of Russian Formalism, like Eikhenbaum, Propp, Tomashevsky, Vinogradov10 and
Zhirmunsky, managed to slip through the years of Stalins terror.11
The strategy adopted by semioticians with respect to this arrangement was complex.
They expressed their deep respect toward middle-level theorizing and empirical research, and
claimed their descent from the formalist and other schools of the Russian humanities.
Simultaneously, they appealed to the authority of natural sciences and Western scholarship
for the support of their claim that the new methods of formalization and modeling allow to
bridge disciplinary boundaries without any recourse to philosophy (see Ivanov 1962). In sum,
semiotics was expected to retrieve the meaningful (non-ideological) aspects of disciplinary
knowledge and overcome disciplinary conservatism and parochialism. It was to constitute a
new, truly scientific center of power and cooperation in the academic domain.
Correspondingly, in contrast to the popular image of the semi-educated official
philosopher, a promotee with strong provincial accident, semioticians put forward the
image of a new scholar as a Renaissance personality. This personality was expected to
combine in-depth expertise in a number of domains with encyclopedic erudition in not only
sciences but also arts and world cultures. This is the type that the Strugatsky12 brothers both
advertised and parodied in their image of the most structural (strukturalneishii) linguist.
Among specific exemplars of such a scholar of the future, the academicianmathematician Andrei Kolmogorov and the linguist Viacheslav V. Ivanov loom particularly
large. Kolmogorovs range of interests indicates that the alliance between natural and human
scientists in the 1950s-60s was not just a one-way borrowing from hard sciences. Known for
his pathbreaking studies in the theories of probability and information, Kolmogorov was also
a passionate lover of literature and a practitioner of statistical poetics, one of the subtends in
the wider structuralist and semiotic movement. He was a patron and a chief participant of the
first major Soviet conference on structural poetics in Gorky (see Shukman 1977, 186). As
Roman Jakobson, who was a frequent visitor to the Soviet Union after 1956, observed,
In Moscow, where I had in general a fascinating time, I had a long conversation with
Kolmogorov he is entirely immersed in metrics and has a staff of some 20 people
among whom there are remarkable workers with mathematical and linguistic

As Eliazar Meletinsky (1998, 513) recalls, his professor, Viktor M. Zhirmunsky (1891-1971), was
not happy with Meletinskys education received in George Lukacs-dominated Moscow Institute of
History, Philosophy and Literature. Zhirmunsky suggested that he should first learn how to do the
laborious job of comparing the sources against each other before indulging in more abstract and
theoretical pursuits.
10
Boris M. Eikhenbaum (1886-1959) was one of the leaders of the Petersburg Opoyaz. The folklorist
Vladimir Ia. Propp (1895-1970) profoundly influenced contemporary narrative theory. Boris V.
Tomashevsky (1890-1957) is famous as provider of the systematic account of the Russian formalist
theory. Viktor V. Vinogradov (1894-1969) was close to formalists in the 1920s, arrested in 1934 for
a few years, and de facto headed Soviet linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s.
11
In contrast, Grigory A. Gukovsky (1902-1950), literary historian known for his theoretical thinking
and closeness to Marxism, died in prison soon after his arrest in 1950 (see on him in Lotman 1994b,
59-64).
12
The Strugatsky brothers, Arkady (1925-1991) and Boris (b.1933), are the most popular Soviet
science fiction writers. Arkady Strugatsky was a specialist in Japanese and knew many Soviet
structuralists personally.

21

training Poetics and the resumption of the Opojaz search is, in general there [in the
USSR] among the young linguists, one of the chief slogans.13
Viacheslav V. Ivanov was the most significant member of Kolmogorovs research group and
later a central figure of the Tartu School (see Appendix A). A son of an important Soviet
writer, he had an incredible luxury of having access to the enormous home library as well as
to the most creative Russians of the period (his dacha is neighboring the one of the poet Boris
Pasternak (1890-1960)). Enjoying an opportunity of home schooling for health reasons, he
made full use of the assets at his disposal and became, according to his contemporaries, one
of the most broadly read persons in Soviet academia. A confidant of Pasternak and a favorite
(in absentia) student of Roman Jakobson, Ivanov later made his name for his extreme
linguistic, cultural and disciplinary polyglottism.
The semiotic frontline of the reform movement in Soviet academia involved not only
distinctive rhetorical figures and remarkable leaders. It also involved a number of distinctive
strategies of institutionalizing the new trend in the Soviet academic system and,
simultaneously, challenging the existing academic order. With the support of such influential
scientists as Kolmogorov as well as enlightened technocrats like the admiral-engineer Axel
Berg,14 scholars like Ivanov were engaged in the complex struggle for recognition of their
new disciplines. By the early 1960s, these negotiations resulted in the establishment of the
divisions of Structural and Applied Linguistics in the major universities, the Sector of
Structural Typology at the Institute of Slavic Studies, and the Linguistic (later Semiotic)
Section within the interdisciplinary Council on Cybernetics of the Soviet Academy of
Science, headed by Admiral Berg. The 1960 resolution of the Presidium of the Soviet
Academy of Sciences called for the establishment of the separate Institute of Semiotics.
However, this major object of the aspirations of Soviet structuralists, the academic
Institute of Semiotics, never materialized (Gerovitch 2002; Ivanov 1998a; 1998b;
V.Uspensky 1998). Why was its establishment so attractive to the participants of the
structuralist movement? Why did they lose? What would result out of their victory and what
actually resulted out of their loss?
Structuralism and Soviet Academic Institutions
To answer these questions, it is necessary to remember that we are dealing with a distinctive
academic regime, Soviet academia. For instance, in American academia, any new discipline
would aspire to its own department or center, such as the departments of Communication
Science, Film Studies or Womens Studies, at majorbut not necessarily Ivy League
universities. In contrast, the Soviet aspirants for recognition did not rush to Soviet
universities. Even the most prestigious Moscow University did not attract the most important
structuralists and semioticians into its newly opened Division of Structural Linguistics at the
Faculty of Philology (see Appendix A). One reason was the choices made by the aspirants
themselves: they largely preferred the institutions of the Academy of Sciences to universities,
including their own alma mater, Moscow University (V.Uspensky 1998).
The key to this issue is the fact that, unlike its American and most other Western
analogues, Soviet academia was characterized by clear separation between research and
13

Jakobson to Taranovski, December 3, 1962. JC, box 46, file 43 (Original in English).
Axel [Aksel] I. Berg (1893-1979) was a nobleman and a marine engineer who managed to reach
the heights of the Soviet hierarchy. An academician since 1946, a one-time deputy Minster of
Defense, and a head of Soviet Cybernetics, he was a hero of contradictory legends among his
intellectual colleagues (see Ivanov 1995; 1998a; 1998b).
14

22

education, or, roughly speaking, between the Academy and the University. This separation
was an outcome of the massive reorganization of Russian science and academia
accomplished in the 1920s-30s (Vucinich 1984). Although, in the 1920s, there was much
effort invested in disestablishing bourgeois science and creating alternative proletarian
structuresfor instance, the Communist Academy in the 1920s,Soviet science of the
subsequent decades was a compromise between various projects including technocratic
elitism, anti-Western nationalism and anti-ideological academism. By the 1930s, there
seemed to be a broad consensus among administrators, Party bosses and academics about the
need for state patronage over science, for non-competitive block financing and, last but not
least, the separation between research and education. 15
An important consequence of this separation was the establishment of a new
hierarchy between scholars: those occupied by pure, or fundamental, studies at the
academic institutes had lower work loads, almost no teaching obligations (except for working
with a small number of graduate students), had higher job security and lower personal
responsibility for the outcomes of their work. According to Loren Grahams calculations,
125,000 academics employed in the Academy system consumed 6.5% of the state research
budget while 600,000 university professors only 7% of it.16 Moreover, as educators of the
younger generation, university professors were much more vulnerable to challenges on
political and academic grounds. Their curricula were highly standardized and watched by
both academic and Party authorities. No surprise that, in effect, The Soviet Academy of
Sciences was the major place of employment of the most outstanding fundamental
researchers in the country (Graham 1998, 83). Viacheslav Ivanovs transfer to the academic
Institute for Slavic Studies after his politically-motivated expulsion from Moscow University
in 1959he supported the poet Boris Pasternak at the time of his lynching in the Soviet media
for publishing his Doctor Zhivago abroadis more of a pattern than merely Ivanovs personal
case.
Therefore it is not surprising that the academic institute was such an attractive idea.
The Academy was perceived as a haven and a free zone for true science (Genis and
Vail 1988). In the early 1960s, the Academy had the image of the most politically
progressive and most intellectually liberal force in society (Churchward 1973, 150). Yet,
amidst these rising expectations, many semioticians did not notice, or chose not to notice, that
their image of the academic order was not radically different from the officially endorsed. For
instance, look at the wording of Andrei Markov Jr.s address to mathematical and structural
linguists, it is time to move from amateur studies in ones spare time to serious goal-oriented
work planned from a single center (see Andreev 1960, 133).17 In a word, by the 1960s, the
image of hierarchical, (institutionally) centralized, planned, state-funded and independent
from education scientific research was largely taken for granted by all players in the
academic field. The main issue was only who was going to be at the top of this system, the
individuals of Kolmogorovs and Ivanovs circle or their opponents, the representatives of the
disciplinary establishments or official philosophers. The Academy of Sciences was an
establishment in which the expectation and demand of academic self-government seemed to
be closer to reality then in any other Soviet academic institution.
15

Funding of research within this system was not dispersed on the basis of competitive applications
by individual researchers, but by block funding of institutes by the central Academy presidium, which
got its money from the government (Graham 1998, 84).
16
The rest of the budget was consumed by the industrial and defense system (around 800,000
personnel). Since I am primarily concerned with human sciences, this third branch of Soviet science
does not directly concern us here.
17
Andrei A. Markov Jr. (1903-79), a son of Andrei Markov Sr., the author of the famous Markov
chains, was a prime candidate for the directorship of the Institute of Cybernetics and/or Semiotics.

23

Thus, the structuralists struggle for recognition and independence was not a struggle
against Soviet academic order. At stake was not independence from this order but a degree
of autonomy and influence within this order. While challenging some rules of the game,
Soviet structuralists followed other rules and often accepted them as natural. Consolidation of
power in one center, personal patronage, lobbying and networking, exchange of favors, the
rhetoric of lagging behind the West and concern for national honorall these techniques of
negotiating academic power were employed by both structuralists and their opponents. In
fact, the struggle for the recognition of semiotics as an Academic Institute-worthy discipline
proceeded along the typical rout that can be summarized approximately as follows:
Lets say a number of ambitious young people, well versed in some Western books,
decide to sprout out. They go to the Central Committee and, if they find some sort of
mediator, they receive a research institute. The demand [for new disciplines or fields
was not market demand or competition based but] was mediated ideologically. [For
instance,] the self-representation to the West was important.18
This is, of course, a crude picture based on the philosopher Mikhail Ryklins understanding
of the experience of sociology with which he is more familiar. In a more general case,
books were not necessarily Western; this could have also been the suppressed masterpieces
of the native academic tradition (e.g. Russian Formalism). Yet, it is true that the patronage in
the higher spheres was essential: for decades, Admiral Berg played the role of the
enlightened lord for Soviet semioticians, while Kolmogorov and a few other prominent
scientists provided a clout from influential hard sciences for a few years (see Ivanov 1995;
1998a). Furthermore, respectability in the eyes of the West was indeed an important
argument of the aspirants to the institutional status: How come that we do not have
something while they [the West] do? This argument was a common trump card used by
geneticists, sociologists, cyberneticians and structural linguists. For instance, another patron
of semiotics, the director of the Institute for Slavic Studies, argued for the establishment of
the Institute of Semiotics as an equivalent to Roman Jakobsons MIT linguistic center.19 The
very fact of such analogy was expected to serve as a justification for the existence of the
pressing need in semiotic studies. Furthermore, the early recognition of young Soviet
structuralists in the West, such as their frequent appearance in international periodicals,20
served as an additional argument that could easily be translated into Soviet newspeak as one
more victory of Soviet science.
We should also not forget the importance of the governments pragmatic concerns
during the Cold War. Cyberneticians and semioticians appealed to the governments strategic
military needs such as code breaking and machine translation, or unmanned speedy
translation of foreign academic, military and technical data. Structural linguistics in the
Soviet Union received an enormous boost after the publication of the report on the
Georgetown Experiment, the first public demonstration of the automatic translation from
Russian to English.21 Semioticians also promised to formalize various branches of science
18

Ryklin, Mikhail. Interview by author. Moscow, July 2002.

The letter of Petr Tretiakov, the director of the Academys Institute of Slavic Studies, to CPSU
Central Committee, 1959 (ARAN, f.1965, op.1, d.226, l.17).
20
For instance, periodicals Poetics/Poetika/Poetyka (1961-66) and Sign-Language-Culture combined
articles of young Soviet researchers along with such masters of European and American linguistics
and semiotics as Chomsky, Chatman, Eco, Gombrich, Greimas, Jakobson and Wierzbicka.
21
See Filinov E.N. Istoriia mashinnogo perevoda (The History of Machine Translation),
http://www.computer-museum.ru/histsoft/histmt.htm.
19

24

and economy with a prospect of optimal planning, more efficient society-state feedback
and thus enhanced governability of society.22
Thus, in addition to the anti-ideological and expansionistic rhetoric, semioticians used
the languages of modernization, scientific-technical revolution and national security. They
also advocated the values of professionalism and meritocracy as opposed to egalitarianism
and proletarian class instinct. That is, far from being somehow non-ideological, they in fact
made use of the plasticity of official ideology by opposing some of its aspects to others for
their own benefit. Similarly, far from being a-political, they manipulated the internal
divisions within the administrative apparatus by appealing to military and industrial
authorities over the head of the academic and Party officials.
Nonetheless, the resultant success was at best only partial: the Institute was not
established. Moreover, after the most representative and aggressive demonstration of the
structuralists aspirations at the Symposium on the Structural Study of Sign Systems in
Moscow in 1962, the movement was harshly criticized by the chief Khrushchevs ideologue,
academician Leonid Ilichev (see V.Uspensky 1998, 297). By 1964, any further institutional
expansion of the structural and semiotic research became highly improbable. Vladimir
Toporov, myth specialist and Ivanovs co-author, was writing in 1964 that the publications
of our sector [of structural typology at the Institute for Slavic Studies] are being attacked by
the unconscientious [nedobrosovestnykh] people or even completely stopped.23 The issue of
the Institute of Semiotics disappeared from the official correspondence and the very word
semiotics returned to the status of suspect terms. This fact explains why the organizers of
the Kriku summer schools, to be discussed shortly, did not mention semiotics in any of
their official documents: secondary modeling systems was originally invented as a
euphemism for the field of semiotics (V.Uspensky 1994).
What happened? Why was the series of successes suddenly interrupted? On the one
hand, the answer seems to be obvious: the short age of Khrushchevs liberalism was coming
to its end and the regime started to consolidate its ideological hegemony, which was
undermined by the anti-Stalinism campaign. Of course, in comparison with Stalins
suppression of the whole scientific trends, the 1963 clampdown on structuralism was very
mild. It only forced Soviet structuralists to abandon their aspirations of expansion and to be
satisfied with their gains and achievements to date. No careers, not to mention lives, were
ended at that point of time. One might say that this mild clampdown was well in the spirit of
the more vegetarian times, as opposed to more carnivorous Stalinism.
Yet, this is at best only a partial explanation. It is too general and does not account
for the details of the events. The Party intervention in 1963 should be considered in the
context of a number of other processes, such as the internal struggles within the Soviet
academic community, the changing outlook on the possible benefits of mathematical
linguistics in the West and Russia, and the new trends in Soviet social life. Let me first
focus at the first point in this list, on the Soviet academic wars.
Soviet Academic Wars over Structuralism and Semiotics
The Soviet field of power struggles is often portrayed as a binary opposition. Intellectuals vs.
bureaucracy, the practitioners of critical thought and true knowledge vs. ideologists and
careerists, this are the typical renditions of the major conflict in Soviet society by Western
critics of totalitarianism and often Soviet intellectuals themselves (see Kagarlitsky 1988;
Pipes 1994; Shlapentokh 1990). Yet, this perspective obscures the ambiguity of the
22
23

See letters to CPSU Central Committee at ARAN, f.1965, op.1, d.226. See also Gerovitch (2002).
Toporov to Lotman, March 17th, 1964 (LC, F135, s.Bt 1442).

25

borderlines between social positions and ideologies of intellectual and political elites in
Soviet society. Although binary thinking was indeed strong among the actors in the Soviet
academic field, all of them used binary categories to their own advantage. Furthermore, if we
look at the actual strategies, employed by intellectuals, of acting and positioning themselves
within Soviet public debates and institutional struggles, we encounter a large variety of often
surprising trajectories and alliances (see Kojevnikov 2004; Krementsov 1997). In Slava
Gerovitchs words, Instead of simple binary opposition, we have a confusing Mbius strip:
it is no longer entirely clear who is on which side (2002, 6). We notice that the competing
strategies were built not in the idealized space of the binary oppositions but in a much
messier multi-polar world in which the very labels of intellectual (intelligent), scientist
(uchenyi) and science were at stake, as constantly contested and reinterpreted identity
markers.
In this context, the academic debates on structuralism and later the Tartu School
reveal a lot about the late Soviet academic wars. If we listen only to structuralists, we get an
impression that the critique of structuralism and semiotics was nothing but a series of
academically shallow but politically dangerous attacks by the priests of Marxist orthodoxy
and various careerists who tried to curry favor with the authorities (e.g. Ivanov 1995). Yet,
if we also take the perspective of the other side of the debate into account, we get a far more
complex and interesting picture.
Indeed, structuralists tended to treat the critique aimed at them as at least irrelevant
but more often denunciatory. For example, in response to a philosophers accusation that
structuralists do not take into account the fundamental principles of Marxist dialectics,
Viacheslav Ivanov reacted by describing this criticism as
a political denunciation in the spirit of the time of the cult of personality. Malicious,
demagogic and absurd speech by [the philosopher] Gorsky has nothing to do with
scientific polemics.24
Here, Ivanov refers to the period of Stalinism, or the cult of the personality, when indeed
one could speak about the close overlap between scientific and political criticism. This is how
one insightful student of Stalinist science describes the spirit of this epoch: the
disappearance of traditional scientific criticism is quite understandablein the atmosphere of
permanent struggle and fierce political campaigns, any criticism could be perceived as a
signal to start a new campaign (Krementsov 1997, 52). In this situation, the academics in the
1930s and 1940s faced the choice between two options: either to engage in toppling their
opponents by using the ideological newspeak and thus, explicitly or not, engaging the
authorities, or to avoid any academic debate whatsoever.
Yet, the fact that Ivanov could possibly respond to his critics by condemning their
recourse to ideology indicates that he was acting no longer within the framework of
Stalinist science. In the 1950s, the framing of ones academic concerns in Marxist terms was
no longer the only acceptable strategy of positioning yourself in the academic debate.
Appeals to pure science, as we have seen, could openly compete with appeals to scientific
ideology. Moreover, the former became a new exclusionary strategy: whoever does not
share cyberspeak and, especially, openly refers to newspeak (including serious marxist
analysis) is outside of the proper scientific discourse. In certain circles and institutions, this
meant that you had to change your workplace. If not because of the administrative pressure
then because of the peer pressure.25
24
25

Symposium, 1962 (ARAN, f.1657, op.1, d.285, l. 176).

See more on the nature and consequences of this peer pressure in chapter 3.

26

It is true that the extent of administrative power enjoyed by the structuralists, even
through their patrons, was still very limited in comparison to the one enjoyed by some of
their high-ranking critics, like Viktor Vinogradov, the director of the Academys Institute of
Russian Language and the chief editor of the main Soviet linguistic journal, or Mikhail V.
Khrapchenko (1904-1986), who later, in 1967, became a head of the Academys Department
of Literature and Language. Yet, despite high official positions, not all these critics were
academically insignificant: Viktor Vinogradov is an obvious example of combining both
formal and informal intellectual authority. Furthermore, by no means all critics were
bosses (nachalniki) or active promoters of Marxist orthodoxy. The nationalist literary
critic Vadim V. Kozhinov (1930-2001), the traditionalist essayist Vladimir Turbin (19271993), Vasily V. Abaev (1900-2001), Viacheslav Ivanovs professor of Indo-European
linguistics, and a number of other critics were far from the heights of formal authority.
Furthermore, if we follow Peter Seyfferts (1983) detailed reconstruction of the Soviet
debates on literary structuralism, we will see that only the minority of critics unequivocally
positioned themselves as orthodox Marxists. More often, the only references to Marxism
were limited to the ritualistically reiterated truths of Hegelian dialectics (the thesis of the
unity of content and form in contrast to structuralists apparent formalism) and the
classical realistic critique of art for arts sake. Yet, this textbook Marxism usually coexisted
with not specifically Marxist condemnations toward structuralists apparent anti-humanism,
anti-patriotism, and their tendency, apparently, to reduce the specificity of art to language.
For instance, some of the critics identified structuralist anti-humanist methodology
with a technocratic version of totalitarianism (Kozhinov 1965). One opponent, the
respectable Indo-European linguist Vasily Abaev, accused structuralists of participating in
the monstrous dehumanization of the Soviet people (see Revzin 1997, 797; cf. Abaev
1965). The traditionalist philosopher Vladimir Turbin summarized this line of criticism as
follows: Structuralism is a sublimated human desire to imprison ones neighbors (1994,
43). All of these criticisms, in a deliberately abstract and obscure manner, identified
structuralism with its supposed opponent, Stalinism.
The charge of anti-humanism was often accompanied by a sense of the threat posed
by structuralists to the disciplinary integrity of such humanistic disciplines as literary
studies (literaturovedenie) (Seyffert 1983, 92). Some literary scholars, not only specialists in
socialist realism, considered the extension of the methods of linguistics and cybernetics to
literature and culture a way towards the new ideological domination, or an attempt to
substitute communist ideology with the ideology of positivistic and West-oriented scientism
(e.g. Abaev 1965). They saw in structuralism and semiotics considerable danger to the
disciplinary culture of Soviet literary studies which was described as emphatically
humanistic, historicist, Romantic, standard language- and classics-oriented. These sentiments
are apparent not only in the publications of the period but also in private diaries and the
memoirs of the contemporaries. For instance, according to Mikhail Gasparov (1994a, 411),
the famous Pushkin scholar Sergei M. Bondi was distressed over the use of the quantitative
methods in the study of poetry by structuralists: Why do we need to count if we can hear.
Bondi was only one the most prominent among those who were upset, to put it mildly, about
the structuralist challenge.
In short, the aspiration of semiotics toward its super-disciplinary status encountered
stringent resistance both from another super-discipline, Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and
from within particular disciplines the representatives of which were afraid for their, already
limited, control over their specialized knowledge. While this resistance was indiscriminately
viewed by structuralists as the case of ignorance and political denunciation, it could also
be seen as an effort by established disciplinary scholars to defend their remaining
professional autonomy and cultural authority, as they understood these concepts.
27

The debate on structuralism and semiotics also shows that, despite using Marxist
newspeak strategically, a large portion of mainstream academics in the humanities were
firmly entrenched in specific disciplinary paradigms such as Indo-European linguistics, or in
non-Marxist ideologies like Russian nationalism, Russian religious philosophy, and various
19th century intelligentsia discourses. If we try to paint the collective portrait of a typical
critic of structuralism, it is going to include an eclectic repertoire of Romantic, nationalistic
and social deterministic assumptions. According to Petr V. Palievsky (b.1932), his antistructuralist camp was convinced that the concepts of national roots, civic responsibility,
and class character are part of the very essence of literature (see Seyffert 1983, 354). In sum,
structuralists were criticized not so much for their non-Marxism as for challenging the
established disciplinary borderlines, as well as a web of Romantic and Realist assumptions in
the foundation of both Russian and Soviet humanities: the work of art is a unique image, or
even a reflection, of reality in its typical features, created by the unique artistic genius,
who, like the Hegelian great personality, is granted with the ability to sense the Zeitgeist
and express it by means of his unique mastership (masterstvo) (see Clark 1985; Groys 1992;
Tertz 1960).
Overall, despite the persuasiveness of the politicized bipolar distinctions, the conflict
outlined above cannot be reduced to the revolt of academic dissidents against the domination
of one and only scientific ideology. To a large extent, the debate on structuralism was
merely a part of the larger competition between different factions within the Soviet academic
intelligentsia. The main stakes were academic autonomy, or the control over academic
institutions and resources, and symbolic power, or power to make and sustain legitimate
distinctions (see Bourdieu 1977, 171-182). In this competition, structuralists were not only
rebels against, and eventually victims of, the Soviet ideological regime. They were also
aggressive aspirants, who were facing the heterogeneous academic establishment, composed
of both new, or Soviet, and old disciplinary and nationalistic intellectual elites. The
temporary defeat of the structuralist movement in 1963 should be seen not so much in
terms of suppression as in terms of being outmaneuvered by the competing academic
groups.
The Crisis of the Soviet Structuralist Movement in the early 1960s
The strong resistance that the structuralist movement encountered within Soviet humanistic
academia was only one reason for the failure of structuralists to establish their strong
institutional base. There were a number of other important reasons. One could be the
growing skepticism about the feasibility and utility of machine translation projects and the
projects of formalizing and mathematizing linguistics not only in Russia but also in the US.
Discussed in more detail in chapter 5, this factor, however, did not play significant role in the
early 1960s. The Western critique of formalization projects and structuralism as a whole
started to play its role in the Soviet debates only later in the 1960s.
More importantly, the institutional and rhetoric strategies, which were adopted by
Soviet structuralists in the 1950s, proved increasingly inadequate by the early 1960s. By
their militant scientist rhetoric and intellectual elitism, structuralists managed to alienate
not only many representatives of the same generation of scholars, but also some of their
teachers and intellectual icons. I have already mentioned the examples of Vasily Abaev and
Sergei Bondi. Even more significant is the fact that Viacheslav Ivanov and his colleagues
failed to establish working relationships with still alive and active leaders of the 1920s
formalism, Victor B. Shklovsky (1893-1984) and Vladimir Propp.
Although the
structuralists of the 1960s respected the classical writings of these authors, they considered
Shklovsky and Propp of the 1960s collaborationists, sellouts and intellectual dead
28

men.26 Furthermore, the alliance with hard scientists was disintegrating. In 1962, Andrei
Kolmogorov refused to attend the Moscow semiotic symposium, which was discussed earlier.
Moreover, in 1963, he joined another meeting, the Symposium on the Complex Study of
Artistic Creativity, which was aimed at sketching out an alternative to structuralism. Clearly,
by 1963, Soviet structuralists were losing their allies.
The agenda of the 1963 symposium, which was attended by Kolmogorov, helps to
clarify what was wrong with the dominant strategy of action which was adopted by Soviet
structuralists. As I mentioned earlier, they tried to reform Soviet humanities based on the
assumption that the adherence to presumably precise rules of the scientific procedure and
ethos would guarantee the independence of such new academic institutions as the Institute of
Semiotics. Yet, Soviet structuralists tended to dismiss the possibility of foolproof
machines, which were based on the rules and procedures of structural linguistics, and could
be used by any idiot, in the words of Alexander Zholkovsky (1998, 168). They
underestimated the ability of their rivals to learn and appropriate their scientific
methodology and their revolutionary rhetoric of exact science. The 1963 symposium was a
symptom of this appropriation.27
Organized by the established literary critic Boris S. Meilakh (1909-1987), this
convention accepted as legitimate structural and mathematical (e.g. statistical) methods in
linguistics and poetics but rejected their structuralist theoretical grounding. In short,
formalizationyes, formalism and structuralismno. In this, the agenda of the 1963
symposium followed closely the suggestion made by one of the leading Soviet official
theorists and historians of literature: If we [established literary scholars] tell them
[Kolmogorov and his colleagues] what, for what reasons and in what direction should be
counted, then we can find common language with them.28 In effect, the symposium
welcomed those who were ready to accept the instrumental interpretation of structural and
mathematical methods, and thus ready to submit to the hegemony of those who accused
structuralists of anti-humanism. By proclaiming structural methods without structuralism,
the 1963 symposium effectively undermined the structuralists claim on the monopoly over
scientific linguistics and literary studies, not to mention the humanities as a whole.
Simultaneously, the very idea of the Institute of Semiotics, which was supposed to be
dominated by structuralists, was appropriated by the disciplinary establishment and then
dropped altogether. If in 1960 Andrei Markov Jr.an ally of Soviet structuralistswas
calling for the centralization of research in cybernetic linguistics, already in 1962 the rivals
of the structuralist movement repeated the same call for institutionalization of structural,
quantitative and semiotic studies on language and the arts. As one official philosopher
pointed out, semiotic studies cannot be dispersed, it is necessary to provide qualified
ideological and scientific leadership from the single center for all academic studies [in this
area]29 Thus, the authorities and the disciplinary elites at first agreed to the establishment of
the Institute, with a precondition that it included their representatives. In academic terms, this
meant that the official recognition of semiotics was conditioned on two things: semiotics
would have to abandon its universalistic claims, and it would have to submit to the authority
of the existing academic paradigms and establishments.
This is how Vladimir Toporov reflected on the possible effects of such a settlement:
26

Ivanov, Viacheslav. Interview by author. Moscow, July 2002. On the relationships between
Shklovsky, Propp, Jakobson and the Tartu School, see also chapter 3.
27
Slava Gerovitch (2002, 279) similarly argues that cybernetics was, in the 1960s, transformed from
a vehicle of reform into a pillar of the status quo.
28
Leonid I. Timofeev (1903-1984), ARAN, f.1902, op.1, d.37.
29
Symposium, 1962 (ARAN, f.1965, op. 1, d.285).

29

I do not doubt that soon we will witness the establishment of structural literary studies
(perhaps, in [Boris] Meilakhs variant by including, as founding fathers, everybody
who is necessary (vsekh kogo nuzhno)),30 and semiotics (something in the same spirit),
etc. Possibly, within these fields, a few serious people would be able to work in
selected domains (specialized enough to be unintelligible).31
Once structuralists were neutralized, the idea of a separate Institute of Semiotics was quickly
forgotten. After all, the aim of the anti-structuralists was, from the outset, the preservation of
the status quo, not innovation.
Thus, as a result of being outmaneuvered by their opponents, Soviet structuralists had
not only to abandon their plans of establishment, hegemony, and expansion but also to face
the prospect of becoming rank-and-file technicians within the watered-down version of
their own project. Unlike Toporov, Ivanov and their circle, many members of the movement
did not find this prospect too unappealing. They followed the example of Kolmogorov and
settled with the narrowly technical definition of structural linguistics as a kind of computer
programming. Within a number of centers of structuralist linguistics, which were established
by 1962, they continued to work on the linguistic aspects of various state-sponsored projects
like automatic content scanning of foreign specialized texts or creating algorithms of machine
translation between languages (see Nauka 1976, 40-42). Although I abstain from making a
judgment on the overall intellectual value of these technical studies, the effectiveness of
this research was limited by the lack of access to computers; computer was a scarce resource,
which was vehemently protected by the military authorities and natural scientists (see
Gerovitch 2002).
Of course, not all Soviet structuralists submitted to this settlement. There were a
number of other social strategies and positions, which were available to less conformist
members of the movement. One such strategy may be called the art of niche-making
(shchelevedenie), to use Mikhail Gasparovs expression.32 This is to define your field
narrowly and make yourself not interesting for kicking (M.Gasparov 2000b, 78). In
contrast to the strategy, which was chosen by the technicians, the strategy of niche-making
involved setting your own research goals and setting them in terms that sounded as
academic, unintelligible, and pragmatically irrelevant as possible. The self-proclaimed
specialist in this strategy, Mikhail Gasparov excelled in the studies of the poetic meter and
rhyme in ancient Greek and modern Russian poetry. Incidentally, his research currently
enjoys considerable recognition among Russian and Western specialists not only in structural
and historical poetics but in critical literary theory as a whole, partially due to his subsequent
involvement with the Tartu School (see Wachtel 1998, 17). However, this is an exception.
The usual cost of this strategy was obscurity, at least outside of a narrow research field.
Another social strategy and position, which was adopted by Soviet structuralists in the
1960s, was public intellectual non-conformism. Public non-conformists did not look for safe
niches, like Mikhail Gasparov, or struggle for controlling research fields and the language of
human sciences per se, as Ivanov did early in the decade. They just did the kind of work
they deemed necessary to be done without even attempting to position and justify this work
30

That is, major opponents of Soviet structuralists, as well as those practitioners of structural
linguistics and poetics who were willing to cooperate with the anti-structuralist establishment.
31
Toporov to Lotman, March 17, 1964 (LC, F135, s.Bt 1442).
32
There is much self-irony in this label. Here, Mikhail Gasparov compares his colleagues and himself
not even to soldiers hunkering down in trenches but with cockroaches hiding in the cracks, or slittrenches (shcheli), in walls and floors from the watchful gaze of the Big Brother (see Gasparov,
Mikhail. Email to author, September 2002).

30

within the larger framework of their academic institutions and Soviet human sciences (see
Apresian 1996; Melchuk 1998; Zholkovsky 1998). In a word, they behaved as if they could
do whatever they wanted, whether their intellectual tastes corresponded to established
conventions or not. In many cases, this was a part of a larger dissident strategy of
exercisinglegal and intellectualrights and freedoms without prior permission
(iavochnym poriadkom) (see Daniel 2001; Nathans 2007; Tks 1975). If political dissidents
tried to do what, they claimed, their human rights allow them to do, i.e. to think and speak
freely, non-conformist academics exercised their right on academic autonomy without
bothering to struggle for institutional reforms.
The emergence of this position in the 1960s signaled a new stage in the unraveling of
the contract between intellectuals and authorities. A growing number of intellectuals and
academics, especially younger humanists, refused to make academic careers, defend
dissertations or publish in official journals.33 The late Soviet guarantees of job security
allowed them to be formally enrolled in academic institutions but their open non-conformism
made them increasingly vulnerable politically. During the periodic anti-dissident crackdowns
in the 1970s, some of these academic dissidents were expelled from their workplaces with
a note for incompetence.34 Ultimately, when effectively or formally excluded from
academia, a large number of non-conformists chose to emigrate (see Appendix A).
To avoid such an end, one could engage in stay home research in addition to, or
even instead of, the academic work within the frameworks of formal institutions. This was
not necessarily a solitary business: since the 1960s, we can speak about the existence of the
whole subculture of informal peer circles with their distinctive sites of intellectual and
personal interaction: home seminars, evening seminars, and summer schools. Some of
these meetings were authorized, allowed or simply tolerated by the institutional authorities.
They took place in empty classrooms of the universities and research institutes after work
hours, or in some remote campuses and resorts. Otherwise, private apartments were the sites
of the unauthorized seminars. Yet, in all cases, these gatherings were initiated and supervised
by academics themselves, with minimal interference from the governing and censoring
agencies. Often hosted by an energetic scholar, sometimes a woman, these salonsas these
sessions were often referred to with some self-ironywere alternative forms of selforganization of the academic public. In comparison to kitchen salonsthe sites of
informal communication, where samizdat poetry was read and the newest politically
incorrect jokes were exchanged, academic salons were more formal and less spontaneous.
They had structure, schedule, lists of participants and other attributes of a regular academic
meetings. Established as alternatives to formal academic gatherings and institutions,
academic salons were characterized by emphatic distancing from official procedures,
language and symbolism. The hierarchies of prestige within this salon subculture often
differed from, or even reversed, the official hierarchies. Yet, the participation in salons did
not exclude the participation in the regular academic life. Despite some intersection with
dissident circles, the academic salons were not dissident or underground organizations per se.
Rather, they were institutions of what I analyze in more detail in the next chapter as parallel
academia, or parallel science.

33

Zholkovsky, interview.
Or rather for incompetence (za profneprigodnost). In particular, Zholkovskys friend and
prominent structural linguist Igor Melchuk (b.1932) was expelled from the Academys Institute of
Linguistics in 1976 after publicly supporting Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet dissidents (see
Zholkovsky 1998, 168). In the following year, he immigrated to Canada. He is currently professor at
the University of Montreal.
34

31

The home and evening seminars, which were led by the psychologist and philosopher
Grigory P. Shchedrovitsky (1929-1994), the sociologist Yuri A. Levada (1930-2006), the
psycholinguist Revekka Frumkina (b. 1931), and by the structuralists Zholkovsky and
Meletinsky, were among most respected among human scientists during the heyday of
academic salons in the 1960s-1970s. Yet, particularly prestigious were semiotic summer
schools in Tartu and Kriku, Estonia, which took place in 1964-1974. A result of the
encounter between Moscow structuralists and the Tartu University professor Yuri Lotman,
these schools provided structuralists with a plausible alternative to self-enclosure in a
narrow niche and to the self-marginalizing dissent. In the following section, I start discussing
the nature of this alternative by focusing on the personality and the social standing of Yuri
Mikhailovich Lotman.
From Moscow to Tartu: Yuri Lotman and the New Beginnings
The significance of the encounter between Moscow structuralists and Yuri Lotman is hard to
underestimate. He appeared on the structuralists horizon at the moment when their
movement was in deep crisis and all prospects of institutional establishment and expansion
were in serious doubt. In this depressing circumstances, Lotman provided new opportunities
for new beginnings. It is through the detour to Tartu that the Soviet semiotic project became
what it is known for, the Tartu-Moscow School, and the base for the distinctive Tartu
project of the science of culture, or culturology (kulturologiia). In what follows I outline
the circumstances that made possible the appearance of this Siamese twin-like alliance that
changed Soviet human sciences to the extent that we can start to appreciate only now.
What was Lotman able to offer to the Muscovites that they were lacking and could
appreciate? To answer this question, let me start by telling the story of the encounter between
Moscow and Tartu groups. As narrated by some witnesses, this encounter happened as
follows: after familiarizing himself with the materials of the 1962 Semiotic Symposium in
Moscow, Yuri Lotman, the professor and the chair of the Department of Russian literature at
Tartu State Universitys Faculty of Philology, sent his envoy, a third-year undergraduate
student Igor Chernov, to Moscow, to the academic Institute for Slavic Studies, hoping to
establish academic contacts. In Chernovs narrative, I went from the train station straight to
the Institute. They [Toporov, Ivanov and their colleagues] were surprised: What? You
too!35 And thus the foundation for the long-term cooperation was laid.
As most memoirs, this story should be taken cum grano salis: Moscow structuralists
were not totally ignorant about the Tartu professor Lotman and his interest in structuralism.
Yet, it is true that this was not the most obvious, or natural, alliance. First of all, Lotman
was not a member of the academic or intellectual circles of Moscow linguists. Seven to
sixteen years older than most Moscow colleagues (except for Petr Bogatyrev, Eliazar
Meletinsky and Lev Zhegin (see Appendix A)), Lotman was a representative of a different
generation. It is true, though, that he graduatedwith honorsfrom Leningrad University
only a year earlier then the key Muscovites, Ivanov and Toporov. Yet, he was a veteran of
the World War IIhe spent six years in the front-line army!and thus was late with his
studies. As most veterans and unlike Moscow structuralists, he was a member of the
Communist Party. Despite this fact, Yuri Lotman was one of many Soviet Jews who, after
graduating in the early 1950s, found themselves unable to continue their studies or find jobs
on most campuses of the Soviet Union.36 The reason was simple: the year of his graduation
35

Chernov, Igor. Interview by author. Tallinn, October 2001.

Lotmans colleague Pavel Reifman and the Tartu philosopher Leonid Stolovich fall into the same
category. See corresponding interviews by author, Tartu, Estonia, October 2001.
36

32

appeared to be the high point of Stalins anti-Semitic campaign against cosmopolitanism

(Lotman 1994c, 36; Egorov 1999, 47). Moreover, he graduated in one of the most
ideological majors, Russian literature. If he was a mathematician or even a linguist, his fate
would probably be different. Paradoxically, however, the disadvantaged status of an
unemployable Jew allowed him to avoid the usual mandatory allocation to the job in a small
town, possibly in Siberia. He received a privileged status of free allocation which was
usually granted to exceptional students wanted by the institutes of the Academy of Sciences
or the military-industrial complex. Yet in Lotmans case this status meant that he was out on
the market. This was an extremely unusual position for a Soviet intellectual, including
Moscow to-be-structuralists: most of them went straight to the graduate school after their
graduation.
As I mentioned, Lotmans major in Leningrad University was Russian literature. This
fact had a number of implications for Lotmans distinctive position among Soviet
structuralists. Due to belonging to the hereditary Moscow intelligentsia, the Muscovites like
Viacheslav V. Ivanov were exposed to some of the most valuable cultural contacts with
which their epoch could provide them. And yet there were few notable formalists or
structuralists among their tutors.37 No surprise that, throughout the 1950s, they were in
desperate search for tutors among natural scientists like Kolmogorov or emigrants like
Roman Jakobson. They seemed to feel as parentless children in search for parents outside of
their narrow specialization or even time and space. The obvious supplements of such
parentage were books, often in foreign languages and out of print, unattainable for larger
audience.38 This tutorlessness was one of the reasons for the scorn many Muscovites
expressed for Soviet formal education. As I have argued, they usually associated their
academic autonomy with the freedom to focus on pure research.
In contrast, Lotman was fortunate enough to study with some of the major figures in
Soviet human sciences, including Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Vladimir Propp,
Grigory Gukovsky and others. This fact not only left a deep imprint on his views but also on
his attitude to and style of teaching. Lotmans colleagues and students often admired in him
what he appreciated in his mentors:
The particularity of professors of that time [the 1930s and 1940s] consisted in their
deep intellectual culture (kulturnost) which lacked affectedness and pretence. This
culture manifested itself in invariable kindness (liubeznost) to students and persistent
readiness to see a colleague in a student (Lotman 1994b, 57).
Lotman did not consider himself parentless; on the contrary, he had a sense of being firmly
entrenched in the continuous Russian tradition of the scholarship in literature and cultural

37

Notable exceptions include: Mikhail N. Peterson (19885-1962), Petr S. Kuznetsov (1899-1968) and
Alexander A. Reformatsky (1900-1978). Yet, these were all linguists, mostly specialists in
phonology. Leningrad University had more professors with world names in folklore and literature
studies.
38
Joseph Brodsky wrote about the significance of books and libraries for many Soviet intellectuals:
Books became the first and the only reality, whereas reality itself was regarded as either nonsense or
nuisance [E]xistence which ignores the standards professed in literature is inferior and unworthy of
effect (1986, 30). Ivanov and Toporov provide extreme cases of such a bibliophily, or a kind of
worship of books and texts. For health reasons, Ivanov had an opportunity of home schooling that
enabled him not only to devour his fathers rich library but also learn an enormous number of foreign
and dead languages (see Ivanov 1995).

33

history, the tradition manifested by the Petrograd Formalism of the 1920s, in particular.39
Therefore, for him, to embrace structuralism and later semiotics meant not, or not only, to
pay his debt to a contemporary fad or to protest against established scholarship. It was also to
continue his student-teacher dialogue with his mentors and their colleagues on empirical and
grounded-theory matters like the emergence of Russian national literary language or the
analysis of the text. Therefore, although occasionally enthusiastic about ideas and theories
outside of his field and in other languages as well as open to the ideas of his well-read
Moscow colleagues, he was never an interdisciplinary erudite or a know-it-all in Western
literature the way Viacheslav V. Ivanov is.40 To the technocratic and often nihilistic spirit of
the younger Muscovites, Lotman added his own aura of the respectable old-school
academic and educator.
Despite or due to these characteristics of Lotmans academic persona, he managed to
establish himself as an important literary historian by the time of the first contact with
Moscow semioticians. His studies focused on the interrelations between literature, ideology,
and personal identity in Russian culture of the late 18thearly 19th century (e.g. Lotman
[1960] 1997; [1966] 1997). Although he still routinely used some of the clichs of Soviet
literary studies like the opposition of progressive and reactionary writers and styles, his
studies carried a mark of the thorough positivistic training and the formalist methodology.
His attention to not only great authors but also minor ones and the emphasis on symbolic
structures of culture, rather then preconceived class struggle, distinguished his scholarship
within the mainstream Soviet scholarship (Lotman [1959] 1997; [1965] 1997). Instead of
judging literary works from the point of view of later generations, he focused on their
meanings for their immediate producers and consumers. Furthermore, as a student of Russian
Formalists, he could not avoid the debates on structuralism and semiotics. His first significant
contribution to these debates, the paper on the delimitation between linguistic and literary
concepts of structure, was already an international success (Lotman 1963). Although lacking
in overseas connections (unlike the Muscovites), he managed to get across his point to the
foreign academic community: his paper was not only immediately translated into French but
also influenced French structuralists, as Julia Kristeva (1994) admitted.
Yuri Lotman was also one of the first professors in the world who started to teach
semiotics in the university setting. Since fall 1962, he lectured on structural poetics and
semiotics (see Lotman 1964). Officially, this was an elective course for the majors in
cybernetics (which existed only in Estonia at that time). Yet, in fact, in the spring 1963, only
one student, Igor Chernov, Russian philology student, attended it. This one-to-one experience
the topic of departmental legends and jokes contributed to establishing a particularly
strong link between Lotman and his student.41 In fact, this two plus Lotmans wife, Zara
Mints, and later the linguist Boris Gasparov became the Tartu branch of the Tartu-Moscow
School.
Hence, although not a member of any Moscow circle, Lotman and his colleagues did
not approach them out of the blue. He had a reputation and he had something to offer: his
scholastic capacities and organizational skills as well as specific, unique in the Soviet Union,
opportunities provided by Estonia. The latter point is particularly noteworthy. To recall, as of
1950, Lotman was an excellent but jobless graduate of Leningrad University. By pure
coincidence, someone advised him to contact the newly established Pedagogical Institute in
39

Of course, this sense of entrenchment does not mean that he was familiar with all significant works
of Formalists. For instance, some of the key works of Shklovsky, Tynianov, and, especially, Roman
Jakobson became available to Soviet intellectuals only in the late 1950s.
40
Chernov, interview.
41
Chernov, interview.

34

Tartu, Estonia, and, unlike in Leningrad, Lotman immediately got the job (see Lotman 1994c,
35-40). In 1954, he joined the Department of Russian Literature at Tartu University and, in
1960, became its chair.
What happened? The matter is that in 1950, Estonia was a recently acquired territory
that became fully pacified only by the mid-1950s (Egorov 1999, 49-50; cf. Misiunas and
Taagepera 1993). There was an urgent need for competent professors of literature and
language because, according to Stalins laws of 1938, Russian was an obligatory subject in
all national schools (Smith 2001, 61-62).42 As important vehicles of Sovietization, Russian
language and literature were supposed to be among immediate priorities of the cultural
politics of the government of Soviet Estonia. In this situation, Lotmans Jewishness did not
matter as much as it did in Leningrad. Moreover, for both disgruntled Estonian intellectuals
and local communist officials, any specialist from Russia was an emissaryor even a
commissarof the center, regardless of his or her actual standing with respect to this
center (see Egorov 1999, 69). This emissary role empowered Russian specialists like
Lotman in the eyes of local officials and provided them with authority they lacked in Russia.
Even if this role effectively separated Lotman and his colleagues from Estonian intellectual
elites, this segregation was not without its advantages: it fenced off the Russians, for the
time being, from local rivalries. In addition, Lotman happened to establish very trusting
relationships with the Rector of the University, the Russified Estonian Fedor Klement (19031973, Rector in 1951-70). This relationship proved to be long-lasting and extremely useful
for Lotman: as a member of the Estonian Communist Partys Central Committee, Klement
was an enormous organizational resource and an undeniable source of protection for
Lotmans upcoming initiatives.43
Yet, even without Rector Klement, Estonia of the late 1950s and the1960s provided
unique opportunities for organizational and intellectual experimentation, of which the work
of the Tartu School was only one (see Misiunas and Taagepera 1993). In this period, Estonia
had the most relaxed political regime and the most prosperous economy within the Soviet
Union. When Khrushchev taunted abstract art during the famous Manezh exhibition in 1962,
this politically incorrect art was flourishing in Tallinn and Tartu. In 1964, Tartu hosted the
first Soviet jazz festival. Partially due to the complete obscurity of their language, Estonian
writers could write things inconceivable in Russian (see Veller 1995). No surprise, Estonian
was the first language to which Solzhenitsyns Gulag Archipelago was translated.
In academia, the first Soviet Institute of Cybernetics was established by the Estonian
Academy of Sciences in 1960. This fact is due to the peculiarity of the unequal imperial
division of labor between Moscow and Tallinn. Each republic was forced to specialize
narrowly but, while, for instance, Uzbekistan was a cotton republic, Estonia was more an
electronics, furniture and dairy-products republic.44 Estonia was a site of all major economic
experiments in the 1960s, from the introduction of the elements of regulated market
economy to personal checks for large purchases (Misiunas and Taagepera 1993). In effect,
42

National schools were the schools where the primary language of instruction was a local
language, not Russian.
43
This fact is noteworthy because, usually, the status of university rectors was lower (with the
exception of major universities like Moscow University). This was a part of the general trend toward
downgrading universities and reducing their functions to teaching (see Smith 2001). In effect, in
contrast to the officials of the Academy who were responsible to federal and republican Central
Committees, rectors were responsible to local city committees. This was, however, not the case of
Rector Klement (see Egorov 1999, 62).
44
Although the video conferencing software Skype is currently hip, the essential role of Estonian
programmers in designing it is hardly known among the general public. The public is even less aware
of the not so distant historical roots of Estonias current technological sophistication.

35

the republic had strong educated middle class, relatively high standard of living and relatively
tolerant regime.
All these factors made Estonia a legend among Soviet intellectuals. Moscow and
Leningrad intelligentsia perceived it as a neighboring country and the internal West
(Levin 1994; Toporov 1994).45 The republic attracted non-conformist intellectuals but, even
among more settled ones, it was fashionable to buy or rent dachas (summer houses) in
Estonia. In fact, Lotman established some of his first Moscow contacts by simply being
neighbors with the Muscovites.
It is not surprising that Kriku and Tartu became essential sites of the Tartu Schools
collective memory. Tartu, the only campus city in the Soviet Union, shocked Moscow
intellectuals by its atmosphere of outlandishness (nezdeshnost'), starting with European
architecture and ending with still existing student fraternities, perceived as the signs of
institutional and intellectual freedom (volnitsa) (Lesskis 1994; Toporov 1994). The halo of
Westernness, foreignness, and frontierness around Tartu, reported by most
participants, enhanced the sense of taking part in a kind of initiatory celebration, as well as an
exciting intellectual game on the verge of the allowed.
Ultimately, Tartu and Estonia appeared to be Lotmans primary organizational and
political resources. An opportunity to meet periodically in a distant place and to publish in a
practically uncensored series was more than the Muscovites could wish for at that point.
Moreover, Tartu University provided them with access to students, that is the opportunity to
reproduce as a school proper. As we know, most Moscow structuralists and semioticians
ended up in the institutions of the Academy of Sciences (see Appendix A). These institutions
provided secure job opportunities and excellent resources for research but they did not
provide access to students. The alliance with Lotman provided this access.
Of course, the attraction was not one-sided. The Muscovites were not the only ones
who benefited from the alliance with the Tartu scholars. Yuri Lotman was extremely
interested in expanding his academic network. In addition to advantages, the relative isolation
of Tartu imposed its limitations. Although high in the local, formal and informal, hierarchy of
prestige, the only university in Estonia was provincial according to the Soviet ranking. For
instance, its library collections, rich in pre-1940 publications in all languages, were poorly
supplied with new publications.46 Furthermore, the immunity from both local and central
power struggles also implied very small scale of academic communication and exchange.
Lotmans initiative to set up a number of vibrant academic series, first in philology and then
in semiotics, was an attempt to break through the isolation: the TRSF was established to put
the Tartu department on the map during the International Slavic Studies Congress in 1958 in
Moscow. This, however, was not sufficient. Connected to Jakobson and other Western
philologists, the Moscow structuralists of Ivanovs circle were literally the best contacts
available for Lotman at the time.
This being said, I do not want to present the Tartu-Moscow alliance as a result of the
rational-choice-like calculated exchange of valuable resources. Lotman and the Muscovites
had enough intellectual roots to share: Russian Formalism, especially Jakobson and Propp,
the interest in the forbidden literature of Russian modernism and avant-garde, to mention
45

In the writer Mikhail Vellers succinct summary, Estonia smelled a little bit like Soviet
Switzerland. Small-scale but comfortable. A kind of internal West. Semi-foreign semi-country. Fork
in the left hand, knife in the right one, Finnish TV, liberalism. And not too far: it takes a night-train to
get to Moscow or Leningrad (Veller 1996, 57)
46
For instance, the 1972 annual report of the Universitys Department of Russian Literature states that
the university library does not subscribe to any foreign [valiutnye]beyond socialist countries
journals and special literature in Russian studies In these respects, the level of the library collection
is lower then even [sic!] in the bourgeois period [i.e. before 1940] (EA F5311, N70, s62, p.8).

36

just a few points of convergence. In conjunction with these overlaps, the critical state of
Moscow structuralism and the opportunities offered by Lotman shaped the unique moment at
which the Tartu-Moscow School proper emerged.
Hence, the emergence of the Tartu-Moscow community was an outcome of the
evolution characterized by the dialectics of continuity and discontinuity, cumulative growth
and gestalt shifts. For one thing, Tartu-Kriku conventions were merely an extension of the
Moscow structuralist movement. This fact is underlined by the continuities in membership
and thematic preferences. If we compare the 1962 Symposium and the 1964 Kriku summer
school, we will notice that 16 of 28 participants of the Symposium delivered their
presentations in Kriku (Shukman 1977, 187-9). Summer schools and Tartu semiotic
publications inherited some of the leaders of this movement, including Viacheslav Ivanov,
Vladimir Toporov, Dmitry Segal and Isaak Revzin (see Appendix A). Undoubtedly, the
social networks established in the 1950s served as a basis for much of the Tartu-Moscow
membership. We can also speak about significant thematic continuities: in both cases, the
aspiration was to expand the new science of semiotics from modeling natural and artificial
languages to literary studies, sociology, history and the theory of culture.47
Yet, to overemphasize the continuity is to read history backwards, from the result to
the processes through which it came to existence. Instead, I argue that the encounter between
Moscow and Tartu intellectuals led to something that Lotman called in his last book an
explosive expansion of the network of academic social and intellectual interactions
accompanied by the substantive transformation of the intellectual paradigm, as well as the
patterns of communication, publishing, and positioning oneself towards various audiences
(Lotman 1992).
Obviously, the expansion of the network did not happen without notable losses in
membership. Such scholars as Academician Kolmogorov, Vladimir Uspensky, Melchuk,
Apresian, Zholkovsky and others had nothing or not much to do with Tartu meetings. Igor
Melchuk, leading specialist in quantitative linguistics and semantics, did not even recognize
semiotics as something meaningful: a la Wittgenstein, he refused to consider literature,
ideology, myth or everyday behavior as objects of structural, and thus scientific, study
(Zholkovsky 2000, 176). Although his friend and coauthor Alexander Zholkovsky did not
share his nihilism, he simply took liberty to ignore the invitation to attend the first
convention in Kriku and, predictably, did not get new offers in the next few years. 48
Furthermore, the scholars clustered around Viacheslav Ivanov were by no means the only
players in the fields of structural linguistics and semiotics. Independent forms of semiotics
were about to be developed by Yuri Stepanov (1971), Grigory Shchedrovitsky (1995), and
later by Marxist-Leninist academician Khrapchenko, the author of what he called Marxist
semiotics (1986).
At the same time, as already the 1964 summer school indicated, the Tartu-Moscow
alliance attracted a number of new people. Out of 26 contributors to the 1964 school, 12 had
no significant record of participating in the structuralist movement. An interesting fact about
these newcomers is that most of them were specialists in Oriental Studies (vostokovedenie),
especially Indology. Lotman and his Tartu associatesalso newcomers to the structuralist
movementwere students of Russian literature.49 This inflow of Orientalists and Slavists
47

See Programma i tezisy dokladov v letnei shkola po vtorichnym modeliruiushchim sistemam, 19-29
avgusta 1964 g. (The First Summer School (1964): Program and Contents). Tartu: Tartuskii
universitet (see the table of contents in Isakov 1991, 117-118; in English: Shukman 1977, 189)
48
Zholkovsky, Alexander. Interview by author. Moscow, July 2002.
49
Some of these new individuals included Indologists Lennart Mll, Boris Ogibenin, Alexander
Syrkin, and Lotmans colleague and friend Boris Egorov (see Appendix A).

37

resulted in, and indicated, a significant shift in the thematic of semiotic publications: from the
preoccupation with formal modeling of language and extralinguistic semiotic systems to
close analysis of specific media, their role in the communication process and their historical
context; from developing the all-purpose structural method to more object-specific studies of
the mechanisms of representation and communication in the arts, in folklore and myth, and
within other cultural genres. Of course, it took about five years for these changes to happen.
Yet, the vector of the Schools evolution was clear and it pointed from the universally
applicable method to object-specific and even historical perspectives, from system (langue)
to parole, and from language to culture.
This transformation had a notable correlate on the level of the dynamics of academic
networks within the institutional and political framework of Soviet science. As I have argued
earlier, much of the pre-Tartu structuralist movement aimed at creating new institutional
centers of academic power, the centers which could potentially claim authority over the
standards of the scientific procedure and truth itself. Other options included either finding a
narrow niche in the existing academic institutions, or outright cooptation, or open dissent,
which was often eventually followed by emigration. The participants of Tartu-Kriku
meetings did not entirely abandon any of these options, except that they gradually scaled
down the revolutionary technocratic rhetoric of the early 1960s. Yet, the Tartu-Moscow
alliance opened before them a decidedly new possibility to establish a parallel academic
public sphere with its own autonomous intuitional structures, publishing opportunities, peer
networks and prestige hierarchies. The social and intellectual characteristics of this social
domain constitute the subject matter of the next chapter.

38

Chapter Three
THE MAKING OF SOVIET PARALLEL SCIENCE:
The Tartu School and the Public Sphere

In his retrospective essay written in 1989, Boris GasparovLotmans colleague at Tartu

University in 1967-80states that Tartu intellectuals were searching for the means of
separating themselves from the [social] context, of finding and demarcating a free, detached
spiritual spacebecause the whole inhabited space of culture was contaminatedto build
on it their own separate world (B.Gasparov 1994a, 282). Here, using the language of his
circle, Gasparov outlines the major shift in the strategies of social behavior and identity
construction among academic intellectuals associated with structuralism and semiotics. This
shift, which was taking place in the second half of the 1960s, and some of its intellectual
consequences are topics of this chapter.
As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, Soviet structuralists dominant strategy in
the 1950s and early 1960s was to make use of their social status, high patronage and
connections, the liberalism of the Khrushchevs Thaw and the rhetoric of scientism to gain
the highest possible control over academic institutions and the terms of the interaction
between science and politics. The failure to establish an alternative center of academic
authority and influence in the form of the Institute (or Institutes) of Cybernetics and
Semiotics resulted in major frustration of these aspirations. By 1964, structuralism-oriented
linguists, folklorists and literary scholars found themselves faced with a very narrow
spectrum of choices. They could allow their work to be defined by their opponents in purely
technical terms; they could escape into highly specializedspecialized enough to be
unintelligible, in Vladimir Toporovs wordsniches within the academic field, or to
become intellectual and possibly political dissidents.1
Yet, another option presented itself in 1963 when Moscow structuralists encountered
the Tartu group headed by Yuri Lotman. This encounter made possible the emergence of the
Tartu-Moscowor, Moscow-Tartu, depending on where from you are lookingSchool
proper. In this chapter, I consider this School as a new type of the academic public, the
institution of what I call parallel science. By exploring in details the historical
transformation of the Tartu network over time and in relation to the wider social context, I
attempt to understand the meanings in which this social space was indeed parallel to, as
well as separated and independent from, Soviet society.
In effort to address this concern, the chapter considers three major periods in the
history of the Tartu School: the period of the summer schools (1964-1974), the epoch of
Lotman-dominated Tartu School (1975-1985) and the perestroika period. I show that each of
these periods is characterized by a number of distinctive social strategies. For instance,
during the summer schools, Tartu scholars tried to achieve a high degree of public invisibility
and enclosure within the narrow circle of friends and colleagues. Later, they took a more
public and expansive stance, which ultimately brought them during the Gorbachevs
1

Toporov to Lotman, March 17, 1964 (LC, F135, s.1442).

39

perestroika into the midst of highly politicized debates. Along with these changes, this
chapter explores a number of common and persistent themes, which were characteristic for
parallel science. For instance, I analyze how in the history of the Tartu School universalistic
values of professionalism and moral life were intertwined with exclusionary techniques of
differentiating us from them, and how the moral community of academic professionals
was conceived in opposition to the world of ideologists, careerists and uncultured lower
class promotes. The central section of the chapter is an exposition of the Tartu Schools
dominant discourse of archaism. Here, I demonstrate how some of the major dimensions of
the Tartu intellectual paradigm reflected and refracted the Schools location and role within
the realm of parallel science. I conclude the chapter by outlining the implications of this my
studies for the broader history and sociology of Soviet (parallel) science and the public
sphere under Soviet socialism.
Networks, Institutions and Parallel Science
The concept of parallel science is one of the central in this book. Therefore, we cannot
proceed without properly introducing it. Preliminarily defined, parallel science is a
historically-specific form that some of the personal networks of academics took in the 1960s80s in Soviet Russia. Unlike institutions and personalities, networks only recently became
the focus of attention of the students of Russian and Soviet science (see Adams 2000;
Kojevnikov 2004). Following Mark Adams definition, network is here understood as
voluntaristic, private, and fluid set of interlinking personal relations and associations based
on ties of trust, family, friendship, old school ties, shared concerns, common fascinations,
and so forth (2000, 11-12). Unlike formal institutions and other structures, networks are
loose, flexible, hard to trace and control. Although private and voluntaristic, they are often
stronger and more durable then any formal structure. The role of networks in the history of
science is hard to summarize in one formula. It is hard to imagine scientific and intellectual
development without informal contacts and ties among scientists and between them and the
broader public. At the same time, the legitimacy of academic disciplines and institutions
often requires hiding or even suppressing the networking behind them (Adams 2000, 13).
In Western academia, there are a number of procedures of regulating the role of
networks.
Anti-nepotism rules, blind peer-review, the competitive nature of job
appointments and grant applications, these are all the mechanisms of minimizing the
influence of networks. Soviet rulers shared these concerns. Stalinist interrogators were
particularly interested in exposing their victims networks of acquaintances. Yet, the
centralized, hierarchical and rather irrational (in the Weberian sense) character of Soviet
institutions, academic institutions in particular, led to bringing the networking and the mutual
exchange of favors to the fore as necessary transmission-belts within the existing institutional
structure (Ledeneva 1998). Even with respect to the Stalinist period, one can speak about the
pronounced dualism between institutions and networks in Soviet academia. Interpersonal
networks were relatively independent social milieus and forces, which proved indispensable
in decision-making on both administrative and intellectual affairs (Kojevnikov 2004).
Networks bridged between institutional and disciplinary boundaries, levels of the hierarchy,
and between academia and authorities. Networking could provide you with a position of
esteem and even power within Soviet academia but it could also undermine the significance
of the official titles bestowed on you. Institutions and disciplines were, to a large extent, the
fields of contestation between competing networks. When a field was occupied by one
circle, e.g. the field of biology by Lysenkos people in the late 1940s, then the members of
the defeated networks retreated into neighboring fields, e.g. mathematics and physics in the
institutes of the Academy of Sciences, under the protection of more powerful colleagues and
40

friends. Under this cover, the counter-networks of geneticists survived the last years of
Stalins rule and later build the institutional bases for genetic research and for the eventual
demise of Lysenko (Adams 2000).
In human sciences, the coming to academic power in Soviet linguistics of Viktor
Vinogradov and other anti-Marrists after Stalins 1950 anti-Marrism campaign can also be
considered as a case of the takeover of the institutions by disciplinary counter-networks. As
we have seen earlier, Soviet structuralists also relied on their preexisting networks to
establish new personal and intellectual ties with hard scientists, sympathetic authorities and
Western scholars. In doing so, they joined the forces with other previously suppressed
movementscyberneticians, geneticists, Vygotskian psychologists, critical Marxistsin
their struggle for establishing their legitimacy within Soviet science and for reforming the
power relations within academic institutions. As we have seen, their partial success was
favored by the Cold War competition with the West and the role science was expected to play
in it, as well as by the comparatively liberal atmosphere of the Thaw and the overall rapid
expansion of Soviet academia.
Yet, last two of these factors lost much of their validity around the mid-1960s.
Khrushchevs Thaw faltered already in his last years in office and was finally curtailed in the
aftermath of the Prague Spring 1968. The institutional expansion of academia was stalled
and ultimately stopped by the end of the decade, too (Graham 1998, 82). Most scholars were
guaranteed safe academic employment and the opportunity to work within, at least, their
narrow professional niches. Yet, the establishment of new institutions and challenging
existing academic establishments from within formal academia became practically
impossible.
In effect, the independent significance of networks has grown immensely. Moreover,
their organization and their relationship to the institutions started to change. Although
academic networks continued to use formal institutions as fields of their contestations, the
energy of many intellectually active scholars was increasingly invested in the work of home
seminars, evening seminars, summer schools and other institutions of what I have called
earlier parallel science. Since it appeared to be impossible to satisfy the intellectuals
demands for academic autonomy and their control over academic professions within
established institutions, a substantial segment of Soviet academics opted for alternative forms
of self-organization of the academic public. Thus, the emergence of parallel science can be
interpreted as a result of the widening of the gap between formal academia and a substantial
group of Soviet academics.
Of course, not everything about parallel science was entirely unprecedented.
Soviet scientists always gathered in somebodys apartments or in empty classrooms after
work, even though in Stalins time this could be dangerous. These were important sites
where interpersonal networks were established and maintained. Moreover, these were the
sites where alternative hierarchies of worth with respect to persons and ideas were worked
out. These were the sites of the so called Hamburg Test, or honest, but not blind,
continuous mutual peer reviewing aimed at establishing real reputations, as differentiated
from, or even opposed to, official reputations and ranks.2 Yet, what gave these kinds of
Hamburg Test sites their particular character of the institutions of parallel science around the
1960s was the scale at which it became possible to effectively specialize in this alternative
academia.
2

Viktor Shklovsky (1929) originally talked about the Hamburg Test (gamburgskii schet) in his
memorable story about the custom of Hamburg circus wrestlers to test their real strength aside from
public matches where outcomes were often predetermined by preliminary agreements between their
agents.

41

The Brezhnevs Little Deal meant not only the states tolerance of petty private
enterprise and trade in exchange for at least outward political loyalty (Millar 1985). For
academics, it also meant considerable job security, undemanding work hours and
considerable tolerance of many alternative but not directly political forms of intellectual selforganization. The researchers at the Academys institutes enjoyed especially flexible
schedules and few truly enforced job obligations, and thus they could grant informal seminars
considerable amounts of their time. University teachers had less time but they were hardly
required to do research. So, those among them who chose to do research had an option to
focus on the readership and the Hamburg Test-style peership provided by parallel science. In
these conditions, informal seminars and summer schools started to play the role of actual
academic institutions with their own curricula and schedules of meetings, informal ranks and
prestige hierarchies, procedures of recruiting personnel and establishing legitimate
directions of research, and, finally, with their own distinctive sites of academic
communication and even publishing bases. In effect, for a growing number of university
students in the 1970s and 1980s, the previously unthinkable choice emerged: to make a career
within formal academia or to concentrate on the institutions of parallel science, while
resigning yourself to occupying a relatively minor, albeit stable, position in a research
institute or a university for decades.3 Participation in informal seminars and circles became
more of an aim in itself, rather then an important precondition for making it within formal
academia.
Overall, if the networks of intellectuals, as described above, permeated Soviet formal
institutions, adapted them to their needs and used in their struggles for scarce resources, the
networks of parallel science built their own institutions (seminars, summer schools,
conferences) outside or at the margins of the framework of formal institutions and official
discourses. All kinds of academics, from most established and official to most nonconformist and even dissident, had their own networks. In contrast, the networks of parallel
science included only those who was seen or wanted to be seen as having an unorthodox
agenda of some sort. Some of these members of parallel science were about to become open
political dissidents or migrs. For instance, for Alexander Zholkovsky, the seminar in his
apartment in 1976-79 was a transition between being a Soviet scholar to being an migr.
Yet, for others this was their way of adapting to the Soviet conditions. Informal seminars and
salons compensated for the increasingly constraining atmosphere of Soviet institutions, with
their pressure to use ideological and clichd language and with their bureaucratic
inflexibility. For some established scholars, parallel science was a place where they could
discuss with peers their less publishable ideas. For niche-bound specialists, the institutions of
parallel science were ways of building bridges across expert domains. For all of them, this
was a public space where they could with some veracity imagine themselves engaged in the
pursuit of truth in the midst of the people who share this objective.
At the same time, parallel science was not, as it were, politically dissident. Its
dominant ideology was not anti-sovietism or anti-communism but rather anti-politics
(Konrad 1984; Szacki 1995). As most reports on the aspirations of the participants of parallel
science indicate, they tried to create the public sphere of social interaction that had nothing to
do with the socialist state. They did this by indulging in all kinds of activities which were not
marked for them as specifically Soviet: from studying ancient texts and going into
archeological expeditions to simply spending time together interacting (obshchayas) without
using the medium of the Soviet newspeak (or while using it ironically). Anti-politics implied
not direct resistance to official discourse but a sustained effort to be outside (vne) of this

See Alexander Ospovat. Interview by author. Moscow, September 2001.

42

discourse (Yurchak 2006, 126-157). In this outsidedness the members of parallel science saw
the only possibility to fully realize their professional vocation.
To what extent they managed to achieve this outsidedness is a disputed matter. For
instance, Sergei Oushakine argues that the discourse that I have just briefly described above
is characterized by mimetic resistance: by turning Soviet official value hierarchies upside
down, Soviet dissidents and other non-conformists effectively imitated the structure of the
Soviet discourse and thus demonstrated that they shared with the state the same vocabulary of
symbolic means and rhetorical devices (2001, 207-8). In other words, both dissidents and
official ideologists used the same categories and binary oppositionsSoviet vs. anti-Soviet,
socialist vs. Western capitalist, international vs. national, progressive vs. reactionarybut
shifted positive evaluation from one end of the binary to another. In short, dissidents were
anti- but real (nastoiashchii) Leninist[s], in the words of Alexander Zholkovsky (1998,
167).
Alexei Yurchak agrees that these mimetic patterns were characteristic for much of the
dissident thinking and behavior. Yet, most of what he calls deterritorialized milieus, of
which parallel science is an example, was represented quite differently. He describes how
various groups of intellectuals, artists and young people positioned themselves as being
outside (vne), being different with respect to any, official or dissident, binary oppositions.
According to Yurchak, this self-positioning involved the performative reproduction of
existing discursive forms but without paying attention to their literal (connotative) meaning.
This performative shift enabled new meanings, lifestyles, communities, and pursuits, all
within the discursive field of the state but without being fully determined or controlled by it
(2006, 134). Thus, Yurchak emphasizes the positive and productive, rather then simply
negativerestraining and suppressingaspects of the Soviet discursive universe.
Both of these perspectives correct the limitations of the other and, ultimately, clarify a
lot about the relationship between parallel science and formal Soviet academia. In the
remainder of this section, I describe the implications of these interpretations for
understanding the character of parallel science.
Most importantly, both Oushakines and Yurchaks interpretations imply that the
relationship between parallel and formal academia cannot be interpreted as the binary one
between two groups or types of individuals with opposite moral characteristics: corruption,
inauthenticity and Sovietness, on the one hand, and freedom, authenticity and outsidedness,
on the other. In fact, despite considerable differentiation between formal and parallel
institutional fields, practically all members of parallel science were employees of Soviet
academic institutions and some occupied in these institutions the positions of importance.
Nevertheless, the binary opposition just outlined was indeed a powerful trope that permeated
the discourses of the historical actors and most Cold War accounts. Yet, in our analysis of
Soviet society and culture, this binary opposition should be seen as an object of study rather
then taken for granted as a premise of analysis.
Furthermore, Oushakine is probably right when he states that binary tropes permeated
both official and unofficial domains of social life. In the unofficial domain, this statement
applies not only to steadfast dissidents, as Yurchak argues, but also to those who tried to
create with their friends and peers parallel forms of public and private life, which would be,
hopefully, invisible to the authorities. For instance, when these individuals attached high
value to presumably apolitical domains and preoccupations which had to do with ancient
history, classical literature and art cinema, this could be partially attributed to a kind of
mimetic resistance to the official and dissident emphasis on political activism, as well as the
official Soviet populism. By positioning themselves and their lifestyle as non-Soviet, not
even anti-Soviet, they continued to employ and reverse the same set of binary oppositions,

43

which revolved around the basic distinctions of us vs. them, and the uncensored vs. the
censored (i.e. included in and excluded from collective memory).
As I am about to show by focusing on the case of the Tartu School, mimetic
resistance was indeed a significant mechanism of identity-formation in the case of the
members of parallel science. Their struggle with official taboos on names and ideas often
turned into the creation of new taboos on specific people and ways of expressing yourself (cf.
Etkind 1981). Their struggle with official literary and historical canon led to the creation of
the new pantheons or, at least, to the refashioning and reshuffling the official ones. Their
rejection of Soviet ritualistic and cultish attitude to science and culture led often to the
creation of new rituals and cults. These new rituals were guarded with more passion by the
self-elected moral and intellectual elites than official rituals by the political elites. The
intellectuals purely academic Hamburg Test in reality often appeared to be a particular
form of political correctness, with its own mechanisms of censoring and ostracizing. The
shape of their inter-circle consensus on ideas and their substantial disagreements with
outsiders are hard to ascertain because of the taboo on friendly fire (the critique of ones
own colleagues) and moral outrange with which any outside critique was met. Thus,
although the members of the parallel science circles positioned themselves as true
scientists, whose value judgments were firmly based on the rules of the scientific procedure,
in actuality their intellectual and personal preferences were strongly shaped by the political
frontlines, which, in their turn, were conceptualized in the terms supplied by the (anti-) Soviet
discourses.4
As I hope to demonstrate in what follows, this perspective captures a lot about the
mechanism of self-positioning and identity-construction among the members of parallel
science. Yet, Oushakine and like-minded critics exaggerate when they create an image of
the Soviet Discourse, as a kind of hermetic semiotic cage from which there is no escape.
For them, not only open anti-Soviet dissent but also various forms of internal emigration or
living not by lies (Solzhenitsyns phrase) were myths, self-deceptions and forms of false
consciousness. Some critics even describe the discourses of anti-politics tacit legitimizing
ideologies of the Brezhnevs regime because, by reproducing the structure of the Soviet
discourse, these discourses created an impression of its naturality, for Russia, and eternity.5
Alexei Yurchaks portrayal of the parallel, or in his parlance deterritorialized,
milieus of social life under socialism is more nuanced. The anti-political discursive strategies
may be illusions in a sense that they were based on denying their seep roots in the Soviet
reality. Yet, these strategies were not merely illusions; they had palpable social realities
behind them. The lifestyles and attitudes, which emerged within these milieus in the 1960s
and 1970s, were indeed new in comparison to the previous historical period. Although these
lifestyles and attitudes often reproduced the clichs of the Soviet discourses, the authorities
did not fully control the directions, which these reproductions and extensions followed. For
instance, the comradery of the friendship circles and kitchen salons was, of course, in part
relying on the officially sanctioned values of collectivism and the well-rounded
personhood. Yet, something else was also happening: the participants of parallel milieus
4

In his memoirs, Alexander Zholkovsky provided a colorful illustration of what Oushakine calls
mimetic resistance. After immigrating to the US, he suddenly realized that his image of free
Western world was very much shaped by opposing Soviet realities and Soviet representations of the
West (1998, 10-12). Even his brand of structuralism, which he perceived as truly modern and
Western, appeared to be hopelessly outdated in the real West (see chapter 4 for a discussion of the
Western reception of the Tartu School).
5
Vladimir Romanov, private communication. The philosopher Mikhail Ryklin expressed similar
ideas in his interview to me.

44

decoupled these values from the rule of the Party and thus reclaimed their meaning for further
creative use.
Similar things were happening among scientists. As Yurchak argues with respect to
what I call parallel science circles and communities, they were made possible and thriving
by the state itself: from the immense prestige accorded to scientists in the Soviet society,
state-sponsored academic institutions where scientists were relieved of teaching duties,
relative financial and political independence, and freedom to choose research topics, to statepromoted discourse on the value of scientific and cultural knowledge, creative arts, music and
literature, and so on (2006, 141). All these and a number of other aspects of the Soviet
system made possible the existence of the working academic quasi-institutions outside of the
framework of formal academia. Enabled but hardly intended by the Soviet system, parallel
science allowed its participants to create their own, fully controlled by academics, institutions
of science, that is to do something they could do with only very limited success within the
framework of formal Soviet academia.
Many memoirists even present the parallel science model of intellectual autonomy as
the closest when one can possibly get to intellectual freedom, under any regime (see
Koshelev 1994). Whatever nostalgic, these impressions are onto something. Indeed, how
many Western scholars would mind if they were offered an opportunity to enjoy the
pleasures of conducting almost any research they wished to conduct and care only about the
opinion of the reference groups they chose for themselves, having not to think about pleasing
grant-givers, fellowship providers, fussy students and tenure commissions, while, at the same
time, having a decently paid, prestigious and tenured position already by their late twenties?
Of course, this picture is slightly idealized because the status of the Soviet scientist
not only made possible these freedoms but also posed considerablebut varied from
position to position and from discipline to disciplinelimitations on them. Yet, what is true
about this model of intellectual autonomy is that the actually working institutions of Soviet
parallel science were closer in their character to the early modern gentlemanly republic of
scientists then to the contemporary Western academia of specialized professionals (see
Shapin 1994). Like this republic, the Soviet community of parallel science was a
community of personally acquainted intellectuals whose personal virtue, whatever its
historically specific definition, and general cultural capital was not less important in
estimating their professional weight by their peers then their specialized knowledge and
achievements. Whatever inadvertently, the Soviet academic regime enabled this model to be
not only imagined but also, to a considerable extent, practiced within Soviet academia. To
dismiss, as Oushakine and like-minded critics do, this model as Soviet and thus
delusional (how can any type of autonomy be possible under the Soviets?!) is to
universalize the contemporary Western model of intellectual autonomy and reject the
possibility of other real and imaginable alternatives.
While Yurchaks perspective is more nuanced, both of the approaches just outlined
share a common weakness: both try to come up with the single mechanism which would
account for the relationship of the Soviet educated class to official discourses and institutions.
I argue, in contrast, that mimetic reproduction and performative extension of Soviet cultural
forms were indeed important but by no means the only mechanisms in question. As I show
in my analysis of the Tartu School as an institution of parallel science, there was a
multiplicity of ways of absorbing, reworking, rejecting and disavowing Soviet cultural forms,
often in very creative ways. This multiplicity reflected the heterogeneity of Soviet culture,
which even Yurchak underplays. The Soviet cultural universe was a mlange of socialist and
nationalist, equalitarian and elitist, progressivist and traditionalist ideologies, tropes and
figures of thought and speech. Thus, none of the inhabitants of this universe related to all its
aspects in the same way: while rejecting some of them, she employed others
45

opportunistically, still others she reinterpreted in her favor and with still others she identified
wholeheartedly.6 This means that, while the Soviet discursive universe was a unique
combination of varied discourses, this universe was hardly a cage, as imagined by Oushakine.
Although political binaries indeed colored most of the personal and social relations among
Soviet citizens, especially intellectuals, these binaries were able to neither define the full
meanings of various alliances and conflicts between individuals and groups, nor predict
specific intellectual choices these individuals and groups made. As in other societies,
identities and distinctions in Soviet academia were also structured by personal tastes, cultural
predilections, class-based biases, and ethnic attitudes and stereotypes.
For understanding the mentality of the members of parallel science, these critical
considerations have at least one fundamental implication: although anti-politics was the
dominant discursive and rhetorical strategy of parallel science, the specific results of its
deployment differed widely depending on particular definitions of political, soviet, and
scientific in use. Depending on these definitions, the state of being outside (vne), nonSoviet, could be interpreted in more or less liberal or nationalistic, elitist or populist ways.
These definitions, in their turn, cannot be understood only with respect to the Soviet
discourse. We should also inquire into their historical precedents, their comparative context
and their social background.
Ultimately, since Soviet political and academic authorities did not have under their
full control any of the discourses that comprised the Soviet intellectual universe, it is not
really an interesting question whether anti-political discourses and parallel practices were
indeed able to leave the cage of Soviet culture. It is more interesting to inquire into what
exactly their outsidedness and parallelism consisted in; how it was constructed in the
course of everyday interactions and negotiations on, for example, educational, researchrelated, administrative and personal issues among academics and between academics and
officials; what consequences parallel science institutions had for Soviet academia as a whole;
what the experience of parallel science means for understanding the public sphere under
socialism and, finally, what the intellectual implications of this experience were.
The Tartu-Moscow School (1964-1974): Playing the Glass-Bead Game
The alliance between Tartu and Moscow structuralists proved to be quite durable: as a dense
network of personal, institutional and intellectual interactions, it persisted for at least ten
years. The visible manifestation of this stability was the existence of two central institutions
of the School, Kriku summer schools and Tartu periodicals, especially k
(Smeiotik), or Trudy po znakovym sistemam (TZS, Works on Sign Systems). To get a better
insight in the nature of these social forms and their intellectual significance, let me start with
the very concept of summer schools.
Of course, the term is simply a category in the formal Soviet nomenclature of
academic gatherings. Yet Lotman and his Moscow colleagues selected this term not by
accident (see V.Uspensky 1994). Along with various conferences, colloquia, or symposia, the
summer (fall or other) school was a form of association which was popular among
6

For instance, Yuri Lotman, as a war veteran, embraced the Soviet interpretation of the World War II,
at least for most of his life. As a professor of Russian literature, he also embraced the Soviet cult of
high culture and classical literature. Yet, he was also working on decoupling the intelligentsias
notion of Russian culture from Soviet official and popular culture. As a Russian-Jewish intellectual,
who happened to work and live in Soviet-occupied Estonia, he opposed the machinery of the Soviet
bureaucratic empire but endorsed the benefits of the multi-ethnic cultural realm created within this
empire (see more in chapters 5 and 6).

46

scientists, especially mathematicians, physicists and biologists in the 1950s and 1960s. 7
Initially designed as a form of postdoctoral education, schools allowed for prolongedfor a
week or morestay in resorts or otherwise remote areas for purposes of exchanging the latest
achievements in specific, often interdisciplinary, fields. Since most of the Soviet research
centers were located in Moscow and other large cities, the geographical seclusion of the
places like Kriku provided conditions for intensive personal communication and complete
immersion into the new material. Moreover, schools tended to be organized by the
academic units of rather low level (departments, sectors, etc.) and thus academics could, to a
large extent, control program and attendance themselves, with minimal interference from
academic and nonacademic authorities.
Although frequent in natural sciences, summer schools were not practiced in Soviet
humanities or social sciences before the Kriku initiative. The idea that the academics, who
represented not only different institutions but also various disciplines, could gather in a
remote location, far from academic officials and philosophers, seemed to sit uneasily with the
very nature of Soviet human sciences as ideological disciplines. The idea that scholars had
considerable control over participation sounded likes a recipe for trouble. Indeed, the Kriku
gatherings were often accused on secretiveness, elitism and esoteric language (see examples
in Seyffert 1983). To be sure, if they were not frequently associated with rhyming semiotic
(semiotics) with semitika ( the Jewish science), these characterizations would not be far
from truth. The Kriku summer schools were indeed not open to any scholars; they were
highly exclusive and even secretive. Yet, according to many participants of these gatherings,
it was precisely this atmosphere of exclusivity that allowed for what Viktor Shklovsky
named the Hamburg Test communication, the authentic and unrestrained interaction
among peers (V.Uspensky 1994; Tsivian 1994; Lesskis 1994).
The idea of the Hamburg Test communication evoked the old imagery of the
republic of the scientists (Bauman 1987). This was a conversation among the equals who
have been chosen presumably not according to their ideological or even formal credentials
but according to their purely academic and genuine contribution as estimated by their
peers. In the eyes of their participants, such occasions as the Kriku summer schools were
like pure lab experiments aimed at distilling undistorted scientific results and
simultaneously at estimating the real worth of each participant (see Levin 1994; Lesskis
1994). Such occasions served as sites for establishing the network of mutual peer recognition
and assessment independent from the official institutions designed to promote and filter
academic cadres. If the Tartu-Moscow School can be compared to a kind of republic of
reason, summer schools were its parliament, the site where the judgments of truth and worth
were pronounced and new, second science hierarchies of academic worth established.
For many participants, Tartu gatherings were also distinguished by their ability to
combine academic respectability with comradely informality. For many, spending time in
Kriku was a form of leisure: these gatherings involved jolly banquets, communal song
singing, and quiet walks on the banks of the lake (Levin 1994; Tsivian 1994). Yet, this was
also an opportunity to get to know closely some of the best scholars in a number of fields,
including Roman Jakobson or Petr Bogatyrev.8 The very opportunity to argue with anyone,
regardless of ranks, was exciting for young Soviet scholars raised in the highly hierarchical
atmosphere of Soviet universities. Probably, this sense of easiness, equality and creativity
7

The 1990s issues of the journal Priroda (Nature) are full of often nostalgic memoirs about these
gatherings.
8
Petr G. Bogatyrev (1893-1971) was the only representative of the Jakobson generation who actively
participated in the work of the Tartu School (see also Appendix A). Bogatyrev was a coauthor of
Jakobson and a member of the Prague School. Unlike Jakobson, he returned to the Soviet Union in
the late 1930s.

47

found its way into Lotmans later definition of literary salons as circles of friends who,
while having fun, create the world of culture.9
The Hamburg Test world of Kriku and Tartu has also been compared to Hermann
Hesses Castalia, the community of the players in the glass-bead game, the pure exercise of
intelligence (see Levin 1994). As we learn from Hesses (1969) novel, this game is a game
with all contents and all values of our culture and its goal is to grow and sustain the true
aristocracy of spirit. Unlike chess, this is not a game in which one can win. It may have a
few basic rules but its whole culture is multilayered, intuition-based and implies multiple
degrees of initiation.
Thus, in many contemporary accounts and recollections, the impressions of equality
and comradery unproblematically coexist with the images of the Castalian Brotherhood of the
Initiated with a hierarchy from freshmen to magistrae ludi. What these images have in
common is the idea of the aristocratic nature of the Tartu community. Each image envisions
a distinction between the contaminated outside world and the inner domain of
trustworthiness and strict professionalism, or the free world outside of the established
institutional and political authorities. Although these images are merely images and thus they
cannot be fully trusted as descriptions of reality, they provide points of departure for
understanding the School as a social and a discursive form.
The Tartu-Moscow School as a Parallel Science Network
The Tartu-Moscow academic community was one of the most successful attempts to create a
working model of parallel science alongside with Soviet academia. As many participants
noted, the point was not revolutionary change or escape into hiding. Their aim was to go
back to normal science presumably interrupted by the interventions of the Communist
regime. What did this return involve? How did the Hamburg Test apparatus of discussing and
selecting the worthy texts work? How was the impression of purely scientific
environment created and nourished? In what follows, I try to answer these questions by
disentangling some of the specific patterns of cooperation and opposition, as revealed by the
work of building circles, managing publications, choosing themes and citing sources.
As I have mentioned, summer schools and Tartu publications were very selective
institutions. Although officially anyone could apply to participate in summer schools and
submit a paper to Smeiotik, in fact, to get to Kriku without special invitation or
reference was hard if not impossible.10 Unknown candidates were treated with suspicion
and eliminated automatically.11 The number of attendees was limited to the participants of
previous schools and people strongly suggested by a number of most authoritative
participants. Any additions to the list of participants were evaluated by Yuri Lotman who, in
case of doubt, consulted with the members of the core, usually Viacheslav Ivanov or Boris
Uspensky (see Appendix A). Hence, the selection procedure consisted in blackballing and
non-blind peer reviewing.
The politics of closed doors was partially motivated by realistic considerations: the
Tartu University sport base could accommodate not much more than 20 persons at a time. In
fact, the popularity of the event attracted up to 60 visitors per day by the end of the 1960s.12
Since some of these people were neither invited nor welcome, Lotman urged his colleagues
9

Lotmans lectures at Tartu University, spring 1982 (LC, F136, s.45).

Nekliudov, Sergei. Interview by author. Moscow, September 2001.
11
Outsiders were filtered by standard rejection letters with formal reference to the fact that the list
and number of participants [of the summer schools] has already been approved by the ESSR
[Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic] Ministry of Higher and Secondary Education (EA, F136, s. 63).
12
Lotman to Toporov, 1966 (Lotman 1997, 676).
10

48

to limit the circulation of the news about upcoming summer schools to avoid attracting
outsiders and simply idle people (prazdnoshataiushchiesia).13 He was concerned that large
numbers of people could stifle the intimate atmosphere of the narrow gathering and distort
the purity of the Hamburg Test.
The proclaimed selection criterion was, of course, quality and solidity of academic
work. However, in practice, this criterion was much more complex and contradictory. Mutual
acquaintance and collaboration was obviously a condition sine qua non for being even
considered. If we try to discern the largest clusters of the schools participants and
contributors to Tartu publications, we find three groups according to the institutional
affiliations of their members: Lotmans associates from Tartu University and scholars from
two academic institutes, the Institute for Slavic Studies and the Institute for Oriental Studies
(see Appendix A). The core of the Tartu-Moscow School was composed of the generation
who graduated from the university in the early 1950s and their students of 1956-60 years of
graduation (correspondingly 7 and 11 out of 33 most frequent participants of the summer
schools). Most of Moscow members were graduates of the Philology Faculty of Moscow
State University and knew each other since student years. Some of the co-authorship or
professor-student relationships date back to the years at the university: here, the Ivanov
Toporov alliance is the most obvious example.
Furthermore, this network of acquaintances was often based on deeper social and
even kinship ties. Many of the frequent participants were members of small and, to the large
extent, inbred hereditary intelligentsia, which was primarily composed of Moscow and
Leningrad-located intellectualsacademics, artists, highly educated professionalsin at
least the second generation.14 Of course, this does not mean that all of these children of
intellectuals had French governesses in their childhood or dachas in the elite writers
village of Peredelkino, as was the case of Viacheslav V. Ivanov. Rather, their lifestyles and
upbringing was closer to the one of most other members of the School, who came from
middle to lower middle class backgrounds of the rank-and-file intelligentsiaschool
teachers, librarians, engineers, and doctors, Still, my point is that the preexisting social ties
and shared high-cultural capital powerfully structured the relations between, and the selfperception of, the core members of such exclusive social formations as the Tartu School.
Another important family connection is the Jewishness of many participants: at
least 19 of 33 scholars considered themselves Jewish or half-Jewish. Although baptized Jews
started to enter the Russian intelligentsia after the 1870s reforms of higher education, their
greatest inflow was jump-started by the 1917 Revolution. The Revolution abolished the the
Pale of Settlement and the requirement of baptism. Some of the most important intellectuals
of the turbulent 1920s and the later period in Russia were Jewish (for example, Viktor
Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov and Lev Vygotsky). Yuri Slezkine explains this
overrepresentation of the Jews among not only technical and scientific but also humanitarian
intelligentsia by the exigencies of modernization and assimilation: in effort to embrace
modernity, the Jews not only passionately embraced the cultural canons of the host
nationsin the Soviet case, the Russian literary classics, first of allbut also often took
upon themselves the role of administrating the spiritual possessions of these nations as
writers, critics, readers and other cultural workers (2004, 69). In effect, even after the openly
anti-Semitic campaign against cosmopolitanism during the last years of Stalins rule, the
13

Lotman to Uspensky, 1973 (Lotman 1997, 546).

Yuri Lotman was a son of the layer and the doctor, and he attended one of the best schools in
Leningrad. Alexander Zholkovsky was growing in the family of the musicologist Lev Mazel (19072000). Viacheslav Ivanov was a son of the prominent Soviet writer, Vsevolod Ivanov (1895-1963).
Through his fathers connections among writers, poets and literary critics, Viacheslav Ivanov had
access to the intellectual networks of which Roman Jakobson was a member (see Ivanov 1995).
14

49

proportion of Jews among Soviet intellectuals did not change significantly. If Russian
scientists [were] one fifth more numerous than their share of the Soviet population, Jewish
scientists [were] over seven times more numerous than their share (Hutchings 1976, 32).
Still, the high concentration of the Jews within a single circles made it particularly suspicious
to the authorities and some of the competing intellectuals, especially those who tended to
render semiotika as semitika (see Lotman 1997, 209; 247).
Another particularity which distinguished Tartu gatherings was a number of academic
couples: Lotman and Mints, Toporov and Elizarenkova, the Lekomtsevs and the Revzins. In
contrast to many other informal intellectual salons, there were 9 women among 33 most
active participants of the summer schools (see Appendix A).15 Yet, by no means all women in
this group were spouses or partners of the male scholars, and even spouses usually had
their independent research preferences and competences.16 This is worth emphasizing
because, despite considerable efforts of affirmative action, women were still, to a large
extent, underrepresented in academia. Philology, which included the study of language,
literature, myth and folklore, was standing out as a particularly feminized field: elite
Philology Faculties was often called the faculties of noble maidens. Yet, as this expression
indicates, philological education still tended to produce either cultured wives or teachers
for high schools. The Tartu School did not fully escape the consequences of this deeplyentrenched gender inequality, either: Tartu women tended to specialize more narrowly and
unlike Lotman, Ivanov and other menproduced much less theoretical statements of
interdisciplinary significance.
Of course, this is only a rough social portrait of the Kriku community. There were
plenty of participants who did not subscribe to any of the categories mentioned above. For
instance, Boris Mikhailovich Gasparov, a graduate of the provincial Rostov-on-Don
University, originated in the local Armenian community in a family of lower middle class
intellectuals (school teachers). He was not a relative of another Gasparov in the group,
Mikhail Leonovich: Gasparov is a widespread Russified Armenian last name.
Furthermore, like Boris Gasparov, most members of the School did not enjoy the privilege of
participating in the preexisting networks of intellectuals and artists by the right of birth. For
themthe children of the rank and file provincial intelligentsiathe university education in
Moscow and Leningrad, and the university-based teacher-student and friendship
relationships, served as the only way to make up for this disadvantage.
Yet, despite these exceptions, my preliminary generalizations about the social
background of, and the nature of the ties within, the Tartu School retain their validity. The
elite intelligentsia upbringing and connections, and even Jewishness should be seen not as
causes but as symbols of the group identity of the School. The symbols like the
intelligentsia, cultural classics, the Jewishness and kinship were embedded in such
practices, or interaction rituals, as recurrent gatherings (e.g. the summer schools), mutual
citations, as well as repeatedly showing signs of understanding certain references, remarks,
linguistic and rhetoric figures (see Collins 1998; Goffman 1967). To become an identity
symbols, it is not enough for a certain social characteristic to be out there; it should be
15

Most important intellectual and academic salons of the 1960s and 1970s were predominantly male
(e.g. Moscow Methodological Circle, Yuri Levadas seminars, etc.). At best, the woman was a
hostess, as in case of Revekka Frumkinas psycholinguistic seminar that took part in her
apartment (see Frumkina 1997; 2002).
16
Tatiana Nikolaeva was among the founders of Soviet text linguistics, a variety of discourse
analysis. Tatiana Elizarenkova, the spouse of Vladimir Toporov, is a world-class authority in ancient
Indian texts and rituals (especially the Rigveda). Zara Mints, the wife of Yuri Lotman, was a Soviet
leading specialist on the Russian poetry of the Silver Age (early 20th century). This list can be
continued (see Appendix A).

50

singled in the course of the negotiations, even struggles for social prestige and influence.
Only then, positions become dispositions, or taxonomies and categories through which the
members of a community perceive and construct themselves and the world around them
(Bourdieu 1977; 1984; Collins 1998).
For instance, the Jewishness was often considered a symbol of the Tartu Schools
identity by Jewish and non-Jewish participants and the opponents of the group. This fact may
be in part a manifestation of the characteristic homology in Soviet discourses between the
distinctions of intellectuals vs. non-intellectuals and Jews vs. non-Jews (Gudkov and
Levinson 1992; Slezkine 2005). Both the Jews and the intellectuals bore an ambiguous status
of having privileged access to knowledge and being politically disenfranchised. Thus, other
things being equal, a Jew was a more probable candidate for in-group membership. This is
particularly visible in the politics of the Tartu University department of Russian Literature
headed by Lotman. After 1962, when Estonian language was no longer a requirement for the
entrance exam, he and his colleagues made efforts to enlist as many students from Soviet
centers like Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev as possible. Before the department became a
fashionable place to study, the pool of non-Estonian candidates consisted mostly of those
who did not get enough points to enroll in major Soviet universities. In this category, the
Jews had the highest probability of being considered because, in places like Kiev State
University, they were often laid off clearly based on their nationality. As a result, Lotmans
department produced a large number of significant scholars, dissidents and simply
intellectuals with the wrong fifth entry (that is, the ethnicity entry that stated Jewish) in
their passports.
Similarly, purely intellectual origins as a symbol of group identity implied not only
kinship or family acquaintance but also the presumption of sharing certain cultural capital in
the form of the ability to recognize and use in everyday and academic communication the
specific stock of artistic, intellectual and historical references. Around 1960, these references
included often forbidden or unavailable poetry of the Silver Age, as well as the books of
Hemingway, Kafka and a few other Western authors (Ivanov 1995(1), 195). The hero of the
day, the poet Boris Pasternak, had just been ostracized by the official press for accepting the
Nobel Prize. Hemingway and Kafka had recently been translated and their books were hard
to acquire (dostat, or procure through the black market). As Ivanov phrased the core of
this kind of cultural elitism, one of Stalins main crimes is that he did not understand
Pasternak (1995(2):199).
In general terms, the participants of the Kriku gatherings were expected to possess
certain intelligentnost, or intellectual culture. This is a complex concept that includes
family background, cultural capital as well as a sense of collective and individual difference
based on the presumed ability of independently rediscovering cultural treasures and values
(Grigory Pomerants, cited in Solzhenitsyn 1975, 245). In principle, according to various
accounts of intellectual culture, this ability is not supposed to depend on social background
and formal education. Yet, in reality, these were significant markers of distinction.
Viacheslav V. Ivanovs memoirs are full of caricatured images of Soviet philosophers and
philologists as petite hooligans (shpana), bandits, informers (stukachi), ignorant and
inept persons (nevezhdy, bezdari) straight from swine herding (Ivanov 1998b, 335).17 One
of my interviewees summarized the infallible criterion of the intellectual and even moral

17

The last epithet refers to Dmitry F. Markov (b.1913), a loyal Soviet literary historian, a specialist on
Slavic literatures and socialist realism. Later, in the 1969, he became the director of the Academys
Institute of Slavic Studies, that is Ivanovs boss.

51

features of a speaker: if he speaks with soft g (), he is not one of us, true intellectuals. 18
This might sound like plain class-based prejudice but Tatiana Nikolaeva explains its
background as follows: if Western radical intellectuals of the 1960s were rebelling against
their bourgeois fathers, for us, bourgeoisness was something inherited from grandmas and
grandpas, something they did not have. And we cherished it (1998, 164). Here, one can see
the clear opposition between us, true intellectuals called to inherit and preserve the cultural
treasures of the past, and them, the new Soviet barbarians, the intelligentsia aspirants,
academic careerists, intellectual dilettantes, cowardly sell-outs, and masked KGB agents.
Indeed, attempts to understand the Schools collective sense of identity inescapably
point to the conditions of the social and discursive struggles of the 1960s-70s in the Soviet
Union. As I have already mentioned, the ideological space was sharply divided by the usthem binary oppositions. It is not that the political and cultural elites were indeed divided into
two camps but the language and symbolism of such division was a crucial aspect of collective
and individual behavior.
Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the central categories, which enframed most
of the ways in which the Tartu Schools members differentiated their own kind from
outsiders, was hygiene. As we know from Mary Douglas, the rituals and rhetoric of
hygiene, cleanliness and purity is about inclusion and exclusion. In her words, rituals of
purity and impurity create unity in experience and uncleanliness and dirt is that which must
not be included (Douglas 1966, 2, 41). Hygiene (gigiena) was also an actual category that
circulated among Soviet intellectuals and referred to the exclusionary strategy of circlebuilding based on the assumption of the binary division of the social (and intellectual) field
into us and them.19 Formally speaking, them were those the very contact with whom
should be avoided, even in a confrontational mode. If expansionist strategies of the early
1960s were dictating direct confrontation, the Tartu ethos was privileging avoidance.
According to Lotman, certain authors are by default not to be read or cited, even for
purposes of critique. In his words, to struggle with infinitesimal and foolish (especially if
they are [morally] dirty) adversaries is easy but it is not an honorable deed.20 In this
particular case, Lotman talks about a scholar known for his undisguised anti-Semitism.
However, more often, much less specific criteria of exclusion were in use. For instance,
consider Ivanovs note made to Lotman about one submission to Smeiotik: NN has written
a good paper but, in the extrascientific plane, his behavior has been impermissible
[therefore], I believe, we should not publish him. 21 Alternatively, Alexander Piatigorsky
recommended one of the candidates by saying that Y is the most honorable person, a person
on whom one can rely completely. 22
These examples demonstrate that, whatever highly valued, the discourse of
professionalism was always entangledbut not wholly identifiedwith the expectation of
high moral standards and trustworthiness, or virtue (or honorability, poriadochnost). Like
18

The soft g is characteristic for some of the southern accents of Russian and for Ukrainian. Since
many Soviet cadres in nomenklatura and scholarship were children of workers and farmers from
Ukraine and Southern Russia (including Khrushchev, Brezhnev and even Gorbachev), this dialect was
characteristic for them. For Russian-speaking intellectuals, this sound became one of the most offputting markers of social and intellectual inferiority.
19
Ospovat, Alexander. Interview by author. Moscow, September 2001.
20
Lotman to Fialkova, 1982 (Lotman 1997, 715).
21
Ivanov to Lotman, 1969 (LC, F135, s., p.39). I am not sure what exactly Ivanov means here. The
addressee of the comment is the Indologist Alexander Syrkin, a non-core member of the School who
alter emigrated to Israel (see Appendix A).
22
Piatigorsky to Lotman, 1963 (LC, F135, s.1180, p. 4). Here, the recommendee is V.A.Zaretsky,
who actively participated in the structuralist movement in its early period.

52

in the case of the 17th century Royal Society, the participation in the Tartu School-related
activities was premised on the particular kind of family background, intellectual horizon and,
most importantly, social behavior.
Poriadochnost is a complex category privileged by the Soviet intelligentsias
practices of self-representation and self-cleansing. Although often described in terms of the
basic moral valueshonor, sincerity, trustworthiness, and ability to hold the word, it usually
functioned as an identity marker of either the intelligentsia in general or its specific circle
within the framework of the us-them opposition. For instance, in the Tartu circle, it was
almost sufficient to have a difficult life, that is to have your father arrested under Stalin
and your family exiled to Siberia or Kazakhstan, to be eligible for the membership in the
circle.23 Simultaneously, it was enough to have a certain vagueoften unformulated and
unclear even to the key playersaura of unreliability around you to be suspect. 24 This could
be a gossip about your connections with organy (the code word for the KGB) or an
otherwise enviable career promotion. Such obviously dishonest deed as taking the position
of a recently fired colleague was a sure way for being excluded from the circle. 25 Other
reasons could be signing a letter in support of Soviet politics (for instance, the 1968 Soviet
invasion of Czechoslovakia) or even refusing to sign a protest letter (against this invasion or
in support of Brodsky, Siniavsky or other dissidents). At the least, an honorable person was
expected to play dirty tricks (podlosti) on their neighbors only when compelled to, and take
no pleasure in it (Grigory Pomerants, quoted in Solzhenitsyn 1975, 245).
Yet, most criteria were much more ambiguous. They involved not many explicit
norms or rules. They rather had to do with the networks of acquaintances with their shared
references and hierarchies of prestige. To be outside of these networks implied being suspect
a priori. This suspicion had a clear political flavor to it: the presumption was that if we do
not know you, your interest in us is motivated by the authorities.26 Ultimately, in most
contexts, poriadochnost meant political correctness, the Soviet intelligentsia style.27
These identity rituals defined the Tartu-Moscow School as a rather typical Soviet
intelligentsias public of the 1960s-70s with its rather strict informal prestige hierarchies
and harsh peer pressure (for other examples, see Kagarlitsky 1988; Shlapentokh 1990).
Viacheslav Ivanovs analogy between Tartu gatherings and a Masonic lodge is revealing
23

Boris Uspensky to Lotman, early 1970s (LC, F135, s.1470, p.36).

For instance, this was the case with a couple of otherwise highly regarded literary historians close to
Formalism and Structuralism, Alexander (1938-2005) and Marietta (b.1937) Chudakovs. In his 1966
letter to Uspensky, Lotman wrote: How about the Chudakovs? They are very nice and will be upset,
if they are not invited, but for a number of Moscow colleagues there is some sort of yes, but about
them, the meaning of which I cannot grasp fully (Lotman 1997, 475).
25
Margarita Lekomtseva told me a story of one young man who frequently attended Tartu student
conferences and other School-related meetings in Moscow. When he took the position of a recently
fired colleague, i.e. committed a non-honorable deed, the doors of all structuralist gatherings and
related intellectual salons were shut for him. Lekomtseva accidentally discovered him only in the
1990s: he was peacefully teaching at Moscow University (Lekomtseva, Margarita. Interview by
author. Moscow, July 2002).
26
Ann Malts, a long-term Lotmans associate and assistant, made the following ironic remark in her
1974 letter to Lotman: I composed negative responses to all unknown pilgrims to the summer
schools and attached to the envelopes unique 4-kopek stamps with the slogan 50 years to the Soviet
KGB (LC, F135, s.854).
27
The peer pressure among intellectuals was at times even harder to resist then the pressure of the
authorities. In the late 1960s, the refusal to sign protest letters could cost you not only respect of your
peers. You could also be forced to change your workplace. The sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh
(b.1926) remembers that he was threatened by his pro-dissident peers with the sanctions from the
liberal authorities and even KGB (!) if he did not sign a protest letter (Shlapentokh 2003, 180).
24

53

because it points inadvertently to the inequalities implicit in the culture of the Hamburg
Testing. For instance, it mattered who introduced a new participant, a core member or
somebody else.28 The highest authority was granted to the generation of Pasternak and
Akhmatova as well as Jakobson and Bogatyrev, the legendary generation of those born
around 1890s-1900s [who constituted] the moral environment which sustains ethical patterns
and makes possible the transition of culture [to new generations] (Frumkina 1997, 216).
Their approval and support legitimized the authority of the younger leaders like Lotman and
Ivanov.
To be true, not all the members of the older generation were uncontested authorities.
Strong moral demands were applicable even to scholars whose scholarship was recognized as
a part of the Schools tradition. In particular, Viacheslav Ivanov could not forgive Viktor
Shklovsky and Vladimir Propp for what he believed was active or passive collaboration with
the regime. In his opinion, Shklovsky went further than other Russian Formalists in adapting
to the establishment of loyal Soviet intellectuals. He evolved from a radical Formalist
academic into a co-opted Soviet writer who did not hesitate to confess his loyalty in his
writings, to vote for officially desired decisions in the Union of Soviet Writers or to openly
condemn his former colleagues. 29 Ivanovs animosity was shared by some Tartu scholars.
For instance, Lotman wrote to Egorov in 1984 that Shklovsky castrated himself
intellectually and became inept (1997, 331).30
An important aspect of the lodge-type communication within the Tartu circle was the
taboo on public critique of one another, especially in print. Do not shoot at our own,
demanded Lotman and justified this requirement by the need to defend weak structures like
the summer schools and Smeiotik (see Zholkovsky 2000, 84). In fact, as I have already
mentioned, any public debate was suspect among most Soviet intellectuals. Yet, most
reprehensible was the behavior of an in-group member who moved internal rivalries and
debates to the public domain. This was the case of two key members of the early 1960s
structuralist movement, Alexander Zholkovsky and Yuri Shcheglov, who first ignored the
invitation to the first summer school and then were no longer invited. In response to such
neglect, they published a critical article in the major academic journal. This article ended
with a biting characterization of Tartu semiotics as more or less sophisticated transliteration
of banal or approximate ideas and Tartu studies as results of mass fabrication timed for the
days of small and large semiotic festivities, that is primarily the summer schools
(Zholkovsky and Shcheglov 1967, 89). As a result, these scholars were for a number of years
barred from the Tartu circle, and thusbecause of their increasingly non-conformist
intellectual position and political behaviorthey lost practically the only opportunity to
publish for almost ten years. This exclusion allows Zholkovsky to call himself today a
dissident among dissidents.31

28

Olga Revzina told me how she was reprimanded for inviting somebody to Kriku on her own
initiative. One of the Schools leaders told her: remember, what applies to you does not apply to
others (Revzina, Olga. Interview by author. Moscow, July 2002).
29
Ivanov, interview.
30
An important aspect of this attitude is the hostility, which developed in the 1960s between two
formerly best friends, Shklovsky and Jakobson (Galushkin 1999). This was partially due to the
competition for intellectual priority at the time of the Formalist renaissance in the West and in Russia.
At another level, Jakobson and his Russian colleagues rejected the intellectual and political evolution
of Shklovsky and his generation since the 1920s, and Shklovsky could not accept this. Finally,
Shklovsky committed a sin of publicly criticizing the ideas of Jakobson and the Tartu School in
print (Shklovsky 1969).
31
Zholkovsky, Alexander. Interview by author. Moscow, July 2002.

54

Of course, even though the Tartu community was based primarily on personal ties as
well as highly politicized and moralistic oppositions and categories, its members
conceptualized their collective identity in terms of being the true community of professionals.
The main assumption here was that the political boundary between us and them roughly
corresponded to the frontier between true science and ideology, and professionalism
and amateurism. This distinction was strategic in a sense that its main function was to
establish a symbolic boundary and not to subscribe to some fixed set of principles or ideas.
As we have seen, the early structuralist ideal of formalized rule-abiding scientific
communication gave way to a sense of the shared situation circumscribed by vaguely defined
norms and dispositions woven into the texture of informal intellectual networks. This is how
one of the youngest participants of the summer schools, Sergei Nekliudov, describes his
sense of the Schools identity:
There was a foggy, without clear boundaries and, to a great extent, mythological
image of some new science with not quite clear, but tempting possibilities, [as well
as] an image of the elite intellectual corporation which rejected mortifying traditions
and was free from social hypocrisy (Nekliudov 1994, 320).
Of course, this is a recent reflection, which was made upon the passage of time. Still, this
memoir alerts us about the multiplicity of actual intellectual agendas of the participants of the
Lotman-organized summer schools. Throughout the book, I will explore this multiplicity. At
this point, however, I am more interested in deciding whether any sense of intellectual
coherence was present or developing in the course of the 1960s. For answering this question
in the first approximation, I look not for common theoretical manifestos, which the Tartu
School did not produce until the early 1970s, but rather at the distribution of thematic
preoccupations as reflected in the titles of the Tartu semiotic series, especially Smeiotik.
Common Themes and the Privileging of the Past
The summer schools were closely tied to Smeiotik volumes. There was a certain division of
labor between these major sites of the School. The summer schools served as filters for
selecting and as occasions for polishing the ideas to appear in Smeiotik. The intermediate
stage was the publication of the schools presentations in the low-circulation brochures of
Programma i tezisy dokladov (The program of the summer school and the theses of the
presentations; see Isakov 1991). Not all presentations became articles in Smeiotik.
Furthermore, the summer schools served as justifications for the overrepresentation of
non-Tartu scholars in the Works (TZS and TRSF): any series of the universitys Acta were, in
theory, supposed to publish the contributions by local professors.32 Yet, due to the
perseverance of Yuri Lotman and the support by most successive university Rectors, the case
of Smeiotik was precisely reverse: over 80% of contributions were coming from
outsiders.33 The effect of this combination of selectiveness and openness was remarkable:
not being a major Soviet academic journal, Works on Sign Systems soon attracted major
reviews in Tel Quel, Change, Linguistics, PMLA and other major Western academic journals
(see, for example, Kristeva 1968).
32

Lotman to Ivanov, 1964 (Lotman 1997, 647).

As Appendix A indicates, there were only 6 Tartu scholars among 33 most frequent contributors:
Yuri Lotman, Zara Mints, Igor Chernov, Boris Gasparov (since 1967), as well as a few Estonians:
e.g. Lennart Mll, a specialist on Buddhism and a Piatigorsky informal student, and Jaak Pldme, a
specialist in metrics.
33

55

Between 1965 and 1975, Smeiotik was a bi-annual edition of quite large size (over
500 pages), especially large in comparison with most other publications of Tartu University
(maximum 200 pages in humanities and social sciences). Over 20 contributors participated in
each volume. In the beginning, there were no subheadings but, when they were introduced in
1969, this was a mere institutionalization of the actual thematic categorization already present
in the 1967 edition. The major headings included: Myth, Folklore, and Religion as Modeling
Systems; Semiotics of Art; Poetics: The Analysis of the Text; and Publications and
Reviews. In the 1971, the section of semiotics, or typology, of culture was added. The rest
of the sections included papers that were harder to classify.
Let me provide a short outline of the kinds of specific topics included under the above
headings (see the bibliography in Isakov 1991). The section on myth et al. included the
papers on
- the nature of the mythological mentality (Piatigorsky);34
- the relationship between natural language and other semiotic systems (Boris
Uspensky and others; for non-Tartu analogues, see the works on language and
culture in American anthropological tradition of Boas, Sapir and Whorf);
- the reconstruction of the Indo-European mythology (Ivanov, Toporov; for the
sources of inspiration and methodology see the works of August Schleicher,
Georges Dumezil, Mircea Eliade and, of course, Roman Jakobson);
- the structure of the narrative based on the analysis of fairy-tales (Meletinsky,
Nekliudov; see the works of Vladimir Propp, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Claude
Bremond);
- the structure of Oriental, especially Ancient Indian, ritual and other religious texts
(Piatigorsky, Elizarenkova and many others).
The section on the semiotics of art comprised the works dedicated to
- the comparison between art and science (Ogibenin);
- the typology and systematic comparison various art genres (Bogatyrev);
- the works on the space-time composition of medieval Russian icons by Leonid
Zhegin and Boris Uspensky;
- the relationship between art and cosmology (Toporov);
- the semiotics of music notation and tonality (Boris Gasparov);
- the relationship between literature and folklore (Levinton, Lotman);
- the semiotics of film (Ivanov, Lotman).
The section on poetics included the papers that dealt with
- the relationship between natural language and poetic language (Lotman, Revzin);
- metric and rhythmic analysis of poetry (Lotman, Mikhail Gasparov)
- the structure of tropes (Yuri Levin);
- the structure of poetic genres (Dmitry Segal, Tatiana Tsivian);
- intertextual analysis (Lotman, Toporov, Tsivian)
- the structural analysis of specific poetic texts, from Ovid to Russian avant-garde
(Lotman, etc.);
- the statistical approach to poetry through compiling frequency dictionaries
(Mikhail Gasparov, Zara Mints)
The section of publications and reviews was a particularly important part of the whole project
of Tartu semiotic publications. Contrary to the model of the contemporary academic journal,
this section was not very much dedicated to reviews or translations of the current, Russian or
Western, academic literature. What we see here is a set of republications, or even first-time
publications, of the works written in the 1920s or 1930s, as well as reviews of the valuable,
34

Some of the major contributors to the topics are in brackets.

56

from the point of view of Lotman or his Moscow colleagues, but forgotten or previously
suppressed and out-of-print studies. As Lotman formulated the ideology of this section, the
undeniable aspect of any well-formed academic trend is the recognition of its own research
method in its relation to preceding scientific and cultural tradition (Lotman 1967d, 363).
This credo was formulated, in part, to counter the critics accusations of historical nihilism.
Instead, Lotman argued that he and his colleagues were trying to retrieve and reintroduce into
the contemporary research practice the best of the classical research in human sciences. In
this way, Tartu semiotics was presented as a modern recapitulation of everything worthy to
remember in the previous humanistic tradition.
The critics of Tartu semiotics often picture it as a kind of neo-Formalism. Indeed,
Eikhenbaum, Jakobson, Shklovsky, Tomashevsky, Tynianov and other others figure
prominently among authors cited, commented and republished in Smeiotik. One reason was
that, in the 1960s, the republication of the works of Formalists was still a necessity. Even
though Shklovsky and Propp were still alive, their early works were hardly available and
Tartu semioticians were among their major propagators.
Yet, the Tartu series are even more famous for reintroducing the works of Mikhail
Bakhtin, Pavel Florensky and Olga Freidenberg to the academic debate and usage. Pavel A.
Florensky (1882-1937), mathematician, Orthodox priest, and Platonist religious philosopher,
who perished in the gulag, developed an important idea of the reverse perspective in
Russian medieval iconography as an alterative to the dominant Western linear perceive in
visual arts. This idea left a particularly strong imprint on Boris Uspensky and his analysis of
multiple perspectives and their distortions in written and visual arts (B.Uspensky 1970;
1995; cf. Panofsky 1997; Gombrich 1960). Similarly, Olga M. Freidenberg (1890-1955),
classic philologist of Nikolai Marrs school and the first Soviet woman who became the
Doctor of Philology, influenced Lotmans theory of art and Ivanov and Toporovs studies of
archaic myth (see Ivanov 1976; Lotman 1973c; cf. Lafferrier 1978).
In 1973, Viacheslav Ivanov wrote a long article, which claimed Mikhail Bakhtin to
the history of Tartu semiotics (Ivanov 1973b). In this piece, Ivanov inscribed Bakhtin in the
lineage of the significant predecessors of Soviet semiotics. Many of the aspects of this
inscription remain debatable to this day. In particular, Ivanov made a strong point for
Bakhtins authorship of the writings of Voloshinov and Medvedev. With this, many
specialists on Bakhtin disagree (see Emerson 1997). Ivanov is also criticized for dissolving
the discontinuities between Voloshinovs Marxism and Bakhtins dialogism, which had roots
in German Neo-Kantianism and Russian religious philosophy (Titunik 1976). Yet, this
attempt to appropriate Bakhtin to semiotics should not be treated only as a tactic in the
Bakhtin wars, although the name of Mikhail Bakhtin is indeed being claimed by various
traditions, from nationalistic traditionalism in Russia and post-Marxist cultural studies in the
West. Ivanovs attempt also exemplifiesas Ivanov himself insistsa more general
intellectual stance, the consistent preference for the past as a source of interpretative models
and meanings. In these sense, the vector of the intellectual development of the Tartu School
is opposite to the one of Western cultural theory and cultural studies.
The cultural turn in Western human sciences in the 1970s resulted in refocusing the
concept of culture from mythological and classical past and the non-Western other to
contemporary ordinary life in developed societies (Sewell 1999). In contrast, Soviet semiotics
announced, as its primary goal, the return to archaic and classical roots of contemporary
cultural phenomena. Even the topics of the early 1960s studies of contemporary cultural
practices, like divination or the advertising screams of peddlers, were chosen as either
representative of some atemporal semiotic principles or as practices about to disappear in the
course of the socialist modernization. Later, the focus shifted decisively towards the cultural

57

history before the twentieth century, with the exception of the studies in Russian modernism
and avant-garde.
There are a number of reasons, which Lotman and other Tartu scholars and students
provide for such privileging of the past. In particular, they appeal to the hardships of truly
non-ideological study of Soviet and even Western societies in the Soviet Union. For
instance, during their interviews with me, both Viktor Zhivov and Mikhail Lotman noted that
the Tartu scholars did not want to mix up with the bad company of careerist scholars who,
they belief, dominated the field. Although Yuri Lotman did not want to spend his time and
nerve cells on constant quarrels about contemporary political issues with morally inferior
opponents.35
Lotmans students exemplify somewhat different argumentation. 36 They appeal to the
idea that, since the object of their study is culture, they should study what has already settled
to the bottom (otstoialos) and acquired the ability to persist in time. They also often point to
a simple fact of their specialization in specific phenomena of the past. They return to a more
political argument by stating that the study of the present simply does not allow for a much
needed distancing between the language of the subject and the meta-language of the
researcher. Finally, Lotmans students and associates argue that their maitre was simply not
interested in the artifacts and symbols of his contemporary culture: Soviet official culture
seemed too secondary and obvious while dissident and underground culture was also
perceived to be outside of perennially valuable literature and culture proper.37
Thus, the arguments for the privileging of the past appeal to either political situation
or to narrow disciplinary orientation, or to both. Both of these justifications are representative
of the period. For Soviet intellectuals, the past was often a form of escape from the Soviet
present, and from various taboos on discussing the contemporary situation. For instance,
while explicitly focusing on the Russian Middle Ages or post-Petrine period, one could safely
reflect on the present by making analogies. In Boris Kagarlitskys (1988, 106) words,
Soviet sociologists, historians and political scientists have developed a special sort of
associative thinking. They study the actual problems of their own country, but to
mention these problems is forbidden. All that remains is to examine similar problems
on the basis of the material of other countries and other periods Using thirdWorld material, he [the researcher] constructed a model which is applicable also to
our understanding of Soviet society.
That is, the privileging of the past was not a way of excluding the present or avoiding any
references to the situation in which researchers found themselves. Rather, it was a form of
reflecting over the present situation but in the mode of disavowal, that is by treating it
indirectly, through hinted associations and the choice of historical data.
Tartu semiotics presented revealing illustrations of these points. As I argue below, the
methodological privilege it granted to the past was also a strategy of reflecting about the
present as if under erasure, in overt denial. Furthermore, Tartu structuralist methodology
itself, with its weakness for establishing a-temporal models and cross-historical homologies,
fitted Kagarlitskys associative thinking quite well. This match between structuralist
35

See, for example, Lotman to Fialkova, 1982 (Lotman 1997, 715).

For instance, Jelena Pogosjan, Roman Leibov and Jelena Grigorjeva (interviews by author. Tartu,
October-November 2001).
37
Mikhail Lotman testifies that his father respected Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) as a public
figure and a publicist but did not consider him an important writer. His point was as follows:
everything is simple and transparent in Solzhenitsyn. Mikhail Lotman and other critics disagree
(Lotman, Mikhail. Interview by author. Tartu, October-November 2001).
36

58

methodology and more general intellectual strategies of the Soviet intelligentsia allowed
Tartu scholars to transform the need and the pressure to avoid talking about the present
directly into a virtue. In what follows, I will discuss the end product of this transformation,
the discourse of archaism as a set of social positions, intellectual assumptions and research
strategies.
The Tartu Discourse of Archaism
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbor where the rain beat,
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
- T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets
Lotman and his colleagues often privately called themselves archaists.38 Originally,
archaism was a term introduced by Yuri Tynianov39 (1929) to describe the intellectual
movement in the early nineteenth century Russia that defined itself in opposition to the so
called innovators of Russian language. The debate between innovators and archaists was,
in the nutshell, between the supporters of the writer and historian Nikolai Karamzins
attempts to create the middle level (neither sacred, nor profane, or vernacular) secular
written language enriched by educated oral speech and liberal borrowings from French, on
the one hand, and those who called for the resurrection of the language of the sacred books
as the only authentic national language and for its protection from foreign incursions
(Lotman and Uspensky [1975] 1994; Tynianov 1929).
Tartu scholars preferred to call themselves archaists not so much because they
subscribed to Romantic and nationalistic conservatism of the nineteenth century
intellectuals.40 Politically and in terms of his personal style, Lotman was closer to
cosmopolitan and liberal innovators. What made Tartu scholars toy with the mask of
archaists was the original archaists radical, almost avant-gardeish, zeal for experimenting
with language. In effort to reconstruct the original and archaic state of language, the
archaists were, in fact, engaged in ruthless breaking of linguistic routines and smoothed out
clichs of polite salon talk (see Lotman and Uspensky [1975]1994). What attracted Tartu
scholars to archaists was their ability to take leap forward through the deliberate posture of
backwardness.41 They recognized in archaists the kindred souls who tackled, just like Soviet
semioticians, the essentially modernist dilemma, as formulated by Baudelaire, Eliot and
Benjamin: How to represent eternal and immutable amidst the chaos of the ephemeral and
fleeting forms of modern life? How to break through to the ever-present edifice of culture in
time, in history and in modernity? (see the epigraph; cf. Harvey 1990, 21-22). The response

38

Lotmans students are my major sources of information of this self-designation of Tartu scholars
(e.g. Leibov, Roman. Interview by author. Tartu, November 2001).
39
Yuri N. Tynianov (1894-1943) was one of the leading members of the Opoyaz and the Russian
formalist movement. He is particularly remembered for his theories of literary fact and literary
evolution (Tynianov 1977).
40
The most notable exception is Vladimir Toporov, who expressed deep interest in the philosophy of
Heidegger and other conservative Western thinkers (see Toporov 1993; 1995 and further discussion in
chapter 5).
41
Gasparov, Boris. Lecture at Columbia University. October 8th, 2002. Cf. Marshall McLuhans
dictum: we march backward into the future (Bowker 1993).

59

that the archaists chose, the deliberate posture of backwardness, appeared to be particularly
resonant with the ethos and social situation of the members of the Tartu School.
A key aspect of this archaist strategy of tackling with historical dilemmas has been
respect for memory as a moral force. This is how the leading Tartu scholars expressed this
sentiment:
memory, recollection is not only something that enables a man to bring his own life
into correlation with history, but is also a deeply moral principle opposing
forgetfulness oblivion and chaos, and serving as the basis for creativity, faith and
truthfulness (Levin, et al. 1974, 50).
To clarify the background to this de facto self-identification on the side of memory as
opposed to forgetfulness, let me first backtrack a bit and compare the Tartu discourse of
archaism with earlier discursive strategies employed by Soviet structuralists. As I have
argued, Soviet structuralists of the 1950s and 1960s modeled their social and academic
behavior on cybernetics with its claims on being a universal discipline. This discourse
involved an assumption that cybernetics and semiotics allow for purely synchronic
observation and modeling of any sign system (for example, language or myth), the
observation unencumbered by time, memory and history. According to Ross Ashby (1956),
memory is a property of a handicapped observer. One implication of this move was the
idea that the whole previous tradition of the humankind was fully recapitulated in the
cyberspeak.42 This tradition thus does not require its previous media, like religion, ritual or
even original academic works published before 1950. Such attitude to tradition was perceived
as a guarantee of the full scientization of human sciences, or at least linguistics for the
moment. Indeed, in science, new contributions often render previous ones obsolete, and even
still powerful paradigms, like Einsteins theory of relativity, are usually not taught via their
original statements.
Yet, the assumption behind the Smeiotik publication section seems to be the
opposite: the original contributions by previous, often ancient (like Panini, ancient Sanskrit
grammarian) and forgotten or simply suppressed authors have value of their own.
Furthermore, by becoming predecessors of modern semiotics they actually acquire value
rather then lose it. Their original texts become objects of significant amount of commenting,
playgrounds of Tartu theorizing and applied fields for exercising Tartu methodologies of
textual and historical analysis. Such commenting and historiographic literature is no longer
just a side hobby or a political/territorial game in addition to the purely scientific and ahistorical modeling of various sign systems. In fact, it is a crucial part of the larger trend: to
focus on reconstruction and revival of the past meanings.
Since the mid-1960s, reconstruction becomes a buzzword of Tartu semiotics. Much
of the empirical work published in Smeiotik reconstructs something, from Ur-myths and
underlying conventional codes to various contexts of production and consumption of literary
texts. Tartu and Moscow non-semiotic publications are also full of reconstructions and
recoveries of suppressed and forgotten poets, artists and whole artistic traditions. In fact,
Tartu is famous not only for its semiotics and cultural theory but also for its role in
reintroducing the whole layers of Russian artistic culture, such as modernism (the so called
Silver Age of Russian poetry) and avant-garde. For most Tartu students and many Soviet
literary historians, the Blok Readings (Blokovskie chteniia)periodic conventions dedicated
the culture of the Silver Age and held in Tartuwere as important as semiotic summer
42

According to Zholkovsky (1998, 168), Igor Melchuk often wondered quite seriously: What good
could have possibly been written before 1946?

60

schools.43 Finally, even elementary modeling systems, the objects of synchronic modeling,
were often chosen because of their rarity and being on the verge of extinction: from the
advertising screams of peddlers to the [bourgeois] etiquette (see Bogatyrev 1971; Ivanov
1973a; Tsivian 1994).
Hence, the historiographic trend in semiotic publications was a part of the larger
archaizing preoccupation of Tartu scholars with historicaland often marginalized or
suppressed in the Soviet Unioncultural heritage at the expense of contemporary official
and popular culture. Tartu and Moscow semioticians saw their movement as primarily a
restoration movement, that is a collective effort to recover forgotten and suppressed layers
of national and human culture, and to endow some of them with the prestigious status of
classics (Seyffert 1983, 238). It is not surprising that Tartu-related scholars were not
opposing themselves to classical philology, as Western (post) structuralists often did (see
Barthes 1986). On the contrary, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Soviet
semioticians increasingly perceived themselves as heirs of what they considered as a forcibly
interrupted lineage of Russian human studies, of which Russian Formalism is an exemplar.
One way to conceive of this restoration movement is, literally, as a kind of
Restoration after the failed Revolution. Yet, to make most out of this analogy, we should
keep in mind all of the contexts on which this revolution vs. restoration opposition could
have been projected by Tartu scholars. One context has already been mentioned: the overall
failure of the social and, as we will see, intellectual strategies associated with the 1950s
academic reform movement. Another is, obviously, the Bolshevik revolution which, as we
have seen, was consciously perceived by Tartu intellectuals as an anti-cultural force of
imposed amnesia. The whole voluminous work of resurrecting the names of suppressed
artists and scholars has been permeated by the sense of post-revolutionary restoration in this
sense (Egorov 1999; Isakov 1991). Finally, semiotic resurrection was perceived by its
practitioners as a post-Enlightenment attempt to clear up the mess left by the attempts to
realize the Enlightenment project, with its contempt for tradition and its opposition between
civilization and nature.
All of these levels are present in Viacheslav Ivanovs attempt to formulate the general
ideology of the Tartu archaism:
Underlying human culture is the tendency to overcome death, a tendency expressed,
in particular, in the accumulation, preservation and constant processing of knowledge
about the past The twentieth century, which posits the questions of the limits of
civilization, endows this truth with particular urgency The issue is how to ensure
the most reliable transmission of the achievements of our civilization The question
is not how to reach immortality, as in mythology, but how to preserve and transmit to
new generations the most complete information about humanity (or specific
civilization or its particular member), which can come to its end at any moment.
[Ultimately,] human culture is a protest against death and destruction, against growing
disorder, or homogeneity and entropy (1973a, 148-149).
In this paperThe Concept of Time in 20th Century Art and Culture,Ivanov (1973a)
conceptualizes culture as essentially what persists, by necessity, in time but also despite time
and its implications, destruction, oblivion, misinterpretation and misuse (Segal 1974, 133).
Time is an enemy of culture: it leads to the avalanche-like increase in information and the
growing inability of human recipients to cope with it, to the interference with, or suppression
43

Blokovskie sborniki (Paper collections in honor of Alexander Blok), edited by Zara Mints. Tartu,
since 1964 (see Isakov 1991).

61

of, cultural memory accompanied by social neurosis (1974, 133). Thus, cultural semiotics,
according to Ivanov, is a kind of therapy of the social neurosis of forgetfulness.
The value of these quotes is that they encompass most of the ways in which Tartu
scholars tended to use culture. Culture was defined through the opposition to time but
time was understood on at least three levels: as a universal property of the world, as
modern times, or modernity, and as simply our time, the time which Tartu intellectuals
happened to inhabit. Thus, if time in the first sense stands against human culture per se, then
time in the last sense opposes the specific culture of the Tartu circle.
Furthermore, Tartu archaism can be seen as a paradigm for interpreting culture as a
vast space woven by analogies, responses, citations and paraphrases. These associations
happen in time and they are definitely shaped by its flow. Yet, for Tartu scholars, the thrill
was to discover the historical depth, or the whole thick mass, of previous cultural
meanings, or subtexts, behind contemporary cultural practice. The promise of archaism
was to see the least significant contemporary reality as a part of the grandiose web that spans
across time and space. In this framework, to access a contemporary event or practice is to
focus not so much on the way past cultural resources are employed and remolded in the
present moment but on these resources themselves. As Geoffrey Hartman (1997, 29)
formulated this attitude, culture is a means to age a modern practice instantly. Therefore,
Tartu scholars had a methodological preference for reconstruction, that is they tried to
remember what had been forgotten by means of close reading, structural analysis,
statistical calculations and circumstantial evidence.
This is a continuation of classical philology, one might say. 44 Indeed, in contrast to
most French structuralists, who opposed their writerly attitude to the philological
readerly one, Soviet structuralists and semioticians would proudly accept the title of a
philologist. In this, they followed not only many classical Russian philologists, whose names
they reclaimed from oblivion, but also an important trend of retrospectivism in Russian
modernist literature of the 1920s-30s (see Clark 1996). Just like Russian Formalism was
based on the insights into the practice of avant-garde futurist art, especially poetry, the Tartu
scholarship associated itself with both the practice of Russian classical literature and the
acmeist trend in the early twentieth century modernist literature represented by such poets
as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. In their manifesto-like analysis
of the acmeist poetry and artistic self-reflection, five major Tartu-related scholars subscribed
to the militant philologism and retrospectivism of Russian acmeists (see Levin, et al.
1974).45
Osip Mandelstam46 (1979) came up with the language extremely resonant with the
Tartu and Moscow semioticians sense of their intellectual and political situation:
Social differences and class antagonisms pale before the division of people into
friends and enemies of the word: literally, sheep and goats. I sense an almost
physically unclean goat-breath emanating from the enemies of the word. Here the
argument which emerges last in any serious disagreement is fully appropriate: my
adversary smells bad (1979, 113).
44

To remind, classical philology aims at the purification of the tradition by the fixation of sound
texts, the interpretation of the authors meaning, a reconstruction of the literary tradition,
bringing more clearly into the forefront the greatest surviving works, a construction of an image of
the past and its re-presentation to living generations (Shils 1981, 145)
45
The title of this important essay is Russian Semantic Poetics as a Potential Cultural Paradigm.
46
Osip E. Mandelstam (Mandelshtam) (1891-1938) was one of the most outspoken theorists of
culture and art among Russian poets. In what follows, I mostly cite his 1921 essay, The Word and
Culture.

62

Tartu scholars could also associate with Mandelstams proclamation that there is only one
authority: the magic of language, the power of the word (1979, 123).
What attracted Tartu scholars in Mandelstam most was not only his cultural elitism
but also his theory and practice of the verbal art. Unlike futurists and formalists, he
emphasized not only an estranging, or defamiliarizing, power of poetry; he also described
specific intentionality of this power, toward the past. In his evocative language, poetry is the
plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, the black earth, appear
on the surface (1979, 113). That is, poetry is a work of destabilizing todays ordinary usage
of words and uncovering what Lotman called the thick mass of connoted, forgotten and
suppressed meanings. It is a recovery of the word as not simply a neutral medium of
messages but a Psyche, a living word which wonders freely around the thing, like the
soul around an abandoned, but not forgotten body (1979, 115). This freedom is achieved by
means of accumulating past usages; poetry gains its aesthetic effect by realizing this
accumulated potential, i.e. by surfacing and colliding contradictory meanings in the
synchronic plain of the verse (Levin et. al. 1974, 64). In short, the most innovative and daring
poetry is such only as an artistic model, or reconstruction, of the whole previous culture.
Here, novelty and recuperation, modernism and classics go together. In Mandelstams
summary, classical poetry is a poetry of revolution (1979, 116).
Mandelstam literally provided a social and intellectual idiom for the majority of the
members of the Tartu circle.47 His identification of the people of the word with emigrants
who survived the shipwreck of the nineteenth century was a powerful badge of identity for
Tartu intellectuals (1979, 144; see Levin, et al. 1974). Moreover, his articles foreshadowed,
in unexpected ways, some of the contrastive developments within Tartu archaist paradigm.
For instance, his insistence on the simultaneous co-presence of the historical epochs in the
mind of the philologist and the poet was developed further by many Tartu scholars, especially
Ivanov and Toporov. Most inclined to indulge in metaphysical speculations, Vladimir
Toporov even predicted the establishment of the new type of consciousness, in which
panchronic and simultaneous treatment of cultural values would prevail. This type of
consciousness would not be needed to be fired up by contemporaneous events, for semiotic
value would be restored to traditional signs, whereas the present would be taken up by the
analysis of the rules of combination (Segal 1974, 135). Similarly, Ivanov (1987, 5)
developed a teleological conception of history: It is possible to study experimentally the
stochastic process of choosing texts, which prepares the creation of such a final text which is
the target of the teleological development of the history of culture. Most famously, in the
works on the semiotics of Russian culture, Lotman and Uspenskij (1984) described the
national culture as an embodiment of certain cultural models (e.g. binary models),
persistent through time.
Simultaneously, Mandelstam may also serve as a key for understanding Lotmans
decisively anti-teleological turn within archaist discourse. For example, Lotman fully shared
Mandelstams critique of the ideology of progress: In literature nothing is ever better, no
progress can be made simply because there is no literary machine and no finish line toward
which everyone must race as rapidly as possible (1979, 119). Furthermore, in some of his
remarks, Mandelstam prefigured Lotmans (1992) concern with temporal emergence and the
47

The majority but not all. At different points in time, the archaism of the Tartu paradigm was
criticized by such insiders as Boris Gasparov, Mikhail Gasparov, Alexander Piatigorsky and
Alexander Zholkovsky. Zholkovsky, in his interview to me, repeated his original nihilist credoI
am always an outsider a formalist and a futurist I am against any respectability with a beard
and characterized the Lotman-Ivanov circle as the kind of crowd (publika) the members of which
want to be simultaneously innovators and the heirs of heavy volumes.

63

explosive character of cultural evolution. Finally, as a School leader and an educator,

Lotman was not satisfied with the status of a passive member of the cultured minority elite
among barbarians; like Mandelstam, he saw his mission in Europeanizing and
humanizing the twentieth century (Mandelstam 1979, 144).
Thus, the discourse of archaism was a very polyvalent, even contradictory, framework
that was open for diverse extensions in terms of theory and research. Yet, this framework was
robust enough to provide the members of the Tartu School with a shared vision of culture,
its place in contemporary society and their own relationship to this society. In fact, the
archaist discourse served as a kind of bridgehead between Tartu research and the Schools
politics of culture.
By conceiving of culture as a collective memory of things that resist time, Lotman
and his colleagues defined the object of their research as something larger and deeper than
any of its contemporary interpretations and appropriations. Even some of their critics were
fascinated by the sense of multi-dimensionality, depth and thickness of culture[the idea]
that archaic and classical structures ooze through contemporary cities, languages, and so
on,the vision that animated the studies of the Tartu School.48 One source of this
fascination was the ability of archaist discourse to turn need into virtue, that is to transform
the perceived need to avoid direct analysis of the present into the declaration of independence
of humanistic culture and Tartu intellectuals as culture specialists. By asserting the
independence of (archaic and classical) cultural practices and symbols from contemporary
society and politics, Tartu scholars acquired the rhetorical means of insolating their
competence as researchers and intellectuals from the standards of their contemporary Soviet
academia and society. Simultaneously they provided their readers with a wealth of analogies
to think about the Soviet present without directly confronting it.
In short, far from being just a conservative ideology or an ideology of private
escape and internal exile, archaism was primarily an ideology of the intelligentsia who
found its claims on epistemic and cultural authority frustrated by the Soviet environment and
found a way out in establishing parallel academia with its unorthodox hierarchy of academic
worth, literary canon and standards of kulturnost (culturedness) and intelligentnost
(intellectual culture).
The Tartu School as Lotmans School (1975-1986)
Around 1970, the favorable social situation around the Tartu-Moscow School started to
deteriorate. Two major historical events are key for understanding what was going on: the
Prague Spring of 1968 and the massive Jewish emigration to the West around 1973. The year
1968 had a devastating effect on many Soviet intellectuals. Before this year, it was still
possible to believe in the transformation of the Soviet regime along either humanistcommunist or technocratic guidelines. Intellectuals like cyberneticians and semioticians
could still hope for a kind of partnership with state and party officials, which could be based
on precise rules of the gameformulated by the intellectuals, of courseand the
institutional autonomy of academia. Even some Estonian intellectuals expressed hope that
sharks will turn into dolphins.49
In contrast, by the end of the early 1970s, especially after 1968, there was a growing
sense of the historical dead-end. For many, it was a matter of fact that Brezhnevs regime
would be a Thousand Year Reich (Shlapentokh 1990, 194) and the question was how to
come to terms with this fact. For some, this meant starting to prepare for emigration. For
48
49

Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin. Interview by author. Moscow, July 2002.
A line from the poem by Rudolf Rimmel (see Misiunas and Taagepera 1993, 194).

64

others, it was a signal for excelling further in shchelevedenie, or the science of nichemaking (see Mikhail Gasparovs cockroach tactic of hiding in the cracks of the Soviet
monolith). For still others, Lotman included, it was a call for developing a series of tactics
for preserving the achieved positions.50
In some ways, the set-up of the Tartu-Moscow community, as described above, was
comparatively well adapted for surviving the hard times. Other movements, such as liberal
sociology, pro-market economic theory or critical Marxism, may have achieved considerable
success in institutionalizing their academic autonomy and authority by the late 1960s but
soon they found themselves in a highly vulnerable position.51 By contrast, the esoteric
language, obscure subject matter and remote location of the Tartu School made it relatively
safe from such attacks. Mikhail Gasparov explained his own immunity by the fact that it was
not interesting to kick him: not much political capital could be gained by engaging in the
obscure subjects of metrics (M.Gasparov 2000b). Although the studies of culture in the
Soviet Union were by no means politically neutral and safe, there was still a sense among
authorities that the study of culture is like the study of table manners, harmless and arcane
(see Kostiushev 1998, 34). Still, this is not to say that the conditions for Tartu-Moscow
studies did not change substantially in the 1970s.
Rector Fedor KlementLotmans faithful patron for many yearswas forced to
retire in 1970. Summer schools planned for 1972 and then 1973 did not materialize. Some of
the projects, like the Semiotics and Art series of Iskusstvo (Art) publishing house in
Moscow, were banned after publishing two major monographs, Lotman (1970b) and
Uspensky (1970). At last, the opponents of the school among local Estonian officials found
something formally wrong with the very institutional bases of Tartu semiotics summer
schools and Smeiotik. Suddenly, it appeared that the universitys financial support for
summer schools was supposed to be premised on the higher percentage of local participants.
Similarly, Smeiotik was criticized for being overcrowded with outsiders. Around 1975,
the University publishing house started to demand to increase the number of local scholars
among contributors, cut the volume in half (because of, presumably, paper shortage) and
exclude the Publication and Reviews section.52
Despite the defense apparatus created in the 1960s, at least two things made Tartu
scholars very vulnerable. One was their dissident engagements and connections. Most of the
Muscovites were so called undersigners (podpisanty): they participated in signing the
letters in support of political prisoners like Brodsky, Siniavsky, Daniel, Ginzburg and others.
Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the scholars in the humanities constituted
the core of the dissident movement (see Daniel 2002; Nathans 2007; Tks 1975). Three of
Lotmans students were prominent young dissidents who spent various terms in prisons
throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Gabriel Superfin, Arseny Roginsky and Rafael Papaian).
Larisa Bogoraz, one of the brave few who protested on the Red Square against the invasion
of Czechoslovakia, was a scholar in the academic Institute of Russian Language. Another
participant of this event, the poet Natalia Gorbanevskaia, was a close friend of the family of
Lotman and Mints. They were in intensive communication both in person and by mail. Thus,
it is not surprising that, despite Lotmans emphatic opposition to any overt political
50

Lotman liked to repeat that my department is my trenchpost (dzot) (see Kiseleva, Liubov.
Interview by author. Tartu, November 2001).
51
The story of Soviet sociology is particularly emblematic in this respect. Although established only
in 1968, the academic institute which supervised the sociological research in the USSRthe Institute
of Concrete Social Studieswas reorganized in 1972 in such a way that most significant
sociologists of the 1960s lost their positions and found themselves unable to conduct empirical studies
and often publish until the late 1980s (see Shlapentokh 1987).
52
Torop, Peeter. Interviews by author. Tartu, October-November 2001.

65

engagements, his apartment was searched for an entire day in January 1970. This event is
remarkable not only as a stressful incident (that later made it into the folklore of local
professors and students). The search made it into The Chronicle of Current Events, the major
underground (samizdat) publication that kept track of the human rights violations in the
Soviet Union.53 In effect, Lotman became something like a dissident celebrity known far
beyond academia. However, this fame was a mixed blessing in the context of Soviet
academic power struggles.
Another source of vulnerability was the nationality of most Tartu School members.
Critics and officials frequently accused Lotman for promoting Jews as professors and
students in the university department, which he chaired. During 1967 hire talks, Lotman
writes: In friendly circles, it was hinted to me that there are just enough Jews [in the
department] (Lotman 1997, 209). Since semiotics (semiotika) was often rhymed with
semitika in private conversations among his opponents, Lotman was forced to constantly
disentangle these concepts: It is disgusting to prove constantly that semiotics is not masked
Zionism.54
The Jewish issue became particularly acute after 1973, when the Jewish emigration
movement flourished. Between 1973 and 1980, 7 out of 33 significant participants of the
School emigrated.55 To be sure, not all of them were Jewish. And yet, the pressure on Lotman
increased. Since this time or even earlier, he was, beyond any doubt, under KGB surveillance
precisely due to the suspicions over his Zionist activities. As one KGB report states,
Lotman was well-known for his systematic semitization (evreizatsiia) of his university
department, as well as his contacts with Victor Erlich, the head of the International
Committee for the Support of the Soviet Jews.56 Lotmans attempts to dissociate himself
from Zionism and any form of nationalism officially did not make him less suspect57.
This and other political difficulties should not be interpreted as simply the realization
of the oppressive nature of the Soviet state, somewhat moderated by the liberal 1960s and
the Estonian political environment. As one can see, KGB was mostly concerned about
political subversion associated with Zionism and emigration movement. As for local
ideological and administrative authorities, they were rarely initiators of the witch-hunting
campaigns in this historical period. In most cases, lower level officials, that is university
bureaucrats and censors, were simply trying to be on the safe side: in certain situations they
would rather impede a publication or a promotion than let it go. Moreover, the more educated
(intelligentnyi) they were, the more dangerous. As Uspensky commented about some
editors-censors, it is better to deal with a bureaucrat, a burbon, than with an intellectual: [the
latter sees more potentially politically incorrect ideas and wordings in your text].58 Overall,
53

Khronika tekushchikh sobytii, issue 12, February 12th, 1970.

Lotman to Egorov, 1973 (Lotman 1997, 247).
55
See Appendix A: Boris Gasparov (USA, 1980), Boris Ogibenin (France, 1974), Alexander
Piatigorsky (UK, 1974), Dmitry Segal (Israel, 1973), Alexander Syrkin (Israel, 1970s), Alexander
Zholkovsky (USA, 1979) and Yuri Shcheglov (USA, 1979).
56
Unfortunately, during my research in 2001, I had no access to KGB documents in either Russia or
Estonia. I had a chance to look at the document, which I cite above, at the exhibition of the newly
declassified documents at the Estonian National Library in March 2002. This KGB report is dated by
January 28th, 1981. Victor Erlich (b. 1914) is, of course, know not only as a supporter of RussianJewish dissidents but as an author of the classical book on Russian Formalism (Erlich 1981).
57
See the text of Lotmans My statement, which was written on the occasion of one of the Jewish
Congresses in the 1960s (LC, F136, s.5, l.2).
58
Uspensky to Lotman (LC, F135, s.1471, l.89). Uspensky uses the nineteenth century nickname for
intransigent and reactionary bureaucrat, which originated from the Old Regime dynasty of the
Bourbons.
54

66

rather than promoting a consistent ideological agenda, Soviet officials were usually acting
upon contingencies (see Kojevnikov 2000; Krementsov 1997).
More significant sources of trouble for Tartu scholars were their opponents among
intellectuals and academics, often positioned in such established seats of academic power as
Moscow University or the Institute of World Literature (IMLI) but also in Tartu University.
As late as in 1975, the major Soviet universitys standardized syllabus still called for the
struggle against bourgeois schools in literary theory, including structuralism (Programma,
10). In 1972, the anti-structuralist broad methodological front the expression of an IMLI
academic materialized in the annual series entitled Kontekst, as opposed to tekst, the Tartu
catchword. It was truly a front composed of highly improbable allies like academician
Khrapchenko, the promoter of the so called Marxist semiotics, and the celebrated cultural
theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who was recently recovered from oblivion and propagated by the
stringent opponents of structuralism, Vadim Kozhinov and Vladimir Turbin.
What made this alliance possible is the resistance of both Party and academic
establishment to significant changes in the existing institutional and disciplinary balance of
forces. As I mentioned earlier, academics were supportive of disciplinary stability not only
because they wished to preserve their monopoly on certain branches of science but because
any change meant at least for some of them a threat to what they considered their intellectual
autonomy. The overlap between the interests of both authorities and the significant part of
academic intellectuals produced what currently is known as the security of cadres epoch
between 1970 and 1985. 59
I am far from lumping together Kontekst publications, KGB reports, the attacks by
Estonian colleagues, and frequent, in the 1970s, check-ups of the work of Lotmans
department by the federal Ministry of Education and other agencies. Yet, the combination of
these factors makes clear why the leadership of Tartu University felt it was under pressure to
increase control over Lotmans activities and to make formal requirements harsher for
summer schools and Tartu semiotic series. Yet, at the same time, if Lotman and his
colleagues were finding legal ways out, university officials rarely rejected their propositions.
For instance, the last school in 1974 was possible under a new name, the First All-Union
Symposium on the Secondary Modeling Systems. By upgrading the event, Lotman justified
the invitation of the outside speakers. By moving to Tartu, he offered a way to cut on costs.
Yet, to be true, this first symposium was also the last one.
Similarly, the growing accusations of nepotism led to the settlement according to
which Lotman quit his job as a head of the department and moved to the neighboring
Department of World Literature. 60 Yet, according to his Tartu colleagues, he continued to be
in charge of the administrative and political affairs of the Department of Russian Literature
until his death.61
As for Smeiotik, its issues indeed thinned rapidly from 572 pages in 1973 to 308
pages in 1975 to 168 pages in 1977 and stayed in this size until the early 1990s.62 However,
59

This settlement brought to halt any significant institutional innovation: according to Graham (1998,
82), there were practically no new academic units established in the Soviet Union in this period.
Furthermore, this security led to the noticeable aging of academia: as Sergei Nekliudov pointed out to
me, he was consistently the youngest in all academic collectives he worked in until the late 1980s
(Nekliudov, interview). Paradoxically, this was also a secure situation for many semi-dissident
intellectuals as long as they did not enter open political struggle.
60
Indeed, Lotman promoted the joint hire of the Jewish couple, Pavel Reifman and Larisa Volpert, in
the mid-1970s.
61
Isakov, interview; Kiseleva, interview; Reifman and Volpert, interview.
62
In his 1978 letter to Egorov, Lotman describes the ninth edition of Smeiotik as extremely thin
and sickly looking (Lotman 1997, 269)

67

the issues became more frequent, often semiannual (see Isakov 1991). In effect, there was no
significant dropdown in the quantity of publications: Smeiotik hosted 179 papers in 196475 and 175 in 176-1990. Although the section of reviews disappeared, Smeiotik continued
its tradition of recovering the forgotten or suppressed past by publishing the works of the
classical philologist Olga Freidenberg, the philosopher-phenomenologist Gustav Shpet
(1879-1937), the symbolist poet, writer and theorist Andrei Bely (1880-1934) and a number
of other forgotten names.
It is not, however, that the Tartu School simply adapted to, and quietly continued its
work under, the new social and political conditions. In fact, the emigration of a few key
participants and the end of summer schools was the end of the Tartu-Moscow School proper.
The lack of the institutionalized opportunity for gathering led to the substantial change in the
nature of alliances on which the School was based. Primarily, the membership changed: in
addition to four deaths and seven emigrations between 1970 and 1980, five other frequent
participants stopped contributing to Smeiotik.63 The number of contributions from the
remaining core Moscow members also dropped. This meant that they concentrated on their
institutional niches in the Academy of Sciences. After ten years of internationally and
nationally visible collective research, such slit-trenching strategy no longer led necessarily to
obscurity and irrelevance.
In effect, the publication politics of Smeiotik changed dramatically. If previously it
was a mouthpiece of the School proper and any enlargement of the circle was very
problematic, since mid-1970s, it became the voice of much wider circle of the representatives
of parallel science. Among new authors, there was Aron Ia. Gurevich (1924-2006), the
leading Soviet historian of Western Middle Ages; Sergei S. Averintsev (1937-2004), the
cultural historian of Byzantium; and Lidiia Ia. Ginzburg (1902-1990), the literary historian
and student of Yuri Tynianov, and other informal stars of the Soviet humanities. Lotman
also occasionally invited representatives of the friendly academic trends and institutions:
for instance, academician Nikita I. Tolstoi (1923-1996), the renown folklorist and cultural
anthropologist, a colleague of Ivanov and Toporov in the Institute of Slavic Studies; and
Peeter Tulviste (b. 1945), the Estonian psychologist of the Vygotskian school. Smeiotik
also opened its doors to a number of Tartu professors and students, as well as to young
scholars from Moscow, Leningrad, Riga and other Soviet academic centers.
One of the key traits that most of these people shared was their precarious, off-center,
if not openly marginal position in Soviet academia. For some innovative younger scholars,
various Tartu gatherings were simply the only public sites for academic communication,
while the Tartu series were the only places in which they were able to publish (see Zorin
1998a). As for older generation, the situation of Aron Gurevich is emblematic. This historian
of European Middle Ages introduced to Soviet academia and developed himself some of the
major ideas the French school of Annales, which was headed by Marc Bloch and Fernand
Braudel. Although Soviet historians and philosophers harshly criticized his works for nonMarxism, he was able to continue to publish both in the USSR and abroad. At the same time,
just like most Tartu scholars, he could not visit international conventions to which he was
repeatedly invited. Moreover, he was allowed to do nothing but pure research: he could not
teach in the capitals (Moscow and Leningrad), chair a sector, a department or edit a
journal, have official students or participate in any committees, including dissertation
committees (Batkin 1994, 81-82). Thus, he was granted with plenty of research time but
63

See Appendix A. The deaths are as follows: 1969Lev Zhegin, 1971Petr Bogatyrev, 1974
Isaak Revzin, and 1979Jaak Pldme. The five dropouts are Tatiana Elizarenkova, Yuri
Lekomtsev, Sergei Nekliudov, Elena Novik and Elena Semeka. Boris Egorov continued to publish
prolifically in TRSF.

68

deprived of any formal access to academic power. Of course, like other members of the trio
of the Moscow virtuosithe Bakhtinian philosopher Vladimir S. Bibler (1918-2000) and
the Renaissance scholar Leonid M. Batkin (b.1932),he was welcomed to multiple home
seminars and other semi-official gatherings, including the ones hosted by Tartu-related
Alexander Zholkovsky and Eliazar Meletinsky in 1976-83 (see M.Gasparov 2001;
Kagarlitsky 1988, 306). However, only Tartu publications and various conferences
patronized by Lotman could ensure that Gurevichs works were discussed at the early stage
of their development and that his academic network spanned the limits of Soviet and
international medievalist community.
This new politics of open doors turned Smeiotik into a major journal of Soviet
parallel science and Lotman into a key gatekeeper in the field of parallel scholarship.
Notably, this transition in academic politics was associated with the transition in
methodology, theory and thematic choices. By the mid-1970s, Lotman and many of his
colleagues dropped their earlier aspiration for precise and formal object-free universal
method of modeling and developed their post-formalist perspectives on (artistic) text and
culture, including the culture of everyday life (byt). In Lotmans words, this was a transition
from syntax and semantics of culture to pragmatics of culture, the perspective that was open
to a variety of methodologies, from topological modeling to close reading (see Lotman
[1977] 1992). In effect, the years 1975-1985 was the period when Lotmans most significant
statements on the theory of culture and his major studies on the semiotics of Russian
culture appeared.64 More aggressively than before, Tartu semioticians invaded the
conventional fields of literary and historical studies, especially the studies of Medieval and
classical Russian literature and culture. If previously their semiotic studies were largely
distinct from their studies on the history of literature and culture, Lotman and his colleagues
started to integrate both (semiotic) theory and history into the body of what they called
cultural semiotics, or Culturology.65 Overall, the relative openness of the Tartu series to
the outsiders ran parallel to their higher thematic richness.
One implication of these shifts was the growing overlap between Smeiotik and the
editions dedicated to the history of Russian literature (especially TRSF, or the Works of
Russian and Slavic Philology). During the summer schools 1964-74, these were separate
publications with different audiences and authors, even though with one editorYuri
Lotman (see Isakov 1991). The TRSF was more of a departmental publication for Tartu
professors and students of Russian literature. Yet, since the mid-1970s, the difference became
harder to identify: in the words of Lotmans associate, if there was an important piece, we
published it in whatever volume was coming out first.66 For instance, Lotman and Uspensky
published some of their major articles on the semiotics of Russian culture in the TRSF.
Overall, in the 1970s, the Tartu School evolved from a tight group of personal friends
and intellectual fellow travelers, a group without the single leader, into a broader and looser
movement, which was clearly identified with Yuri Lotman.
In the 1960s, the summer
schools were motivated by a dream of a robustif no longer exact and quantitative
structuralist language and possibly even theory of culture. As such, the Tartu-Moscow
School represented one of the unorthodox projects in Soviet humanities, albeit particularly
prestigious because of its international reputation. By the end of the 1970s, Lotman appeared
to many, and fashioned himself, as the center of the broad front of all healthy forces within
64

These works are mostly translated to English in Lotman and Uspenskij (1984) and Lotman, et al.
(1985).
65
Of course, this merger between theory and history started earlier (e.g. Lotman 1970a; 1973c; 1976c;
Ivanov et al. 1973). Yet, only in mid-1970s, this trend started to dominate the Smeiotik
publications.
66
See Kiseleva, interview; Torop, interview.

69

Soviet literary and cultural studies. Thus, his role as unofficial arbiter of intellectual tastes
and anointer of legitimate research has increased immensely. The Tartu School became a
kind of parallel sciences establishment.
The Tartu School as Establishment
The phenomenon of unofficial establishment was, to a certain extent, an effect of the
hierarchical structure of the Soviet academic field. Just like institutional science was
organized around the hierarchy of departments and institutes, parallel science was heavily
centered around a few groups that managed to achieve certain degree of institutionalization
and access to publishing. If the scholar was marginal in established science, unknown in the
West or occupied too narrow a niche, he or she had practically no other choice than to be
accepted by the existing centers of informal prestige and power. Other choices would be to
quit academia altogether or to emigrate.
It would be not an exaggeration to say that Lotmans Tartu School became, by the late
1970s, a unofficial establishment that monopolized the whole sector of parallel science just
like the Schools loyal opponents monopolized disciplines and fields within formal academia.
Indeed, various Tartu academic gatherings and the publications under Lotmans editorship
were basically the only game in town for many literary and cultural historians, whose
agendas and personal convictions did not fit into the framework of the official ideology
and/or disciplinary orthodoxies.67 Even more importantly, only through Tartu could
marginals access the Western academic public: by the late 1970s, Tartu was practically the
only research project in cultural and literary studies, which was recognized in the West.68
Since, at this time, the Tartu School and Smeiotik meant Yuri Lotman, he effectively held
in his hands the fates of many scholars who could not or chose not to publish some of their
more unorthodox pieces in official journals. How did Lotman perform this role? What
motivated him to choose or to reject a paper to be published in one of Tartu publications?
How did rank-and-file member of parallel science react to Lotmans rulings?
One of the most revealing cases in point is Lotmans publication in Smeiotik of a
scandalous article by mathematicians Mikhail M. Postnikov (1927-2004) and Anatoly T.
Fomenko (b.1945) entitled New Methods of the Statistical Analysis of the NarrativeQuantitative Material in Ancient History (Postnikov and Fomenko 1982). In this paper, on
the basis of their statistical analysis of historical texts, the authors came to an astounding
conclusion: by and large, the historical record of humanity before the fifteenth century is
fake. For instance, they found that there are too many coincidences of the time spans and the
characteristics of the rules of certain kings and dynasties in very different civilizations and
historical epochs. The conclusion was that these are the same kings projected onto the
67

For Alexander Ospovat (b. 1948), Tartu was the only light in the window in the whole Soviet
humanistic academia. Ospovat is a representative of the whole younger generation of scholars who
were not members of the Tartu School proper but were raised by Tartu student conferences and
personal contacts with Tartu scholars. Other representatives of this generation include Andrei Zorin,
presently professor at Oxford; Yuri Tsivian, film historian at the University of Chicago; Roman
Timenchik, professor of Slavic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Mikhail Iampolski,
literary theorist and philosopher at New York University; Georgy Levinton, professor of the European
University at St. Petersburg; Sergei Kozlov, an editor of Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, one of
Russias chief intellectual reviews, and many others.
68
The exceptions to this rule are scholars like Mikhail Bakhtin or Dmitry S. Likhachev (1906-1999).
Likhachev made a mind-boggling career from the gulag (1928-31) to the Academy of Sciences
(1970). Revered and powerful under both Soviet and post-Soviet authorities, he was the major
scholar of medieval Russian literature and an important ally of the Tartu School.

70

invented timeline by the early modern Western literati and the Jesuits. This was the first
publication of what later became Fomenkos The New Chronology, the intellectual
blockbuster of the 1990s and a huge success among the students of the Russian university
departments of history.69 Inadvertently, Lotman was instrumental in launching the career of
this new, post-Soviet Lysenko.
One may wonder how Lotman could buy into Postnikov and Fomenkos conspiracy
theory. To be sure, he was careful enough to supply the publication with hisalbeit
sympathetic, only mildly criticalcomment. Originally, the idea of this publication came
from Vladimir Uspensky, the mathematician and the brother of Boris Uspensky. Boris
Uspensky, despite expressing multiple stipulations, saw, as he put it, something in
Postnikov and Fomenkos ideas, too. 70 At the surface, the ideas of the new chronologists
seemed to overlap with Lotman and Uspenskys ideas about the filtering, distorting and
mythologizing role of historical narratives (see 1971). For both groups, culture was not
necessarily memory of real events but memory shared by, and refracted through the minds of,
the people of the word, that is the intellectual elite. Thus, it is quite thinkable to suppose
that the literati simply invented history. Moreover, this supposition corresponded to the
experience of the Soviet person: her textbook versions of historical events changed quite a
few times during her lifetime.
Yet, already at the early stage of negotiations about this publication, Lotman called it
nonsense (bred) in private correspondence with Boris Uspensky.71 He was aware of the
inadequacy between Postnikov and Fomenkos sophisticated mathematics and their nave
perspective on the historical record. Furthermore, their historical revisionism was clearly
going to far, to Lotmans taste. In fact, Fomenko was much more radical in deconstructing
history than any Western practitioner of contre-histoire or a listener to the voices of the
subalterns (see, for example, cultural and post-colonial studies (see Loomba 1998)).
Yet, ultimately, Lotman chose to ignore these considerations. After calling Postnikov
and Fomenkos paper nonsense, he immediate states: we will publish it nonetheless.72
This decision did not change even in 1982, when Fomenko asked to remove the paper from
Lotmans publishing plan because of the mounting criticism of his theories among
established scholars. In response, Lotman pretended that paper is already in print and
nothing could be done to stop it.
There are a number of ways to account for this decision. One is Lotmans persisting
attraction toward natural sciences, from cybernetics in the 1960s to cognitive psychology
and synergetic in the 1980s. Natural scientists carried much prestige for Lotman. Yet, more
important is Lotmans conception of the mission of the Tartu series: to attract all alternative
and healthy forces in Soviet scholarship, to be the center of the unofficial humanities. As
Viktor Zhivov pointed out in his interview, when dominant culture lies too much, any
iconoclastic effort is perceived as fresh wind.73 Thus, when Lotman heard that the
established critics involved the Central Committee in disciplining the new chronologists, it
was a question of honor for Lotman to support the persecuted.74
69

Not to mention people like chess champion Garry Kasparov who passionately supported The New
Chronology on TV in the 1990s (personal recollection).
70
Uspensky to Lotman, February 1983 (LC, F135, s. 1472).
71
Lotman to Uspensky, March 28, 1980 (Lotman 1997, 600).
72
Lotman to Uspensky, March 28, 1980 (Lotman 1997, 600).
73
Zhivov, Viktor. Interview by author. September 2001.
74
Alexander Zholkovsky claims that Lotman published one of his papers right after Zholkovskys
emigration for the same reasons: To publish an migr in defiance of the authorities was for the
Chief Editor [Lotman] a matter of honor, valor, and heroism, no matter subtle semiotic
contradictions (2000, 209).

71

As one can see, Lotman the editor was very sensitive to the politics of the to-bepublications in Smeiotik and other Tartu series. In the nutshell, both the content of the
article and the public persona of the author were expected to maintain the border between the
binary oppositions of us and them, between parallel science and civil society, on the one
hand, and the loyal academic establishment, on the other. Whatever academically and
intellectually problematic, the article by Postnikov and Fomenko did not challenge this
symbolic boundary. By uncovering the gigantic conspiracy of the Jesuits (and, by
implication, the established historical scholarship), they positioned themselves as true
intellectuals, whose only role was to reveal the truth and to deliver it to the public. In its
grotesqueness, their thesis appealed particularly well to the self-representation of the member
of parallel science as a rebel, non-conformist and outsider to the system. Yet, this was on
the level of the connotations that this thesis evoked; in its literal sense, it was politically safe:
as one Central Committee official pointed out: It does not matter for me when Julius Cesar
was really killed (Novikov 1996, part II).
By contrast, the paper by two other scholars was rejected arguably because it did not
have the characteristics just outlined. To be sure, two Moscow sociologists, Boris Dubin (b.
1946) and Lev Gudkov (b.1946), who submitted their paper on the possibility of studying
society through literature to Lotman in the early 1980s, were not people from the street.
They had good credentials (in terms of poriadochnost, or honorability and virtue, as
discussed earlier) and recommendations.75 Moreover, Dubin and Gudkov were definite
outsiders to the establishment. As researchers under the auspice of the Lenin Library in
Moscow, they could count only on very low-circulation, often intra-institutional, publications
in library studies, which were hardly accessible or interesting to the wider academic public.
The publication in Smeiotik would definitely enlarge their audience and possibly introduce
them to Western academia. Later, in the 1990s, they achieved considerable recognition for
their studies in cultural sociology but that is another story.
Of course, the fact that Dubin and Gudkov had no science background and that they
were social scientists was already bad enough. Lotman tried to keep as far as he could
from sociologists because their subject matter, contemporary society, was too close to
politics. From Lotmans anti-political perspective, sociologists by definition were either
too close to the authorities and the official newspeak, or they were in danger of harsher
reprisals for their unorthodox ideas on the nature of Soviet society then most humanists, and
thus close association with them was dangerous. Furthermore, as Dubin pointed out,
sociology was associated with sociologism [i.e. the vulgar Marxist opponents of Russian
Formalists] of the 1920s and thus nobody [in Lotmans entourage] expected anything good
from it.76 This may be one of the reasons why Lotmans attitude to Yuri Levada, who was
fired from Moscow University in 1969 for publishing not-quite-Marxist lectures on
sociology, comprised both sympathy and distance.77
Yet, more importantly, for Lotman, the specific intellectual paradigm, in which
Dubin and Gudkov worked, was highly problematic for him. Lotman was particularly put off
by their critique of the literature-centric ideology of the Russian intelligentsia (see Dubin
2001). Dubin and Gudkov argued that this ideology idolized and mystified the texts of the
classics and downplayed the role of the relations of power in language and literature.
Although they did not at that time know Foucault and Bourdieu and cited mostly German
75

For example, the recommendations of Yuri Levada (1930-2006), a theoretical sociologist in official
disgrace and a close Tartu ally (later a founder of VTsIOM and Levada-Center), and Igor Chernov,
Lotmans favorite student.
76
Dubin and Gudkov. Interview by author. July 2002.
77
Levada, personal communication; Dubin and Gudkov, interview.

72

reception theorists (e.g. Iser 1974), they argued, like many Russian and Western scholars in
the 1990s, that the fetishism of culture is as much rooted in the intelligentsias resistance to
the state as it is in its evolvement in the states policies of socialist modernization (cf.
Lovell 2000, 22; 39). In the words of one Russian poststructuralist, Mikhail Iampolski, in
the absence of a market, the fetishization of culture replaces that of money and exchange
value (see Lovell 2000, 70). Although Dubin and Gudkovs attempts to demystify the cult of
culture were not as radical, Lotman correctly sensed that their framework challenged his
milieus taken-for-granted oppositions between Power and Culture. Although by no means
intended as a challenge to Lotman and his circle, the paper by Dubin and Gudkov was
received as a threat to the deepest insights that underlined both Tartu theorizing of culture
and their social strategies of positioning themselves in Soviet society.
If Dubin and Gudkov did not directly attack Lotman and his supremacy over
parallel literary studies, others did. One of the most revealing cases in point was the
publication of the samizdat philological journal called Metrodor by a group of scholars and
students of Leningrad University in 1982 (see Panchenko 1995). In this journal, serious
critical articles and satiric doodles were mostly directed not at official science but at Vladimir
Toporov s reconstructions of the archaic mythological structures and at Lotmans cultural
history of Russia. What was, and still is, a source of some controversy is the fate of this
journal: after a few issues, the journal was banned and, moreover, its participants were
excluded from the university for subversive activity. Nobody formally accused Lotman and
his colleagues of pulling strings but the connection between criticism and expulsion has
persisted in the memory of the Soviet philological community (see Levinton 2002). This case
strengthened the point of those who positioned themselves within parallel science as
opponents to Lotmans diktat.
The Case of Nikolai Karamzins letters
To conclude this section, let me present one more case that is particularly revealing of the
way, in which the Lotman-led Tartu School was involved in struggles for authority in Soviet
humanistic academia. An angry exchange between the representatives of the Literary
Heritage series78 and Lotman, who served these series as an academic consultant, grew out
of an overtly technical disagreement on how to publish the private letters of Nikolai
Karamzin (1766-1826), an important Russian writer and historian: should one use the
eighteenth or the twentieth century orthography? On the basis of his theory of meaning
generation in literary texts (see chapter 5), Lotman argued that the modernization of
orthography is not as harmless and painless for the authors text as one might think (Lotman
1972, 74). He was concerned about the preservation of the semantic richness of what he
considered to be a classical text of Russian literary culture. To this, his opponents responded
that the publication should be accessible to the general public.79
At one level, this was a debate between two different strategies of publishing classical
literature: should we try to raise the masses to the level of the masterpieces or to adapt the
texts to the level of the reader. It was also a conflict between the archaist assumptions of a
classical philologist and the present-oriented stance of a pragmatic publisher. And yet, the
heated atmosphere of the debate does not seem to correspond to its actual significance. The
78

The Literaturnoe nasledstvo series, established in 1931, is dedicated to publishing previously

unpublished materials on the history of Russian literary and social thought. The series was (and still
is) sponsored by IMLI, that is by the opponents of Lotman.
79
See the traces of this debate in 1978-1981 Lotmans correspondence with colleagues (Lotman 1997,
274, 599, 613, and 616) and in Boris Uspenskiis letters to Lotman (e.g. March 1980; LC, F135,
s.1470, p. 33).

73

fact of the matter is that the academic debate on Karamzins private letters, not even some
consensual masterpiece, went out of hand. The exchange between the series and Lotman
turned nasty. They exchanged mutual accusations and appealed to other, more influential
academics to serve as arbiters. Lotmans letters to his colleagues were full of harsh words in
respect to his main opponent, Andrei L. Grishunin (b. 1921), whom he accused of the Soviet
habit of cleansing history, as well as of secret insinuations and improper networking.
Lotman referred to the debate as a struggle, even war. Ultimately, after many years of
deliberations, Lotman won and Karamzins letters were published in their original
orthography.
Why did this overtly minor accident was such an important matter for Lotman? Why
is it important for us? My answer to both of these questions is that the debate on orthography
in the private letters of a nineteenth writer was a debate on who defines the canons of high
culture and who controls their transmission to the wider public. Here, who refers to the
representatives of the academic establishment and parallel science. Since parallel academia
was an integral part of Soviet academia, the outcome was not preordained even under the
Brezhnevs regime,. Lotmans ultimate victory in the late 1980s was greatly helped by the
new role and power of the elite intelligential under Mikhail Gorbachev.
Politics and the Academic Intelligentsia during the Perestroika (1986-91)
The period of Gorbachevs perestroika was not only the last attempt of reforming the
communist regime. It was also an apex of the elite intelligentsias aspirations for social
significance and influence. We have already seen how, by means of various identity rituals,
Tartu and Moscow semioticians managed to circumscribe their own space within Soviet
academia without exposing themselves as a threat to existing order, to the extent that some
younger marginals started to perceive them as a part of the larger Soviet academic
establishment. However, the alliance forged between Gorbachevs cohort of the reformist
authorities and the West-oriented liberal intelligentsia of the 1960s generation
(shestidesiatniki) provided new opportunities for achieving the correspondence between the
intelligentsias vision of its position in society and its actual place in it.
A lot has been written about the relationships between the authorities and the
intelligentsia under Gorbachev (e.g. Faraday 2000; Kagarlitsky 1988; Shlapentokh 1990). To
make a long story short, it was a period when selected groups of intellectuals seemed to
achieve what socialism promised, or seemed to promise, but never truly delivered. This was
the time when liberal journals, which were filled with the unmaskings of the past and the
present of the regime, were receiving the highest subscription rates ever (Lovell 1998). This
was the time when fragile and stuttering dissident academician Andrei D. Sakharov (19211989) became a national hero. The internationally-renown representatives of the intelligentsia
were taking high positions in the state: they were elected into the new Soviet and regional
parliaments and composed the newly established Presidential Advisory Council. In sum,
Gorbachevs rule seemed to bring the vision of the intellectuals on the road to class power
quite close to reality (cf. Konrad and Szelenyi 1979).
The Tartu School was not outside of these trends. For two years, Viacheslav Ivanov
headed the prestigious Library of Foreign Literature, the main reservoir of non-Soviet
academic and other publications in the Soviet Union. He was also a deputy of the Soviet
parliament and an activist of the democratic opposition in it. Yuri Lotman also became a
public intellectual in Estonia during the rise of the national and democratic aspirations as well
as the tensions between the Estonian and Russian population. Lotmans public
pronouncements of this period were quite characteristic of the ideology of the liberal Soviet
intellectual of the late 1980s.
74

On the one hand, Lotman supported the national aspirations of Estonians and
defended them against accusations in nationalism. Due to this support, he damaged a number
of long standing relationships with people like Academician Dmitry Likhachev.80 However,
he also protested against the politization of the national divisions between Russians and
Estonians and, instead, emphasized the conflict between local civil society (Estonian and
Russian) and the bureaucratic center. Simultaneously, he advocated a new, post-Soviet
vision of the Soviet space as no longer bureaucratic and ideological but humanistic one
(Lotman 1988b; see also Waldstein 2007).
If political power and influence of intellectuals, especially academic intellectuals of
the Tartu School, were still miniscule, their academic situation changed considerably.
Basically, Gorbachevs rule led to further expansion of parallel science into the domain of the
established, formal academia. Some of the leaders of the former gained privileged positions
in the existing academic hierarchies as well as received an opportunity to create their own
institutions. In 1989, Viacheslav Ivanov managed to establish the Department of World
Culture at the central bastion of Soviet Marxist domination, the Faculty of Philosophy at
Moscow University. Meletinsky and Nekliudov established the research Institute of
Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the newly established Russian University of the
Humanities in Moscow. Culturology, which was previously an informal name for a multitude
of projects, including the Tartu semiotics of culture, became an official discipline in the
national university curriculum (see chapter 6). In 1992, a number of Tartu scholars became
full members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, i.e. achieved the highest possible level of
institutional recognition available for Russian scholars.81
This transformation of the circles location within the Soviet academic field left a
noticeable imprint on its academic work of the time. This is particularly evident in Lotmans
last book, Kultura i vzryv (Culture and explosion) (1992). In it, he not only freely refers to
contemporary political situation but also proposes what reviewers called a new politicallymotivated discourse (Delcheva and Vlasov 1996, 148). According to this discourse, in
addition to past-oriented historical reconstructions, semiotics should also be a science of
making conscious choices between available opportunities under the conditions of extreme
unpredictability, that is the situations of explosions. In contrast to the emphasis of the
classical cultural semiotics of the 1970s on the continuities of national development, Lotman
puts emphasis on the marginalized and suppressed paths it could have taken. He argues that,
in the contemporary situation of high unpredictability (he means the 1989-1991 period), it is
possible to revitalize these traditions and, ultimately, shift from Russian to European
cultural models (1992, 270). Continuous with both the liberal intelligentsias Westernism
and Tartu archaism, this position reflects a late Soviet intellectuals optimistic estimation of
his social authority and ability to influence the course of national development.
At this point, it is important to stipulate that the expansion of parallel science into the
institutions of established science did not lead to the symmetrical turning of the tables in
Russian academia. Most of the Schools opponents, even those who made their career in
socialist realism and Soviet Marxism, did not lose their positions. Furthermore, since the
academic field was much more fractured than its binary renditions, the new science of
culturekulturologiiaappeared to be a highly heterogeneous assemblage of often
incompatible and competing groupings. The members and successors of the Tartu School by
80

In the late 1980s, Lotman published a newspaper response to the open letter signed by six
prominent Russian cultural leaders, including Likhachev and the Russian Orthodox patriarch Aleksiy
II. Answering their accusation in nationalism directed against the Estonian independence movement,
Lotman imputed Russian nationalism and even residual Stalinism to his faltering friends (see LC,
F136, s., ll.40-42).
81
For instance, Mikhail Gasparov, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Vladimir Toporov.

75

no means monopolize this field; they just constitute, at the moment, its most prolific branch
that enjoys the most recognition among Western colleagues and grant-givers.
A more definite outcome of the changes in national and academic politics is the end
of the Tartu School per se. Already in 1986, at the memorial summer school in Tartu, many
presentations were dedicated to the assessment of the collective work for over twenty years
(published in volume 20 of Smeiotik, 1987). As indicated by the shrinking volume of
Lotmans correspondence by the end of 1980s, personal relations were wearing off, even with
his closest collaborators like Boris Uspensky (see Lotman 1997). Whatever may be personal
reasons for this cooling of the relationships in particular cases, the general case is that the
Tartu School as a kind of academic community and a personal circle was losing its social
relevance. It existed as a framework for knowledge production in the polarized us/them
social environment where intellectual autonomy was constantly at stake. As a parallel science
institution, the School was more than a community of like-minded scholars. Yet, with the
opening of new opportunities for converting their accumulated cultural capital into the loci of
academic influence, Tartu and Moscow semioticians ceased to need the Schools framework
of academic communication and mutual assessment.
The epoch of perestroika and the gains it brought to the intelligentsia appeared to be
short-lived. Yet, the dissolution of the ultimate symbiosis of power and knowledge and the
final guarantees of intellectual autonomy was short-lived. The failure of the 1991 August
coup and the breakdown of the USSR in December of the same year gave the last boost to the
hopes on a new compact between power and knowledge, the one based on the equality of the
partners and the full guarantees of intellectual autonomy. In fact, however, these events were
last nails in the coffin of the intelligentsias extraordinary status in Soviet society, the status
of the states major ally in its efforts to modernize society and its major opponent. Intellectual
positions were losing their appeal among the wider masses for some time before 1991 but
such indicators of the intelligentsias symbolic power as the circulation rates of major
reviews (thick journals) and the demand on high culture items (for example, book
collections) dropped down rapidly (Lovell 1998).
The strata of the intelligentsia who profited most from Gorbachevs rule were the
biggest losers of the 1990s. The loss of social status, economic wellbeing and stability and
cultural prestige were some of the dimensions of this situation (Faraday 2000; Lahusen and
Kuperman 1993; Lovell 1998). Most painful was the failure of the illusionary alliance
between the intelligentsia and the state as well as the hopes of preserving the multicultural
post-Soviet space. Many leaders of the 1960s started to feel homeless at home. At the end of
1991, after reading his course of lectures in Moscow University, Viacheslav Ivanov took off
to a position at the University of California, Los Angeles. Boris Uspensky had already been
teaching in Italy.
Yuri Lotman made his last appearance in Moscow in September 1991, right after the
August coup. In his lecture on September 12th, 1991, at which I was present, he was offering
to the public the conception of his last book, Culture and Explosion (Lotman 1992).
Paradoxically, exactly when this book announced the newly political and activist role for
semiotics and culturology, Lotman was pushed out of his activist mood by the constellation
of physical and social circumstances. Hardly recovered from the stroke when his speech
capacities were severely damaged, Yuri Lotman soon lost his wife as a result of minor but
unsuccessful operation performed in Italy in 1990. Surrounded by his faithful young students
during his last years, he confessed that he had nobody to speak to. To the post-Soviet reality,
he referred with a mixture of irony and grief: I like the world of my memory more than the
one I see around myself and The situation is laughable and unlike all preceding life: I feel

76

like a dinosaur (mastodont) who accidentally walked into a modern elegant boutique
(passazh).82
Yuri Lotman died on October 28, 1993. My historical narrative will not move
beyond this date. In what follows, I plan to turn the clock back to the years before the 1950s.
In the next chapter, we will overview the relevant trends in the history of Russian Formalism
and Western (post-)structuralism with an aim of reconstructing the conceptual, terminological
and thematic roots of the Schools intellectual agenda.
Parallel Science and the Public Sphere in the Soviet Union
Now, based on the preceding discussion, let me summarize some of the characteristics of
parallel science. On the one hand, the emergence of the networks and the institutions of
parallel science was a result of the disillusionment of a sizable group of Soviet intellectuals
mostly connected through various disciplinary counter-networksabout the prospects of
reshaping the power hierarchies within Soviet academia in their favor. In these respects,
parallel science is a form of resistance or, for some, escapes from disheartening social
realities as well as constraining and hollow official ideologies and symbols. Yet, on the other
hand, in contrast to anti-establishment movements in the West, there was no option of
creating separate private institutions, publishers, journals or foundations in the Soviet Union.
As we have already seen, parallel science depended on the formal Soviet institutions for
research and publishing facilities, employment, money, sometimes space and protection, or at
least tolerance of the authorities. Moreover, much of the everyday operations of parallel
science depended on either pragmatically using or taking for granted various aspects of
Soviet reality: from official edification of science and cultural canon and the state-guaranteed
job security to the mechanisms of patronage, nepotism and exchange of favors. Yet, this does
not mean that the independence, or even simply difference, of the parallel science
communities with respect to formal academic collectives was just a daydream. Within the
realm of parallel science, you could enjoy all the major benefits of the Soviet system but also
avoid many of its shortcomings, such as the Partys ideological control, the use of no longer
meaningful clichs, the bureaucratic hierarchies and their inefficient operation. Of course,
most members of the parallel science networks could not travel abroad and many were
intentionally kept at the arms length from students but this was a comparatively mild price to
pay for relatively comfortable and undemanding work environment and the benefits of
enjoying the close-knit company of the best Russian minds of the time. After all, as far as I
remember, Kant wrote his Critique of the Judgment of Taste without having seen a single
worthy original art piece and without even stepping outside of Knigsberg!83
Thus, far from being defined simply by the negativity of saying no to the Soviets,
the space of parallel science was also a positive set of social and discursive positions within
Soviet society and academia. Due to being perceived as existing outside of Soviet society,
these positions afforded their occupants with considerable disadvantages, especially in
comparison with the members of the institutional establishments, who had access to various
administrative and other resources. Yet the parallel science positions also granted their
occupants with immense advantages to these elites, not to mention rank-and-file scholars who
did not manage to find their way into the close-knit parallel science networks. One
82

Lotman to Sonkina, 1993; Lotman to Egorov, 1992 (Lotman 1997, 358, 442). For more on this
period, see Waldstein (2007).
83
It is not that I do not see the benefits of international academic exchange for most of us who are not
immanuel-kants. My point is that we should not overestimate the extent to which Soviet science was
isolated from the world and the impact this relative isolation had on Soviet scientists.

77

advantage was that the leaders of parallel science communities relied on the resources
provided by both their official positions and their membership in parallel institutions. For
instance, in addition to being a world-renown leader of Tartu semiotics, Yuri Lotman on the
1960s through the 1980s was also an important member of the pedagogical establishment in
the Soviet Republic of Estonia. As professor and, in 1960-77, the head of the Department of
Russian Literature at the only, at that time, university in Estonia, he made a notable imprint
on the local deliberations and policies on teaching Russian language and literature (see
Waldstein 2007).
Of course, this was rather limited administrative and political power, in comparison to
some of the established opponents of structuralism, who often headed research institutes and
held keys to the whole disciplines. Yet, Lotman was also a central figure in the network of
parallel science. This position gave him and his group the kind of prestige and influence that
most of his highly positioned opponents did not enjoy. This prestige was coming from the
perception of the Tartu School as existing outside (vne) of formal Soviet institutional realities
and thus, by definition, outside of political and academic power. This was a prestige based on
the assumption of Lotmans and his colleagues relative disinterestedness and powerlessness,
which was associated with the idea of intellectual autonomy. Yet, as we know from
Bourdieu, this perception and self-perception can itself be a form and a resource of power,
power that is not perceived as such and that is recognized as merely a legitimate claim on
prestige and recognition (1977, 171-182). In addition, Lotman was able to further support
this symbolic power, which resided in the claim of being totally vne politiki (outside of
politics), by managing to put together and sustain over time the working alternative
institutions of academic research and training. This combination of symbolic and institutional
authority was the basis of Lotmans and the Tartu Schools high status not only among other
members of parallel science but also among the outsiders, the members of formal academia
on the various levels of its hierarchy. Under the conditions of the lack of formal power, this
prestige served as a powerful source of influence. In other words, its reputation was the
Schools capital which was indispensable for its members interventions in the Soviet
academic wars.
I believe my study have demonstrated even more than this. In fact, as a stronghold of
academic autonomy, parallel science is also an advantageous strategic springboard for the
eventual expansion of its participants back into the realm of formal science. Let me unpack
this a little bit. As I pointed out earlier, by the 1960s, some of the counter-networks of the
Stalinist period gained access to institutional power.84 Other counter-networks, including
structuralists in philology, achieved more modest results in these respects by the time when
the possibilities for further institutional change became negligible and the system ossified.
Emerging in this period, parallel science was in fact a form in which these left-out counternetworks institutionalized themselves. Far from being simply an act of desperation or
resistance, the establishment of parallel science turned out to be an act of self-assertion; an
act of achieving, by new means, essentially the same goals that were not achieved fully at the
time of the academic reform movement: academic autonomy and control over the meaning
and practice of science and culture, and the de facto ability to draw the demarcations
between knowledge and power. The Tartu 1970s project of the science of culture,
culturology, is definitely one of the most complete expressions of these aspirations.
Lotmans project of the semiotics of Russian culture, his efforts to create the unified front
of healthy forces by publishing unorthodox works on culture, his sometimes noisy run-ins
with official publishers and ultimately the establishment of culturology as a discipline at the
84

In human sciences, the successful rise of Vygotsky-Luria psychology is a prime example (Joravsky
1989).

78

end of the perestroikathese are some of the steps of the strategy (by no means all planned
and masterminded) of reentering formal academia not as outsiders but as prominent, if not
dominant, insiders. Far from being just an effort to exit, to be outside of Soviet science, the
project of parallel science was also a strategy by the counter-networks to reenter it and
occupy in it the position that their representatives thought they deserved. This strategy is
particularly characteristic for the later period in the history of the Tartu School. At the time
of the Kriku and Tartu summer schools, Lotman and his colleagues tried primarily to keep
a low profile and to be as invisible to the authorities as possible. They tried to keep
themselves as a small exclusive circle of like-minded colleagues and friends. At a later
period, Lotman became the center of the unofficial establishment. His later strategy was
more the one of visibility: Lotman was at that time refashioning the Tartu series into the
public forum of potentially all of the unorthodox scholarship in the studies of culture and a
major center of the humanities in the Soviet realm and, possibly, on a broader international
scene. 85
This kind of visibility and the aura of autonomy and prestige attracted to such
institutions of parallel science as the Tartu School young and most intellectually promising
scholars and drew off the attention of the West from the established Soviet scholarship.
Although only the directors of research institutes and the deans of university departments, as
well as a handful of loyal scholars, were allowed to attend international conferences, it was
Lotman and the members of his circle who were consistently invited to these conferences.
These kinds of things could not fail to provoke considerable irritation and resentment on the
part of the intellectuals who were more centrally located within Soviet academia. As we
have already seen and will still see, this resentment was an important, although not the only,
motive for attacking such groups as the Tartu School. Yet, what is more interesting is that
the authorities and established scholars usually could not just ignore these groups, or
proclaim them non-existent, or even make them disappear by some minor or major
clampdown. Some of the opponents of the Tartu School, as we have already seen, were
highly positioned academic officials. They arguably had enough power to rein in the
development of parallel science. Indeed, they used this power on a multitude of specific
occasions, for instance when individual promotions and publications were discussed or the
number of pages and copies of the new Smeiotik volume were negotiated. Yet, the final
clampdown never came, at least in the case of the Tartu School and many other cases. To
some extent, these facts reflect the growing ineptness of both the Soviet academic
establishment and the whole regime by the 1970s. Yet, these facts also reflect what I call the
symbiotic character of the relationship between formal and parallel science.
Historically, this symbiosis can be seen as an extension of the relationships between
academic institutions and personal networks of academics, as discussed in the beginning of
this chapter. These relationships can also be described as symbiotic: one implies and
compliments the other, even though more or less significant discrepancy between, for
instance, the recognition within your close circle, by your coworkers and by your bosses is a
part of the game. Networks struggle for institutional resources and institutions try to rely on
85

Such processes as the conversion between Tartu semiotic and historical research at Tartu, the shifts
in Lotmans publishing policy since the mid-1970s and his run-ins with the Literary Heritage series,
as described above, can be seen as the strategies of capturing the dominant positions in the field of
Russian Studies. On the significance of this field, Mikhail Iampolski writes as follows: The
institutional field of human sciences in [Soviet] Russia was hierarchically organized around Russian
studies It dominated over other research fields to such an extent that it attracted anyone who wanted
to participate in the academic commonwealth seriously and be in the center of academic thought
The control over Russian studies meant in practice the control over Russian philology and, as it were,
the humanities (Iampolski 2001, 102)

79

certain personal networks to be efficient in their work. Furthermore, individual members of

networks work on converting their network capital (respect, recognition, personal
acquaintances) into institutional capital (access to research facilities, students, publishing
and money), and people with ranks make sure that they do not lose their respect among
people by whom they aspire to be respected.
With the emergence of parallel science, this symbiotic relationship did not unravel
but became more complex. Some of the most vibrant counter-networks, e.g. Soviet
structuralists, created their own institutions and these institutionswith their national and
international visibility and prestigebecame prime assets in the competition with the
dominant networks in charge of formal institutions. Yet, by itself, this prestige and
reputation of some parallel science groups do not give us reasons why the institutional
establishment and the state tolerated parallel science as such. We should already know well
enough what parallel science scholars owed to the Soviet system, even though they did not
like to admit this. Yet, what did state and academic institutions got out of this symbiotic
relationship?
In fact, both formal academia and the Soviet regime needed parallel science for a
number of reasons. The existence of informal seminars and summer schools channeled the
protest energy of the intelligentsia into a presumably non-conformist but still non-political
direction. The same applies to the whole discourse of anti-politics. Furthermore, parallel
science was needed to raise the flexibility of the increasingly bureaucratized academic
system. The institutions of parallel science provided alternative channels for communication
across the administrative divisions between the Academy and the University, between
research institutes and departments. In part due to the establishment of direct and regular
connections between scholars without the mediation of their bosses, Soviet science and
especially humanities retained considerable amount of intellectual vibrancy at the time that is
often referred to as the period of stagnation.
Furthermore, in the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet authorities were particularly
concerned about their international reputation. The more a parallel science group like the
Tartu School was known abroad, the more both local (e.g. Tartu University) and central
authorities were disposed to be either tolerant or even supportive of this group. Of course,
the influence of the West was not straightforward and there were many cases when the
recognition by the Western public or academic opinion caused both the outcry of the official
media and, at least, administrative and professional difficulties. In the world of the arts, the
case of the poet Boris Pasternak comes immediately to mind: after publishing his Doctor
Zhivago abroad and receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, he was publicly
humiliated and forced to reject the award. Yet, by the 1970s, these cases became very rare.
If anyone was publicly humiliated among scholars, this was usually a local celebrity without
the international clout.86
Finally, it is important to remember that neither the Soviet academic establishment
nor the authorities of various levels were a homogeneous bunch. There were a number of
competing groups, some of which more or less openly stood by various parallel science
groups. Among other reasons for this support, one stands out: to support a group like the
Tartu School was a method of gaining prestige, a way to (re)establish ones status as a
scholar and an intellectual among other scholars or to become known as an enlightened
administrator. Although this reputation was not always beneficial in the eyes of the top
leadership, it allowed an established scholar or an academic official to retain his or her
integrity and self-esteem in the situation when the Soviet power-knowledge empire gradually
86

For instance, the sociologist Yuri Levada was fired from Moscow University because of the
ideological mistakes in his lectures (In Memoriam 2007).

80

unraveled and the alienation between authorities and intellectuals, the bearers of political
power and cultural capital, deepened.
This last observation points to the fact that, although the relationship between formal
and parallel institutions was symbiotic in the short terms of a few decades, the emergence of
parallel science was, nevertheless, a symptom of the unraveling of the Soviet system. By
establishing such domains as parallel science, intellectuals further pushed the leadership in
the directions it could not take without allowing the qualitative changes in the foundations of
the social system. It is the direction in which Gorbachev moved, to some extent, by granting
intellectuals, scientists, artists, and professionals considerable legal autonomy and power over
their symbolic resources and expert knowledge without withholding the states obligations of
financial and other support. Yet, this new consensus in making proved to be extremely shortlived and did not withstand the advance of market economy.
One last point I want to make about parallel science is as follows: like formal
academia and the academic establishment, the field of parallel science was not homogeneous.
Where there are institutions, there is also a distinction between institutions and networks.
Networks, in their turn, can be dominant and counter-networks, of which the first control
established institutions while the latter aspire to such control. Thus, Lotmans Tartu School of
the late 1970s and 1980s, as described above, was a classical establishment but within the
framework of parallel academia. Everything said before about parallel science applies
primarily to this kind of establishment. This means that there was a large, and growing,
number of Soviet intellectuals who were effectively excluded from both formal and parallel
science. The implications of this point require separate study, which may potentially bring
interesting insights into the sociology and politics of intellectual elites in the Soviet Union.
To conclude, I want to throw in some reflections on the implications of my analysis of
parallel science and the Tartu School as its exemplary institution for the much debated issue
of the public sphere and civil society under Soviet socialism. This issue came to the fore
especially in the 1980s and 1990s, immediately before and in the aftermath of the fall of state
socialism (e.g. Keane 1988; Szacki 1995). The main question was whether (post-)socialist
societies had anything similar to the public sphere and civil society which in the West,
according to many political theorists, played historically and still play a pivotal role in
establishing and maintaining political democracy.
Here, I cannot overview all the intricacies of the debate and its implications for
understanding Soviet society. Thus, my discussion is going to be necessarily schematic. In
the nutshell, civil society was one of the key slogans of the, primarily, East European
dissidents and other non-conformists. Vaclav Havel called upon his compatriots to create
social domains where they can live in truth and ignore the very existence of their
totalitarian states (Havel 1986). His critics argued that neither truly voluntary civic and
social organizations and institutions (civil society) nor truly free public discussion (the staple
of the public sphere) is possible under totalitarianism. We have already familiarized
ourselves with Sergei Oushakines (2001) idea that the dissident discourse under socialism
was mimetic with respect to the major tropes of the official discourse. Similarly, Jerzy Szacki
argues that dissident civil society under was simply negative with respect to, and thus
dependent on, socialist society. Thus, individualism of the members of this civil society
was in fact but conformism, the desire to be like others who refuse to submit to the states
dictate (1995, 85). Szacki further argues that, devoid of its proper economic foundation, the
private property, socialist civil society was merely a transplant of Western ideas and ideals
on the soil, which was still alien to them. Following the same logic, Marc Garcelon states
that socialism, especially in its Russian version, did not know Western distinction between
the private and the public sphere (1997). Instead, he differentiates between official social
and unofficial intimate domains, which correspond approximately to the distinctions
81

between socialist economy and black market, between the distributions through official
channels and through blat networks. My distinction between institutions and networks may
also be an analogue here.
Based on my discussion of parallel science in the Soviet Union, I conclude that all of
these perspectives, although insightful to some degree, are based on universalizing and
idealizing the Western experience of publicness and civility. They simply take a ready-made
(e.g. Habermas (1989)) model of the public sphere and civil society, apply it to the Soviet
case and then conclude whether there is a match. In principle, this can be a useful heuristic
device, if not followed by the ontological statements on whether there is a (or, there is no)
public spherein Habermas senseunder socialism. Used heuristically, Habermas
definition of the public sphere can be useful for positioning the parallel forms of life under
socialism in a comparative and historical context. Indeed, parallel science can be seen as an
academic public sphere as much as they are both social and discursive domains where private
individuals get together to deliberate issues of mutual concern and they both constitute
regulatory institutions independent or contrary to the authority of the state (1989, 27). Like
Britains coffee-houses, Frances salons and Germanys Tischgesellschaften, Soviet home
seminars and kitchen salons organized discussion among people that tended to be ongoing;
hence they had a number of institutional criteria in common (1989, 36). Yet, under
socialism, this domain neither presumed property ownership and market exchange nor
underlined democratic governance. On the contrary, as the example of parallel science
testifies, the public domain under socialism presumedin the sense of relying on, taking
for granted and, of course, evading and even rejectingthe framework of official
Soviet institutions and discourses. These official and parallel frameworks existed in the
symbiotic relationship and died together. Yet, this interconnectedness does not contradict to
the idea that parallel science was a really existing and working public sphere, which was
comparable but by no means identical to the bourgeois public sphere, as analyzed by
Habermas. The conclusion is that we should probably speak about different historical types
of the public sphere, which can be fruitfully compared to its Western models but which
should not be judged according to their norms and standards. The same logic can be
extended to the concept of civil society, although I have no space for discussing this here.
Of course, this perspective can be criticized: why do we need to use Western terms to
describe Russian or socialist social phenomena. Indeed, we do not have to and the concept of
parallel science, like Yurchaks deterritorialized milieus, is an attempt to break some of
the intellectual routines in thinking about Soviet science and society. Yet, by refusing to use
whatever problematic but well-developed concepts, we put ourselves in danger of inventing
the wheel and failing to explore the similarities across national borders and historical epochs.
For instance, Habermas concept of the public sphere allows us to pin down a number of
specificities of parallel science and other parallel forms of sociality under socialism. For
instance, this concept allows us to avoid confusing parallel science as a public sphere with
the private and particularistic relations based on kinship ties, ethnic identities, network
contacts, blat exchanges and mafia-type clicks. Of course, as I have shown in the case of the
Tartu School, these kinds of ties and identities played significant role in shaping the (self)image of the School. Yet, these particularistic identities and distinctions did not by
themselves determine the shape which the School and its intellectual paradigm took. They
played their role in the package with other factors: the politicized rituals of purity, or
hygiene, the moral discourses of personal virtue (poriadochnost), and the general, as well
as disciplinary, criteria of scientific rationality. Thus, the identity of the Tartu School was
shaped by a variety of material and symbolic practices: exclusive and inclusive ones, as well
as particularistic and general/universalistic.
The dimension of generality and

82

intersubjectivity of the terms and issues, discussed by the School, and of the criteria of
worth, adopted by its members, is what is captured by the concept of the public sphere.
This concept also helps to differentiae the participation in parallel science from
participating the work of Soviet formal academic institutions. Although these institutions
were, of course, the seats of professional intellectual activity, they were also jobs, offices and
civil posts at the service of the state, that is the realms of what Kant called private use of
reason (Habermas 1989, 85). In contrast, in parallel science, which arguably had the
public presentation of truth as its sole function, Soviet intellectuals could come closest to the
Kantian ideal of the public use of reasons (1989, 85). Here, they could realistically
imagine themselves as not merely Soviet scientists, with all the baggage of intellectual
constraint and conformism that this term indicates, but as scholars before other scholars, the
scholarly public per se.
In the next chapters, I want to focus on these public, general, universalistic and
intersubjective aspects of the Tartu legacy. Thus, while continuing to explore the
interrelations between the Schools intellectual paradigm and the social contexts and
practices in which it was embedded, I plan to show in more detail how this intellectual
paradigm can be incorporated in the contemporary global discussions on culture, its history
and nature.

83

Chapter Four
TOWARD A GLOBAL HISTORY OF STRUCTURALISM:
Roman Jakobson in the Center

If the concept of school has served us to introduce some of the key social, institutional,
cultural and personal aspects of the predicament of the Tartu School, the terms
structuralism and semiotics offer us a glimpse at its theoretical and research background.
Indeed, if we analyze who Tartu people cited most, we find the names of Russian formalists
and Western structuralists and semioticians at the top of the list. Furthermore, without some
familiarity with the problematic and the jargon of various scientific trends associated with
these labels, it is very risky to try to grapple with the major works of the representatives of
the School, let alone to form a coherent perspective on its contributions.
Before proceeding, however, I reflect on two methodological issues. One is inspired
by Anthony Giddens (1987, 195) almost two decade old announcement that structuralism,
and post-structuralism also, are dead traditions of thought. If this is true and the theories of
Tartu School are somehow structuralist, then why bother? Without going into the
philosophical intricacies of what it means for traditions to be dead, I argue that Giddens
proclamation does not seem to be particularly consequential. First, because it is hardly
possible to deny the extent to which (post) structuralist ideas and idioms have shaped the
humanities and even social sciences (and natural sciences, one might argue). Most of them
have become our soil to such extent that we no longer recognize them as sources of our
ideas. Second, as Yuri Lotman said in his last interview, if serious ideas are at stake, then it
is very difficult to tell whether they have been exhausted or not (see Torop 2000b, 15). Ideas
come and go but they also recur under different guises and configurations to the extent that
only strong psychological and institutional pressures to forget can grant us a gratifying
illusion of discovering something entirely new.
My other stipulation is that the consideration of the Tartu School against the
background of international structuralism and semiotics does not automatically imply that it
should be judged according to the known achievements or failures of these movements in the
West. In the literature on Soviet Semiotics, there is a strong tendency to simply transpose
ready made precepts from one experience onto another one based only on following the
magic of nomination (e.g., to some extent, Jameson 1988; Hymes 1978). A gamut of
conceptual stereotypes from privileging the signified to anti-historicism may or may
not be applicable to the Tartu School. The usual narratives about structuralisms and
semiotics evolution from Prague to Paris, from structuralism to poststructuralism, from
Saussure to Pierce are both inapplicable to Soviet structuralism and semiotics and leave the
Tartu School out of the picture altogether (cf. Culler 1975; Hawkes 1977; Merquior 1986).
Therefore, in what follows, I am doing more than just introducing major names, ideas,
themes and terms of the international structural linguistics and structuralism-inspired
semiotics. I am outlining the blueprint according to which the histories of these movements
can be rewritten to accommodate the multiplicity of roots and branches, from Geneva,
84

Moscow, Petrograd and Prague schools to French structuralism and poststructuralism to

British cultural studies and Tartu cultural semiotics.
As a critical aspect of this effort, I propose to recenter the history of global
structuralism away from traditional linear and cumulative narratives and towards a spatial
network model of this history, with the figure of Roman Jakobson as a crucial node. Instead
of seeing him as a predecessor of (French) structuralism, I rely on the tradition of seeing
him as a key mediator who, literally and physically, stitched together multiple academic and
national traditions in the course of the series of his forced emigrations and voluntary travels
(Bradford 1995; Holenstein 1976). Jakobson is a unique example of a historical actor whose
chief, albeit not exclusive, significance consists in being a universal translator in the
primordial sense of the word, i.e. the one who shuttles between various lineages and modifies
them by establishing new links between them (see Latour 1999, 179). Jakobson was not just
an influential link to Russian Formalism; he was a person who played a unique coalescing
role within the fractured and multivocal space of international structuralism and
semiotics. He seems to represent one of the very few nodes that almost none of the varied
trajectories were able to miss. He was indeed what Michel Callon (1986) called the the
obligatory passage point. Roman Jakobson is also one of the most central figures who can
give us clues on how to understand Tartu semiotics and the nature of its reception in the
West.
Structuralism and Semiotics in the West: Guidelines and Frontlines
Since the labels of structuralism and semiotics were often used interchangeably in Soviet
academic debates, I have so far presumed their close affinity. Yet, for further progress, we
should get a better idea of the historically malleable borders of these intellectual movements
as well as frontlines within each of them. The assumption on which I proceed is that, despite
considerable divergence among scholars traditionally associated with these movements, they
share a relatively robust network of cross-references, a number of theoretical ideas and
research topics and, finally, various aspects of language, including specific academic jargon
and categorical distinctions. I also point to a few academic debates significant for
understanding Tartu scholarship.
According to a classical definition, semiotics is either a science or a perspective
concerned with everything that, on the grounds of a previously established social
convention, can be taken as something standing for something else (Eco 1979, 16). A
science fits better the project originated with the ideas of Charles S. Peirce. This American
philosopher and logician advocated the establishment of the metadiscipline, or the science of
sciences, which would deal with the universal process of inquiry, basically understood as
the logic of mind (Kevelson 1986, 525). Charles Morris (1938) later developed this project of
semiotic(s) into what he optimistically called the Unified Science.
In the meantime, the idea of the science of signs, or semiology, was also
proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure. He saw semiology as an extension of his structuralist
linguistics beyond the realm of language. Later, the relationship between the linguistic and
the semiotic underwent multiple transformations. For instance, considering cultural systems
like myth, narrative or journalism as secondary languages superimposed on human, or
natural, language, Benveniste (1969) and, especially, Barthes (1973, 11) turned semiology
into a part of [structural] linguistics. Alternatively, in effort to propose a descriptive rather
than programmatic definition of structuralism and semiotics, Terry Eagleton (1996, 87)
differentiated them as a linguistic, but potentially domain-general, method and a field
resultant form this methods extension beyond language proper.

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Hence, historical meanings and interconnections between structuralism and

semiotics as well as related categories of formalism and post-structuralism are diverse
and resistant to efforts to pin them down. One of the key bones of contention is the role of
natural language with respect to understanding the broader mechanism of signification. Yet,
despite these differences, one can still talk about a number of assumptions essential for being
both structuralists and semioticians (Culler 1975, 198; Hawkes 1977; Jameson 1972). In the
core of these assumptions, there is an idea of relational, or functional, structure, which,
according to Jean Piaget, can be characterized by the wholeness (its elements are defined
through their relations to the other and to the whole), transformation (new clusters are
results of the rule-governed transformations of existing clusters) and self-regulation (its
operations do not require the validation from outside of structure, i.e. reality) (Hawkes
1977, 16). This turn from substances to relations, from the presence of things to the
absence of deep structural relations is characteristic of not only linguistics but rather much
of the mid-twentieth century science as such. Thus, along with, for instance, the physicist
Eddington, the philosopher Cassirer and the psychologist Piaget, one may speak about
structuralism as a general scientific principle which treats phenomena not as mechanical
agglomeration but as a structural whole, as Jakobson (1966) put it in 1929. In adherence to
this principle, there is no significant difference between Saussurean and Piercean semiotics
(Kevelson 1986).
Sign and Meaning in Structuralist Semiotics
According to an authoritative summary, the following features are characteristic for
Saussures structuralism (and poststructuralism) and semiotics (or semiology):
the thesis that linguistics is of key importance to philosophy and social theory as a
whole; the thesis of the arbitrary character of the sign, together with a stress upon
the primacy of signifiers over what is signified; the decentering of the subject; a
peculiar concern with the nature of writing, and therefore with textual materials, and
an interest in the character of temporality as somehow constitutively involved with
the nature of objects and events (Giddens 1987, 196).
As is well known, the key categorical pair introduced by de Saussure is the one of languagesystem (langue) vs. speech (parole). Modeled on such rule-bound games as chess, the
system can be interpreted either as an abstract network of relations or an empirical entity,
such as a social institution (Saussure, Hjelmslev), a communicative medium (Jakobson) or a
sequence of regularized sounds (Bloomfield, cf. Giddens 1987, 197). These diverse
formulations have in common the conviction that the relations between the items of language
are not defined by the material identity and evolutionary origins of these items. In Saussures
influential formulations, the system value of these items proceeds from their mutual
differences. (I)n language, there are only differences (Saussure, quoted in Jameson 1972,
15). Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results
solely from the simultaneous presence of the others (Saussure, quoted in Hawkes 1977, 26).
While this idea refers to human language as such, Roman Jakobson differentiates specific
languages by what contrasts are functional in them.1

For instance, in Russian, where stress is free, it is functional in differentiating the meanings of
words; this is not the case in Polish or Czech. Or, the phonic distinction between l and r is nonfunctional in Japanese, while combination zri- does not make sense in English.

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The fundamental insight of structuralist semiotics is that there is no meaning which

is not designated (Barthes 1973, 10). This idea implies a shift from relations between
words and things to the ones between sound image and concept, or the signifier and
the signified. Both constitute the planes of the linguistic system, the planes of expression
and content, to use Hjelmslevs terms. One of Saussures most influential ideas is that the
relationship between these planes is arbitrary and conventional. The relations between the
signifier and the signified are arbitrary because they are not defined by the nature of the units
related. Instead, these relations are based on social conventions which can be learned.
Roman Jakobson argues that the meaning of the sign is defined not by pointing to the
object in the world but by its systematic relationship to other signs within a particular code.
Borrowed from information theory, the concept of code serves as a fundamental analogy
that constitutes the field of (structuralist) semiotics. Code pertains not only to linguistic
system but also to any system of signification, insofar as it couples present entities with
absent units (Eco 1979, 8). In this way, the function of standing for is introduced and thus
mere signals get transformed into symbolically encoded messages, the objects of
interpretative decoding.
Although Roman Jakobson subscribes to Saussures emphasis on the conventionality
of the sign, he also adopts Charles Pierces classification of signs into icons, indexes and
symbols. In Jakobsons (1971a) adaptation, icons and indexes differ from symbols as results
of the presence or absence of the factual connection between the signifier and the signified.
The latter is purely conventional while the former is motivated by the physical either
similarity or continuity between two sides of the sign. For instance, an icon, as a portrait
or an imitative gesture, conveys messages by emphasizing the material resemblance between
content and the means of its expression.
The introduction of icons and indexes might seem to be an infringement on the
arbitrary nature of signification. However, Jakobson emphasizes that the distinctions within
his typology are not absolute. All signs, as signs, are conventional to various degrees: even
physicalnot to mention nonsensuousresemblance does not acquire a signifying function
automatically but only within a set of relations, conceptual or social. Furthermore, the
motivation itself is, to a large extent, a matter of social and historical construction. Thus
motivation and arbitrariness may be considered as two poles of one continuum. The
implication is that, in addition to artificially created codes, one can speak about codes as sets
of examples the application of which is regulated not only by rules but also by habits,
customs and simply experience (see Eco 1979). Hence, in contrast to strict Saussurean
structuralism, Jakobsons logic implies that one can speak about closed and open codes
as well as digital (discrete, conventional) and analogical (continuous, iconic) signs (see
Chandler 2002, 46).
Phonology and Binary Oppositions
The structuralist perspective on language and signification is further complicated by the idea
of the hierarchy. Languages and codes are rarely homogeneous networks of relations; they
are organized as a hierarchy of multiple codes superimposed one upon another. Each
subcode, or level, is irreducible to the other; each one is governed by its singular patterns of
constraints. By superimposing patterns of one order on the patterns of another one, one lays
constraints on the latters application. For instance, the earliest version of Chomskys
universal grammar, being an equivalent of the Turing machine, was able to generate
grammatically correct strings of words but it did not have a mechanism which differentiated
between meaningful and meaningless sentences. Other, semantic mechanisms did the work of
limiting the scope of generated linguistic strings.
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It has been Roman Jakobsons and many other structuralists hope to find langueparole-type differentiation on each level of the hierarchy of language. This hope has been
based on the postulate of homology (or structural analogy) of different levels. The main
implication of this concept is that one can extend the success of phonology, as the most
exact, or formalized and predictive branch of linguistics, to other levels and beyond
language itself. Due to the works of Baudouin de Courtenay, Nikolai Trubetskoi and Roman
Jakobson, it turned out to be possible to complement the traditional analysis of speech-sounds
(phonetics) with the analysis of the deep structure of oppositions behind them (phonology,
phonemics). In contrast to material sounds, phonemes are unperceivable contrastive units
that, not unlike genes, account for the variation in sounds, or the phenotype of language.
According to Jakobson, Fant and Halle ([1957] 1988), phonemes are composed of bundles,
or combinations, of distinctive features which can be properly represented as pairs of
binary oppositions: nasal/oral, voiced/voiceless, etc. For instance, phoneme b is alike d in
that it is voiced in contrast to voiceless p and t, and it is alike p in that it is occlusive in
contrast to fricative v and f (Jakobson and Pomorska 1983, 25).
In effect, Jakobson and his colleagues constructed the Mendeleevs Periodic Tablelike schema that purported not only to explain the existing variety of sound combinations but
also to predict possible combinations not described yet. They also called for the typology of
languages based on what oppositions are functional, or significant, i.e. able to discriminate
meanings. For instance, the opposition of t/d is a meaning-differentiating opposition in
English words code and coat but it does not play this role in the case of Russian words kot
(cat) and kod (code): both are pronounced as [kot].
These ideas initiated a wave of extensions to other levels of the semiotic hierarchy:
phonemes gave birth to various morphemes, semes and mythemes. Roman Jakobson
can rightfully claim the fatherhood in respect to the multitude of structuralist studies in not
only linguistics but also ethnology, sociology and history of culture. In short, this research is
based on identifying binary oppositions in various domains of human life (e.g. Levi-Strauss
1962). Despite the variety of specific subject matters, these studies can be reduced to the
manipulations with the basic semiotic relationship of markedness (Jakobson and Pomorska
1983, 95).
The opposition between marked and unmarked terms might well be viewed as the key
to structuralist methodology. Based on the law of the excluded third, it is an opposition in
which the signifier of a term is characterized by the presence of a significant element, a mark,
which is missing in the signifier of the other (Barthes 1973, 76). For instance, a compact
phoneme is always marked in respect to a diffuse one if both are consonants. Similarly,
female is marked in respect to male. However, despite its apparent simplicity, this distinction
bears a burden of the large amount of conceptual work and inspires considerable controversy
(Barthes 1973; Derrida 1976). The critics of the idea of markedness see social and value
hierarchies implicit in it. However, Jakobson is more concerned with its heuristic value: the
possibility of identifying the distinction between the marked and the unmarked on various
levels of language and human culture serves him both to point to the deep similarity of the
empirically distant and to the difference of the empirically similar. As he noted already in
1921, the natural, unmarked nakedness of the cave dweller and the disrobing of the
European of the Victorian era are fundamentally different cultural phenomena (Jakobson
and Pomorska 1983, 94). Here, disrobing presumes the presence or the memory of a robe; it
is a significant absence, or a zero sign (Barthes 1973, 77).
Thus, on the model of phonology, structuralism reduces various linguistic (and nonlinguistic) systems into a hierarchical ensemble of pairs of marked and unmarked
components in opposition to each other (Jakobson and Pomorska 1983, 96). These
oppositions are results of the structuralist methodological quest for defining the basic (i.e. not
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decomposable further) elements on each level. Yet, the relation of markedness indicates only
one axis of this quest, the paradigmatic as opposed to syntagmatic.
The paradigm in structural linguistics indicates a class of units that can be
potentially substituted for one another in a given language (for example, s but not l can be
substituted for r in reason). It is a vertical (that is, in memory) association of phonemes (or
other linguistic units), of which one is selected in actual speech. The syntagm refers to a
string of adjacent linguistic units that can meaningfully be coupled together (or combined).
To use Saussures analogy between linguistic unit and a column in an ancient building, a
paradigm would be a set of different architectural orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) while
syntagm would be a relation of contiguity with other parts of the building (Barthes 1973,
59). Yet, in contrast to Saussure and his followers, Jakobson refuses to identify paradigmatic
with langue and syntagmatic with parole. He argues that both axes are systemic and rulegoverned. Moreover, as he argues in his paper on Two Aspects of Language and Two Types
of Aphasic Disturbances (Jakobson 1956), the distinction has a deep neurophysiologic basis
revealed by two types of mental aphasia: the impairment of the ability of language
acquisition leads to the declining ability to discriminate sounds and words (that is, selection
disorder) while the impairment of the ability of language emission (production) leads to the
telegraphic speech composed of unimpaired communicative gestures, words, and even
whole idiomatic expressions (combination disorder).
Reassured by such striking analogies, Roman Jakobson came up with a whole
program of conceptualizing human nature and culture on the model of the distinction between
paradigmatic and syntagmatic. He found that the variety of classical rhetoric tropes could be
reduced to the substitution between normally unrelated domains (metaphor) and combination
of adjacent, contiguous domains (metonymy and synecdoche). This distinction further
produced a series of typologies of literary genres (lyric and epic), styles (Romanticism and
symbolism vs. realism) and art forms (poetry vs. prose, iconography vs. film). In summary,
metaphoric art tends to distance from context and produce shocking performances while
metonymic art is about verisimilitude and reference (Jakobson 1956; cf. Barthes 1973, 60).
The universalization of the paradigmatic/syntagmatic distinction has been criticized
for objectifying analytical categories (metalanguage) and reducing complexity to neat binary
oppositions (e.g. Barthes 1973, 82). Critics undoubtedly have a point here: the far-fetched
analogies between literary genres and brain zones are indeed suspicious. As cognitive
scientists argue, the distinctions in the mind do not have to correspond to the segmentation in
the brain (Fodor and Katz 1964). On the other hand, one might argue that Jakobson does not
do much more then reproduces the classical distinction between myth and reason.
However, before dismissing Jakobsons categories and much of Tartu semiotics
based on them I would like to warn against a number of frequent misunderstandings of
Jakobsons position. First, the classification of something along the lines of
marked/unmarked does not entail the specific value hierarchy at work: what should indicate
disadvantage, the marked (as deviant) or the unmarked (as lacking) term? Furthermore, the
same term may be marked or unmarked depending on context: for instance, in Soviet schools,
the male teacher was a marked term.
Second, the relation of markedness is not identical with the dualism of
paradigmatic/syntagmatic. This relation structures only the paradigmatic axis; the
syntagmatic one is structured by the succession of units. Furthermore, only the dichotomy of
marked/unmarked is exclusive: the unmarked, or normal, state is when one is either male
or female. The third attribute being both/neither male and/nor female neutralizes the
opposition, i.e. makes it irrelevant or, at least, problematic. On the contrary, mutual
penetration of such terms of dualistic oppositions as metaphor and metonymy or literature
and myth does not neutralize them (Barthes 1973, 83). What constitutes a certain phrase or
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text as metaphorical, or mythological, is the relative dominance of the corresponding

principle of organization. For instance, a poetic text is fundamentally constituted by the set
(Einstellung), or dominanta, on the axis of selection, the set inscribed in the very composition
of the text.2
While keeping this in mind, let me move to Jakobsons structural poetics as a basis of
not only his theory of art but also communication and culture as such.
Poetics and Communication
In Roman Jakobsons words, in Russia, verse had been an object of study for a long time,
and it is in fact verse that served as a point of departure for the questions and debates on the
nature of the linguistic material itself (Jakobson and Pomorska 1983, 19). Thus, if, in the
West, structuralism in literary studies, or structural poetics, was only one of the extensions
of structural linguistics outside of language per se, Russian Formalism and Czech
structuralism grew primarily out of the problematic of verbal arts. Russian formalists made
their name by their concept of literariness, or that which makes of a given work a work of
literature (Jakobson, quoted in Erlich 1981, 172). Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson
defined literariness as a result of the peculiar, poetic way of using language. The poetic
attitude consists in making strange, or defamiliarizing, the habitual way of speaking and
perceiving the world. Usually, in the routine of everyday life, we scarcely hear the words
which we utter: for ordinary speakers and listeners, language is an all-too-familiar vehicle
for communication and a transparent tool for designation, or reference (Shklovsky, quoted in
Erlich 1981, 176). By imposing deliberately impeded form like rhythm and other artistic
devices on the everyday speech or ideological discourse, the poetic attitude engenders the
semantic shift from oblique taken-for-granted certainty to sharp density of perception and
rich ambiguity of imagery. In a poem, the emphasis shifts from message to the medium itself
and thus the word is perceived as a word and not merely a proxy for the denoted object or an
outburst of emotion (Jakobson, quoted in Erlich1981, 183). In poetry, language reaches selfawareness by making us focus on its own palpability, materiality, construction and function
in a larger cultural context. Therefore, although its ability to communicate in a practical mode
might suffer, the poetic text is the primordial source of knowledge about language itself. By
engendering the deviations from grammatical and other norms, poetic speech elucidates the
core of the corresponding language, what it must convey as opposed to what it may
convey (Jakobson 1989, 149), i.e. the mythology implicit in grammar and other formal
aspects of linguistic expression.3 Simultaneously, it is precisely the poetic foregrounding of
the relationship between sound and meaning as well as generally form and content that makes
poems so difficult to translate.
This thinking contains two moves which often diverged, but just as often got
entangled, in the history of formalism and structuralism. Both lines of reasoning are rooted
in the ambiguity of traditional Aristotelian poetics with its desire to inquire into the
specificity of the art of poetry and its interest in the poetic activity as the model case of
production (poesis), or human creativity as such (Dolezel 1990, 7). Russian formalists, who
2

Or, in Jakobsons jargon, The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axes of
selection to the axes of combination (Jakobson 1960, 358). Thus, in poetry, any metonymy is
slightly metaphorical and any metaphor has a metonymical tint (Jakobson and Halle 1956, 79). Here,
the binary opposition between metaphor and metonymy is not problematized; it serves as a condition
of the possibility of the poetic effect.
3
For instance, in one of his presentations, Jakobson noted that the so called free word order in
Slavic language is actually a vast scale of stylistic deviations from the basic , unmarked design (JC,
box 5, folder 5). Here, actually refers to the results of the poetic analysis.

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preferred to call themselves specifiers, largely focused on the specific features, or devices,
of literary discourse as opposed to externalist explanations of art works on the basis of
biographic and sociological facts. The most coherent, often at the verge of reduction ad
absurdum, version of such internalist analysis of literature was undertaken by French
structuralists in the 1960s: they approached literature, specific genres and even single texts as
totally coherent, synchronic, homogeneous and self-referential systems (Barthes 1973, 9598).
However, some Russian formalists underlined that the boundary between literature
and life is fluid (Tynianov 1929, 9). Roman Jakobson (1960) argued that the poetic is one of
the functions of any linguistic communication, verbal arts included. The difference of verbal
arts is in the supremacy of the defamiliarizing set, or orientation, toward the message, or
rather text as such, regardless of destination, sender, context, reference or other aspects of
regular communication. Although communicative, referential and other functions of speech
are not obliterated, they play a subsidiary role while the poetic function dominates.
Thus, when Terry Eagleton mocks Formalists for their search for literariness in the
text itself, he misses most of their points. For instance, he argues that the statement Dogs
must be carried on the escalator seen in London underground can easily be perceived as
strange, that is ambiguous, depending on the perceivers standpoint and the context. This
may be an argument against extreme specifiers but not against Jakobsons idea of the
poetic function. According to Jakobson, the deformation of the written instruction above is
a natural possibility implicit in any communication due to the fact that the poetic is one of its
functions. Moreover, in principle, any graphic image can be reframed in such a way that it
becomes an artistic performance.4 To a large extent, Eagleton is breaking through the open
door here.
The idea of the poetic as a universal function is hard to understand without the
reference to Jakobsons highly influential and controversial communication model based on
the hybridization of older functional models in linguistics (Karl Bhlers, for example) and
Claude Shannons information transmission model (Jakobson 1960). By translating the terms
of linguistics in the language of information theory and cybernetics, Roman Jakobson forged
a field in which verbal messages would be considered in the same framework as visual and
auditory messages (the field of semiotics) and non-messages like commodities and mating
partners (the field of communication sciences) (Jakobson 1971a). This framework is based on
the unified communication model reproduced below.
CONTEXT, or referent
(referential, or cognitive, or denotative)
MESSAGE
(poetic)
ADDRESSER______________________________________ADDRESSEE
(emotive, or expressive)
(conative, or imperative)
CONTACT, or channel
(phatic)
CODE
(metalinguistic)

Jakobsons model of communication. Source: Jakobson (1960)

When Eagleton asks ironically Are you likely to be banned from the escalator unless you can find
some stray mongrel to clutch in your arms on the way up? (1996, 6), he is in fact not criticizing
scholars like Jakobson but, on the contrary, proposing an idea on how to make a piece of art according
to Jakobsons recipe.

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As one can see, Roman Jakobson draws a correspondence between constituent factors of
any act of communication and specific functions of language ( see in the brackets). Each of
these functions is set toward a particular factor: for instance, the phatic function serves to
establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works,
while metalinguistic function is used to check whether both communicants use the same
code. In this context, the poetic is implicit in any communicative act while the specifically
poetic text is also an act of communication (Jakobson 1960).
Although Jakobsons distinction between poetry and universal poetic function proved
to be popular among his colleagues in the West and in the East, his communication model
and the very act of enlisting linguistics and semiotics under the theory of communication
provoked controversy among structuralists. Some doubted the analogy between natural
language and human-made codes, others criticized the assumption of the linearity of
transmitting a ready-made and uniformly-encoded message from addresser to addressee
though the noises produced by context and channel (e.g. Barthes 1973, 18; Scholes 1982).
A strong criticism came from the proponents of Noam Chomskys linguistics: as is known,
Chomsky portrayed language as a cognitive module independent of any communication. For
the proponents of this view, it was common to differentiate communication and signification,
or the product and the process of articulating meaning (e.g. Eco 1979). In this context,
communication theory was portrayed as based on the possibility of thinking a concept
signified in and of itself, a concept simply present for thought, independent of a relationship
to language (Derrida 1981, 19). In this framework, the poetic was once more opposed to
communication and reference. Yet, this time, this opposition was no longer the one of
peculiarly aesthetic and mundane attitudes to reality. It was an opposition between faithful
Jakobsonians and upcoming deconstructionist.
Among different dimensions of this opposition, I highlight only two. One of them is a
contradiction between different interpretations of the poetic function, or literariness. In
Barthes interpretation, the poetic function liberates the signifier from any master-codes and
invites us into the world of floating signifiers where the signified is perpetually deferred. In
contrast, in Jakobsons own version, The supremacy of the poetic function over the
referential function does not obliterate the reference but makes it ambiguous (see Scholes
1982, 87). As Robert Scholes develops this idea, we sense literariness in an utterance when
any one of the six features of communication loses its simplicity and becomes multiple and
duplicitous (1982, 21). From the point of view of Jakobson and his supporters,
deconstruction and poststructuralism enthrones language as the only legitimate frame of
reference let alone the ultimately reality to contrive a ritual dance of signifiers in a
vacuum (Erlich 1981, 14).
These debates find a continuation and clarification in the actual clash between readerand writer-oriented literary scholarship. In the readers motto, there is no Racine en Soi
Racine exists in the reading of Racine and apart from reading there is no Racine (Serge
Doubrovsky, in Hawkes 1977, 157). Based on this frame of mind, Jonathan Culler (1975)
calls for the shift from the Jakobsonian analysis of the formal patterns within texts to the
study of their actual reception (effects). In his angry reply, Roman Jakobson scolded Culler
as a lackadaisical student for his mistakes point by point:
It is really not difficult to see which grammatical categories contribute through their
distribution to the artistic individualization of the parts, as well as to the integration of
the whole poem, and which categories, on the contrary, remain passive. It is easy to
verify statistically the likelihood and the precision of the choices one has made The
idea that it is possible to discover as many symmetrical categories as one wants is
firmly contradicted by the concrete experience of analysis it would be a serious
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error to begin the analysis with the determination of the effects of the poem, for
making such a determination without knowing the means in question can only lead to
naively impressionistic observations (Jakobson and Pomorska 1983, 117-119).
Thus, instead of identifying a critic with a reader and treating readers as co-writers of a
text, Jakobson stays faithful to the classical philological and, simultaneously, positivistic
reliance on the fully objective procedure of discovering and describing the structure of the
text.
The example to be added: the internalist analysis of Baudelaires Les Chats by
Jakobson and Levi-Strauss.
Western and Eastern European Structuralism on Evolution and History
One of the key charges to structuralism has always been its rejection of history (for
example, Jameson 1972; Eagleton 1996). This charge originates with Saussures famous
distinction between the synchronic and diachronic study of language. This opposition was
introduced to oppose the historicism of the nineteenth century linguistics with its attempts to
explain observable differences and similarities between linguistic units and whole languages
by the reference to the past, that is to historical evolution understood as a continuous
divergent ancestor-descendant branching of the universal family tree of languages. Although
strongly supported by the Darwinian evolutionary perspective, traditional historicism shared
some of the shortcomings of both Romantic and positivistic reasoning: the aversion to
hybridity and the teleology of progress. Despite its sophistication and ability to process
rapidly growing linguistic data, Indo-European historical linguistics often served to justify
contemporary nationalistic and racial divisions by identifying spatial distinctions with
temporal sequences of developmental stages (Fabian 1983).5 Simultaneously, the effects of
non-hereditary affinities between languages, the evidence for saltationary evolution, as
well as the very mechanism of heredity6 was left to competing theories based on polygenist
and preformist assumptions.
Although Saussure did not object to evolutionary theory in principle, his concept of
langue implied shifting the whole debate from specific languages to language as such and
from drawing the lines of descent to the functional study of the linguistic system. Since
structure was understood as a network of reciprocal oppositions in which every entity
acquires its value on account of the presence or absence of another entity (Eco 1975, 13),
the value of a unit in the system appeared to have nothing to do with either natural world (the
case of onomatopoeia) or with past history (e.g. etymology).7 As a result, language acquired
certain durability and resistance to changes; it appeared to be a great conservative force in
human apprehension of the world (Hawkes 1977, 26). Unsurprisingly, structuralist studies
eventually developed an alliance with phonology, a kind of linguistic genetics.
Consequently, or so it seems, the purpose of the structuralist is to analyze the elementary and

Traditional historicist explanations involved circular reasoning: phenotypical similarities indicated

kinship but only kinship, rooted in common ancestry, could serve as a basis for a significant, nonaccidental, similarity (see Stocking 1994).
6
In the absence of genetic theory, Darwin had to accept Lamarckian law of exercise as the
mechanism of heredity. Since evolutionary theory, by itself, could not explain the source of hereditary
variation upon which natural selection operated, it accepted Lamarcks idea of the inheritance of
acquired characteristics (Stocking 1994).
7
Although etymologically unrelated, rage and outrage are functionally related and meaningfully
linked due to their sound coincidence in modern English.

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unchanged, or a-temporal, equipment of human language and, by extension, human

communication and culture.
However, in fact, the relationship between structuralism, on the one hand, and
evolution, history and temporality, on the other, has never been a simple one. It is true that
the anti-historicist perspective has been one of the most popular interpretations of Saussures
program. This interpretation was developed in detail by French structuralists in the 1960s. No
surprise that this anti-historicism even made it into textbooks and critique (Barthes 1973;
Culler 1975; Eagleton 1996; Hawkes 1977; Jameson 1972). However, considered in a
broader theoretical and historical perspective, this was an aspect of only one variety in a
wider movement, of what Thomas Pavel (1989) called speculative structuralism with its
exaggeration of the scientific, formalistic and logocentric aspects of Saussures heritage.
As the debates on Saussures scandalously nonstructuralist preoccupation with anagrams
indicate, anti-historicism was not the only option. Furthermore, the acquaintance with Eastern
European formalisms and structuralisms sheds light on the connections between
structuralist research and the debates on biological evolution and cultural history. To
understand the peculiarity of the Tartu perspectives on semiotic evolution, it is mandatory
to overview the range of possibilities provided by the intellectual history of the international
structuralist movement.
The classical anti-historical stance consists in collapsing major oppositions langue
and parole, paradigmatic and syntagmatic, and synchronic and diachronic into one
opposition between the synchronic system (langue) based on vertical hierarchical
associations among linguistic items and the diachronic speech chain (parole) embedded in
lateral propositional sequences. This perspective implies that speech process and the history
of language are either utterly irrelevant to, or outside of, the structuralist paradigm. Here, the
irreducible contingency of the history of events is simply unthinkable (Levi-Strauss
1962). Considering that its practitioners often identify structuralism with science, this is
indeed a strong and consequential stance. When extended to texts and other cultural artifacts
under the umbrella of semiotics (or semiology), this perspective implies either the
limitation of the scope of structural analysis to code-like situations and systems (from traffic
signs to folklore and myth with an emphasized exception of modern literature) or the
reduction of multiply-coded literary and other texts to their presumed invariants
homogeneous in substance and in time (Barthes 1973, 97-98). Early Formalist
enumeration and recombination of distinctive devices in a literary work was a significant
predecessor of the formal narrative syntax worked out in the early studies by Barthes (1963),
Genette (1980), Greimas and others.
The expulsion of history and time practiced by some structuralists does not imply that
they are not interested in it. On the contrary, in some cases, this expulsion promotes the
problematization of history as a taken for granted environment we live in. Already Boris
Eikhenbaum (1924) differentiated between actual passage of physical time and the
continuous and causal history which he considered a fiction and a convention. Claude
Levi-Strauss (1962) developed similar ideas by arguing that history is a product of specific
operations of thought rather than its basis. That is, in contrast to traditional etymological and
genealogical assumptions, history is not a source of the authentic meanings of words. 8 In
fact, Levi-Strauss argues, there is no single, homogeneous and teleological History, which
8

As Levi-Strauss put it in response to Roman Jakobsons private critique of his chapter on Sartres
theory of historical praxis, Lobject vritable du chapitre est de montrer que la connaissance
historique nest pas au dessus, et en dehors, de la pense sauvage: une sorte de privilge de lhomme
blanc et civilis; mais quelle en fait, bien au contraire, partie (Levi-Strauss to Jakobson, July 5,
1962; JC, box 43, folder 33).

94

leads to the contemporary state of affairs and justifies it. There are only partial, incomplete,
biased histories-for, that is historical narratives with their narrators and audiences (1962,
257). Levi-Strauss opposes the historical method of cataloguing the elements of any
structure to the reversible time of myth and cold cultures (1962, 262).
To simplify the issue a bit, the objective of ahistorical structuralism is to study
synchronic systems of language and culture in abstraction from any historical account of their
origin or change. This does not mean that linguistic and cultural change is inaccessible to
structuralist methodology. Petr Bogatyrev (1971), Jakobsons coauthor and an active
participant of the Tartu summer schools, provided an exemplary extension of Saussures
approach to folklore. He argued that not every improvisation within certain plot or folkloric
work can be accepted as its systemic element worthy of further transmission. To become a
folkloric fact, it has to be approved by the collective censorship of the group. This
approach implies the key Formalist distinction between psychological and social genesis
and structural evolution of an artistic device, work or genre. As Tynianov summarized this
idea in 1924, the psychological genesis of a phenomenon does not correspond to its
evolutionary significance (1977, 267). Furthermore, the history of the system is a system
itself (Jakobson and Tynianov [1928], see Tynianov 1977, 282).
This idea of the systemic nature of linguistic and cultural evolution implies Roman
Jakobsons open revolt against the popular way of collapsing major structuralist oppositions.
He was at pain demonstrating that synchronic vs. diachronic opposition is not identical to the
opposition between static vs. dynamic and systemic vs. systemless (Jakobson and Pomorska
1983, 57). In fact, any semiotic system is dynamic; it can be studied both synchronically and
diachronically. Moreover, according to Russian Formalists, diachronic analysis is superior
because the contemporary state of linguistic and, especially, literary system cannot be
isolated from its past.
These ideas by no means imply return to the nineteenth century historicism.
Formalists consistently opposed genetic explanations of linguistic, folkloric or literary
phenomena by reference to individual creativity or social circumstances. With respect to
literature, they were particularly disdainful toward the genre of the history of literary
generals so popular in Russia: the quasi-Biblical story of one classic anointing, or giving
birth, to another without much reference to the larger context of literary production and
reception (Tynianov 1977, 270). To these stories, Formalists opposed the idea of the
structural history of literature as a dynamic speech construction (1977, 261). However, the
closer look at various versions of this history reveals substantial variation in approach among
Russian Formalists. Since, I believe, this variation is paradigmatic for the history of Tartu
structuralism, let me provide a few details of what I see as a debate, whatever implicit,
between Tynianov and Jakobson.
Roman Jakobsons focus on phonology and poetry made him alert to topics marginal
to classical Saussurean structuralism, for instance anagram, etymology, and prosody. All
these topics indicate the relevance of the past for the present: it is as if the voices of the past
haunt us and upset the ideal of the synchronic system. In fact, Jakobson argues, any system
is heterogeneous, it is a system of systems organized into a hierarchy. Yet, a text is, in
synchrony, a hierarchy of subsystems, in diachrony, it is a juxtaposition of different stages
of a language over an extended period of time (Jakobson and Pomorska 1983, 57). Thus,
todays state of language or literary work is a spatial and layered imprint of the history of its
constitution since the times of hypothetical proto-languages and Ur-Texts.
In this framework, Jakobson conceptualized literary evolution as the shift in the
hierarchy of preexisting artistic norms and devices (such as rhythm, syllabic scheme and
intentional unity in poetry). Whichever norms and devices crown this hierarchy at the
moment, they become dominants, that is they rule, determine, and transform the
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remaining components as well as guarantee the integrity of the structure of the artwork
(Jakobson 1981, 751). Although the precise direction in which evolution goes at any
particular juncture is indeterminate, the repertoire of possibilities is available in advance.
Thus the reconstruction of the rational evolution of, lets say, Russian literary history aims
at showing to what extent Russian literature through centuries is rich and, simultaneously,
monolithic (1981, 754).
In the 1920s and 1930s, Jakobson and Trubetskoi openly opposed Darwinian
evolution as divergent, hereditary, piecemeal, contingent process driven by adaptive natural
selection of the fittest (Sriot 1999). Instead, they adopted the idea of convergent, nonhereditary, non-linear, non-causal, ruptured (saltationary), purposeful and rational
evolution of various non-Darwinian biological theories of the day, the theories broadly
reminiscent of Goethes morphology. This was to address the concern of explaining nonkinship-based affinities among languages and mythical plots, analogous to the affinities
between fishes and sea mammals. Jakobson and Trubetskoi explained these affinities by the
convergence of the representatives of different families in common environments along some
predisposed affordances in their structure. These affordances, or typological
commonalities, in their turn, were referred to some proto-forms, like proto-Slavic or protoIndo-European language and myth. Ultimately, these proto-forms were conceived as cases of
the original coexistence of various stages of development (Jakobson and Pomorska 1983,
60).
This thoroughly teleological and spatial image of history was closely tied to
Jakobsons involvement with the Eurasian movement between the world wars (Sriot 1999;
Avtonomova and Gasparov 1997). He attempted to extend Trubetskois idea of Balkan
language union (Sprachbund) on the Eurasian region and thus justify the unity of fate of
the people of the former Russian empire. Although, after the World War II, he dropped his
anti-Darwinism and turned to a less politically precarious topic of the Slavic linguistic unity,
his image of evolution retained its distinctive features, as his interviews with Kristina
Pomorska indicate (1983).
Yuri Tynianov, Jakobsons coauthor and friend, was also apparently concerned with
systematic and internalist account of the change in literature. Yet, his perspective is
strikingly different from Jakobsons one. Much less elaborated, this approach is basically
contained in two seminal papers, undeservedly unknown outside of literary studies, Literary
Fact (1924) and On Literary Evolution (1927), as well as in a number of empirical studies
(Tynianov 1929). In his works, Tynianov presents literary evolution as an open-ended
process full of systemic displacements, semantic shifts (slomy) and temporal ruptures. Not
planned evolution but saltation, not development but displacement (1977, 256). Neither
literature, nor genre or artwork is bounded entities defined in advance of the process in which
they are produced. As Eikhenbaum put a similar idea, the work of art is always a result of
complex struggle among various form-creating elements; it is always a kind of compromise
(quoted in Steiner 1984, 105). In particular, it is a compromise between the tendencies of
automatization and deautomatization.
As Tynianov demonstrates in his case study of the decline of the classicist ode in the
eighteenth century Russian literature, dominant artistic forms may stop performing their
estranging role with respect to ordinary speech. They become habitual and thus create the
background for what used to be just mistakes to be perceived as parodies. Tynianov traces
the process in which the old constructive principle (or dominanta) of the rhetoric speech
delivered before large audiences looses its power to mold everyday material and to produce
evocative texts. The odic clichs and poses infiltrate inappropriate zones of everyday life
(e.g. private life, or low bodily functions) and become objects of ridicule. In this situation,
any other aspect of everyday life can suddenly acquire the function of estrangement, or
96

become a literary fact. Thus, facts of literature are not absolute essences but relational, or
functional, constructions produced in the course of the interactions between the dominant
and everyday life. In Tynianovs case, private letter replaced the ode. The epistolary genre
moved into the realm of literature and private letters expressing personal sentiments became
major devices of the new sentimentalist style.
Yuri Tynianov summarizes the logic of literary evolution as follows: (1) the
contrastive principle of construction dialectically rises in respect to the automatized principle
of construction; (2) it is applied the constructive principle seeks the easiest application; (3)
it spreads over the maximal number of phenomena; (4) it is automatized and gives rise to a
contrastive principle of construction (in Steiner 1984, 121). Tynianov opposes this
dialectical image of evolution to the traditional linearly portrayal of tradition. In his
account, the fictive totality of tradition is based on streamlining formally similar
phenomena without any regard for their functional roles as elements within specific
corpuses of artworks and styles. An example of such a fictive totality would be the tradition
of the perennial realism from Satiricon to Zola and Hemingway.
To sum up, Tynianovs literary evolution is not an abstract ancestral lineage of
distinctively literary phenomena but rather a succession of situated leaps forward into the
unpredictable. The new principle may involve the renewed, or refreshed, use of old motifs
and devices or a return to even older forms, which seemed to be forgotten (see Shklovskys
the knights move (1928)). It may canonize the junior branch, i.e. raise the status of a
low genre, or make an utterly non-artistic practice, like reportage or letter writing, a
literary fact. New principles can alternatively foreground either complexity or simplicity,
either esoteric or public, either pompous or modest. The borders of literature can be radically
redrawn. What remains constant is the very logic of the process and the very distinction
between art and life maintained and reproduced through defamiliarizations of the
habitual and the ordinary.
Such understanding of the literary evolution leads Tynianov and some of his
colleagues beyond the immanence of the literary series, into the social world of the
institutions of art, networks of influence and political ideologies. The speed and the specific
direction of the process cannot be explained without correlating literary and other historical
series (see Tynianov 1977). This is not social determinism but an account of the
convergence: among the pretenders to dominance in the literary system, the one that
converges with the developmental tendencies of the overall cultural system becomes the
victor (Steiner 1984, 112). Yet, the strongest influence from the non-literary may leave no
imprint on literature if no corresponding literary conditions are at place (Tynianov 1977,
280).
Overall, although Tynianov and Jakobson attack the same shortcomings of the
nineteenth century literary scholarship and come up with similar remedies like convergent
and ruptured evolution, they follow two different paths, the one of perennial teleology and
the one of emergent open-endedness. It is hard to fail to notice to what extent Tynianovs
ideas resemble almost contemporary ideas of Ludwik Fleck. Considering that Fleck was
working in Poland, it would be interesting to inquire into the possible links between early
science studies and Russian-Czech Literary Formalism. Yet, at the moment, it suffices to
mention that the divergence between Tynianov and Jakobsons paths is essential for
understanding the divergence within Tartu culturological studies.
In these sections, I have demonstrated the coherence and heterogeneity of the
international structuralist movement. Its coherence is based on strong thematic and
terminological overlaps, citation networks and personal translations by people like Roman
Jakobson. Simultaneously, the movement encompasses varied and even opposite theoretical
trends and research strategies. For every stereotype we have about structuralism (or
97

semiotics, formalism and poststructuralism), we can find the evidence for the presence of the
opposite stances in structuralist works. To give an example, the overabundance of the
signifier (in Levi-Strausss words) in some studies is often compensated by the emphasis on
communication and reference in others, the stress on difference coexists with the search for
invariance and identity, diachrony balances out synchrony, icon arbitrariness of a sign,
readerisminternalism, and so on. In cases of some key figures, the terms of these
oppositions coexist in uneasy but productive ways (see Jakobsons far-reaching conceptual
opposition between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic). In other cases, certain terms get
privileged and ally together to form the frameworks of specific schools and intellectual
movements. For instance, despite their differences, French structuralism and
poststructuralism share a set of choices within the pool of possibilities available within the
broader structuralist movement: e.g. the primacy of linguistics, difference, arbitrary
signification and the signifier over the signified (see Giddens 1987).
In this context, the Tartu semiotics can be viewed as a set of particular choices within
the broader field outlined in this chapter. Methodologically, this implies that one way to
define the framework of the School is to position its ideas with respect to other intellectual
stances and strategies variedly marked as formalism, structuralism and semiotics. Such
mapping of the Tartu stances is an objective of the next chapter. Yet, before launching into
the thick of Tartu ideas, let me dwell for a while on the history of the Schools reception in
Western academia.
A Short History of the Reception of the Tartu School in the West
Just as the conceptual framework of the Tartu School can be understood by its comparative
juxtapositions with preceding and contemporary trends in formalism, structuralism and
semiotics, its history is most intelligible if we go beyond Soviet borders and trace some of the
contacts between Tartu scholars and their Western colleagues. As I have already mentioned,
the West had a prominent presence in the discursive environment surrounding Soviet
structuralism and in the everyday lives of the Tartu scholars. It is sufficient to recall the
pervasive atmosphere of summer schools as the existence on the border, whether discursive,
political or geographical. Although the Schools apparent cosmopolitism and Westernism
provoked quite a few critical remarks, the actual ties and relative recognition in the West
were among legitimizing and stabilizing factors that help to account for the relative
continuity of the Tartu project during almost three decades.
Indeed, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the Tartu School was one of the
very few best-connected academic groups in Soviet academia, definitely in human sciences.9
Most others who made their name known outside of the Iron Curtain were usually brilliant
individuals like Mikhail Bakhtin. Alternatively, from the very beginning, the Tartu group
advertised itself as such, as a group or a school. This is partially due to the fact that its leaders
consciously capitalized on the traditions of sound schools in linguistics and literary studies
like the Geneva School, Moscow Linguistic Circle, the Prague School, and many
more. The collective Theses on the Study of Cultures (Theses-1973) were first published in
Warsaw and then by Mouton in The Hague; they were not even designed for domestic
publication.
Before elaborating on the dimensions and scope of the connectedness of the School
in the West, I would like to emphasize that the matter should not be reduced to the history of
the attempts of some local group of scholars trapped behind the Iron Curtain to get to the
9

The only worthy competitor would be Vygotskian psychologists clustered around Alexander Luriia
(see Luriia 1976). This school even has dedicated followers in the United States (see Wertsch 1984).

98

larger world of international scholarship. In fact, we should speak about the exchange of
mutual support and recognition between Tartu scholars and their colleagues in the West, at
least until mid-1970s. It is not only that Soviet scholars sought publicity in the West and were
ultimately recognized by some as worthy relatives from the East. The reverse was also true:
in the 1960s, the Tartu scholars, perceived as representatives of the Russian Formalist
tradition and close associates of Roman Jakobson, were often taken as vivid reminders of the
Western backwardness. Described by Thomas Pavel (1989) with respect to French
structuralists of the 1960s, this complex of Occidental backwardness 10 was one of the
engines of introducing the work of Soviet semioticians into the Western conversations.11
Be this as it may, the early establishment of the connections with Roman Jakobson
paved the path for Soviet structuralists entry into the several domains of the Western
humanities. The Tartu Schools success within the field of the Slavic Studies has been
particularly impressive. Due to the leading position of Roman Jakobson, Viktor Erlich and
other formalists in the Western studies on Russian and Eastern European culture, Moscow
and later Tartu structuralists effectively monopolized the Soviet input into Western Slavic
Studies: such international editions as Poetics/Poetyka/Poetika and Sign-Language-Culture
were hosting often very young Soviet scholars of Viacheslav Ivanovs circle, and only this
circle, along with the masters of Western linguistics and literary analysis like Barthes,
Greimas, Jakobson and Levi-Strauss. Furthermore, Tartu scholars played a prominent role in
the institutionalization of the international semiotic movement. Lotman and Ivanov were
among official founding fathers, and vice-presidents until 1985, of the International Semiotic
Association, established in 1968 and, at different times, headed by such figures as Umberto
Eco. In the 1960s, Tartu and Kriku were places of the pilgrimage for some of the key
semioticians: Jakobson visited Kriku in 1966, Julia Kristeva in 1969, and Tomas Sebeok in
1970.
Throughout 1960s to 1980s, there were a number of waves of interest in Tartu. In the
1960s, French journals Tel Quel and Change were among the first to publish single short
pieces by Lotman and his colleagues, as well as the reviews of the Tartu Schools works by
Julia Kristeva (e.g. 1968). As I have mentioned, this was a part of the general intellectual fad
on Russian Formalism and Bakhtin. By the early 1970s, the first signs of the emergence of
the Tartu industry emerged in Italy, Germany and the USA. Karl Aimermacher of Ruhr
University at Bohum, who published the first bibliography of what he called the MoscowTartu School of Semiotics, became the first specialist on Tartu (Aimermacher 1971). In
Italy, the School was first marketed by Leftist intellectuals clustered around Einaudi
publishing house and interested in propagating nonorthodox Soviet ideas. Soon, the
reception was picked up by wider circles of semioticians and cultural historians of the Middle
Ages, like Umberto Eco, Carlo Ginzburg and Maria Corti (e.g. Corti and Meddemen 1979;
Eco 1979; 1990). In the US, the major centers of reception were Brown University,
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Yale University and Indiana University at
Bloomington. This is not an accidental bunch: these places were major centers of the Slavic
10

This complex still persists in some circles of Western intelligentsia. For instance, this is what Vern
McGee, the translator of Bakhtin (1986), writes about the obscurity of Potebnia, Russias major
nineteenth century anthropologist, in the West: The obscurity of Potebnya and his followers in the
West is simply one more example of our provincialism (see 1986, xxii).
11
In their earlier works, Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov, Bulgarian migrs on the way to the
heights of French academic esteem and media prominence, were frequently alluding to Tartu works as
supports of their ideas. I am talking not only about a number of reviews Kristeva wrote about Tartu
summer schools but also about her first book entitled Smeiotik (1969). The Tartu scholars
immediately noticed the connection with the title of the Works on Sign Systems and referred to it,
privately and semi-jokingly, as a case of intellectual plagiarism (see Lotman 1997).

99

Studies and semiotics and thus the major attractions for Roman Jakobsons students, as well
as for the specialists in poetics and culture who preferred structuralism in its Russian and
Czech brands to Paris structuralism, poststructuralism and the Piercean renaissance in
semiotics.
The series of publications of Tartu works and on Tartu around 1978 ended the
reception of the School qua School in the West, at least in the USA. Although the name of
the School still persists in several enclaves of the Western academic discourse, the Western
attention is focused on specific figures and projects, such as Lotman and Uspenskiis works
on the semiotics of Russian culture (1984) or Lotmans studies on culture (see 1990, with
Umberto Ecos preface). Lately, we are on the crest of another wave of interest in Tartu (e.g.
Andrews 2003; Alexandrov 2000). Yet, so far, it has not left its traditional boundaries:
Russian cultural and literary history as well as the semiotics of cognition and communication.
Indeed, the Tartu School is a phenomenon which is simultaneously known and
unknown, that is its reception may be strong in some areas but it remains very limited in
expanse and depth. It is strong enough to constitute the very soil, a handful of absolutely
mandatory readings on Russian cultural history in major universities of America and Europe
(e.g. Wortman 1995). It is strong enough to single out potential applicants for graduate
schools and jobs in best American universities for Tartu-related emigrants and, in the 1990s,
for Tartu students. According to my private communication with both Tartu scholars and
American commenters, Tartu Schooling and the very fact of belonging to the Tartu-centered
network matters in such issues.
However, generally, the relationships between Tartu and Western scholarship may be
characterized as a series of misunderstandings and mismatches piling up one upon another.
Already early on, during the short honeymoon with Tel Quel, one could notice that the
French were interested in anti-structuralist tendencies of Tartu publications, the tendencies
which Tartu scholars were not inclined to underline at that time (Kristeva 1968; 1994). These
theoretical tensions were emphasized by the political misunderstandings between the French
leftist intelligentsia of 1968 and Soviet semi-dissident academics. As Kagarlitsky
summarized this mismatch, the Western intellectuals rebelled against repressive tolerance,
whereas the Russians suffered from much more repressive intolerance (1988, 208). Since
the Tartu scholars did not wish to participate in the Soviet genre of the critique of bourgeois
philosophy, they did not leave any systematic critique of early French poststructuralism,
except for the occasional remarks on non-scientific essayism and the frivolity of thought
scattered in the correspondence and conveyed to me during the interviews.12 In effect, the
sources convey not much more than the grudging displeasure with one another: all the rest is
subject to reconstruction.
Yet, one thing can be mentioned here: the Tartu scholars were dissatisfied not only
with, as they believed, irresponsible play with fire of Communism and Maoism but also
with the very understanding of semiotics as the counter-cultural critique of Western
(equated with bourgeois) cultural tradition, including its key signifiers like Subjectivity,
Personhood, Classics and University. As Dmitry Segal summarized the crux of the
disagreement, the Tartu School exercises a basically protective attitude towards traditional
semiotic systems which are endowed with cultural value The latter position is in sharp
12

For instance, I fully agree with you that Tel Quel irritates (the pastime of adult naughty boys but,
unfortunately, in quite serious circumstances). Maybe, we should give them a flick on the nose
(poshelkat) in the fifth volume [of Smeiotik]? To be honest, I do not feel much pathos, it is too
alien and unnecessary (Lotman to Ivanov, 1970; see Lotman 1997, 658)). Important observations can
be found in my interviews with Toporov. In Toporovs words, I do not see any necessary scholars
for me in the French School. They often commit a sin of frivolity. It is a pleasure to read, though
(Toporov, interview).

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contrast to some of the tenets of the Western philosophical structuralism which sees itself as
an instrument of dislocation, disruption, and sometimes even destruction of existing semiotic
systems (1974, 133). This mismatch is worthy to be kept in mind to understand further
divergences between Tartu and Western structuralism and poststructuralism on a more subtle
level.
In the USA, the reception of the Tartu School was complicated by both political and
academic circumstances. It was the Cold War and there was a strong resistance to the
communication with Soviet academics. In the 1950s, Roman Jakobson and his colleagues had
to wage a campaign for keeping the channels open by appealing to the State Department
and arguing that such contacts might bolster the non-conformists from within the Soviet
block.13
More importantly, however, the influence of Roman Jakobson was declining in the
1970s, the period of the most intensive reception of the Soviet humanities. As early as in the
1950s, Roman Jakobsons ideas of fusing poetics, linguistics and semiotics in the powerful
analysis of communication based on the methodology of Eastern European structuralism
seemed to attract the attention of the scientific communities and funding organizations.14 The
1958 Indiana University Symposium on Style seemed to be the beginning of a larger
movement (Sebeok 1960). Yet, as Richard Bradford shows in his book on Jakobson, it was
rather a curtain call. Over next 10 years,
The energies and motivating forces of critical writing shifted from a centripetal forces
that put such emphasis upon the constitution of the literary text to the centrifugal forces
that sweep such artifacts into the diffuse and untidy world of deconstruction, gender
studies, psychoanalysis and historicism (1995, 76).
The reception of Tartu was managed not by those who were riding these centrifugal forces.
Some more subtle theoretical and social reasons for this mismatch are to be discussed in the
next chapters. Here, I would like to highlight the most obvious circumstances of the Tartu
Schools reception.
One is language. Obviously, Russian literature has less chances to catch up with
American sentiments than French one. Yet, there are exceptions like Bakhtin and even
Vygotsky. Therefore, more important factor is the style and thematic of the Tartu works.
Although the language of French poststructuralists was not less esoteric than the one of the
Tartu series, it was an esoterism of philosophical speculation rather then dry nineteenth
century German positivism of some Tartu publications. The Tartu Schools strategies of
survival, which included the emphasis on professionalism and specialized non-linear
exposition, proved to be hindrances for understanding.15 Henryk Baran cites one of his
American colleagues, who pointed out that, when reading the Tartu studies on mythology,
We turn into Dr. Watsons who listen to the conclusions of Sherlock Holmes. We can only
admire but if we have doubts, we cannot express them (1998, 261). This might have been
partially related to the choice of research topics by Tartu scholars. Ancient European and
13

Erlich to Jakobson, 1957 (JC, box 4, folder 69).

Jakobson to Erlich, 1952 (JC, box 41, folder 18).
15
In Viktor Zhivovs summary, Moscow semiotic publications were characterized not only by
specific conceptual apparatus but also by certain mode of enunciation/exposition when most of
important observations were located in multiple footnotes which made impossible the linear
perception of the text. Perhaps, this elimination of the natural (linear) process of reading aimed at
opposing the new semiotic science to the style of Soviet humanitarian works where words were
hooked up with words to create the continuous narrative which produced the visibility of meaning
(2002, 292-293)
14

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Indian texts, or even Russian classical and modernist literature tended to gather increasingly
modest audiences by the 1980s, when classical philology found itself under attack and the
decline of Russian state socialism became apparent. The winds of academic attention were
blowing elsewhere.
The so called theory as well as cultural and postcolonial studies seem to be some of
the attractors of these winds, at least, until recently. A result of academic appropriation of
French poststructuralism, theory is an anti-disciplinary movement which is based on
discovering an essential literariness in non-literary phenomena (Culler 1987, 88).
Although this trope fits well to the Tartu Schools idea of culture as text, theory does not
seem to be very interested in elaborate mediating systems but rather aims at generating
interpretations, i.e. in reading rather than reconstructing (1987, 94). The success of the latter
and the failure of the former is partially due to the structural shifts in American university
toward commodification and customer-satisfaction, or the shaping of the university by the
demands of its student population (Coser1970, 285).
Similarly, cultural studies moved from traditional foci of cultural analysis, artistic
artifacts of the past, to such heterogeneous phenomena of present-day popular culture as
television, advertisement, tourism, design and more (G.Turner 1992). The inclusion of
Althusser, Gramsci, Foucault and other theorists initiates the interest in the politics of culture
which is inconceivable within Tartu framework: within this framework, one can study the
culture of politics but not the other way around.
Despite obvious limitations on the scope of reception, the works of the Tartu School
are read and cited. As I mentioned in the introduction, Lotmans citation index is only
slightly below the one of Mikhail Bakhtin. The specialists in the history, anthropology and
sociology of culture increasingly find his ideas, especially found in his historical studies and
grounded theories, relevant to their studies (e.g. Burke 1991; Greenblatt 1989). As this often
happens in the history of ideas and science, limited networks may suddenly start to grow
exponentially. Today, when the language of such recently triumphant trends as French and
Anglo-American poststructuralism and cultural studies seem to grow automatized,16 the
exposure to less fortunate traditions, like Tartu semiotics, may prove to be refreshing and
intellectually stimulating. Whether these suppositions are grounded or futile, we can decide
only by taking a closer look at the work of the representatives of the Tartu School.

16

See so called Sokals hoax, or the provocative publication of mock constructionist article in
Social Text in 1996 (see Hacking 1999, 3).

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Chapter Five
FROM RULES TO TEXTS:
The Idioms of Soviet Structuralism

In the early 1970s, Yuri Lotman (1971) proposed a typology of two possible attitudes to
preserving and transmitting cultural tradition, or two attitudes to culture learning
(obuchenie kulture). In short, the idea was that one can communicate culture across time
and between generations either as a system of rules and norms, or as a repertoire of texts,
either as a Handbook, or as a Book.
This distinction was not only a central analytical tool deployed by Lotman in his
cultural semiotics; it was also a product of his reflection on the transformation of the Soviet
semiotic project over time since the late 1950s. In this chapter, I take this hint and consider
the intellectual history of the Tartu School as an evolution between two major idioms, from
what I call the Rule (or System, or Handbook) Idiom to the Text (or Book) Idiom. I propose
this framework not as a description of the actual progressive process but rather as a
heuristic myth useful for ordering the immense amount of data at my disposal. That is, by
tracing the evolution from rules to texts, I keep in mind the ambiguity and malleability of
the terminology involved. I am also aware of the coexistence and interpenetration between
various conceptual frameworks in which these ideal-typical idioms are embodied.
Yet, these reservations notwithstanding, the trend from rules to texts indeed gives a
sense of the logic of the intellectual history of Soviet semiotics. Most early semiotic
propositions were motivated by the prospects of standardizing human language and artistic
discourse by means of the newest formal and cybernetic models. By considering language
and art on the model of structured games like chess, structural linguistics and semiotics were
hoping to provide the means for optimal economic accumulation and the most efficient
transmission of culturally valuable information (for instance, the project of Machine
Translation). The core of this Handbook Idiom in Soviet structuralism and semiotics was a
hope that precise rule following would provide the conditions for no-nonsense social and
academic communication.
The emergence of the alternative Book Idiom was facilitated by the lack of machine
realization for the results of earlier projects and a general disenchantment with formal
modeling. By the early 1970s, a number of Tartu scholars focused on the actual cultural
processes of cultural production and reproduction. The literary text, as a real-existing
thinking machine for accumulating, transmitting and generating cultural information,
became not only the central category but also the key idiom of a variety of Tartu writings.
The text became the brand name and the catchword that differentiated Tartu discourse to
almost the same extent as dialogue distinguished Bakhtins work and habitus Bourdieus.
In what follows, I consider different guises under which the Text, or Book, Idiom was
embodied in Tartu research and theorizing. The question I address in this chapter is why the
text came to play the idiomatic role and what implications this status has had for interpreting
and evaluating the Tartu studies on myth, art and culture.

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I end this chapter by contrasting the Tartu theory of the text with historically and
conceptually related theories, which were developed by French structuralists and
poststructuralists. In particular, I compare what might be called the democratic-republican
model of textualityor the empire of signswith its aristocratic model, as developed by
correspondingly Roland Barthes and Yuri Lotman. By reactivating the implicitin Lotman
but not in Barthespolitical metaphors behind the thinking of these two theorists, this
chapter puts the history of ideas in touch with intellectual and social history, as discussed in
first chapters of this book.
The Applied Semiotics of Modeling Systems
There was an old lady of Cloves,
Who wore boots instead of gloves,
When they asked for a hand,
she could not understand,
That quadrupedous lady of Cloves
- Segal and Tsivian (1965, 326)
This limerick was written by Dmitry Segal and Tatiana Tsivian to illustrate the algorithm of
text generation they proposed for Edward Lears limericks. Nonsense poetry attracted their
attention as a prototype of the situation when, devoid of any content, the sign refers to itself
and thus reveals the structure of language itself. This interest demonstrates the widespread
preoccupation with the internal organization of the sign in pre-Tartu and early Tartu periods
of the history of Soviet semiotics.
One of the main enthusiasts of the scientific linguistics of the 1960s, Isaak Revzin
has later developed a sophisticated critique of early Moscow structuralism (Revzin 1977). He
described his own evolution as the one from the late 1950s decision that structuralism is the
only way to go to the early 1970s conclusion that there are many truths and only pluralism
of approaches will provide an opportunity to understand language (Revzin 1997, 794, 833).
What exactly was he departing from? The answer to this question will constitute the core of
the summary of early Tartu semiotics, or formalistic structuralism. Based on this
introduction, I concentrate on a number of specific projects either typical of this stage or
interesting beyond its assumptions.
The constitutive trait of the close network of projects known as structural linguistics
and structural poetics was the focus on the signifier in abstraction from its relations to the
signified and context. In Revzins (1977) terms, this was a focus on periphrastic meaning
rather than categorical meaning. Periphrastic meaning is an invariant of synonymous
propositions. Here, the logical, linguistic or simply material form of these propositions is
irrelevant to the invariant meaning they convey. Therefore, one can speak about formalistic
structuralism. Its assumptions correspond to what Levi-Strauss criticized as formalism, in
which form is defined by opposing it to a content which is external to it (Levi-Strauss
1960, 122).1
In contrast, categorical meaningthe concept developed in the tradition stretching
from Wilhelm von Humboldt to Lev Vygotskyis the result of the interaction between
thought and language, between the signified and the peculiar organization of the signifier

Notice that here the predicate formalistic is more indebted to the critics of Russian Formalism then
to actual ideas and self-understanding of the members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the
Opoyaz (cf. Erlich 1981; Steiner 1984).

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(Revzin 1977, 245). This concept of the categorical meaning, or simply the Word, is
essential for later versions of Tartu semiotics.
The privileging of periphrastic meaning implies that, in contrast to Saussures
emphasis on difference, Russian structural linguists followed Roman Jakobson in stressing
the invariance, equivalence or isomorphism (homology) between the elements in different
words, propositions or languages. They were interested in what constitutes certain language,
text or genre as a coherent and robust whole and how this whole shapes the meaning. To
achieve this goal, structuralists employed formal modeling and frequency analysis, or the
statistical analysis of the frequency with which various units occurred in a corpus under
study.
Machine Translation
The ideal type of formalistic structuralism outlined above works best in the field of Machine,
or Automatic, Translation (MT) popular in Soviet academia in the late 1950s-early 1960s.
Fascinated by the prospects offered by Shannon and Weavers information theory as
interpreted by academician Kolmogorov and Roman Jakobson, Russian linguists and
programmers formed a large network of labs around the Soviet Union working on the
issues of encoding and decoding messages in natural and artificial languages. Any code is a
language and any coding is nothing but translation from one language into another, wrote
Viacheslav Ivanov and Sebastian Shaumian in 1961. In this perspective, the purposes of
structural linguistics and semioticsas its extension to non-linguistic sign systems of culture
were either the formalization of existing languages, including languages of myth and
literature, or the construction of some sort of Interlingua, or Universal Grammar (for
example, Revzin 1962). The first project aimed at reducing existing languages to the finite
list of rules and basic semantic units, e.g. basic grammar and vocabulary in the project of
creating basic Russian (see Gerovitch 2002) or modeling simple semiotic systems like
road signs or chess (Revzin 1970; Zalizniak, et al. 1962). The second one splits into further
subbranches such as the projects of discovering linguistic universals through either
typological schematization or generative models like the Chomskian Universal Syntax. In all
cases, the attempt was to enhance translatability by presenting languages in some uniform
way.
In the United States, the classical MT was abandoned by the mid-1960s, especially
after the famous ALPAC2 report in 1966, primarily because of the existing models tended to
ignore the ambiguity of natural languages and the difficulties in establishing the
equivalence between these languages (Haugeland 1985, 174-176). As one of the key
participants of the project reflected, a translation machine should not only be supplied with a
dictionary but also with a universal encyclopedia [which is] surely utterly chimerical (BarHillel 1960, 160). Yet, this was precisely the direction taken by some Soviet linguists. As
Ivanov declared in one of the early manifestos, The establishment of the one-to-one
correspondences between languages may be regarded as a preliminary step towards setting up
a universal inventory of linguistic meanings (Ivanov 1959, 55). This was a beginning of the
prolific stream of work aimed at singling out the synonym-less semantic atoms (sememes)
which constitute the languages nave world image (see Apresian 1995).3 One the most
daring attempts to incorporate semantics into MT research was Zholkovsky and Melchuks so
called MeaningText Model. In their own summary,
The American Language Processing Advisory Committee of the National Academy of Science.
This work resonated with some of the Western studies in semantics (e.g. Wierzbicka 1967 and
Lakoff 1968) as well as the work in Artificial Intelligence (e.g. Fodor and Katz 1962).
2
3

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It seems natural to consider the central task of linguistics to be the creation of a

working model of languagea logical device which, operating on purely automatic
basis, would be capable of imitating human speech activity. This device should be
thought of as a system of data and rules, which comprise, so to speak, the grammar of
the handbook of language, its working description, which in principle can be
implemented in a computer program The speaker has a certain meaning in mind
and constructs a corresponding text, while the listener receives a certain text and
extracts meaning from it. Language here functions as a mechanism in the full
meaning of the word, namely, as a device for the transformation, meaning-textmeaning (Zholkovsky and Melchuk 1970, 159).
The common assumption of these, syntactic or semantic, projects is an independence of
meaning from its linguistic form: the change in the form does not affect its content. Since
there is a complete freedom of paraphrasing, or recoding, language appears to be an
unmarked, or neutral, vehicle for transmitting ready-made messages.
Another important fact about the projects of formalistic structuralism, MT research in
particular, is that they were not concerned with context, usage, production and consumption
of communications. At best, there was some interest in how the intended impact on other
minds is programmed in the structure of, for example, ritual chants or modern poems (see
Zholkovsky and Shcheglov 1967). Yet, the variety or failure of actual impact was in the
realm of unthinkable, or noise. The focus was on how knowledge is imputed rather than on
how it is acquired and on how it is generated rather then produced. Therefore, considering
the interest of Soviet structuralists in the issues of information transmission not only between
automata but also between natural languages, there was surprisingly small amount of
applied work on education (exceptions include Kull 1965, Ogibenin 1965). There seems to be
nothing special to say about education if its pragmatic aspect is out of the picture.
Despite these problems and failures, the leaders of the MT movement are largely
unrepentant at present. For instance, Igor Melchuk currently argues that Soviet MT
distinguished itself from its American counterpart by higher sophistication of its models:
Soviet algorithms were truly cybernetic, that is they were able to expand, or learn, in the
course of their successive employments (Melchuk 1998). Be this as it may, MTs
terminology and some of its tropes indeed left a significant imprint on the work of the Tartu
School and on Tartu culturology, despite being subjects of first camouflaged and later
explicit criticisms (Lotman 1970b; Revzin 1977; Torop 1982). As we will see, the semantic
trend in MT studies is crucial for understanding the Tartu-Moscow studies on folklore and
myth. The image of language implicit in MT research continued to form a largely taken-forgranted background of clearly non-MT studies on poetry, art and culture. When Lotman
(1963) was contrasting linguistic and literary structures, he only sought to limit the validity of
the MT models to non-artistic communication. Even in the mode of negation, the lingo of MT
has served as sound background for Lotmans central ideas on text and culture.
Structural Poetics
Moscow and Tartu studies in structural linguistics received their major inspiration from three
major sources: the works of Roman Jakobson, statistical probability analysis of texts by
academician Kolmogorovs group, and Noam Chomskys generative syntax. Despite
Jakobsons pervasive influence and authority, the most original achievements have been
made in the field of so-called generative poetics. In Revzins (1966, 121) programmatic
summary of this trend, the endeavors of structural poetics, just as in structural linguistics,
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aim to discover an experimental approach to artistic works where a certain hypothesis is

formed as to the generative structure of the given text and then a corresponding generative
mechanism is constructed, and if this mechanism renders results which are similar to the
analyzed text, then one may consider that the researchers hypothesis is close to the truth
(translated in Seyffert 1983). The aim was to construct computer program-like algorithms of
derivation of the whole genres of texts such as a typical fairy-tale or a good detective
story (see the above limerick as another example). This selection of genres is not accidental:
the generativists often cite Viktor Shklovskys (1965) and Propps (1958) analyses of the
invariant plot structures of these genres. Like Lears limericks, both fairy-tales and detective
stories are highly clichd and predictable types of popular literature and thus most
affordable to structural analysis. In Revzins (1966, 121) words, works of highly gifted
artists who [constantly] alternate existing generative mechanisms, or codes, are beyond
formalization.
In contrast to this widely shared frame of mind, the most significant Soviet
generativists, Alexander Zholkovsky and Yuri Shcheglov, did not only add satire and humor
but also great poetry (Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova) to the list of
generatable kinds of texts. This was partially because their interests were not so much
definitional (what is genre X?) as utilitarian: How to optimize the ability of certain texts to
produce a desired effect on readers (listeners, consumers) (Zholkovsky and Shcheglov 1967)?
Classical texts, as the most effective pieces of art, were considered objects par excellance
for the study motivated by such a research question.
To be sure, this overt utilitarianism was, to a large extent, polemical and even
provocative. In contrast to the appeals of some structuralists to the needs of the militaryindustrial complex, Zholkovsky and Shcheglovs emphasized the persuasive power of the
great poetry marginal in, or often excluded from, the pantheon of the Soviet classics. At the
same time, they tried to demonstrate that the greatness and compelling power of this art
could not be accounted by the reference to either social conditions or inspiration. This
last emphasis was directed against the humanist critique of structuralism as a drainer of
the soul of art (see Seyffert 1983, 174).
To this critique, Zholkovsky and Shcheglov opposed what seemed to be the most
modern and cybernetic image of verbal art. They conceptualized the artwork as a specialpurpose machine directed at instilling (vnushenie) the authors attitude toward facts narrated
to the minds of the readers. In their words,
Any artistic text is a kind of machine, which acts upon the readers mind as a
transformer, or something which at the first glance can be called a machine in the
figurative sense but in reality can be called such also in the serious, cybernetic sense
(Zholkovsky and Shcheglov 1967).
Thus, the artistic text is a kind of artificial intelligence based on a series of algorithms of
transformation, or ifthen rules. Thus the objective of generative poetics is to construct a
model of the transformation of a certain theme into a text by means of the successive
application of different expressive devices (like emphasis, approximation, contrast, etc.).
The result is not the model of the actual process of writing and the outcome is not the same
text, as in the case of Borges Pierre Menard, but a completely different but still synonymous
text. As one American professor explained to me, the result cannot be one of the existing
Bachs fugues but something that resembles Bach on a bad day.4 This resemblance is a

Robert Belknap, private communication.

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criterion of capturing the semantic invariant of the work of the poet, or his poetic world
(Zholkovsky 1975).
Despite the fact that Zholkovsky and Shcheglov produced a number of interesting
analyses and their brand of generative poetics still has its enthusiasts, it can be considered the
most obvious example of the magnificent failure (Levin 1987, 10). Indeed, generative
poetics proved to be unmanageable: highly technical analytical descriptions were many
times larger than texts analyzed. Most importantly, Zholkovsky never clarified where the
theme was supposed to come from. At first, he identified it with the authors project or
idea. Later, he saw it as an invariant idea running through the artists work. Yet, how
interesting is it to try to derive the richness of Pasternaks poetry from the banal theme of
the unity and beauty of the world (Zholkovsky and Shcheglov 1980, 205)?
After immigrating to the US, Zholkovsky realized that his highly technical version of
structural poetics would not earn him many allies among American academics. As a result of
this cultural shock,5 the theoretical framework of his more recent writings, even his writing
style itself, changed radically already by the mid-1980s. Although his subject matter did not
change too muchhe always focused on the early 20th-century Russian modernism (although
he is currently more into contemporary literature), his perspective now combines not only
elements of less technical structuralism but also poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, reception
theory and what have you. Zholkovsky even invented a name for this gentlemans set of
methodologies at the disposal of any contemporary Western literary historian, enlightened
eclecticism (1992, 6).
Yet, at home, in Russia, the failure of generative poetics played a more positive
role. Zholkovskys and similar projects served as an important point of departure for more
process- and feedback-oriented approaches to text-generation, for instance Lotmans analysis
of the temporal structure of the process of writing (Lotman 1990, 74-78; cf. Waldstein 2007,
236-239). The idea of the artistic text as a kind of intelligence also survived and, in fact,
became one of the pillars of Lotmans poetics and cultural theory. The notion of intelligence,
however, evolved considerably since the epoch of structuralist Sturm and Drang (see the
section of Lotmans theory of the text in this chapter).
Elementary Semiotic Systems
The study of the so called elementary semiotic systems such as traffic signals, folk dress,
divination, etiquette, thieves cant and so on was one of the most distinctive preoccupations
of the participants of the 1962 Symposium and the first summer schools in Kriku. The
basic idea was to extend the descriptive procedures of linguistics to other, extralinguistic,
forms of behavior and discourse. This extension would have a twofold significance of
presenting these forms as (potential) objects of axiomatic description and as a way to work
out methods which would later be applicable to more complex systems (Ivanov 1962, 8).
Elementary systems served as bricks for the bottom-up construction of the science of
signification, that is as exemplars of formalization to be extended on more complex cultural
languages and as the actual elements of their syntax and grammar.
Although this branch of research was consciously derived from ethnographic
descriptions of folklore and material culture (e.g. Bogatyrev 1971), it had a distinctive
flavor of amateurish thought experimentation and even reckless intellectual game around it.
5

About his encounter with Terry Eagleton in 1980, Zholkovsky writes: instead of a formal talk, he
proposed to sing his own ballad on literary theory, which he did. Imagine how shocked I was [by this
sacrilege; I was fresh from Russia and I] still believed in the coming triumph of Science and in the
sacredness of Poetry (1998, 190).

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Most of the specific objects were chosen not so much because they fall into the domain of
professional competence of the researchers but because of, precisely, these objects exclusion
from academic and public discourse. It is not an accident that such topics as cartomancy and
thieves cant became targets of indignant remarks of the party boss Leonid Ilichev
immediately after the 1962 Symposium (see V. Uspensky 1997). What appalled Party
ideologists was nonetheless appreciated by the public. The atmosphere of excitement,
reported by many participants of the semiotic conferences in 1962 and in mid-1960s, is
particularly due to the very choice of topics with their tongue in cheek references to
Stalins camps, bourgeois etiquette, market economy and other politically incorrect
topics of that time (see Lesskis 1994; Levin 1994; Toporov 1994; Tsivian 1994).
Although the 1962 presentation of Petr Bogatyrev on the street cries of peddlers and
itinerant tradesmen as advertisement signals was framed in the same mood, it was a study by
a professional cultural anthropologistor ethnographer, in Russian terminologydescribing
the economic practices and folklore genres about to die out. Most of other studies were
amateurish in a sense that the researchers did not reveal any long-term commitment to the
objects studied. The very idea that semiotics can be built bottom-up, from uniform bricks of
elementary systems no matter what their specific nature was, reflected on the style of these
writings with their not quite assuring promises of future formalization and pervasive
ambiguity about specific objectives of study. In addition, to substitute for actual
formalization, these studies were highly schematic. This is by no means characteristic of only
Russian elementary systems studies: Culler (1975, 32-40) made similar observations about
Barthes description of fashion. Thus, we should not be surprised that much of the findings
became soon outdated and lost attraction to even their authors (e.g. Levin 1987). Still, some
of the pages of this branch of research are definitely worth remembering.
Margarita Lekomtseva and Boris Uspenskys semiotics of cartomancy, or fortune
telling by means of playing cards, is a classic of the genre (1962; 1965). It is a good example
because it represents simultaneously two different trends in elementary systems studies. On
the one hand, Lekomtseva and Uspensky purport to extend the analysis of synchronic
linguistic structure to the practice of divination. They also treat the exchange between the
fortune-teller and the customer as a case of communication framed in terms of Jakobsons
diagram. Yet, on the other hand, they manage to capture the temporal aspect of the practice
and thus go beyond the paradigm of the elementary systems studies and the limits of the
Game/Handbook idiom.
In the effort of synchronic structuralist analysis, Lekomtseva and Uspensky compare
cartomancy with natural language and determine that the former has a small vocabulary (list
of cards with their distinct meanings), a finite-state grammar (rules of cards combination)
and very simple syntax (the order of the relative values of different cards) (1962, 85-86). The
system behind cartomancy is analogous to the artificial linguistic system, such as chess
game or logical calculus, and thus can bein the near futurepresented by the generative
model similar to Chomskys generative syntax schemes. However, the authors primary
concern lies elsewhere. They are more interested in the actual process of sentence production
(synthesis) and the pragmatics of the interactions between the fortune-teller and the
divinated person. Ultimately, they are interested in the hermeneutic and social exchange in
which a fortune-teller (A) tries to predictor, in semiotic terms, programa persons (B)
future, that is to produce the effect of the natural connection between As cards layout
(signifier) and Bs personal experiences (signified). Lekomtseva and Uspensky see the
situation as follows: A and B share common knowledge on the level of the signifier (the plane

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of expression), i.e. they know, more or less, the langue of cards as described above6; yet, they
differ on the level of the signified (the plane of contents): since A knows nothing about B,
only the latter can provide referents for As variables. The interaction between these actors
is like participating in turn-taking games (playing!), in which As moves are controlled by Bs
reactions on them. A starts by interpreting the layout in some very obscure but culturally
defined way in which such phrases as favorable brunette or long road serve as variables
to be filled by Bs referents. Judging upon Bs reaction, A makes changes to the layout and
advances her interpretation. As purpose is to gain trust by convincing B that the cards tell A
something about Bs past and present. If this does not work, A usually refuses to continue by
inventing some reasonable way-out.
Thus, in Lekomtseva and Uspenskys portrayal, cartomancy is an open-ended and
feedback-based process (or self-generating system (1962, 85)), the closure of which is not
determined by the underlying sign system. The system defines that the successful closure
of divination would be a prediction of Bs future recognized by B as such. Yet, it determines
neither the content of the closure nor the very fact that it would be achieved. This is precisely
the point which was contested by the alternative account of cartomancy by Egorov (1965). In
his view, Lekomtseva and Uspensky leave the realm of system and enter the world of
pragmatics and play too quickly. They do not make full use of the semiotic promise of
formalization. Alternatively, Egorov proposes to see cartomancy as a rudimentary plot
similar to the ones in fairy tales, detective stories and Edward Lears limericks, as analyzed
by Propp (1958), Revzin (1964) and Segal and Tsivian (1965). He attempts to reconstruct an
invariant succession of steps, or regular permutations of a limited number of signs (cards). As
a result, instead of an open-ended process, the reading of cards (by A or B) appears to be
governed by the fixed narrative structure.
Models and Modeling
Egorovs objections are rather typical for the earlier idiom of Soviet semiotics, the idiom of
the chess-like game bound by exact rules. However, the object of Lekomtseva and
Uspenskys studies forced them to search for ways of accounting for playing which
involves not only following codes and rules but also switching them, performing and
extending exemplars at ones risk. This tension between constructing formal models and
tracing the modeling processes within cultural practices themselves is crucial for
understanding the history of the Tartu studies.
Following largely Jakobson, Tartu and Moscow semioticians conceived of linguistic
and other signs as representations, or models, of reality. They did not imply that signs
somehow reflect reality but that they refer to it and carry information about it. Of course,
signs do this only within certain sign systems, or modeling systems, or languages of all
sorts.7 Here, modeling is a process by which information is actively reworked and ordered
internally through the system of linguistic categories (Revzin 1964, cited in Shukman 1977,
6

Lekomtseva and Uspensky consciously lay aside the situations when B does not know the rules or
even when Bs participation is emphatically unserious. In these cases, there is just no situation of
cartomancy, whatever else may take place instead. For cartomancy to take place, both agents should
not so much necessarily believe in the possibility of fortune telling as be aware of the situation they
are involved in and be willing to follow along, at least for the moment. One can easily imagine a
modern rationalistic person who, with a smile of superiority, agrees to be divinated, and then, contrary
to all his beliefs, takes predictions seriously. The effect of following along for a moment is similar
to bracketing once everyday life in the film (see Lotman and Tsivian 1994; cf. Schutz 1945).
7
Here, language is used metaphorically to designate any communication system which can be
articulated in the meta-language of structuralism.

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203). Within these categories, sign and object enter the relationship of equivalence, or
analogy. That is, despite its inextricable arbitrariness, every sign may be an icon, or an iconic
representation, in the sense of Peirce and Jakobson (1971a, b). For instance, an arbitrary
juxtaposition of children and flowers, once established, can represent and communicate a
rich ideological complex of the whole countercultural milieu.
Furthermore, signs are not only models of but also models for (cf. Geertz 1973). At
the earlier stages of Tartu semiotics, this modeling for was still understood on the model of
playing chess: world-models were defined as an automated formal programs imposed on all
members of a group (Zalizniak, et. al. 1962). Yet, already at this stage, the distinction was
made between limited (vyrozhdennyi) and unlimited models. Artificial languages are
most limited, or closed, and most detached from reality; they have the least modeling power.
In contrast, such modeling systems as myth and religion are least detached and most
powerful. They model not specific aspects of the world but the whole world, its structure and
its history (world-models, modeli mira). This globality, however, comes at the cost of
polysemy, loss of precision and openness to multiple interpretative and practical extensions.
Their relation to behavior is not the one of rules to operations but exemplars to performances.
It is these unlimited modeling systems, from myths and fairy-tales to artistic texts and
Russian nobilitys strategies of self-fashioning, that occupy the bulk of Tartu studies by the
early 1970s. Although unified by the idioms of playing and text-orientation (the Book Idiom),
these studies reveal a number of further divergences I am about to explore.
Mythology and Folklore: A Mythopoetic Paradigm
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the largest volume of the work of the Moscow
branch of the Tartu (-Moscow) School was conducted in the linguistic anthropology of
myth and folklore. This is understandable considering the formulaic and repetitive nature of
myths and fairy-tales: it is as if they ask to be put into some kind of robust taxonomy or even
computer program (cf. Turner 1994). Mythical and folkloric objects are clearly highly
transparent for structural methods: among unlimited modeling systems, myths are most
closed, stable, visible and semiotic through and through systems (Meletinsky 1998, 42).
Yet the feasibility and the implications of the successful and comprehensive structural
description of myth proved to be far from being self-evident. Thus, the differences among
Tartu and Moscow scholars as well as between them and their Russian predecessors and
Western contemporaries with respect to mythological and folkloric studies are particularly
suggestive of the nature of Tartu(-Moscow) discourse and its evolution.
Myth and folklore is particularly central in the context of the narrative from rules to
texts and from game to play(ing) adopted in this chapter. Perhaps, myth may be seen as a
considerably robust and self-sufficient but it does not seem to be regulated by the same, or
even the same kind of, rules that the logical mind adopts. The impression of the contrast has
been in the basis of frequent accounts of a- or prelogical thought and its relegation to the
childhood of the humanity. As Lotman (1973b) argued, myth is not about communicating a
new message but code itself; it is about preserving and passing along the very structure of the
global world image of the human condition. Thus, descriptive models based on chessanalogy may have not much to capture in myth as a distinctive modeling system and a text.
The very synchronic nature of such modeling may be a hindrance because it is unable to
clarify such issues as the relationship between myth today and archaic mythology as well
as between mythos, logos and poesis as major aspects of the conditio humana. In sum, Tartu
mythological studies should be particularly revealing of the particularity of the Schools
agenda and methodology.

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There are two basic trends in the structuralist semiotics of myth and folklore, the
narratological and the linguistic one. Following Roman Jakobson, Claude Levi-Strauss
stressed language analogy and binary patterning; he and his French colleagues like Bremond,
Greimas and others searched for the grammar of the mythological mind or the universal
narrative grammar from which one could deduce specific kinds of texts. The Russian
folklorist Vladimir Propp, on the contrary, did not presume any a priori linguistic models. He
was more conserved about inductive and empirical search for the invariant sequence of acts
which can define a particular narrative genre. As we will see, Tartu and Moscow studies on
myth and folklore combined both trends.8
One of the key faultlines between these two trends is the attitude to structure and
history. Propp separated the invariant structural (morphological) skeleton of all tales of a
particular genre (magic tales which proceed in consecutive stages from loss to its
liquidation) and historical origins of specific plots in the usages and the life of the people
and in the forms of thought that emerge from them in the first stages of the development of
human society (Propp 1976, 282). Against Propps historicism, Levi-Strauss argued that
it is not the past he [Propp] lacks, it is the context (Levi-Strauss 1960, 137). The context
Levi-Strauss implied was the one of the untamed mind with its operations of bricolage and
analogical thought.
In their turn, Moscow mythologists and folklorists do not see much difference
between Propps past and Levi-Strausss context. Following Jakobson, they argue that
the archaic past of the mythological archetypes is the decisive context for understanding
persistent folkloric and even literary stereotypes. As Sergei Nekliudov summarized this
mythopoetic perspective,
To explain things means to explain their origins. This idea is in the basis of
mythopoetic approach. Synchrony does not exist, it is a fiction. It exists only as a
multiplicity of actualized details of previous layers. The existence of a text can be
adequately described only in diachrony. The diachronic investigation allows to
establish the place of elements in the whole, their meaning.9
As one can see, Moscow semioticians are reluctant to adhere to the severe demands of
Levi-Straussian anti-historicism. They emphasize their ascendancy to classical IndoEuropean linguistic and mythological paradigms with their search for origins and
prototypes (see Eliade 1959; Dumzil 1952; Jung 1959). Yet, they also underline the truly
scientific, i.e. structuralist nature of their enterprise. They argue that structuralism, with its
emphasis on systemic and relational definition of (language or mythology) units, is able to
evaluate the significance of resemblances: not all familial resemblances are of structural
significance, i.e. relevant to meaning. In contrast to Saussure and Levi-Strauss, Moscow
semioticians further argue that the system in question is not a synchronic langue of a
language speaker or taleteller but rather a whole thick mass (tolshcha) of texts and contexts
in which the unit in question has operated throughout the history of human culture (Lotman
[1985] 1992b, 201).
According to the Tartu School, pure synchrony is insufficient as a framework
because, if we look at the current state of a myth or a fairy-tale, it looks like a heterogeneous
8

In the structuralist jargon, they can also be distinguished as the syntagmatic and paradigmatic trends.
As we will see, Propp was concerned about the linear, sequential unfolding of the narrative while
Jakobson and Levi-Strauss about its paradigmatic patterning, i.e. parallelisms, repetitions and
vertical associations.
9
Nekliudov, interview.

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combination of both highly, emotionally and semantically, charged segments and utterly
automatized, even meaningless clichs which serve as either anomalies or formal elements of
discourse. However, Moscow semioticians proceed, this is only the surface structure. In the
diachrony, all aspects of the text are significant and interconnected. However, these
interconnections cannot be seen from here and now of a contemporary person (perceived
past). They can only be seen in the perspective of the noumenal past, that is the paradigm
of possible transformations of some primordial, or archetypical, proto-forms of thought and
action (cf. Goethes Ur-Pflantze) (Ivanov and Toporov 1976). In this past, clichd and
anomalous elements of contemporary discourses are meaningful fragments of older and fuller
texts in which these elements used to have had meaning.
Here, Moscow semioticians bring together Jakobsons ideas and the ideas of the
Marrist School in Soviet linguistics and anthropology. In Lotmans restatement of the key
concerns of Olga Freidenbergs paleontological analysis, it
proceeds from ready made phenomenon and uncovers, stage by stage, the multistadiality of the development of this phenomenon. [She was] interested in relics,
fragments of previous textual formations, meaningless in their new environment,
intelligible for neither [modern] authors nor audiences and acquiring meaning only
upon their transposition into authentic or hypothetic contexts of deep antiquity
(Lotman 1973c, 483-484).
Based on these archaist concepts, Tartu-associated Moscow linguists and anthropologists
followed two major directions in their studies on myth and folklore. One was the
reconstruction of archaic and archetypical forms of myth and the other consisted in tracing
the role they played in shaping literature and culture of more historical epochs (so called
historical poetics). The first direction was pursued in the voluminous studies, often
coauthored by Viacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov, on Indo-European and Slavic
mythology (e.g. Ivanov and Toporov 1974; 1984).
The Travel to the Roots of the Human Mind
The purpose of their studies is not just the reconstruction of archetypical stories like the
creation of the world but the reconstitution of the whole mythopoetic, or myth generating,
universe of the ancient proto-Indo-Europeans and proto-Slavs in its major structural
coordinates. Their ultimate purpose is the universal human world-image, even though, in
contrast to much of Western anthropology, they claim to proceed inductively, from worldimages to specific cultures and civilizations. The result, according to Toporovs Western
admirer, is a theoretical foundation for the study of Indo-European poetics (Watkins 1995,
26).
What has been the source of the urgency of such an enormous task, the reconstruction
of the archaic world image? Beyond narrow tasks of the Indo-European philology, Tartu
scholars consider such reconstruction a necessary precondition for understanding the
evolution of human culture. The point is that the most archaic is also the most universal and
thus informative of the human condition per se. The objective of Moscow mythologists is to
provide a universal grid of primordial differences and resemblances that constitute the
invariant paradigm of subsequent transformations. For instance, on the basis of enormously
rich linguistic (including etymological), ritual, archeological and even later literary evidence,
Vladimir Toporov reconstructs the figure of the World Tree (Arbor Mundi, drevo mira) as a
key archetype of Indo-European and, arguably, human mind. This is not just a psychological

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image, as in Jungian psychoanalysis (Jung 1959), but a grid of structural oppositions and
their permutations.
The intersection of the vertical opposition of top vs. bottom with the horizontal right
vs. left one produces the tripartite scheme of heaven, earth and the subterranean. As a
commenter points out, this is a model [which] encodes rules of social behavior, in particular
marriage and kinship system. It provides a universal scheme of basic semantic oppositions
(Rudy 1986, 571). Indeed, Toporov argues, such distinctions as life vs. death, light vs. dark,
male vs. female as well as such symbols as cross, mountain, and the first human being can be
understood by mapping them onto the model of Arbor Mundi. The same is true about the
universal cycle of birth, development and death (Toporov 1973a).
Unlike postmodern critics of Eurocentric rationalism, Toporov does not target his
analysis at critiquing the World Tree mentality. The logic of his reconstruction does not allow
for any alternatives to this mentality, such as the decentered network, or rhizome (see
Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Like Kantian necessary illusions (the Ideas of Pure Reason),
the Tree is a necessary and natural construct based on human anatomy, biological processes
and human position in the world.10 Due to the presumed correspondence between nature and
culture, such models as Arbor Mundi are not only the most persistent figures of human
thought and imagination but also the most efficient means of preserving and passing along
the most essential non-genetic information necessary for human survival (Toporov 1973a).
To question the naturality of these models is either to propose one more transform of the
archetype (e.g. the rhizome as a contrastive variant of the World Tree mythology) or to pose
a threat to the survival of the human species.
The ideology of mythopoetic studies can be further clarified by analyzing Ivanov and
Toporovs justifications for their focus on the reconstruction of the proto-Slavic mental
universe. Their point of departure is dissatisfaction with the state of the studies on Slavic
antiquities in comparison to the classical-philological studies on Hellenic, Indian and
Germanic mythology. The traditional view is that Slavic mythology is either an
underdeveloped, a derivative or a degenerate form of the common Indo-European
mythological system, as reconstructed by such authors as August Schleicher and Georges
Dumezil. Slavic mythology does not seem to have a clear pantheon of divinities and
correspondent social and conceptual hierarchies. This argumentation has been at one point
incorporated into Nazi racist justification of Slavic inferiority (see Rudy 1986).
Most significant Russian students of myth, from Alexander Potebnia to Nikolai
Trubetskoi and Roman Jakobson, saw their mission in rehabilitating ancient Slavic
mythology. Following this tradition, Ivanov and Toporov (1984) conducted the most
comprehensive reconstruction of the proto-Slavic pantheon and cosmology to date. Yet, they
went even further than their predecessors. When reflecting on the methodology of such
reconstruction, they argued that Slavic mythology was not a degenerate but a particularly
revealing form of the Indo-European model of the world. They argued that the paucity of
written records about Slavic mythology may be a sign of its higher authenticity, its closeness
to the original Indo-European culture and society.
Slavic tradition is distinguished by the vividness of its not-yet-institutionalized forms
and relative closeness to the primordial dialect system In the developed traditions,
such as a Celtic one, the primordial system is, first, institutionalized, i.e. taken out of
the natural evolution, and second, open for the inclusions of multiple late elements
(1984, 88).
10

Ivanov (1978) hypothesizes the correspondence between genes and semes, the elementary units of
meaning.

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In short, Slavic mythology, reconstructed on the material of Slavic peasants folklore, their
social organization and subsequent literary production provides more adequate insights into
the ancient Indo-European, and ultimately human, mentality and social organization than
established European traditions.
Myth and History
We should not forget that, from the standpoint of Moscow semioticians, mythological
mentality is not only the cultural idiom of one specific type of society, cold society, but
also a universal stage in the development of human consciousness, a typological layer which
may always be activated again (Segal 1974, 151). Ivanov and Toporov interpret this
statement in such a way that the multiplicity of more contemporary cultural forms is a set of
algorithmic transformations of certain initial forms. According to their definition,
transformation is an operation leading to the distortion of the [initial] text while retaining the
invariant scheme (Ivanov and Toporov 1976, 268). This is essentially the formula of cultural
evolution which is also defined as resulting from the superimposition of noise during the
transmission of a text (1976, 266). The noise is the changes in social and natural
environment in time.
Thus, the whole human history is simultaneously a distortion and retention of the
initial proto-myth, or the proto-text. This archaic text is so robust that its distortions are
also its transforms, or its variants. By analyzing a wide range of phenomena, from literature
and science to folklore and even graffiti in Leningrad public restrooms, Vladimir Toporov
shows how contemporary notions of causality, modern polyphonic novel and obscene riddles
are not much more than repercussions and splinters of archetypical oppositions and
resemblances (Toporov 1971; 1973a; 1992). In a word, the whole complexity of human
culture can be reduced to the archetypes like the World Tree as variants to their invariant.
Toporov (1973a, 167) further argues that the operations of the historical mind are
variations of the major cosmological schemas in the situation when the temperature of society
gets higher (see on hot an cold societies in Levi-Strauss 1962 and Ivanov 1986).
By postulating the continuity of human history, Tartu scholars enter the realm of
spatial analogies, like the ones borrowed from topological analysis. Topology deals with such
properties of objects which are preserved through deformations, twistings and stretchings.
Topology does not deal with tearing and other ruptures of continuity. It is a space in which
one can demonstrate the equivalence of various objects as long as one can transform one
into another (i.e. circle into ellipse), in a finite and traceable sequence of steps (Lotman 1969;
Toporov [1983] 1998).
From topological perspective, the relationship between a contemporary text and its
invariant (archetype) is like the relationship between one possible position of an hour hand of
a clock and a circle. Thus the mythological model of the world can be presented as a
synchronic space of all possible texts (or positions of the hour hand) of a given type. In
contrast to Newtonian space, this primordial space is not neutral to objects in it. It is unevenly
structured around basic binary oppositions like center vs. periphery or us vs. them; it is
gradated with respect to value and sacredness (Toporov 1988). This space is not just a static
container of things; it is realized through various paths, or ways of neutralizing oppositions
of this and that, internal and external, home and forest, cultural and natural, and more
(Toporov [1983] 1998, 489). These paths constitute a matrix of possible transformations, or
specific texts, in respect to which mythological space serves as a proto-text (455). In other
words, mythological space conditions and constrains its own possible extensions in time.

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This is, Toporov claims, the secret of the survival of oral plots lacking written inscription (as
in Slavic tradition).
Thus, history is not much else then a set of possible spatial paths realized in real time.
In this spatialized time, much can be forgotten but nothing is totally lost: even the most
formal rules of mathematics and law can be shown to have archetypical origin in myth (or in
paths in mythical space) (Ivanov 1976). Still, contemporary cultural artifacts and practices
differ in the way they preserve their perennial heritage. Some lose their original iconicity and
ambiguity and become purely conventional sings or utilitarian things, e.g. etiquette or design.
Yet, other contemporary situations and persons are particularly receptive to their archetypical
background. This is dream, literature, revolution or affective states of all sorts.
According to Toporov, the works of such writers as Dostoevsky and Gogol are
particularly revealing of the mythopoetic dimension. For example, the persistence of the
word suddenly in Dostoevskys novels leads back to the archetypical pattern of crisis when
the organized, predictable cosmic principle is threatened by a return to destructive,
unpredictable state of chaos (Toporov 1973b). The key to this and many other
mythopoetic analyses of modern literature is the idea that defamiliarizing and codebreaking effect of literary devices is an effect of the reactivation of the dormant resemblances
and interconnections in the archaic mythological topology. By displacing our attention from
the message to the linguistic code, art, in Walter Benjamins words, flits past, or reveals
the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension hidden in our language, the
most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity we still possess (Benjamin 1978, 335-336).
Myth, Technology and Modernism
Here, we approach what I consider the most interesting aspect of the mythopoetic studies. As
Russian Formalists argued, the aesthetic effect of art, especially some forms of poetry and
film, is based on the foregrounding the technology of their production: formal devices
become bearers of meaning. The film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, along with many other avantgarde artists, founded his artistic practice on this intuition. However, he went further and
proclaimed that art is nothing but an artificial retrogression in the field of psychology
toward the forms of earlier thought-processes, that is a phenomenon identical with any given
form of drug, alcohol, shamanism, [and] religion (see Moore 2002, 35). In a series of papers,
Viacheslav Ivanov interpreted this idea in the framework of mythopoetic analysis: ambiguous
and polyvalent artistic associations are nothing but the traces of archetypical invariants, or
vestiges of mythological thinking revealed behind the crust of modern culture of
conventionality and forgetfulness (Ivanov 1976; 1999). In particular, art reveals that, in the
basis of words meanings (even those of most abstract words), there are signs of simple
bodily movements (Ivanov 1976, 29). In Eisensteins words, thought is a spatial act, i.e. a
material gesture or a manipulation of the environment in time and space (Ivanov 1978, 62).
Proceeding from these ideas, Ivanov went on to demonstrate how, in his films, Eisenstein
tried to recapture the immediate, iconic and mimetic, relationship between the signifier and
the signified, how his films retraced this link forgotten behind our habit to treat this
relationship as arbitrary (Ivanov 1976).11

11

For example, consider the way Eisenstein refreshes long automatized metaphors. In one of his
films, a metaphor bursts into the action, fountains of milk, echoing the folklore images of rivers of
milk and a land flowing with milk and honeysymbols of material well-being (Moore 2002, 47).
A suggestive example of the close reading of Eisensteins semiotics of gesture can be found in Yuri
Tsivians (2002) analysis of the film Ivan the Terrible.

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Most important is the treatment of technology in this context. Of course, it may

participate in forgetting the Being, as Heidegger (1977) argued. For example, Fordist
discipline can be viewed as dehumanization through training. However, Eisenstein and
Ivanov demonstrate that the use of Fordist biotechnology in avant-garde theater can also be a
way of recapturing the primary meanings. Montage in film can participate in dislodging
contemporary static and conventional meanings of signs and in revealing the intricate
mimetic identity between gesture and word (cf. Benjamin 1968; Moore 2002; Taussig 1993).
In addition, these conclusions overlap with Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Lurias
theory of concrete thought (see Luria 1976). Developed on the material of the childs
development, it has also been applied to ethnographic data and to the reconstruction of cold
societies. Concrete thought has also been shown to underlie some of the adult functions
like skill acquisition and language learning (e.g. Tulviste 1977, 95). Viacheslav Ivanov
argues for the basic identity of concrete and mythopoetic thought as described by Moscow
semioticians: both categories refer to the phenomenon immediately embedded in the practical
and ritualized interaction with the world (Ivanov 1976).
One implication of this link between myth and technology is that the most radical and
pathbreaking innovations in human history are archaizing innovations, or innovations
which recapture the most archaic layers and models of human thought and behavior (Toporov
1979). For instance, radical futurists are usually better archaists than any of their
conservative opponents: in order to challenge the whole culture of the past, artistic radicals
should be aware of it in a much fuller sense than its traditional adherents usually are (Ivanov
1986). In sum, something is new to the extent that it recaptures the noumenal past, i.e.
recognizes itself as perennial. As Osip Mandelstam put it, creativity is accompanied by the
profound joy of recurrence (1979, 114).
Science and Myth: The Importance of Gnosis
Although Ivanov and Toporov cite mostly writers and artists, e.g. Dostoyevsky and Gogol or
Eisenstein and Mandelstam, as exemplars of such recapitulation of mythopoetic thought, they
make clear that this option is open to scholars and scientists too. In his interview, Vladimir
Toporov shared with me his ideas on the importance of having a vision, or gnosis, before
approaching culture in its totality. For instance, he claims, Mircea Eliade was a
mythological man, he knew beforehand [what was to be discovered] and only then turned to
sources and interpreted them in detail. Usually, his results were close to what he knew before
he started to work on the problem.12 This might sound like criticism but it is the highest
praise. Toporov says that, unlike many other modern scholars who look at myth from the
outside, Eliade was so deeply tuned to the mythological in his culture that he was open to
the mythological roots of any culture. In more general terms, the scientific interpretation of
a fact does not contradict to its mythology; both are essentially attempts at patterning and
classification (Tsivian 1990, 23). The implication is that to criticize the search for roots and
origins as mythological is besides the point: This might seem to be a mythological figure
[of thought] but it is also natural, necessary for self-identification13 Thus, together with
the Italian historian of culture Carlo Ginzburg, Tartu students of myth could summarize their
credo as follows: I try to show that most of the so-called human sciences draw their
inspiration from an epistemology of divination (see P. Anderson 1992, 216).

12
13

Toporov, interview.
Nekliudov, interview

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A Critique of Mythopoetic Analysis

In sum, Tartu-Moscow mythopoetic analysis developed some of the intuitions of Russian and
Western anthropology and philosophy of myth, especially the ideas of Jakobson, Trubetskoi,
Propp, Levi-Strauss, Victor Turner and Mircea Eliade. In contrast to early Tartu structural
linguists and most Western structuralists, Tartu students of myth and folklore turn to the
structure in diachrony. Their perspective, however, makes them spatialize time and reduce
the variety of cultural phenomena to their supposed archetypes in the primordial
mythopoetic thought of early humankind. The most persistent figure of their thought is the
reconstruction of origins. Such origin story seems to them a necessary prerequisite for
understanding the deep-structure function of a cultural unit. Moscow semioticians
recognize that contemporary language lacks cohesion and homogeneity. They believe that,
ultimately, every fragment of culture is significant and related to all other fragments in a
traceable way, through their origin in the proto-forms of thought and action.
It is not surprising that this idiom evoked multiple criticisms in the West and the
Soviet Union. Dell Hymes (1978, 403) was appalled by the sense of sweeping, simple
periodization of human cultures [, the sense characteristic for Tartu studies but apparently]
lost in American anthropology. Philosophers Mamardashvili14 and Piatigorsky developed
the full-fledged phenomenological critique of archetypical analysis on the basis of
understanding that every attempt to reconstruct the initial conditions already contains these
conditions in itself implicitly (1982, 29). Similar to Derridas criticism of the transcendental
signifier, these critics pointed to the dubious teleology inherent within mythopoetic analysis.
Ivanov and Toporov do not try to protect themselves against these accusations. On the
contrary, Toporov talks about research as a form of remembering your own mythological
roots. Ivanov openly proclaims that the observer can perceive only those possible worlds
which made possible this observers existence by their development from the moment of their
original emergence (Ivanov 1995, 3: 179). Ivanov and Toporov privilege everything that
reveals identity of things, not their difference. They are not concerned about the possibility
that there might be other observers who privilege completely different lineages and objects.
In effect, they reify their own epistemological status to the level of the transcendental
observer overseeing the transhistorical space, or topology, of cultural history from the
standpoint of some supreme knowledge, which curiously combines academic erudition and
esoteric gnosis. In the sight of such an observer, everything indeed has its authentic
meaning and everything can be transformed into everything else by a set of intermediate
links.15
The pivotal danger of this perspective is high arbitrariness of interpretations. Vadim
Rudnev (1998) is not alone in accusing Toporov and Ivanov of creating ancient Russian
mythology practically out of thin air. This may be an overstatement but Moscow
mythologists indeed seem to be so single-minded in their quest for invariance and hidden
truth that they make their conclusions notoriously contestable.16
Furthermore, high reliance on personal erudition opens a way for direct influxes of
social ideologies and concerns. Here, it suffices to mention the very Slavism underlying
14

Merab K. Mamardashvili (1930-90) was one of the most important non-Marxist philosophers in the
Soviet Union. In the 1950s, together with Boris Grushin, Alexander Piatigorsky, Georgy
Shchedrovitsky, Alexander Zinoviev, and other philosophers and social scientists, he was a
participant of the Moscow Logical Circle, a hugely influential academic salon (see chapter 2 and 3;
see also Piatigorskys (1996, 308-335) memoirs).
15
Cf. Perry Andersons critique of Carlo Ginzburgs methodological credo (1992, 212).
16
On Orientalism and Russian (self-)Orientalism see, for example, Brower and Lazzerini (1997), Said
(1978) and Waldstein (2002).

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semiotic and supposedly universalistic interpretations. Inherited from Jakobson and

Trubetskoi, and reinforced by the self-Orientalizing inferiority/superiority complex of the
Soviet intelligentsia with respect to the West, this Slavism makes Ivanov and Toporov
trapped in the nationalistic search for prestigious genealogy for the Slavic people, denied for
them by Western Eurocentric and racist scholarship. Instead of problematizing both Western
and Russian cultural stereotypes, they involve themselves in the game of who has privilege
over whom? (see Ivanov and Toporov 1984).
To be sure, this philosophy was by no means unquestionably accepted even within the
ranks of Tartu scholars. Although the rules of collegiality in Soviet academia did not allow
for much open criticism of ones closest colleagues, the dissatisfaction with mythopoetic
methodology can be found through the close reading of certain published texts and private
correspondences. For instance, Lotman criticized some of his students for overindulging in
Toporov-type reconstructions (private communication). In his review of a book by a Polish
colleague, he criticized him for confusing ideological and artistic neomythologism of
Marina Tsvetaevas poetry with the unwilling reproduction of mythological patterns, as
reconstructed by mythopoetic analysis. Furthermore, he argued that the interpretation of
[Marina] Tsvetaevas texts with the help of only archaic mythological code gives a holistic
and consistent decipherment but removes semantic tension, inconsistency, and ambiguity in
her texts.17
Similarly, Mikhail Gasparov criticized both the teleological nature of mythopoetic
research and its resistance to any outside verification (as in case of deciphering anagrams):
I have an impression that mythologism is not in the object but in the subject of study,
in method and approach, and, if wished, it can be read into any text Alliteration can
be made explicit by simple counting of sounds used above average; as for anagram, it
can be found only if you know the searched word in advance (my italicsM.W.) 18
These criticisms indicate the existence of different trends in the Tartu and Moscow studies of
myth and folklore. The alternatives are primarily associated with the works of Piatigorsky
(1965; 1971), Lotman and Uspensky (1973) and Lennart Mll (1965). For instance,
Alexander Piatigorsky and his Estonian colleague Lennart Mll departed from mythopoetic
orthodoxy quite significantly. In particular, on the basis of their studies of Buddhist
philosophy and mythology, they developed the original criticism of the binary oppositions as
a just one possible frame of thought, by no means universal or necessary. In contrast to the
binary framework propagated by Jakobson and Ivanov, Piatigorsky and Mll worked out the
idea of the zero way and tetralemma as fundamentally non-binary structures.19 Mll
(1965) came to the conclusion that signifying systems were not the only means of framing the
world. Otherwise we would find ourselves in the utterly untenable position on small islands
of separate signifying systems in the ocean of being (Mll 1965, 189). Other means of
framing are what Buddhists call the middle, or zero, way. If the ordinary sign presumes the
opposition between the signifier and the signified and the signified can only take the form of
A or not A, the Buddhist dharma is best represented by tetralemma, or the conjunction of
four statements of the following type:

17

See Lotmans review of Jerzy Farynos dissertation on Marina Tsvetaeva (LC, F136, s.47, p.32).
Mikhail Gasparov to Zara Mints, 1978 (LC, F135, s.312).
19
System and structure are inappropriate terms here. Alexander Piatigorsky (1970) comes up with
an alternative category, symbolic apparatus.
18

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The Buddhas teaching is as follows:

Everything is truth (A);
Everything is not truth (not A);
Everything is truth and not truth (A and not A);
Everything is neither truth nor not truth (not (A and not A)).
(Ngrjuna, in Mll 1965, 189)
In short, the zero-way is represented by the conflictual conjunction of A and not A (or, rather,
the conjunction which can be approximately rendered by Indo-European languages as but
and although which implies linking A and not A without any Hegelian synthesis).
What does this esoteric logical discourse imply? At least, one thing is obvious: binary
oppositions are not universal or necessary human cognitive attire. Unsurprisingly, among
many papers collected in Smeiotik, French structuralists paid disproportionate attention to
extremely shortwell, this could have been one of the reasons! pieces by Mll (Kristeva
1968; Barthes 1973). Roland Barthess (1973, 80-82) arguments against the naturality of
binary oppositions echoed Mlls short pieces. Mlls interpretation of tetralemma visibly
influenced Julia Kristevas (1969, 40) appropriation of Bakhtins concept of the dialogue and
her critique of the sign as Eurocentric and metaphysical concept.
All these examples demonstrate the heterogeneity of the Tartu framework of the
studies of myth. We encounter the same complexity in their approaches to the category of the
artistic and cultural text but the balance of forces is different in this field: what used to be the
minority tendencies in myth studies turns into the most representative Tartu conception,
Lotmans theory of the artistic text.
Text, Art, Human Nature: The Dialectics of Emergence
All words can be found in the dictionary;
and yet the [new] books published every minute
are not just repetitions of the dictionary.
- Alexander Pushkin
The text is central to both Tartu discourse and the criticism of the School. Leading
representatives of the Tartu School announced text semiotics (semiotika teksta) the
distinctive contribution of the School to contemporary human sciences (Ivanov 1976;
B.Uspensky 1994b). Simultaneously, their critics appealed to late Bakhtins opposition
between text vs. dialogue and code vs. context to accuse Tartu scholars of enclosure in a
text (Bakhtin 1986, 169). They even exploited the contrastive potential of these oppositions
to mobilize around the annual publication called Kontekst, a highly eclectic edition
publishing everything, from Russian hermeneutics and Bakhtin to standard Soviet literary
scholarship, as long as it was somewhat anti-structuralist. Be that as it may, the Tartu School
was the key Soviet analogue to the object of the Western critique of the fallacy of
textualism. In what follows, I consider how, if at all, this charge is applicable to the Tartu
School and how its conception of the text positions the school with respect to Western poststructuralist semiology.
According to Richard Rorty (1982, 139), textualists are those who write as if there
was nothing but texts. For the critics, the exemplar of the textualist is Jacques Derrida who
privileges writing over oral speech and declares that There is nothing outside of text
(Derrida 1976, 158). In a wider sense, the main charge against textualism is the implausibility
of imagining that we are [dealing with] a text that is writing itself, a discourse that is
speaking all by itself, a play of signifiers without signified (Latour 1993, 64). However, the
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main problem with these criticisms is that they presume a basic agreement between the critics
and the criticized on what text is. In fact, however, there is no more obscure concept than
the concept of the text. Yet, it is obscure not just due to the imprecision of language or its
use but due to the attractiveness of the text to varied agendas. In what follows, I
concentrate on the concept of the text, the artistic text in particular, with the focus on the
continuities and ruptures between Tartu semiotics, French (post)structuralism and Mikhail
Bakhtins philosophy of dialogue.
To start with, the text is supposed to be of no interest to structuralists at all. This
seems to follow from the idea that structuralism is not about explain(ing) individual works
but about making explicit the system of figures and conventions that enable works to have
the form and meaning they do (Genette 1988, 8). Indeed, this is one way of treating
individual texts and works: they pertain to the realm of chaotic parole and performance,
they are beyond the reach of the structural method and science as such (see Culler 1975).
This perspective is usually associated with restrictive semiotics that refuses to deal with
parole, connotation, diachrony as well as the objects less clichd and schematic than myth or
fairy tale (see Chandler 2002; Revzin 1977; Shukman 1977).
However, from American New Critics and Russian Formalisms to the masters of
French (post)structuralism, individual artworks continue to be in the center of attention of
such different scholars as Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Barthes and
Foucault. The common point of departure for these studies is the view of the text as a system
of its own, superimposed over the langue and susceptible to close reading. One way of
pursuing this agenda is to oppose the work as a historical monument, the object of classical
philology, to the text as just a string of words on the page, words which yield themselves
to close reading. This kind of reading presumes that everything exterior to words on the
pagebiographical, social, psychological or historical circumstancesis irrelevant to the
account of the presentation and sophisticated organization of a set of complex experiences in
a verbal form (Hawkes 1977, 152). Similarly, Viktor Shklovsky urged his colleagues to
focus on the devices of verbal orchestration like articulation, mimicry and sound genitures
regardless of any extraneous factors (see Erlich 1981, 75).
The starting point for the Tartu semiotics of the text is this explosive combination of
anti-textual restrictive semiotics and the rigorist conception of the text as system of its own.
This combination is characteristic for Lotmans early magnum opus, Lectures on Structural
Poetics (1964; Koshelev 1994), and, to some extent, his more mature books, The Structure of
the Artistic Text ([1970] 1998) and The Analysis of the Poetic Text (1972). The history of the
Tartu semiotics of the text can be understood as a series of attempts to either bridge these
perspectives or overcome them altogether. These attempts were tied to a number of problem
domains, the particularity of artistic communication being the central one. Here, Tartu studies
proceeded explicitly from the Formalist concept of estrangement and Jakobsons poetic
function. However, their specific solutions carried an imprint of the particular historical
juncture of the 1960s and 1970s.
Complexity, Information and Artistic Play
As I argued earlier, one dimension of the historical conjuncture at which Soviet structuralist
poetics and semiotics emerged was the cybernetic revolution aimed at expanding scientific
methods to human sciences. Roman Jakobson was the key bridge-builder between
cybernetics, information theory and structural linguistics. His hybrid model of
communication left deep imprint on Soviet semioticians. Not less influential were
academician Kolmogorovs efforts to measure artistic information as well as various attempts
to provide generative algorithms for various kinds of texts. These and other concerns
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converged under the roof of the growing interest in both technical and theoretical aspects of
preserving and transmitting cultural tradition.
Early formalistic structuralism sought to resolve this issue by reducing the scope of
the meaningful information to the one which can be formalized and reliably transmitted
through highly codified channels. According to these models, information is encoded in texts
and then decoded by receivers. Here, the text is just an intermediary in the communication
exchange or a realization of the ready-made linguistic system. The idea that texts (or
discourses) are essentially long linguistic sentences constructed according to the rules of the
langue is in the focus of text linguistics and discourse analysis, as developed in Moscow
and in the West (see Nikolaeva1997; cf. Levinson 1983).
From early on, Yuri Lotman took a different road. In his first semiotic paper, he
argued for the significant difference between linguistic and literary structure (Lotman 1963;
cf. Kristeva 1968). Literary text, according to Lotman, is irreducible to linguistic rules (or the
langue); it exists on the level of interrelations between different languages, or codes. This
specificity makes literary (and artistic, by extension) texts particularly complex and allows
them to be particularly efficient carriers and producers (!) of valuable cultural information. In
contrast to non-artistic media, artistic texts are able to transmit much more information per
unit of their structure. This immense compactness and informativeness is, in fact, Lotmans
definition of art. Beauty is information, his dictum states (Lotman 1964; Koshelev 1994,
85).
Obviously, this brief summary needs some elaboration. Lotman consistently conflates
textuality and artisticity (khudozhestvennost, cf. literariness of Russian Formalists) as
well as textual complexity and artistic value (Lotman 1964; [1970] 1998; cf.
Cherednichenko 2001). To illustrate this link, let me employ Lotmans favorite example
repeated during introductory lectures at Tartu University: a chair may become an artwork if
you increase its complexity by putting it into the frame, that is encode from more than one
perspective, as not only a practical object but also an object of contemplation and value.20
This example indicates that Lotman used complexity in an uncommon way.
Here, the immediate reference is to Kolmogorovs complexity, the concept worked
out to determine the quantity of information in individual objects. In addition to Shannons
information theory which mainly concerned itself with the average information of a random
source, Kolmogorovs statistical information theory determines the informativeness of an
object with respect to its frequency in the pool from which it is selected. For instance,
according to Kolmogorovs tongue in cheek calculations, lead articles in Soviet newspapers
usually contain low informative load because its word selection and style can be predicted
out of the pool of similar articles with high probability. In Kolmogorovs terms, these articles
have low complexity, i.e. can be compressed without loss of significant information. In
Kolmogorovs words, the length of the shortest program [or Markov chain] of producing
[such an article] is not high (see Uspensky 1997, 195). In contrast, he argues, the ideal
machine for generating Pushkins Eugene Onegin would have to contain the whole
experience of the humanity in its memory (1997, 245). 21 The flip side of this argument is
that the text by Pushkin is itself a machine for transmitting universal human heritage. Finally,
20

I am grateful to Liudmila Zaionts, Moscow University professor and Lotmans student, for
mentioning this example to me.
21
Another exercise in information measurement was cited by Tartu scholars even more frequently
(see Lotman 1964; [1970] 1998; 1972): on the basis of analyzing a corpus of newspaper articles and a
number of poems, a Hungarian scholar Fonagy demonstrated in 1961 that the knowledge of only 35%
of words in articles allows to predict the rest 65%. The interpretation is this 65% of the verbal
material in newspaper articles is redundant, or meaningless. For poetry, the ratio is 60% to 40%
(Koshelev 1994, 86; Lotman [1970] 1998, 81).

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it is important to mention that these examples are not just hobby-like applications of serious
mathematical ideas: unfortunately, it is not widely known that both Markov and Kolmogorov
came up with their ideas of the chain and complexity while trying to come up with a
program for generating an approximation to a literary text, Eugene Onegin in particular.
Hence, Kolmogorov connects complexity, informativeness and literariness. Lotman
picks up this idea and argues that it is experimentally proven that the informative capacity of
the poetic speech is not lower but higher than that of the ordinary speech (Lotman 1964;
Koshelev 1994, 86). That is, although Lotman does not abandon the Formalist idea that
deautomatization as the defining quality of literariness, he prefers to define artisticity
through complexity. The artistic text is the one which, despite the redundancy of its structural
elements, preserves and even increases its own informativeness through multiple contexts
and usages. In short, the closer we get to the end of the newspaper article, the less we expect
to be surprised; true literature should be able to surprise us all the way through and even upon
repeated reading.
More specifically, Lotman argues that the literary text and the ordinary linguistic
message differ in the manner in which information is encoded in them, i.e. in their
organization (1964; 1972). The ordinary linguistic text allows for various expressions for the
same content. It is translatable and, in principle, indifferent to specific forms of inscription
[e.g. sounds, letters and telegraphic signs] (Lotman 1964, 156). Here, language (code) is too
familiar to be worthy of notice. Since information transmission is pragmatic and automatized,
language seems to be innocent, that is free of semantic and ideological load. The choice of
specific linguistic medium is largely irrelevant to the information transmitted.
Yet, once a new code, i.e. rhythm or frame, is superimposed on the grammar of such
natural language as English or Russian, this language loses its transparency and automaticity.
Not only what but also how of the communication gets into the picture. The medium is also
the message. Content and form are no longer easy to distinguish. Just like life is a function of
the whole working system of the organism, the
idea [of the artistic text] is not contained in particular citations; [rather,] it is
expressed in the whole of the artistic structure The ideological content of the work
is structure. The idea in art is always a model, it reproduces the image of the world.
Outside of structure, there is no idea (Lotman 1972, 37-38)
Furthermore, in contrast to non-text,
The text of the literary piece is individual [and unique] The link between content
and expression is so strong that the translation into another system of inscription is
not indifferent for the content The system of enunciation in the artistic text is closer
to the one in music. Text should be first translated into sounds and then perceived
(Lotman 1964, 157).
That is, if you wish to inscribe a poetic text differentlyin English rather then in Russian or as
a film rather then as a novelyou are going to get a significantly different text. This is
because the meaning is washed-over the n-dimensional semantic space of the given text
in such a way that any element, including misprints, may turn out to be significant
(1990, 48). Lotman demonstrates that such formal mechanism as phonemes and meter
participate in the generation of the meaning in a poem. For instance, by highlighting the
parallelism between otherwise unrelated words and sentences, the rhythm of the poem brings
out new equivalences and oppositions, irreducible to the ones contained in dictionaries,

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grammar books and even everyday talk.22 This is a feature of poetic language which
Tynianov called the density of the poetic line while Jakobson enshrined it in the famous
formula: the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from axes of selection [the
paradigmatic] to the axes of combination [the syntagmatic] (Jakobson 1960, 358). Yet,
never [before Lotman], the essence of poetry have been related to parallelism so powerfully
(even though it is hard to find another phenomenon within the poetic text which enunciates
the structure of poetic communication more clearly (Cherednichenko 2001, 155). In Yuri
Lotmans summary, poetry is a structure all elements of which are, on different levels,
parallel to another and thus bear distinctive semantic load (Lotman 1972, 74).
In contrast to a phrase in the ordinary speech or even an object in our everyday
experience, the literary text is a complexly constructed meaning in which neither element is
purely redundant or random (1972, 38). It is not random because, as Anton Chekhov liked to
say, if there is a rifle hanging on the wall in the first act of the play, it has to shoot in the
third. This is a rule of the genre. The point, however, is that the literary text is always an
interaction and a conflict between at least two genres, styles, as well as graphic, phonological
and lexical systems. If ordinary or mythical text is a realization of a certain system, or
code, the literary text is a dialogue of the multiplicity of them (1990).
The reality of the text is constructed by the system of relations [between, for example,
meter and lexeme and, ultimately, the whole of the text and its specific subsystems]
The relationship between text and system in the artistic text is not an automatic
realization of abstract structure in concrete material but always a tension, a struggle
and a conflict (1972, 12; 124).
This tension, and even struggle, is a precondition of the aesthetic perception. One code sets
up an expectation while another one violates it: for example, the rhyme may violate the
grammar. These inter-code relations throw the rules of each code into vivid relief,
demonstrate their conventionality and thus introduce the tension between rule abiding and
rule breaching into every code involved (1972, 43). Therefore, Chekhovs remark may refer
to abstract genre but not to the whole of the text: whether the rifle shoots or not, whether the
shot is going to be deadly or just imitated by some bottle [is unpredictable, and] this
unpredictability provides this moment [when the rifle shoots] with the significance of plot
event (1992, 28).
Lotman argues that the combination of the density of patterning and the interplay of
codes constitutes the distinctive complexity and informativeness of artistic texts. Taken in
isolation, the density is also characteristic for mythical, religious and simply rhetorical
compositions. Sacred texts, as interpreted by medieval scholastics, are like matreshka dolls:
one level of interpretation is enveloped by another and so on. In contrast, the consciousnessexpanding effect of the text of modern literature is achieved not by the static hierarchical
coexistence of different meanings but by their dynamic pulsation, or flickering (mertsanie)
(Lotman [1970] 1998; 1990). That is, in the course of reading, we do not attend to different
meanings of the same structural elements one after another, in the manner of removing veils
or restoring the original of the palimpsest-like painting. We grasp different connotations
compressed in the sign simultaneously. The way that Lotman describes this process is quite
similar to the way that the brain physiologist and cybernetician Grey Walter described the
effect of visual flicker on the brain: At certain frequencies the rhythmic series of flashes
22

See, for example, how Shakespeares King Lear connects historically unrelated words into a false
(or poetic) etymology: Why brand they us/With base? With baseness? bastardies? (Attridge 1987,
194).

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appeared to be breaking down some of the psychological barriers between different regions
of the brain (1953, 91).
Another metaphor that Yuri Lotman employs to characterize the dynamic working
of the text is play. As I have argued, structural linguistics is based on the chess analogy
(see Revzin 1970). Here, linguistic messages and, by extension, mythical texts are analogous
to the moves in the game or to the whole game sessions, like chess games and football
matches. In contrast, artistic texts, as portrayed by Lotman, are more like sites in which rules
are established in the course of playing (Lotman 1964, 174). Lotmans play is based on
previously established meanings but not bound by them. In his definition, play is an acute
awareness of the possibility of other meanings (Lotman [1970] 1998, 77). Thus understood,
play is conditio sine qua non of the kind of informativeness that is unaccompanied by the
rising entropy: in textual play, simple ambiguity becomes semantic richness.
The ability of playing to accumulate flickering meanings makes it the key for
understanding the relationship between art and life. No play is simply a fancy or just a
pragmatic act. Look at a playing kid or a reader of the novel, urges Lotman. They laugh and
cry about something supposedly non-real.23 Whatever fanciful, all kinds of playing
ultimately produce very real consequences like acquired skill or matured mind. Yet, their
reality does not imply that the film spectator runs out of the theater at the sight of the
approaching train on the screen. In sum, art requires the two-fold experience of
simultaneously forgetting that you are confronted by an imaginary event and not forgetting it
[this fact] (Lotman [1973] 1998, 17). This is the effect of the inherent playfulness of art.
Lotman goes on to point out that the more general term for this effect is translation.
Here, translation is not a recoding of ready-made information from one code to another, as
MT enthusiasts believed. Lotman is much closer to Bruno Latours recent definition of
translation than one might expect. In Latours words, I used translation to mean
displacement, drift, invention, mediation, the creation of a link that did not exist before and
that to some degree modifies the original two (1999, 179). Similarly, Lotman talks about the
impossible translation in the core of human productivity. The playful translationfrom
life to text, from written text to the screenis impossible because there is no one-to-one
equivalence between the translated. Yet, this impossibility is not an obstacle: the search for
the strange, not similar, is the basic motivation for interpersonal and intercultural contact. It
is precisely this impossibility that makes efforts to translate most determined and the
results most valuable (Lotman 1990, 37). Such translations provoke unexpected
associations, new semantic connections and, ultimately, give rise to new texts.
In sum, Lotman defines the artistic text as a site of freedom and agency. Language
may be a rule-bound prison-house but text is not: into the world of linguistic automatism,
the world of structural regularities which do not have alternatives, poetry introduces
freedom (Lotman 1972, 131).24 Reality cannot realize all the potentialities of human nature;
art provides an opportunity for experimenting with them (Lotman 1970b; 1992). In this sense,
the text is not only a capacious medium for transmitting human culture but also an exercise in
agency and a space for it. It is a complex and dense assemblage of practices like writing,
reading, commenting, reconstructing, canonizing and challenging which cannot be reduced to
some deep structural level at which it can be predictable and algorithmically generatable.

23

Lotmans favorite quote ever is Pushkins line, I shed tears over an imaginary event (Nad
vymyslom slezami obolius) (e.g. Lotman 1972, 38). He repeats it in almost every book.
24
Here, Lotman explicitly refers to the definition of information as a measure of ones freedom of
choice when one selects a message (Shannon and Weaver 1949, 8).

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Text and Art: Contra Formalism.

According to Lotman, it is particular structural organization that distinguishes a lyric poem or
a conceptualist installation from the multiplicity of other messages circulating in society. To
many critics, this sounds like an essentially Formalist stance: while Lotman is talking about
complexity and playfulness, Russian Formalists insisted on the presence of specific
estranging devices for something to qualify as an artwork (see Seyffert 1983). Highly
conscious of the possibility of being accused of formalism, Lotman rejects his positions
affinity to the theory of devices already in his early structuralist Lectures of 1964:
The main handicap of the so called formal method consists in that it often led
researchers to the idea that literature is a sum total of devices, their mechanical
conglomerate. The real study of an artwork is only made possible by approaching it as
a unified, multi-plane functional structure... (see Koshelev 1994, 26).
Lotmans goal is to replace the metaphysical concept of device as the basis of art with the
dialectical concept of artistic function (Lotman 1974, 15). With reference to Roman
Jakobsons idea of markedness, he argues that devices do not preexist texts; as such, devices
are defined through their function in texts: The untied tie at the ball party implies higher
degree of nakedness than the absence of clothes in the bathroom. The statue to Apollo in the
museum does not look naked but if you try to put a necktie on its neck, it [the statue] will
shock you by its indecency (Lotman 1972, 24). Similarly, the reduction of the color palette
of the film to clack and white may or may not be a device. The role of color depends on its
place within the functional whole of a film, as well as genre conventions at hand.
Some Tartu literary structuralists extend this logic to the idea of measuring the
information, and thus the beauty, of the artwork. For instance, Yuri Levin (1966) proposes
to define and measure the literariness of a text and even the quality of an artwork by the ratio
of whole syntagms (that is clichs, including terms, idioms and tautologies) to free, or
semantically ill-structured, syntagms. He even determines that the pieces of high literature
are composed of 60 to 90 % of free syntagms. These findings supposedly account for the low
redundancy of artistic texts and differentiate them from mass literature and scientific texts.
In contrast, Lotman first postpones and then abandons the idea of measuring
literariness (see 1964; 1972). While his one reason is technical infeasibilitysee
Kolmogorovs skepticism about the possibility of generating Pushkins poems, the other
one is even more theoretically consequential. Developing Roman Jakobsons idea of the
universality of the poetic function in human communication, Yuri Lotman proclaims that art
is itself a functional category.
The text is only one of the elements of the account. The real flesh of the literary work
consists of a text (a system of intratextual relations) in its relationship to extratextual
reality: life, literary norms, tradition, and ideas. It is impossible to conceive of the text
thoroughly extracted from this network (Lotman, quoted in Champagne 1978, 206)
That is, the same string of words or pictorial images may be perceived as art in one context
and ritual object in another. Moreover, it may not be perceived as text at all, i.e. the potential
of textual complexity may be spent in vain if the reader or viewer is not able to appreciate
various interplays between backgrounds and figure as well as norms and their breakings. The
textual organization and the function of being a text may not coincide as it happens within
official Soviet culture where multiple artworks were not recognized as such for reasons of
political incorrectness (see hints at this in Lotman and Piatigorsky [1968] 1992). To be
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sure, Lotman stipulates, not every verbal string can claim textuality and literariness with
the same prospects of success. Yet, the change in the function of the text provides it with
new semantics and syntax (Lotman 1970b, 443). Furthermore, as Mikhail Gasparov explains
in his commentary to Lotmans works,
each word in the poem is perceived not only against the background of other words of
the poem but against the background of all other poetic and not poetic uses of this
word kept in the memory of the reader (1994b, 12).
To continue my film example, the meaning of the black and white shot depends not only on
its role within the whole of the text of the film but also on the habits and expectations of
the audience. In some cases, the absence of the expected may itself become a meaningful
sign, so called zero-sign. For instance, Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose is based on
pointing the reader towards the markers of a typical detective story and, simultaneously,
upsetting these expectations by excluding such elements of the detective plot as the allknowing detective and the catharsis of catching the thief (see Lotman 1998).
Thus, what Lotman and his colleagues portrayed as the multiplicity of interacting
codes can also be seen as the multiplicity of varied standpoints and voices (Uspensky
1970). These can be voices of the characters, of the implied narrator and reader, as well as of
the ones of an actual author and actual readers. These voices may proceed from various
spatial-temporal, perceptual, stylistic and ideological (here, value-laden) perspectives both
within, and outside of, the marked space of the text. In this framework, the history of the
readings of the literary work is by no means irrelevant to this works textual meaning. As
Lotman puts in his 1964 Lectures, Hamlet contains more information for us than in
Shakespeares time [because] it correlates with all the subsequent experience of the
humanity (Koshelev 1994, 242). In the language of contemporary literary theory, the
memory of the text is intertextual (Kristeva 1980, 36).
Open, relational and playful nature of texts in Lotmans semiotics of literature puts
it into the diverse company of the dialogical ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin and his Circle, on the
one hand, and the deconstructionist contributions by French new philosophers and
semioticians, on the other. For various historical reasons, mentioned in chapter four, these
groups did not enter direct debate. By reconstructing the commonalities and contrasts
between them (with the emphasis on Tartu and French scholars), I aim to achieve a clearer
perspective on the implications of Lotmans ideas and the nature of his textocentrism.
Lotman and French (Post)Structuralism: Negotiating the Text
The overlap with Barthes, Derrida and Foucaults concepts of text, or writing (ecriture), is
quite instructive. Based on the analysis of European avant-garde, Roland Barthess category
of Text is opposes to work modeled on classical literature of the epoch of realism. The
problem with work, according to Barthes, is that, by claiming to represent reality, it
exercises and hides the repressive power implicit in its language. It is the power to allocate
and determine, to put in sequence and impose the closure. The unproblematic unity of the
work is guaranteed by the father figure of the author as the source of signification. By
realizing that the author does not precede the work, [that] he is a certain functional principle
by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses, the reader acquires an ability to
problematize the innocence of the work by realizing its radically symbolic, constructed,
decentered, plural nature (Foucault 1979, 159). Out of a passive consumer, she turns into a
co-writer, an active collaborator in the infinite process of writing. The Text is this process,
always paradoxical, structured but decentered, plural and playful (see Barthes 1979). The
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Text is both an exposure of the repressive power in language and a prospect of liberation. In
Barthess summary, the Text is indeed the permanent revolution in language: The Text is
that social space that leaves no language safe or untouched, that allows no denunciative
subject to hold the position of judge, teacher, analyst, confessor, or Decoder (1979, 81).
Devoid of any closure, Barthes Text is not a ready-made inscription to be read; it is
to be co-written by whoever attends to it. In the words of Barthes colleague, there is no
Racine en soi Racine exists in the reading of Racine and apart from the readings there is no
Racine (see Hawkes 1977, 157). This is a radically anti-canonical position: any canonical
work or reading is an exercise of repressive power. Radical (post)structuralists condemn
classical cultural canon as a single score of the Ideology of the ruling class (Althusser
1971, 154): the more free and self-motivated the subjects of ideology are, the more
efficient is the reproduction of social domination. On the contrary, the creation of writable
texts is an exercise in subversion and liberation. The core of this emancipatory function is the
very exposure of the politics and ideology behind the humanistic claims of classical
literature and its priests, critics and philologists.
I do not insist that Barthes ideas on the Text are fully representative for the trend I
have been targeting. Yet, as far as they are, Lotman may be said to be in opposition to the
main tenets of French (post)structuralism. For one thing, both French semiologists and
Lotman proceed from Jakobsons idea of the poetic function. However, like early
Formalists, French structuralists emphasize the suspension, if not the abolition, of
communication and reference of the signifier under the poetic focus on words in and for
themselves. In Barthess lapidary summary of this perspective, the Text practices the
infinite deferral of the signified (Barthes 1979, 76).
Undoubtedly, Lotman would agree that the text does not just transmit ready-made
messages and reflects outside world. However, he argues that the poetic estrangement of
the routine usage only increases the ability of the text to communicate and represent the
world in all of its complexity. The goal of poetry is . understanding the world and
communication between people, self-knowledge, self-construction of the human personality
in the course of cognition and social interactions. In the final account, the purpose of poetry
overlaps with the purpose of culture (1972, 131). Among other cultural means of cognition
and communication, literature is distinguished by being the body of utterances that is least
reductive of [worlds] variety (Holquist 1990, 28).
Hence, Lotmans poetic and literary text is a complex, subversive and playful
model of and for social reality (cf. Geertz 1973). As a model of the world, or world-model,
it is informative about the immediate environment of its production and a wider human
condition. In his numerous studies of Russian classical literature, Lotman paid particular
attention to the reconstruction of the readers expectation backgrounds. Pushkin and other
Russian writers were writing for specific readers, their contemporaries of particular class and
culture, and thus, to understand Eugene Onegin without understanding the life around
Pushkin, from deep ideological movements to the trifle of everyday life, is impossible
(Lotman 1980, 8). It is precisely because the literary text defies the expectations of the
readers and plays with them that the work and the epoch are revealing in respect to one
another.
Furthermore, the texture of the text, from themes and plots to the technology of
literary inscription and social attitudes, is not limited to the short lifespan of a writer. This
texture bears an imprint of its previous history. Hence, the literary text may be seen as a
compressed historya kind of modelof humankind refracted through the particularity of
time, place and authorship.
Texts are also models for the world: they operate as machines which transform and
create subjectivities and objects. Lotman, however, did not suspect this productivity of being
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an exercise of power, at least of the monological power of a specific ideology or institution.

According to Lotman, texts are multi-vocal sites for interacting ideologies. This is what
Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) called polyphony. To be true, more often than not, the author takes
ideological sides within the body of his or her piece. Yet, Lotman insists, this fact by itself
does not make a literary text a piece of propaganda. It is propaganda, though, if it is easy to
disentangle the authors stance from the formal composition of his or her work. The text is
an example of bad art if it is just a conveyer of the writers ideology. The true artwork
reveals itself in the ruptures of emergence and unpredictability between the authors
intention, the meaning dispersed in the whole structure of the text and, ultimately, possible
and actual readings. The artistic value is associated not with propagandistic capabilities of the
text but with its ability to provoke readers, to push them into risky but individualizing and
thus gratifying adventures of self- and world-discovery (Lotman [1970] 1998; 1972; 1990). If
one of the outcomes of such reading is the acceptance of the authors ideology, this is not by
itself evidence of the texts intrinsic repressive power. As one of Lotmans students pointed
out to me, to accuse dead, white Western classics of Western colonialism is to blame the
train for Anna Kareninas death.25 That is the best artworks can convince but they have to be
able to transform the readers identity, usually in a way utterly unexpected by the author.
To be sure, Lotman was not completely unsympathetic to the problematic of the
deconstructive critique of a hegemonic politics of culture. As a Soviet scholar, he was aware
of the deadening power of the monopolistic reading of literature through the lenses of
Marxism-Leninism and socialist realism. He was also skeptical of the artistic value of the
literary production based on the socialist-realist canon. However, he provided these effects
with distinctive interpretation. As I have mentioned, Barthes and Foucault aimed at liberating
the text from the figure of the author and subject in general. Thus they hoped to unleash the
writerly capabilities of the reader. The idea was that the philological ideology of the
work resulted in the correlation between such subject positions as creative author vs.
passive reader. Yet, for Lotman, this arguments is an evidence of complete
misunderstanding of the particularity of authors and readers positioning with respect to a
text.
From the point of view of a writer a text is never finalized, a writer is always prone to
reworking or reshaping it Anything could have changed. For the reader the text is a
cast-iron structure, where everything is in the only possible place, where everything
bears a meaning and nothing can be changed (1990, 79).
Lotmans point is that the readers position at the receptive side of the communication chain
determines her propensity to ossify the text, not the other way around. Her passivity is
active: she tries to reduce the text to her level. In contrast, the writer attempts to challenge
this tendency. In effect, the text appears to be an arena of the struggle between the author and
the audience. The
more unexpected is the world created by the author, the harder it is for him26 to win
over the audience, the further she is from recognition. Yet, the more useful it is for the
audience to be defeated in this tournament with the text and its author. The author is,
one might say, retightens the viewer on his position, gives him [the reader] his own
eyes (Lotman and Tsivian 1994, 104).

25
26

Elena Grigoreva, interview.

Here, as in Lotmans Russian original, masculine pronouns are used as gender-neutral.

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In sum, French semiologists empower the reader, or consumer, of art to construct his or her
own collage out of the floating signifiers and traces of the past.27 For Lotman and his
colleagues, this is a a rebellion of a self-establishing reader against the imposed cultural
authorities (M.Gasparov 1979, 112). They believe that this rebellion can either lead to a
legitimate form of artistic creativity, but not genuine scholarship, or to the monopoly of mass
consumer taste, no matter how it is institutionalized, as market economy or state-run
distribution.
Lotmans own position is that literary and artistic culture is an essentially liberating
and individualizing enterprise. However, for him, this is not liberation from meaning by
turning the text into the empty shell for whatever game the art consumer chooses to play with
it. In contrast, art liberates from naturalized conventions by simultaneously deviating from
them and recalling them, keeping them alive in the readers mind.
Without preceding prohibitions, a succeeding permission cannot be a structurally
significant factor and will be indistinguishable from the absence of organization; it
will not be able to serve as the means of transmitting information. The implication is
that the abolition of prohibitions in the structure of the text is not their eradication.
The system of permissions is significant only against the background of prohibitions
and presupposes the memory about them (1972, 55).
This perspective presumes distinctive attitude to the nature of tradition, innovation and power
struggle. To say the new word, to produce an innovative text unpredictable from the
vantage point of the past, is not to commit the act of fratricide in respect to the authorities and
the canonic texts of the tradition. Quite on the contrary, it is to give them new life, to liberate
them from the layers of slavish imitations and ritualized representations. It is such a play
with what Bakhtin called alien words which restores these words inherent ambiguity, their
ability to resonate with multiple cultural situations. The actual murder of artistic tradition, i.e.
its forgetting, is suicidal for innovative movements themselves because outside of
[traditional] norms, [their] innovations lose meaning (Lotman 1972, 56). The success of
these movements is premised on the preservation of what they are rebelling against. In
Jakobsons (1981, 756) words, simultaneous preservation of tradition and breaking away
from tradition form the essence of every new work of art.
Lotman is quite explicit that one of his intentions is to oppose struggle in art and
culture and struggle in society and politics (Lotman 1972, 56). The latter aims at the
elimination of the enemy, be it another class or repressive regime, or at its selective
absorption on the terms of the winner. Not so in literature. Its own tradition is its bread and
its meaning. According to Viacheslav Ivanov (1986), the most radical avant-garde was more
traditional and academic than the academic school in art.28 This is because culture is
based on the assumption that nothing is ever better, no progress can be made
(Mandelstam 1979, 119). A necessary element of the literary pleasure is the joy of
recurrence, the sense that all this already was and yet not a single poet has yet appeared
and yesterday has not yet been born (1979, 113-114). That is, according to Lotman, the
27

Indeed, Barthes writer-reader is not interested in something like Japan; Japan is a mere pretense
for the exercise of his writing and a means of achieving pleasure of the text. In Barthess words,
Japan has afforded him a situation for writing. This situation is the very one in which a certain
disturbance of the person occurs, a subversion of earlier readings, a shock of meaning lacerated
(Barthes 1982, 4)
28
As Benedikt Livshits described the paradox of Russian avant-gardists, they wanted to through
Pushkin overboard and slept with Pushkin under the pillow (see Bowlt and Matich 1996, 6).

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struggle in literary evolution is not about abolishing Virgil and Pushkin but about reading
them anew, on top of multiple previous readings.
These remarks point to the distinction between (post)structuralist and Tartu attitude to
intertextuality. Developing Bakhtins concept of alien words (1986, 106,162), Julia
Kristeva defines text as a permutation of texts; in the space of a given text, several
utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another(1980, 36). For
Kristeva and Barthes, intertextuality is the means of opening up work into writing, or
ecriture. The key point here is that the intertexts should not be confused with origins
and influences (Barthes 1979, 77). The threads of which the text is composed are
anonymous and irrecoverable (!); they do not serve to connect the text to any literary
tradition but rather certify the openness, plurality and network-like nature of the text. In
sum, in intertexts, the text negates its own identity.
Lotman and his colleagues use similar but different term, subtext. Introduced into
Slavic poetics by Kiril Taranovsky, this concept was used to reconstruct the sources of
specific, often implicit, quotations, allusions, references, and so on. Boris Gasparov (1996b)
has summarized these approaches succinctly,
The subtext performs the integrative function within the text in which it has been
incorporated; the presence of subtexts allows us to see presumed semantic motifs
which explain the link between various elements of the text which used to seem
accidentally juxtaposed; in the end, the text appears to be more coherent and
meaningful after recognizing subtexts present in it. In contrast, the concept of
intertexts is, from the outset, directed at the destruction of the myth of the unity
and wholeness of the text; the intertext dissolves the boundaries of the text, makes its
composition (faktura) penetrable, its semantic contour indefinite and changeable
The text is lost in the continuity of intertextual superimpositions.
Thus, building on the traditions of classical philology, as well as Saussure and Jakobson,
French semiologists and Soviet semioticians come to almost symmetrically opposite views on
art and its power, on tradition and its subversion. The matter here is not only in the attitudes
to art but in the very attitude toward the European tradition (or the Western canon) and
its categories of individuality and culture. The deconstruction of the Western signifiers of
ego, soul, tradition, gender and God are among the targets of the French and their American
followers. They aim at unmasking these categories by revealing the operations of what
Bourdieu calls symbolic violence within these categories. That is, the deconstructionists try
to break through the prison-house of language in which power works through concealing
its own operations (see Bourdieu 1977; Jameson 1972).
For Lotman, this rebellious anti-classicism is caused by the confusion between
cultural struggle and social struggle. For instance, it is a confusion of the actual
transgression of gender borderlines with such transgression as an aesthetic play (Lotman
1992, 173). In his last book, he discusses multiple cases of gender reversals in Russian
literature and history. Yet his conclusions are different from the ones contemporary feminists
draw from similar cases. Lotman could have agreed with Judith Butler that drag dramatizes
the signifying gestures through which gender is established (Butler 1999, xxviii). He could
also agree that such gender performance problematizes the natural distribution of
attributes between genders: active vs. passive, rational vs. emotional, and so on. Yet, to be
more than just odd, to be culturally consequential, this performance should be able to recall
the difference it subverts. In Lotmans words, the meaning of cross-dressing is to introduce
the variability into the structure which lacks it by nature (1992, 136). That is, according to
Lotman and his colleagues (e.g. Tsivian 1990), while the difference between sexes is a
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cultural universal, the substance of this difference is a cultural construct that can be undone.
Yet, if the attempt to undo it leads to the forgetting of the very difference, the consequences
may be catastrophic. For instance,
In Russia, the idea of the equality of man and woman turned into the form of the
exploitation of a woman, because the natural difference was sacrificed to the
unrealized utopia which in practice turned into exploitation (1992, 173).
Furthermore, from Lotmans position, the counter-cultural rebellion seems the more pointless
the more flexibility he suspects inherent in existing cultural codes, from gender distinctions
to canonic artistic conventions. This idea of open codes runs counter to the intuition that
codes are just inflexible rule-abiding systemic objects which can only be imposed on the
agents from the outside. Even Mikhail Bakhtin, who otherwise appreciated Lotmans
research, criticized Tartu people for preferring static codes to live contexts and fixed text to
multi-vocal dialogue. He argued that, in structuralism, all relations are logical But I
hear voices in everything. He also warned against enclosure in a text (Bakhtin 1986, 169).
Semiotics deals primarily with the transmissions of ready-made communication
using a ready-made code. But in live speech, strictly speaking communication is first
created in the process of transmission, and there is , in essence, no code The
context is potentially unfinalized; a code must be finalized. A code is only a technical
means of transmitting information; it does not have cognitive, creative significance. A
code is a deliberately established, killed context (1986, 147).
In the light of Lotmans conception of art, these criticisms sound like an exaggeration. They
are, at best, applicable only to Soviet structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed,
developed fully in the 1970s and 1980s, Lotmans concept of the artistic text implies that
coded nature of cultural action is compatible with its heterogeneity, polysemy and
playfulness. Yet, it is precisely the relative predictability of the coded modes of behavior
that allows for interesting metaphors, juxtapositions and contrasts produced through the
juxtaposition of codes. In this respect, Lotmans ideas are in continuity with more strictly
rule-oriented poetic theories (e.g. Revzin 1971).
Bakhtin says that the code is finalized and ready-made but, according to Lotman, it
may happen only in the narrow synchronic perspective. Historically conceived, every code is
a product of previous making in time and space. Furthermore, the interaction between codes
is open-ended. In this respect, the product of such interactions, the text, is similar to human
actors. Just like texts, actors are intersections of different codes. Yet they are not reducible to
these codes. Lotman makes the analogy between texts and human actors explicit by saying
that the structural parallelism of the semiotic characteristics of texts and persons allows us to
define the text of any level as a semiotic individuality and the individuality on any sociocultural level as a text ([1983] 1992, 116). Thus an individual personality, a literary work
and the whole culture can be considered as texts of various levels.
By drawing these analogies, Lotman provides his solutions to a number of problems
that social sciences and the humanities share. First, the multivocal, playful and,
simultaneously, robust text provides an original nondeterministic model for the personal
identity. This is a model of a performer, or a player with various social and cultural codes,
the model which finds its best realization in Lotmans grounded theory of theatricality (see
chapter 7). Simultaneously, by extending the attributes of human actors onto literary texts and
other sites of cultural production, Lotman puts forward the idea of the independent agency of
texts, which is informed by, but irreducible to, the social context, popular reception, and
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power relations. These are the core moves within Lotmans theory and history of culture (see
next chapter).
Textocentrism as Cultural Politics
This chapter has so far presented an outline of the evolution of Soviet structuralism and
semiotics from Rules to Texts. At one level, this evolution is analogous to the evolution of
Western structuralism. Soon after the structuralist movement seemed to have triumphed in
many minds and university departments around the world, it found itself under powerful
attack from both outside and even inside. This critique gave birth to Derridas deconstruction,
on the one hand, and the rediscovery of Mikhail Bakhtin, on the other. Yet, the analogy
between Soviet and Western developments cannot overshadow the differences between two
trajectories. Despite the vast variety of actual ways of interpreting the text within the Tartu
Schoolas the juxtaposition of the mythopoetic analyses and Lotmans textual semiotics
demonstrates, they share the common attitude which may be defined as textocentrism, as
opposed to the textualism of Western (post) structuralists.
The difference is significant, as I have tried to show in the last section. If French
authors aimed at decentering canonical cultural authorities, e.g. Western Canon and
classical philology, Tartu scholars desired to reestablish them after what they saw as the
ideological destruction of the classical culture in the course of the attempts to appropriate it
for the purposes of producing the docile Soviet subject. The objective of Soviet intellectuals
was to show how the robust structure of the classical texts makes them perfect media of
preserving and promoting the spirit of creative ambiguity and artistic freedom. Lotman
summarized his credo best in one of his last interviews:
Everybody understands traffic rules to the same extent, except for those who do not
know them However, do people understand Pushkin in the same way? No, in
different ways. And do not tell me that some people understand him correctly and
others incorrectly. Pushkin appears to each person as if he were writing personally for
him [this person] (see Koshelev 1994. 460).
To understand the full social and epistemological significance of this contrast, let me briefly
turn to some of the social practices and attitudes that accompanied the contrastive positions
of French and Soviet theorists towards the text.
It has been argued that (post)structuralist cultural criticism is related to the peculiar
pattern of discretionary intellectual behavior caused by excessive wealth in the 1960s
(Pavel 1989, 141). Indeed, it was students with good prospects of employment in middle
class jobs who took up structuralism, among other fads of the time, as a tool of critiquing the
basic institutions of Western civilization, the University and the School above all.
Intellectuals, especially French structuralists and poststructuralists, have done a great deal to
provide this counter-cultural movement with its language and symbolism. Most famously,
Louis Althusser (1971) proclaimed the school a dominant ideological state apparatus.
According to Althusser, the school is essential for reproducing the class power of the
bourgeoisie precisely because it is able to hide its engaged and class-based nature under the
mask of positivistic objectivity, universalistic humanism and academic purity. Radical
structuralists also condemned the classical cultural canon as a single score of the Ideology
of the ruling class (1971, 154): the more free and self-motivated the subjects of ideology
are, the more efficient is the reproduction of social domination (cf. Bourdieu 1984).
Nothing can be further from the thinking of Soviet intellectuals in the same period. To
be sure, average Soviet secondary and college-level education was increasingly an object of
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sarcastic remarks and dismissive comments. Moreover, since around 1968, it was no longer
appropriate to defend dissertations among certain semi-dissident intellectuals (see
Zholkovsky 1998; 2000). Yet, this scorn was directed mostly at the Sovietness and the
increasingly mass character of the higher education, which was blamed for the falling
standards and the overproduction of career-, rather then vocation-, driven professionals. For
instance, in the 1960s, a number of high-profile publications criticized official policies that
allegedly led to the inflation of educational credentials and the accessibility of jobs that used
to be the property of the upper middle class (intelligentskie dolzhnosti) (e.g. Kantorovich
1967). Hence, existing institutions of education were criticized not for reproducing class
inequalities but for the erosion of the social distinctiveness and privilege that the elite
intelligentsia previously enjoyed.
Despite these criticisms, the University and the Academy were still considered by
intellectuals as major seats of their authority and influence. Although one could not exactly
teach what one wished, one could, for example, use the allowed texts of classical literature
as vehicles of cultural and often political subversion. This subversion could consist in
opening-up the text, making it ambiguous and thus potentially subversive and enriching.
For educators like Lotman, the point was not to overthrow the classical canon but to
purify it from Soviet pseudo-literature and ideological readings. In fact, Lotmans
department was quite a unique place in Soviet humanistic academia: it effectively stopped
teaching Soviet socialist realist literature and Soviet literary theory already in the 1960s.29
The syllabus of the courses on the theory of literature for 1974-75 looks much more like
contemporary Columbia and Stanford courses on Russian literary theory than any similar
courses in Soviet universities.30
Thus, the alternative to ideology was the scientific methodology of Tartu
Semiotics. At first, as I have demonstrated, the alternative consisted in opposing formal
generative grammars of poetry and genre literature to the ambiguity of the Soviet ideological
blah-blah (boltovnia). Yet, it soon became apparent that this ideology of exactness could
be appropriated by the ideological and disciplinary establishments. Lotman and his
colleagues also found themselves disenchanted with their own early technocratic optimism:
Lotman (1990) later argued that Tartu semiotics firmly established that machines do not
write poetry. In effect, Tartu-Moscow semiotics, especially its Lotmans version, departed
substantially from early formalistic structuralism. It turned into what the philosopher Leonid
Stolovich calls structuralism with a human face (1998).
Hence, to Soviet ideological reading and technocratic optimism, Tartu scholars
opposed their methodology of recovering multiple historically evolved layers of the texts
meaning. The purpose was not to come up with the final interpretation of the text but to
produce the most competent readers possible. That is, Lotmans struggle against the official
version of the canon was directed not so much against specific ideas as against existing
alienation of the academic intellectual from control over the whole enterprise of educating
students and producing knowledge. His struggle was for the redistribution of power in Soviet
academia in favor of intellectuals themselves. It was a struggle for the reappropriation of the
means and the sites of intellectual production by knowledge-producers and educators.
Overall, far from disestablishing the school or deschooling of society, as Ivan
Illich (1972) put it, the common sentiment among Tartu intellectuals was evolving toward
something precisely opposite, the depolitization of education and the reinforcement of
academic autonomy. If the target of radical Western intellectuals of the 1960s and later
decades was existing class, gender and race privilege, embodied in educational institutions,
29
30

See Waldstein (2007, 587) for more details.

EA, F311, N70, s.76.

134

Soviet intellectuals were more concerned about preserving their privilege as knowledge- and
(cultural) tradition-producers and transmitters. Confronted not by raving student crowds (of
the 1968 protesters) but by Soviet officials and technocrats, Soviet academics were trying to
establish their academic workplaces as strongholds for preserving their personal and group
integrity and as springboards for making interventions into the public domain. This struggle
for control over production, legitimation, and transmission of knowledge is in the core of
what I have called soviet academic wars.
Thus, it appears that the social context of Lotmans institutional politics of cultural
education and academic freedom is highly relevant for understanding the kinds of choices he
tended to make in theory and research. Going back to the theoretical point made in chapter 1,
we can talk about the structural analogy between the intellectual strategy of textocentrism
and Tartu scholars (especially Lotmans) social strategies of reestablishing and defending
their authority over their professional preoccupations under the conditions of Soviet
academia.
As for the difference between Tartu and French structuralisms, I have tried to
demonstrate that the difference between their underlying paradigms can be, to a significant
extent, explained by the difference in the social conditions, in which these paradigms
developed, and the strategies of dealing with these conditions, which were chosen by
corresponding groups of intellectuals. I would like to conclude this chapter by bringing
together what was said so by means of an ideal-typical opposition between two
understandings of the empire of signs.
In his important essay entitled Saussure, the Sign, Democracy, Roland Barthes
(1988, 151-157) proclaims the empire of signthe realm of texts and discoursesa
democratic republic. He argues, in essence, that the Saussurean relational model of langue
where the correspondence between the signifier and the signified, the value in language, is
not guaranteed by any universal standards like God, Origins or Realityis ultimately a
product of democratic and market-oriented society. Like individuals in bourgeois society,
signs are divided, isolated and closed-off; their ancestry does not define their fortunes. In
Barthes metaphorical language, Saussures signs are not somebodys sons but autonomous
citizens and, as such, they are themselves the only sources of Truth and Meaning (152).
Shared by Barthes, this model is inherently opposed to any lordship and Gaullism,
including the primacy of the writer over the reader or the priority of the classic text over the
consumer preferences of the mass public. In effect, Barthes appears as both an analyst and an
advocate of democratic consumer culture.
Lotman and his colleagues effectively rejected this democratic image of the empire of
signs. They feel that, in this empire, surfaces without depth are celebrated and culture is
treated as a kind of game, which consists in endlessly juggling with and manipulating
essentially empty signifiers. According to Tartu cultural theories, signs do refer to
themselvesas French theorists arguebut they also communicate something meaningful
about the world and the communicator. Narratives do indeed shape and reshape our
individual and collective identities but they also represent real things for us. In contrast to
French theories, the historical origins do matter and Tartu scholars are busy reconstructing
them: behind seemingly arbitrary, meaningless and even dead cultural symbols of today,
Tartu semioticians uncover the worlds of mythological and classical references and
resonances, which constitute the whole thick mass (tolshcha) of the national and universal
cultural memory (e.g. Lotman [1985] 1992b, 201). Due to this historical depth, Lotmans
empire of signs, or the Text, exhibits incredible resilience in the face of the attempts by the
(con)temporary social forcesfrom Communism to nationalism and consumerismto
appropriate its powers for the purposes of legitimating and motivating desired social
behavior. Although Tartu scholars differ in their interpretation of the specific mechanisms by
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which texts endure in time, they agree on the exceptional role of the cultural minority of the
people of the word. The main job of these intellectuals and literati is to remember and to
pass on cultural tradition and thus, according to Tartu scholars, to reproduce the conditions
for artistic and intellectual creativity. In a word, Tartu scholars see not democracy but
aristocracycultural and intellectual aristocracy, of courseas the political regime in
charge of the empire of texts. As such, they position themselves as opponents to the forces
of cultural forgetting. These forces include Soviet modernity, of course, but also, to some
extent, the Enlightenment project, with its anti-traditionalism, and Western society of the
spectacle, with its mental consumerism, its celebration of surfaces, and its hunger for
diversion and stimulation (Lotman 1990, 35; cf. Ivanov 1973a; Debord 1994).
Thus, the difference between French and Tartu structuralism and semiotics can be
represented as the difference between the republican-democratic and the aristocratic idioms
in conceptualizing textuality, or the empire of signs. By considering Tartu theories of
culture, I am planning to provide this conclusion with more depth and to develop it in a
number of interesting directions.

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Chapter Six
THINKING CULTUROLOGICALLY:
Tartu Perspectives on Culture

A semiotic theory and history of culture is the most distinctive contribution of the Tartu
School. This is a message that leading Tartu scholars tried to convey starting with Lotmans
(1970a; 1973d) Essays on the Typology of Culture and five-author Theses on the Semiotic
Study of Cultures (Ivanov et al. 1973) and ending with Lotmans latest books to be published
during his lifetime: The Universe of Mind (1990) and Culture and Explosion (1992). This is a
consistent opinion held by most of my interviewees, Tartu scholars and students of different
generations. This is what attracted to the School most of its admirers in the past and it is how
the work of Lotman and his associates appears to their contemporary readers (Alexandrov
2000; Andrews 2003; Mandelker 1994; Schnle 2006; Zorin 1998a).
The major idea of this chapter is that Tartu culturology is one of the most persistent,
if not always coherent, attempts to justify the autonomy of culture and its emancipatory role.
Here, culture should be understood as not only a subject of study but also as an
environment of social action and a framework of everyday attitudes of the Tartu-related
intellectuals. For these scholars, their scientific semiotics and their nave, or daily,
philosophy of culture were closely entangled to constitute a continuum in which each domain
seemed to justify and clarify the other.
In what follows, I consider Tartu culturology in the context of the studies of culture
within and beyond Russia. By positioning cultural semiotics with respect to the major trends
in Western cultural history and the 1970s cultural turn in social sciences, as well as to
Soviet and Russian culturology, this chapter illuminates the nature of the Schools
categorical apparatus, thematic priorities and research strategies. In contrast to most existing
accounts of the Tartu School, I concentrate, in this and next chapters, on the dynamic
interplay between the Schools theoretical ideas, empirical/historical studies and attempts at
self-reflection and self-fashioning in its peculiar social environment.
I conclude this chapter by proposing an additional generalization about the Tartu
perspective on the nature of the empire of signs. I demonstrate that, in addition to being
aristocratic, Tartu theories of textuality and culture are also imperial. This conclusion
brings to the fore the social and political stances of the members of the School. By
presenting themselves as heirs to the cosmopolitan cultural traditions, embedded in such
imperial historical formations as the West and the Russian Empire, Tartu intellectuals
differentiated themselves from the legacies of both political-bureaucratic empires, like the
Soviet Union, and nationalistic movements. In particular, even though Lotman was empathic
to the Estonians resistance to totalitarian rule, he did not accept the Estonian nationalist
project of destroying the multi-ethnic cultural space, which, as Lotman and his colleagues
believed, existed on the territory of the Soviet Union despite the heavy-handedness of the
Soviet rulers.

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The Cultural Turn and Russian Culturology

There is no way out of the game of culture.
- Pierre Bourdieu (1984)
Let us stop protecting culture.
Let us just try not to impede its work
- Leonid Batkin (1979)
In his recent survey of the cultural turn in American social and human sciences, William
Sewell (1999) dates it quite precisely, the year of 1973. This was the year when such
pathbreaking studies as Clifford Geertzs (1973) Interpretation of Cultures and Hayden
Whites Metahistory appeared in print. A number of other seminal works like Foucaults The
Archeology of Knowledge (1972) and The Order of Things (1971) were published in English
around the same time. Since 1973 was also the year when leading Tartu scholars came up
with their collective manifesto (Ivanov et al. 1973), it would be highly suggestive to
recapitulate some of the key tenets of this turn and thus provide the global and national
background for the subsequent presentation of the culturological ideas of Lotman and his
associates.
As the very phrase suggests, the cultural turn was an attempt to configure the fields of
the humanities and social sciences around the concept of culture. This does not mean that
culture was not an object of human sciences and philosophy before 1973. In fact, as classical
and recent overviews of the large amount of both still inspiring and already outdated
literature on culture demonstrate, culture as a noun entered academic usage around the
second half of the eighteenth century first in Germany and then in France and Britain
(Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952; Williams 1983; Hartman 1997). Developed from the
hybridization of agricultural (cultivating as the tending of natural growth) and religious
(cult as honor and worship) meanings, culture was employed by often opposing social and
intellectual parties to address quite contradictory concerns which arose in the course of the
establishment of modernity associated with capitalism, nationalism, colonialism, bourgeois
subjectivity and universal education (Williams 1983). As Norbert Elias (1996) argues, the
German Kulturgeschichte as the history of morals and arts emerged in opposition to
aristocratic political history of kings and wars in the situation when economically powerful
bourgeoisie was still alienated from political power. At the same time, in the atmosphere of
the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, culture acquired a meaning of a site of the
search for the lost unity, the unity of the premodern organic community. The evolution from
Kants to Spenglers ways of opposing culture and civilization, i.e. from universalism to
cultural relativism, is symptomatic of this transformation not only in Germany.1
Culture has always been one of the most ambivalent concepts. Raymond Williams
(1983, 90) summarized English usage of culture in three major categories: a general process
of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, a particular way of life, whether of a
people, a period, a group, or humanity in general and the works and practices of intellectual
and especially artistic activity. Thus, one can speak about culture and cultures.
Culture in singular may refer to specifically human software (cf. Nederveen Pieterse
1

According to Kant, The ideal of [universal] morality belongs to culture; its use for some
simulacrum of morality in the love of honor and outward decorum constitutes mere civilization (see
Hartman 1997, 218). Oswald Spengler also used the opposition between the deep (culture) vs. the
superficial (civilization) but identified civilization with the declining slope in the development of
monad-like cultures (e.g. Hellenism and contemporary technological civilization).

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1995), to the best which has been thought and said in the world (Mathew Arnold, quoted in
Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952, 55) or to human development from savagery to civilization as
well as personal development from childhood to adulthood (see Kants famous analogy
between modernity and adulthood). On the contrary, a culture as employed by cultural
anthropologists often designates an entire way of life of local people, or folk, including
their rituals, beliefs and material production. Here, the emphasis is on reproduction of the
same patterns of behavior and thought (Kroeber 1952), on social continuity and heredity2
as well as on isolation and homogeneity. Cultures in plural also imply some form of
cultural relativism; the simultaneous coexistence of separate cultural units in empty,
homogeneous time (Benjamin 1968; Anderson 1991, 187).
The third category of Williams summary introduces a few more conceptual
oppositions: between culture as just a specialized type of action and objects or as a particular
social function and culture as coextensive with total personal or collective identity. If
understood in the first way, culture is brought into the sphere of social control and
administration by such institutions as liberal colleges or the Ministry of Culture. Otherwise,
in Parsonian functionalism, it serves as one of the few functions of social action. Here, the
action is considered in the light of norms and values, as opposed to material interests (see
Swidler 1986). Hence, culture is only an aspect of the human condition.
Thus, culture may have very different connotations and serve to very different
causes. It acquires distinctive meaning only within specific local contexts of oppositions.
Similarly, the cultural turn in social sciences followed a number of important
displacements within different fields of human studies. The models of local cultures appeared
to be relevant to modern societies; the reading of literary texts appeared to be a relevant
model for reading cultures; the history of elites gave way to the history of longue dure
popular cultures. Simultaneously, the history of large social and economic trends produced,
as a reaction, a wave of interest in the situated constructions of reality (Burke 1991; Sewell
1999). The shift of interest to the history from below, from native point of view along
with the availability of semiotic, structuralist and other methods of reading opened the way
for the cultural turn.
In contrast to more traditional culturalist ideologies and research practices, the
cultural turn was trying to avoid the conflation of the Matthew Arnolds the best, i.e.
dominant cultural representations, with the cultural per se. In effort to marshal a new,
ethnographic and interpretative, understating, Clifford Geertz defined culture as a webs of
significance that [human being] himself has spun (1973, 5). Guided by the works of Geertz,
Goffman, Bourdieu and others, social scientists turned from objectified social facts to
practical knowledge, from social structures to human agency and from causal or functional
explanations to the unwinding the webs of meaning. The structuralist studies of culture gave
way to the interest in practice and performance where actors are active interpreters and users
of the tool-kit of resources provided by cultures (see Swidler 1986). The culturalist and
structuralist image of a consensual, shared, bounded and static culture turned into recognition
of heterogeneity, hybridity and only thin coherence of cultural processes (Sewell 1999).
However, the cultural critique of naturalized structures and facts did not stop at
proclaiming that everything is culturally constructed. Culture itself, as some sort of
ontological foundation of human practices, became an object of criticism through its
contextualization within the relations of power (Bourdieu 1984; Foucault 1980). Despite
significant gains, this move led to the reduction of symbolic resources to the status of a
plastic medium which politically powerful social elites may rework and remold at will
2

As for instance, in Edward Sapirs 1921 definition of culture as the socially inherited assemblage of
practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952, 214).

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(Hartman 1997, 31). For instance, deep cultural traditions turned into invented traditions.
Cultural canon appeared to be a manifestation of the monopoly on symbolic violence
exercised by the ruling class through the institutions of education (e.g. Bourdieu and Passeron
1977).
Thus, by overstretching itself to the whole way of being, culture suddenly loses its
specificity and falls for adjacent categories like power. In actual research practice, this shift
often implies that we learn how human actors employ the material and symbolic toolkit at
hand but not what difference it makes whether they use this or other toolkit. That is, we do
not learn specifically cultural mechanisms. In contrast, this is the explicit concern of the
Soviet and Russian field of culturology developed in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-1970s.
It would certainly be a mistake if we limit ourselves to opposing the Western cultural
turn directly to the Tartu School. In fact, this would lead to omitting a large and burgeoning
movement in the Soviet academic and intellectual circles, which acquired the name of
culturology since its inception in the 1960s-70s. The Tartu School was only an important
participant in this movement.
Culturology, or kulturologiia, is a very recent phenomenon approximately
simultaneous with the cultural turn in the West. The origins of the term in Russian academic
vocabulary are murkysome refer to the early twentieth century infrequent German
Kulturologie while others to Lesley Whites project of culturologybut, in any case, the
word is based on an obvious pattern of word formation: culturology is a science of culture
(Asoian and Malafeev 2000).3 In contrast to a multitude of subdisciplinary and
interdisciplinary fields produced by the cultural turn in the West, Russian culturology has
been institutionalized as a separate discipline after the fall of Communism. However, this
does not mean that it is much more theoretically and methodologically coherent than
American or European studies of culture. On the contrary, as one of the speakers for
contemporary Russian culturology pointed out, it is
an eclectic construction out of the elements of Western social and cultural
anthropology, Weberian and Sorokinian sociology of culture, local pre-Revolutionary
cultural-historical typology and the ideas of Eurasianism, Spengler-Toynbee
civilization theories, Gumilevs bioethnic conception, the Silver Age philosophies of
the Russian idea, modern Soviet creativity- and activity-oriented philosophy of
culture, the perspectives on culture offered by the classics of Russian literature,
mythological and semiotic schools of local philology, semantic-hermeneutic studies
in art history, etc. (Flier 1997, 247).4
3

A poet, writer and philosopher Andrei Bely used this term already in the 1900s as a derogatory
nickname for Hermann Cohens philosophy of culture (see Asoian and Malafeev 2000, 119)
4
Although I will still discuss some of the elements of this mix, let me briefly remind about the
meaning of the least known of them. Eurasianism, the conservative emigrant intellectual movement
of which linguists Trubetskoi and Jakobson were a part, professed radical cultural relativism and
pictured Russia as a multi-ethnic Eurasian civilization based not so much on national or racial
roots as on the convergence of different historical paths in the unity of fate. The influential Soviet
Eurasianist Lev Gumilev (1912-1992) argued in his theory of ethnogenesis that ethnic groups become
conquerors and full-fledged nations when, as a result of biological mutations, a large portion of their
members abolish their natural instinct of self-preservation for the sake of some utopian vision. The
Silver Age is the early twentieth century period of the flourishing of Russian artistic modernism: the
artists of these period are famous for their intensive reflexivity over their work and other metaphysical
matters, including the nature of Russia. Vygotskys activity theory had implications for not only
Soviet psychology but also culturology. Finally, the hermeneutic history of art usually includes Pavel
Florenskys conception of reverse perspective and Gustav Shpets phenomenology of art.

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What unifies these often incommensurable trends is that they are usually out of place in
traditional disciplines like history, psychology or sociology, as they developed in Russia.
Another unifying factor is the official role of culturology in the university curriculum: since
1992, it serves although not without serious contestation as a new replacement for
Marxist philosophy, as a major general education discipline available and, in some places,
required for students of all disciplines. Thus culturology, despite its heterogeneity, is
presently a contender for becoming the backbone of the national civic education in the postSoviet Russia.
The fact that culturology claims the status of Marxist philosophy within the Russian
university curriculum is not entirely unexpected from a historical perspective (see Asoian and
Malafeev 2000; Kelly and Shepherd 1998; Meyer 1952). In wide use since the rise of the
non-aristocratic intelligentsia in the 1860s, the term culture and culturedness
(kulturnost) quickly subsumed such older terms as enlightenment, education and
spirituality (dukhovnost). Liberally used by both the intelligentsia and the Soviet regime,
these categories have at least three main semantic connotations: (1) artistic and intellectual
pursuits and objects; (2) historical level of development of society and human beings
expressed in the types and forms of the organization of human life and activity, as well as in
material and spiritual values (BSE, 13: 594); and (3) both the distinctive property of the
intelligentsia and the universal heritage which the intelligentsia is called upon to transmit to
backward masses.5
Although there is nothing specifically Russian about this distribution of meanings, it
is worth noting that the Russian discourse of culture is often focused specifically on the
issues of Russian identity with respect to the processes of modernization and
Westernization. In Meyers words, the problem of Russian history was one of the
central themes with which all social thought, from Chaadaev to Stalin and Berdiaev, had to
deal (1952, 407). This fact explains the centrality of the so called historiosophy to Russian
popular and often academic thought. In one of the current definitions, Russian historiosophy
aimed at the internally coherent description of the system of thought and behavior that is
called Russian idea, Russian soul, or Russian character: to provide the list of absolute
ideas, the fundamental substantive elements of Russian life, seen from the point of view of
God (Zaretsky and Peskov 1998, 386). Any historiosophy, whether Westernizer or
Slavophile, is based on the assumption, often reified as a universal constant, of the
opposition between Russia and the West. Here, culture usually refers to the positively
valued side of the opposition: world/Western culture of the Westernizers and authentic
Russian culture of the Slavophiles. Although the works of Russias major historiosophers
Petr Chaadaev, Vladimir Soloviov, Nikolai Berdiaev, and otherswere either tabooed or
simply out of print in the Soviet period, the major tropes of their thought persisted even in the
most established Soviet scholarship.
Composed of the semantic layers outlined above, culture was one of the key
components in the discourse of both the intelligentsia and Soviet authorities. Kultura
gradually came to constitute one of the central spiritual values of Soviet civilization. From
this fact, Kelly and Shepherd (1998) derive the nature of Soviet culturology as officially
promoted but essentially non-Marxist account of the smooth process of cultural inheritance
unimpeded by reinterpretation and conflict. However, although it is true that continuity is the
key trope of Russian culturology, this interpretation is based on the unwarranted
identification of the culturological movement and the vast literature glorifying the Soviet
5

According to one Soviet encyclopedia of the 1930s, socialism to use the words of Lenin begins
where culture spreads among the millions (see Meyer 1952, 417).

141

way of life. If this were true, the Soviets would easily institutionalize culturology around
the early 1970s, when the bulk of major classical culturological work appeared.
In fact, however, the centrality of the discourse of culture in official and unofficial
discourses was not accompanied by any systematic reflection over its presuppositions and
terms and thus any need for the study of culture. The expulsion of culture to the peripheral
realm of superstructure and ideology, that is its treatment as a reflection of the class
struggle, was an indicator of cultures low theoretical status. Culture was a matter of
propaganda and administration, or cultural politics. The ideological foundations of such
politics were simply borrowed from predecessorsas well as constantly reinterpreted within
the Partys objectives of the momentand enshrined in the syllabi of school and university
courses on Russian and Soviet literature. Although intellectuals might have contested specific
interpretations and appropriations of the classical cultural tradition, they rarely expressed
doubt about the normative nature of this tradition for staying human in Soviet society.
Overall, regardless of specific usage by various groups in Soviet society, culture had an
obvious aura of certainty and even necessity about it.
The culturological movement appeared as an alternative to this certainty and, in the
language of Formalists, automaticity with which the discourse of culture was reproduced.
This is hardly surprising considering that some culturologists initially went through the late
1950s and early 1960s debates on method. These were discussions among philosophers and
other academics on the procedures by means of which scientific and other knowledge is
produced (see Piatigorsky 1996; Frumkina 2002). Inspired by the cybernetic revolution,
critical Marxists and structural linguists, in occasional cooperation, turned the attention of
Soviet academics to the fact that representations, or world-images, are not just
reflections of reality but rather products of various mechanisms of coding, modeling, and
ordering, the mechanisms which deserve specific and systemic attention (see Zinoviev and
Revzin 1960). Later, Tartu culturologists abandoned the idea of the domain-general method
whether Marxist or cybernetic. Still, the debates on method played the paramount role in
carving out the space for the problematic of culturology.
Another point of departure for Soviet culturology was theoretical marginality of
human ideas and social actionso called human factor in contrast to objective laws
within Soviet Marxist theory. Often approached and definitely studied as a kind of
embellishment over economic basis and the politics of class struggle, the human factor
attracted the attention of disgruntled philosophers and other scholars who searched for new
perspectives. For instance, a Mediaeval historian Aron Gurevich discovered for himself that
traditional Marxist account of feudal property relations and non-economic exploitation was
severely handicapped by omitting such insignificant occurrences as gift exchanges and
banquets (piry) (Gurevich 1985). In effect, he developed a structural cultural history of
Western Middle Ages based on the idea that economic and political relations are not
coordinated as cause and effect but as different manifestations of the world-image of the
medieval person, that is specific models of time and space, right and wrong, wealth and
poverty. Although Gurevich was for many years teaching outside of Moscow and had poor
access to contemporary Western literature, he eventually became one of the key
representatives of the nouevelle histoire movement in the Soviet Union.
The idea of noncausal affinity between different aspects of culture was proceeding
from such different directions as Marxist appropriations of Talcott Parsons functionalism
and Russian interpretations of Oswald Spenglers cultural relativism (Markarian 1969;
Averintsev 1977). These holistic perspectives were often associated with the implicit
criticism of Hegelian (in fact, Soviet Marxist) implied presentism of the teleological and
Eurocentric narrative in which preceding states were studied for the premonitions and roots
of the succeeding ones. The interest of culturologists shifted toward the identification and the
142

interpretation of specific agendas of particular cultures (rather than stages of development).

In effect, it turned out that what used to be opposed as progressive and reactionary trends
and ideologies can be seen as variations within the same cultural pattern.6 The shift from the
teleology of progress to relatively stable cultural structures, or mentalities, allowed
culturologists to introduce what supposedly materialistic Marxist theory largely neglected:
everyday life, material culture, non-canonic and popular beliefs. Culturology expanded the
scope of narrow ethnographic and folkloric studies to civilized societies.
Soviet Marxist and quasi-Marxist historiography emphasized the continuous and
necessary progress from one mode of production to another. Simultaneously, it stressed the
irreducible novelty of new modes as the results of the leap (skachok) from one quantity
to another. This dialectics left its definite imprint on the differentiation within culturology.
If some culturologists treated culture as a source of discontinuity and rupture against the
background of continuous social progress, others emphasized the cultural mechanism of
recurrence and non-biological inheritance of the archaic and primordial forms against the
background of temporary and passing modes of production. Although these perspectives
often co-existed in practice, they still constituted the major tension within Soviet accounts of
tradition and memory.
The proponents of cultural continuity, often nationalistic intellectuals, tended to
perceive social processes in terms of their opposition and even threat to culture (e.g.
Kozhinov 1970). They called for the protection of ready and finished culture in which they
sought to find, in the words of a critic, the means of harmonizing the soul-splitting
extremities of untidy nature and [contemporary] unenlightened sociality (Batkin 1979, 591).
In protesting against socialist modernity and Western influences, these intellectuals sought to
save culture from oblivion, popularization and commodification. This ideology was further
supported by the forced or freely chosen focus of Soviet culturological studies on topics far
away in time and space (Kagarlitsky 1988, 107), from the Middle Ages to the classical age
of Russian literature.
To this traditionalism and elitism, Leonid Batkin opposed what he presented as a
Bakhtinian perspective on culture as a creative ability for thought experiments, for
seeing a material for change in the actually existing [state of affairs, in order] to become the
true historical subject (1979, 592). In contrast to ready-made cultural heritage, he
advocated the decentered view of culture as something that exists on the borders, in the
dialogue, contestation, even partial forgetting. Batkin also argued that rigid faithfulness to the
past might lead to its betrayal while its creative transformation is precisely in the spirit of
culture. He echoed Ernest Renan by saying We remember what we forget (Batkin 1979,
593; cf. Anderson 1991, 200).
Despite these conflicting sensibilities, Soviet culturologists shared the presumptions
of the humanistic culturalist discourse which tends to conflate the understanding of culture as
a way of life and as the reservoir of the most valuable human achievements. Therefore,
until the 1990s, there was no serious interest in the links between power and the established
canon of high culture. In the manner of the eighteenth century German cultural history,
culturology was defined primarily in opposition to dominant and politicized Marxist
philosophy and sociology. In this context, any analysis of struggle smacked of the official
version of class analysis.
Tartu and especially Lotmans studies on culture share most of the characteristics and
concerns of Soviet culturology. Yet, by refracting these concerns through his conception of
the artistic text, Lotman came up with a number of original ideas and interesting results that
6

See Averintsev (1977) on the continuities between the cultural attitudes of the Christians and the
Pagans in the 4th-5th centuries.

143

may still acquire a new life in the context of their juxtaposition to the related trends in the
West.
Of Culturology: A History of Theory
Culture did not establish itself as a focus of Tartu research preoccupations until the early
1970s. Before, Tartu publications focused on secondary modeling systems like myth,
religion and literature. Superimposed on natural language, they were described as grandiose
modeling and communicative devices based on the resources of language but irreducible to it
in their functioning (Zalizniak et al. 1962; Ivanov 1962). It has been recently argued that the
jargon of secondary systems was an Aesopian invention to justify the studies of culture not
guided explicitly by the assumptions of historical materialism (V.Uspensky 1994). Hence, the
idea of secondary systems may be a product, intentional or not, of the substitution of the
Marxist superstructural status of symbolic processes by another superstructure, no longer
over economic base but over natural language.
However, this account misses the obvious discontinuity between early Tartu
structuralism and self-conscious culturology. The first aimed at constructing the uniform
semiotic method from bottom up, on the basis of exhaustively formalized descriptions and
classifications of specific media with respect to their syntactic and semantic properties. The
dispassionate observer, the semiotician, was expected to come up, in some non-distant future,
with a complete repertoire of rules for generating all kinds of meaningful messages.
By contrast, Tartu culturology was based on realizing the semiotic observers
embeddedness in their object. It occurred to Tartu scholars that, by singling out specific
systems, they decontextualize their own and their subjects modeling activity from the space
of symbolic action that precedes and animates these systems. Eventually, they concluded that
culture is not the sum of separate languages, rather separate languages can be isolated from
culture through the operation of analysis (Lotman and Uspenskij 1984, xi). Ultimately, the
Tartu School shifted its attention from abstract sign systems to the real time and space
pragmatics of functional correlations between these systems (Ivanov et al. 1973, 1). In this
way, the School opened the doors to the historical studies for cultural production and
reproduction.
As a heading for a large subset of presentations, the concept of the semiotics of
culture emerged at the 1970 summer school in Kriku. This was an attempt to
institutionalize the developments of the later 1960s, primarily indebted to the cooperation
between Yuri Lotman, Boris Uspensky and Alexander Piatigorsky (Lotman and Piatigorsky
[1968] 1992; Lotman 1970; 1973d; Lotman and Uspensky 1971). The major product of this
cooperation was the establishment of the analogy between the structure and the operation of
the artistic text and culture. In the words of a Lotman student, art as a component of culture
may be viewed in many respects as the model for the whole culture, since in it all the
fundamental features of the functioning of the mechanism of culture are most clearly
manifested (Chernov 1976, 136). What were these fundamental features? How did the
analogy just mentioned shape the development of Tartu culturology?
For one thing, by defining culture as a kind of text, or a sum total of texts, Tartu
scholars opposed, usually implicitly, some of the most popular definitions of culture
circulating in Soviet and Western academia.7 For instance, defined as text, culture is no

In particular, they cite Kroeber and Kluckhohns (1952) summary of the anthropological usages of
culture. Since access to Western literature was limited, especially in Tartu, the significance of such
summarizing texts was particularly high. The only other important texts on culture included Ruth

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longer identified with either superstructure, or ideology, or reflection of reality. It is also

neither collective nor private mental representations. All of these concepts presume the rigid
divisions between form and content as well as reality and representation while Lotmans
definition of the text relativizes them.
As we have already seen, the effect of the artistic text is based on the interplay, of
flickering, between the representation and the represented. Similarly, according to Lotman,
culture is based on the doubling (razdvoenie) between signs and things, and the interplay
between them, on a larger scale. As such, Lotmans culture is similar to Webers and
Geertzs web of significations spun by human actors (Geertz 1973, 5).
In Tartu culturology, the analogy between culture and text does not imply the analogy
between culture and language, as in Levi-Strausss works, or their co-extensiveness, as in the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see Hawkes 1977, 31). Culture is not a kind of language because it
is not a system la Saussures langue. As we have seen, multiple languages, or codes of
different nature, structure texts. Hence, culture is where we have interplay between
perspectives, voices, and agencies. In Lotmans interpretation, culture starts where linguistic
system ends and when languages start to translate into one another.
Culture as a sum total of texts is also different from directly observable behavioral
patterns (Kroeber 1952). This interpretation was popular in behaviorism-dominated
American social sciences in the 1950s. It aimed at the objective description of human
behavioral responses to environmental stimuli, regardless of meaning attached to these
stimuli by actors. In effect, as Tartu scholars argue in a piece of rare explicit criticism,
behaviorists either fail to differentiate significant and irrelevant patterns or impose their own
cultural definition on their subjects. To avoid this danger, Tartu semiotics introduces the
category of symbolic (or semiotic) activity (semioticheskaya deiatelnost) that unfolds in
the space between stimulus and reaction (see Lotman and Uspensky 1971).
Notice that Lotman and his colleagues are talking about culture without trying to
specify whether they are talking about human culture, as opposed to nature, or about a
culture, as opposed to another culture. This is a possibility offered by Russian language. The
structuralist idea of the homology between different levels of structuration supports this habit,
too: culture recapitulates its basic characteristics on the levels of humankind, society, group
and an individual. In fact, Lotmans kultura can best be translated as the cultural to avoid
any essentialist assumptions he self-consciously tried to avoid.
According to Lotmans portrayal of cultures beginnings, it enters the scene when
the satisfaction of a desire or a need is delayed to a later moment (Lotman 1970; 1976a,
214).8 One cannot delay hunger and sleep for too long. Yet one can delay the consumption of
certain products (e.g. meat) or submit your sleeping habits to a discipline. Not all needs are
gratified by immediate satisfaction; some are staggered and thus accumulated. What can be
accumulated is not only food for the next feast but also knowledge about how and why
fasting should be practiced. According to Lotman and his colleagues, where the delay of
gratification and the accumulation of information take place, we have culture. As much as
human agency is not just a response to external stimuli or the threat to individual and
collective survival, this is cultural agency. Yet, Lotman warns us against treating the
cultural as something secondary, for instance as a superstructure over the economic basis.
In his words, for any collective, culture is not merely an optional addition to the minimum

Benedicts Patterns of Culture, Marcel Mausss Sociologie et anthropologie and Levi-Strausss

Anthropologie structurale (see Lotman and Uspensky 1971).
8
Lotman is not talking about temporal origins; beginnings have a sense of the logical and
theoretical origin myth, as in Rousseau and Freud.

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requirements for life but a necessary condition for the collectives very existence (1976a,
214).
The secret of this necessity of culture is in the kind of work it does. This work
consists in the structural organization of the surrounding world (Lotman and Uspensky
1971, 328). Cultural texts order the world around us and make it meaningful and reasonably
predictable. Furthermore, culture is a generator of structuredness and thus it creates around
the human being the social sphere which, like biosphere, makes lifesocial, not biological
possible (1971, 328). Later, in the 1980s, Lotman called this sphere the semiosphere. 9 He
theorized this sphere as not just a result of the structuring semiotic activity but as a condition
of the possibility of this activity. The semiosphere is the semiotic ecology of human
existence, the symbolic space in which languages and media interact (see Lotman 1990, 123130). In another book, he characterized this space as the whole resonant space of human
significations which crosses the boundaries of historical epochs, national cultures and
absorbs us into one culture, the culture of humankind (Lotman 1994a, 8). To say that human
activity is enveloped by the semiosphere is to imply that humans act not just on the basis of
biological impulses and even immediately available cultural significations but based on the
whole thick mass (tolshcha) of previous texts of culture, which constitute the semiosphere
([1985] 1992, 201).
This last idea goes back to Lotmans earlier classical definition of culture as
collective non-hereditary information accumulated, preserved and handed on by various
groups of human society (Lotman 1973a, 1213). From the point of view of culture as
collective memory, the past is never absolutely pass ([1985] 1992, 201). A text or meaning
can be forgotten or suppressed within a particular epoch or society but, as long as its traces
are preserved somewhere within the giant storehouse of culture, it can be reactivated, or
remembered. Yet, reactivation is also transformation and creation. Culture is not just a
storehouse; through the mechanisms of forgetting and remembering, it generates new texts
not only in the present but also the past.10 In the memory of culture, meanings are not just
stored; they also grow ([1985] 1992, 202). In this respect, culture as memory is less like the
library or the memory software of the computer and more like a great piece of art, a novel or
a film.11
This is obviously Tartu Archaism as interpreted by Lotman: the better the text, or
the more it is semantically complex and unpredictable, the more it remembers, or resonates
with a variety of other cultural texts, which are preserved in the collective memory of human
culture. In a sense, the more the text is innovative, the more it is old and even ancient. If an
innovation gets routinized too soon, it was not a genuine innovation: its ability to surprise
or shock has been based on upsetting the most superficial levels of our experience, such as
our political concerns of the moment or our sexual repressions. Yet, if the object or text can
be read many times as if the first time, it is culture per se.
To sum up: when natural and social stimuli become detached from their immediate
practical and embodied contexts, they become signs and texts and thus aspects of the gigantic
9

This crucial Lotmans concept first appeared in his 1984 paper On semiosphere, which was
published in the 17th volume of the TZS. This concept was explicitly modeled on Vladimir I.
Vernadskys (1863-1945) concept of the biosphere (Vernadsky 1998). According to Vernadsky,
like stratosphere or lithosphere, the biosphere constitutes a kind of membrane over the planet
surface; it is an aggregate of all living matter and it functions as a unified whole. Vernadskys theories
have made considerable impact on contemporary ecology.
10
See the phenomenon of rediscovery of forgotten texts or their reconstruction out of the
remaining fragments
11
Here, Lotman explicitly cites Andrei Tarkovskys treatment of memory in his film The Mirror
(1975) ([1985] 1992, 201).

146

memory base of the universal culture, or the semiosphere. As such, culture is an independent
structure able to accumulate and generate information (Lotman 1992, 220). Based on
cultures historical and semantic depth, this independence is what makes any culture
irreducible to any todays power interests and commercial needs. Independence means
perenniality and continuity: in Lotmans (1998) symptomatic comment on Umberto Ecos
famous novel, the rose withers but the word rose persists in multiple inscriptions and
readings. This is the perenniality not of a particular interpretation of a text or a symbol but of
the text itself, with all its ambiguity and heterogeneity. In short, according to Lotman
(although he was not a religious person), theologies come and go but the Book stays.
This concept of cultures autonomy does not imply static juxtaposition with the
biological and physical structure. Culture is a structure which is inserted into the outside
world, which [the structure] draws it in itself and throws it out in a changed form, organized
according to this structure (1992, 207). Similarly, the independence of culture does not
imply the substantive distinction between symbolic behavior and other types of social action.
Lotman explicitly opposes this distinction inherent in Soviet cultural politics aimed at
administering and propagating specifically cultural activities like art. In his treatment,
culture is a dimension of any human action. Whatever any action does, it involves processing,
organizing, preserving and generating information. Even the most natural function of survival
and reproduction is mediated through cultural mechanisms of classification and
textualization.
This position diverges significantly from early Moscow and Tartu structuralism. In
earlier perspectives, culture was not only modeled on natural language but also deemed to be
a kind of superstructure reliant on linguistic resources and circumscribed by language.
Language was seen as essentially pre-cultural and non-ideological. In contrast, the idea of the
semiosphere and the independence of culture implies that the semiotic sphere [is] necessary
for the existence and functioning of language, [it] has a prior existence and is in constant
interaction with languages Outside the semiosphere there can be neither communication,
nor language (1990, 123-124). In a sense, semiotic space precedes system and text
precedes language.
Hence, culture as the semiosphere of human existence is an ontological, but not
biological, foundation of specifically human action, language and thought. One implication
has been formulated by Dmitry Segal (1974, 96):
what was traditionally regarded as purely economic and political activity was, in fact,
a complex system of purely semiotic behavior in which material transactions were
only the outer expression of symbolic content. Honor, glory, duty , and other
notions of feudal ethos organized the exchange of gifts and services.
Another implication is that the very nature of cultural symbols makes them resistant to
political appropriations. Culture is, by its very nature, an inexhaustible reservoir of the means
for any form of emancipation (cf. Schnle 2006).
Such is the core of Lotmans theory of culture. Under this broad heading, a number of
smaller empirical and conceptual projects thrived. Some of them tend to rely more heavily on
the structuralist and classical philological heritage of the School. Others are tacitly or overtly
engaged with such trends as the New History and anti-teleological historicism (neohistoricism) similar to the one of French new philosophers of the 1960s-70s. In what
follows, I will introduce two major directions of Tartu research, cultural typology and
cultural dynamics.

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The Project of the Universal Typology

Cultural typology is a way to detect order and find ones way in the immense space of the
semiosphere by illuminating partial analogies between various loci in the continuum of
human history. The work of typology is to organize difference, to express it in a uniform
way. The introduction of the (phon)emic analysis into linguistics by Jakobsons structuralism
gave rise to the hopes of founding the comparative study of cultures on the firm scientific
basis of structural typology. In response to this call, Claude Levi-Strauss postulated the
taxonomic (tabular) space as a logical grid for plotting cultural isolates. Similarly, in his
1968 letter to Roman Jakobson, Viacheslav Ivanov expressed his solidarity with the plans to
construct something like the general system of distinctive features for various types of
culture. 12 In effect, he hoped to get a kind of Periodic System, or a set universal binary
oppositions alike the system outlined by Jakobson for phonology. Moreover, Ivanov hoped to
predict possible and unknown permutations of these oppositions and thus possible cultures.
The aim of this theory of potential culture (as opposed to actual one) was to differentiate
between deep homologies and superficial analogies among cultures and thus establish the
fixed logical carcass for human history (see Chernov 1976; Ivanov 1986). The words of Osip
Mandelstam (1979, 117) summarize this project well, even though they explicitly refer to
Henri Bergsons philosophy:
Bergson does not consider phenomena according to the way they submit to the law of
temporal succession, but rather according to their spatial extension. He is interested
exclusively in the internal connection among phenomena. He liberates this connection
from time and considers it independently. Phenomena thus connected to one another
form, as it were, a kind of fan whose folds can be opened up in time; however, this
fan may also be closed up in a way intelligible to the human mind.
In his influential Essays on the Typology of Culture, Yuri Lotman (1970; 1973d) goes even
further: as Dmitry Segal (1974, 86) summarized his project, one speaks of typology of
cultures in the Western tradition vs. typology of culture as adopted in the Soviet school.
Indeed, Lotman (1973d) targeted his project of cultural typology at nothing less than the
logical-deductive definition of the essence of the phenomenon of culture as a constant
structure without which the existence of the humanity is impossible. In effect, he came up
with the most self-conscious and ambitious program for cultural classification that we yet
have, according to Frederick Jamesons (1988, 166) evaluation. In particular, Lotman
proposed a number of distinctive features based on the major conceptual oppositions of the
structuralist framework like metaphor vs. metonymy, syntactic vs. semantic, paradigm vs.
syntagm, and rhetoric vs. stylistic. He anticipated that the resultant grid will allow one to plot
different native theories (self-descriptions) and even sophisticated theories of culture and
history without necessarily following either of them. Typology was a means of establishing
distance between the researcher, her ideological background and the object of her interest.
Indeed, Lotman and his colleagues seemed to have achieved some success in this
direction. Their multiple typological distinctions often went beyond simple variations within
the traditional teleological narrative of tradition vs. modernity or myth vs. reason. For
instance, Lotman adopted William Frazers famous distinction between magic and religion
precisely because it was hard to plot it on the temporal axes: according to Frazer, the magic is
both primordial and modern, since science is magic reincarnate (Lotman 1990, 254-268).

12

Ivanov to Jakobson, February 1, 1968 (JC, box 42, folder 30).

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In effect, Tartu typologies aim at a kind of encyclopedia of different, often

overlapping and intersecting, tropes of Western and Russian anthropology and cultural
history, without privileging any of them.13 In different papers, Tartu semioticians introduce
such analytical oppositions as metaphorical vs. metonymic, paradigmatic (hierarchical) vs.
syntagmatic, closed (past-, or origin-oriented) vs. open (future-, or redemption-oriented),
cosmological vs. historical, central and peripheral, as well as classicist and romantic cultures
(e.g. Lotman 1970; 1973d; 1990).
It is mandatory to mention that, at least in Lotmans (1970) usage, these oppositions
should not be interpreted as substantive, or ontological, distinctions between well-bounded
entities. Rather, Lotman treats these distinctions as relational and nested. For instance,
depending on what Russian culture is compared to, to English or Indian culture, for example,
it can be seen as cosmological and closed or historical and open. Also, a poet is a
Romantic not as such, according to her essence, but with respect to the horizon of
significances against which we consider her. Furthermore, Lotmans typological distinctions
are comparable to what Andrew Abbott calls fractal distinctions, that is the distinctions that
repeat their oppositional patterns within each of the terms of the opposition (2001, 9). For
instance, despite the difference between sexes, the opposition between male and female
gender roles is reproduced within each sex. According to Lotman, this kind of fractal
doubling is the nature of any text and any human individual. Each individual constitutes a
border case and an interplay between different gender identities (see Lotman 1992, 255-256).
Thus Lotmans typologies potentially provide a considerably flexible repertoire of
categories for describing and comparing different cultures. Yet, this project encountered a
few serious difficulties early on. This frameworks greatest problem is its inability to provide
a clue to how and why a culture is as it is. Of course, one can relegate the account of cultural
production to the next, historical and empirical stage of research. Yet, this is easier to say
than do. In fact, typologies are already imbued with historical narratives they purport to plot
and formalize in an objective manner. These narratives resist being presented as just logical
oppositions of distinctive features. Despite all attempts to bracket off their implicit
ontological and historical connotations, (topo)logical oppositions persistently lead
culturologists back to the basic master-narratives of the modern mind. For instance, in the
works of Vladimir Toporov (1973a), the typological distinction between cosmological and
historical texts brought him back to the historical distinction between pre- and postAxenzeit humanity.14 Similarly, Lotman transforms the typological distinctions between
metaphorical and metonymic cultures into the temporal succession between medieval and
Enlightenment cultures (Lotman 1973a).
Another problem, which Tartu scholars encountered in the course of constructing the
universal cultural typology, was irreducible inexactness of terminology. If linguists have hard
time establishing the finite number of universal distinctive features beyond phonology, this is
immensely more complicated for culture. Consequently, the prospect of the deductive theory
of culture appeared to be even more distant than Tartu scholars were prepared to expect.
Yet, there is no evidence that they came to the conclusion that their typological
project is not only an inelegant solution, but probably hopeless (Sahlins 1985, xvi). Instead,
they just downsized their conceptual work to the level of their immediate expertise. In
13

A number of Tartu-related scholars, especially Eliazar Meletinsky and Vladimir Toporov, played
crucial role in creating a blockbuster of the Soviet black market, the two-volume Mify narodov mira
(The myths of the peoples of the world), which was published in 1980.
14
See Karl Jaspers (1969) idea that human civilization, as we know it, has been greatly shaped by a
series of cultural innovations like Buddhism and Greek philosophy which emerged in a number of
isolated civilizations at approximately the same time, between the 6th century BC and the 2nd century
AB.

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particular, Ivanov and Toporov concentrated on the underlying archetypical and invariant
aspects of the world-pictures of Indo-European and Slavic cultural domains (Ivanov and
Toporov 1969; Ivanov 1984). Similarly, Lotman and Uspensky focused on the medieval and
early modern history of Russian culture and thus produced some of the most influential
recent studies on these subjects.
In what follows, I demonstrate that, although Tartu scholars never abandoned the idea
of universal typology, they effectively settled with a number of disjoined and often ad hoc
categorical oppositions, presumably arising from empirical data itself but often strikingly
reminiscent of the classical oppositions of tradition vs. modernity, myth vs. reason, and
Russia vs. West.15 The Tartu works on the semiotics of Russian culture are relatively wellknown and substantively rich examples of this settlement in practice.
Russian Culture and the Idea of Perennial Dualism
The decade between 1975 and 1985 may be called the Decade of the Semiotics of Russian
Culture in the history of the Tartu School. In this period, a series of large articles, often cosigned by Lotman and Uspensky, appeared in the Tartu Works on Slavic and Russian
Philology (TRSF) and other publications dedicated to various aspects of medieval and early
modern Russian history. The semiotic nature of these studies implied the shift in historical
research from the commonplaces of Soviet historiography (that is the assumptions of social
progress, class struggle, Russian backwardness and the quest for causal explanation).
Although Tartu scholars rarely confronted the supposedly Marxist framework of mainstream
Soviet scholarship, they tended to ignore or downplay Soviet works on relevant historical
periods. The majority of citations were coming from the originals or historical studies from
the eighteenth century to the 1920s (see Lotman and Uspensky [1977]1984).16 Just like the
whole Tartu project, even more strikingly, the studies on Russian culture exemplified the
pose of originating the leap forward through deliberate posture of backwardness.17
Instead of considering cultural processes as reflections or ideologies above and in
addition to the infrastructural processes of social development, Lotman and Uspensky
announced most important historical shifts and conflicts properly semiotic and even
philological in nature (see B. Uspensky [1986] 1994). According to Tartu semioticians,
historical ruptures like the Schism (raskol) in the Russian Orthodox Church in the
seventeenth century or the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great were essentially the
results of the misunderstandings in the course of transmitting messages between social
groups, nations and even epochs (B.Uspensky 1976). They were effects of the clash between
languages and attitudes to signification. For instance, the damaging raskol between the
supporters of the new rites and the stringent adherents of the old ones (the Old Believers)
was, according to Boris Uspensky (1992), more than just a preparation for the opening up of
Russia to the West or a sign of resistance to the consolidation of the absolutist monarchy.
15

The sign of this transition is that, while most of the works of typology were published in
Smeiotik, the Tartu classical works on culture were publishes in specifically philological journals
and collections (e.g. TRSF).
16
One of the most frequent exceptions was Dmitry Likhachev, the key Russian medieval historian of
the late twentieth century. As an academician and a high official in the academic Institute of Russian
Literature in Leningrad, Likhachev was one of Lotmans most rewarding allies in the matters of
publishing and procuring research agendas. An aristocrat and a former prisoner of the gulag,
Likhachevin his own wordshad pleasure in assisting people he considered true members of
the intelligentsia. As he wrote in his 1958 letter to Lotman, I love to be of use to any good person
(LC, F135, s.801).
17
Boris Gasparov, lecture.

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According to Uspensky, these explanations do not account for the unique significance of the
issue of correct sign in this conflict. The Old Believers and the reformers differed in their
attitude to Orthodox ritual and Slavonic orthography. The former professed sacramental
materialism and thus believed that any change in the outward symbols of faith leads to the
change of faith and thus betrayal of the Orthodoxy. The latter adopted a Baroque idea of the
detachability between the sign and its meaning. That is, Boris Uspensky approached this
conflict as the one about the concepts of (Orthodox and Russian) tradition between the
adherents of non-conventional and conventional attitudes to signification.
Thus, behind conflicts of classes, political groups and religions, Tartu semioticians
discover basic typological oppositions of cultural attitudes. This is the key methodological
stance that guides Lotman and Uspenskys important studies on the politics of the Schism
and Tsar Peters modernization. Another related stance is the critique of the theories of
progress and modernization, the theories that treat these crucial events of Russian history as
cases of the struggle between modernity and tradition, or new and old.
In a series of papers, Lotman and Uspensky demonstrate that the very distinction
between old and new is not a historical fact but a mythological trope arbitrarily related to
specific historical events and circumstances. It particular, they draw our attention to the fact
that, after the baptism of Russia in the tenth century, Christianity was associated with the
new ways while paganism was considered old. Yet, after the fifteenth century, this
distinction was reversed: most written sources indicate the identification of the new ways
with both paganism and Western Christianity. Tsar Peter preserved this interpretation but
reversed valuations from plus to minus and vice versa: to remember meant to be an
ignoramus, to forgetto be enlightened (Lotman and Uspensky [1977] 1984, 16).
Furthermore, Tartu semioticians argue that the old ways traditionalisms were
culturally more radical than the new ways modernisms that were paradoxically combined
with the activation of extremely archaic cultural models ([1977] 1984, 7). At the same time,
the stringent guardians of tradition, the Old Believers, rejected the whole social order in the
name of the natural one [and thus came up with] the most profound negation anticipating
Rousseaus and [Leo] Tolstojs ideas. Their image of the old ways aimed at breaking with
actual historical tradition ([1977] 1984, 15).
Similarly, according to Lotman and Uspensky, Tsar Peter did not simply introduce
new, i.e. Western, customs to Russian society. His specific choice of symbolic gestures, like
transferring the capital to the borderland, giving it a German name and renaming himself
an emperor, to mention just a few of his innovations, were more indebted to the indigenous
interpretation of such acts than to some genuinely Western agenda. All these gestures
fitted already preexisting images of pagan and unholy behavior, or anti-behavior, within
Russian cultural memory (B.Uspensky 1976, 57). According to Boris Uspensky, Tsar Peter
forged his image of the West and Westernized Russia out of the local resources of antibehavior. To be sure, if this was a self-conscious act on the part of Peter and his comrades,
wider masses followed this pattern more automatically. As Uspensky likes to reiterate, when
Peter forced his soldiers to shave their beardsa sign of Orthodoxy for most peopleand wear
Western costumesassociated with carnival, or reverse drag,soldiers started to behave
accordingly, i.e. rape, pillage and harass their own compatriots (see Lotman and Uspenskij
1984). In other words, both traditionalists and reformers invented their cherished and
despised traditions, Western and Russian, pagan and Christian.
So far so good. We have an account of invented traditions, selective memory and
discursive hegemony. The new appears to be made out of existing symbolic resources and
in view of existing horizons of expectations. The old turns to us with its freshly polished
surface of made-up antiquity. This tradition makes sense only within specific social and
symbolic oppositions between Westernized elites and indigenous people, between state
151

and intelligentsia which were not envisioned in the past to which this tradition is supposed
to refer. Simultaneously, while the Westernized elites seem to be successful in implementing
some of their agenda, the effects of their polices are identical to neither their original
intentions nor Western sources of their inspiration. Europeanization was not only imposed
from above but also generated, resisted and invented from below. As Lotman and
Uspensky formulated these ideas,
The subjective Europeanization of life had nothing in common with any real
convergence with Western life-style, and at the same time definitely influenced the
setting up of anti-Christian forms such as had certainly never been possible in the life
of the Christian West. This can be seen in the case, for example, of serf harems, an
institution that was quite impossible (in a completely open and public form) in prePetrine life, but which became quite normal in the eighteenth century. Serf harems
were not a survival from older times ([1977] 1984, 21-22).
If we temporarily bracket Lotman and Uspenskys tendency to essentialize the Christian
West and focus on the texts produced by the educated clergy and nobility, it seems that we
witness a genuine alternative to both modernization theories and binary typologies. This
perspective does not seem to require any holistic characterizations of Russian culture as such.
On the contrary, it seems to invite interesting comparisons with contemporary and analogical
processes of Westernization, from Germany to India. Simultaneously, Lotman and
Uspenskys studies clearly imply attention to what Sahlins (1985) called a historical
structure of the conjuncture, or the practical realization of the cultural categories in a
special historical context, as expressed in the interested action of the historical agents,
including the microsociology of their interaction (Sahlins 1985, xiv).
Yet, these motives are often outbalanced in Lotman and Uspenskys cultural
semiotics by a peculiar form of cultural essentialism. In opposition to the mainstream
insistence on the deep rupture between tradition and modernity, as well as pre- and postPetrine Russia, the Tartu scholarship tends to underline structural continuities. By itself, this
emphasis is not problematic; it resembles Fernand Braudels long sixteenth century or,
more closely, Nancy Kollmanns suggestions about the long early modern period in
Russian history from 1600 to 1800.18 Similarly, Lotman uses the idea of uneven
development to point to the different speeds with which different social spheres and
institutions change. However, this thinking is not what distinguishes Lotman and Uspenskys
works on Russian culture. These works are more famous, or notorious, for the attempt to
reduce the whole Russian national history to a number of perennial models, or
developmental patterns, supposedly characteristic for Russian culture. Most famously,
Lotman and Uspenskij (1984) truncate the emergent and hybrid cultural forms described
above to the level of a simple pattern they call binary (or dual) models.
The idea that dual models in the dynamics of culture are essential for understanding
Russian history has been first formulated in Lotman and Uspensky ([1977] 1984) and refined
to the full-fledged opposition between West and Russia in Lotmans last book (1992). It is
based on a particular interpretation of the semiotic studies of Russian culture. As we have
seen, Lotman and Uspensky convincingly demonstrated the relational, not substantive,
nature of the oppositions between new and old, modern and traditional, Western
and Russian, as well as elite and popular. With respect to Tsar Peters epoch, Tartu
culturologists argued that
18

Beneath the obvious and dramatic changes in political ideology, institutions, and high culture,
much about Muscovy changed slowly, if at all (Kollmann 1999, 251).

152

the intense rapidity of the Petrine transformations, the very idea of speed and urgency
which gripped the minds of Peters Europeanized comrades in arms was in
complementary correlation with the Old Believer consciousness which was extratemporal and in principle anti-historical. The one was impossible without the other
(Lotman and Uspenskij 1984, xiii).
Yet the next immediate step in the discourse of Tartu culturologists was to proclaim this
correlation, especially its binary character, a specific and perennial feature of Russian
cultural history. By inserting this correlation into the series of extremely similar events
throughout the history of Russia, the authors come up with the following opposition:
The basic cultural values in the system of medieval Russia are arranged in a bipolar
value field divided by a sharp line and without any neutral axiological zone [On the
contrary,] in medieval West we find a wide band of neutral behavior and there are
neutral social institutions which are neither holy nor sinful, neither state
organized nor anti-state, they are neither good nor bad. This neutral space becomes
a structural reserve from which tomorrows system develops. Since continuity is
obvious here there is no need either to emphasize it structurally or establish it
consciously and artificially. [In contrast,] the Russian medieval system was
constructed on a marked dualism Dualism and the absence of a neutral axiological
zone led to the new being regarded not as a continuation but as an eschatological
replacement of everything change takes place as a radical rejection of the preceding
stage. The natural result of this was that the new emerged not from the structurally
unexplored reserve, but as a result of the transformation of the old, as it were, of its
being turned inside out. In this way repeated changes could in fact lead to the
regeneration of archaic forms It is this deep developmental structures which enable
us to speak of the unity of Russian culture at the various stages of its history. It is in
change that the unchanging is revealed (Lotman and Uspensky [1977]1984, 4-5).
To sum up by means of using Lotman and Uspenskys example, Western Catholic culture is
tri-partite, it allows for purgatory between hell and heaven, while Russian Orthodox culture is
binary, it does not allow for purgatory. While the ternary system attempts to adapt the idea
to reality, the binary one [attempts] to fulfill the unrealizable in practice (Lotman 1992,
258). Thus, if the former allows for development, continuity and learning, the latter provides
only for inside-out reversals between ready-made oppositions of practices and symbols. Yet,
it is precisely the ruptured character of Russian history that produces its continuous perennial
pattern.
Boris Gasparov (1996b) succinctly summarized these and other binary cultural
oppositions as oppositions between Roman imperial and Catholic traditions with their cult
of laws and institutions and Russian Orthodox tradition of unconditional trust, moral
absolutism and mythogenic logocentrism.19 Although it is hard to agree with Gasparov that
Lotmans value preferences are unambiguously on the Russian side, he rightly points to
19

Lotman, to my knowledge, never employed this concept of Derrida. Yet, it has been recently often
used in respect to both Russian culture and Tartu semiotics. For instance, Mikhail Lotman noted in his
interview to me (Tartu, November 2001): while Russian culture is explicitly logocentric and
phonocentric, Tartu semiotics is [a form] of its self-consciousness. This statement has a particular
relevance to what Lotman and Uspensky ([1975] 1994) describe as the Russian attitude to the word:
the Word as an inherently authoritative utterance (cf. Bakhtins (1990) philosophy of the word as a
morally and existentially responsible act).

153

Lotman and Uspenskys tendency to collapse various oppositions around preconceived

dilemmas. Importantly, this way of collapsing is unacceptable from the point of view of the
initial models of periodic system and distinctive features. In these models, the oppositions
were meant to be relational rather than substantial. However, by superimposing a multitude
of ad hoc oppositions along the Russia-West imaginary borderline, Tartu semioticians create
an impression, and fall prey to this impression themselves, that they describe two
nonrelational substances with fixed attributes. In effect, they produce an image of the
perennial Russian cultural language 20 and Russian history as a series of variations within
constraints imposed by the basic models implicit in this language. Consequently, Soviet
semioticians reintroduce the concepts of ancestry and origin, expunged by structuralism. As a
temporal series of substantially varied but structurally identical epochs, Russian history
appears to form a perfect hereditary lineage. In this lineage, new generations have no other
choice but to assign new contents to the same genetically predisposed set of formal
functions.
Be this as it may, we have seen how a rather unrealistic project of universal typology
evolved into a number of versions of cultural relativism. Opposed to the Soviet Marxist and
Eurocentric notion of social progress, this conception rejected, at least theoretically, the
concepts of developmental stage, backwardness or modernization. In effort to
understand the patterns of the Petrine Westernization, Lotman and Uspensky pointed to the
diachronic analogies with the Byzantine Christianization of Russia in 988 rather than to any
simultaneous processes in Europe or in Asia (Lotman [1989] 1992a). In Lotmans words,
the [Petrine] secularization of culture did not affect the deep structural foundations of the
national model developed during preceding centuries. The set of functions was preserved,
although their material substrates changed (Lotman 1994d, 367). Instead of cultural
influence, Lotman and Uspensky were concerned about decontextualization, reframing, and
ultimately cultural production, rather than re-production of the Western exemplars within
local models. Thus, they approached the issues of local agency but interpreted it in terms of
the holistic agency of Russian culture as such.
In sum, the Tartu semiotics of Russian culture allowed its authors to solve a number
of intellectual problems. It equipped them with relativistic critique of traditional theories of
modernization and progress. It allowed them to escape from the dead-end of the ambitious
but unrealistic project of universal typology. However, perennialist cultural semiotics as an
intellectual strategy contained a serious flaw, the tendency to ontologize culture
(Piatigorsky 1994, 326). That is, structuralist categories and oppositions, instead of being
treated as research tools, turned into the laws of the nature. In effect, Tartu culturologists
made themselves very vulnerable to accusations of simply reiterating the traditional selfOrientalizing Russian historiosophy (Amelin and Pilshchikov 1998; Zaretsky and Peskov
1998).21
Furthermore, as deeply convinced empiricists in their attitude to theory-building, the
Tartu scholars, especially Lotman, must have been aware of the weak explanatory power of
their schemas. One obvious problem with the Schools reliance on persistent cultural
models for explaining specific historical phenomena is that they do not explain why this and
not other object or practice (for example, national literature, duel or salon) perform a
20

The language of culture is not just a metaphor but also an indication of the parallelism between
language and culture. For instance, in the manner of linguistic relativism, Boris Uspensky (1994a)
argues for the parallelism between cultural binary models and linguistic diglossia in medieval
Russia.
21
This term is frequently used by critics. Indeed, Lotman and Uspenskiis models often reproduce
Nikolai Berdiaevs ideas on Russian essential dualism, maximalism, tendency for self-surrender and
so on (see Zaretsky and Peskov 1998).

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presumably perennial function in the studied period. Another problem has been recently
pointed out by Viktor Zhivov (Zhivov 2002). He demonstrated that many Tartu
generalizations about Russian culture were simply extrapolations from the ideologies implicit
in selected official or elite sources. Finally, Tartu perennialism does not imply any way of
tackling with modernity and individuality, the topics of utmost importance for Lotman.
It seems plausible to suppose that, at least, Lotman was aware of these problems. This
might be one reason why his actual research practice was never just a realization of a single
theory. In fact, there were always more than one theoretical perspective and research
framework present in his work. The logic of taxonomic structuralism and relativistic
culturalism coexisted with Marxist and other assumptions.22 For Lotmans sensitivity to
contradictions and his interest in arts social production, Mikhail Gasparov (1996c) even
called him a Marxist, not in his system (theory and ideology) but in his dialectical
method. This sensitivity found its most adequate realization in Lotmans other brainchild,
his project of cultural dynamics also developed in the 1970s.
Lotmans Theory of Cultural Dynamics and Neo-Historicism
The point of departure for Lotmans theory of cultural dynamics is an overtly simple idea
that, to experience something as culture, it should be opposed to something that is deemed
non-culture (Lotman and Uspensky 1971). This is a high abstraction from such cultural
universals as the oppositions between cosmos and chaos, life and death, man and female, us
and them. However, in contrast to Levi-Strausss culture vs. nature distinction, Lotmans
opposition does not have substantive connotations. As already mentioned, it is purely
relational and can be filled with any substance. For instance, sexuality, femininity or the
Orient is by no means necessarily assigned to the right term of the opposition: one can easily
imagine cultural idioms in which femininity and the Orient are forces of the self rather than
the Other (cf. Butler 1999, 48). In any case, Tartu scholars seem to be conscious of the
possible accusations of Eurocentrism and sexism. They wish to make sure that their
intentions are well-understood: they only want to say that each culture will need such an
opposition [in which] only culture will serve as a marked member (Lotman and Uspensky
1971). What specific things and acts are classified on the left side of the opposition is a
matter of specific cultural types and historical contingencies.
Furthermore, whereas the native defines her culture in opposition to non-culture,
this opposition itself is a cultural phenomenon for the semiotic observer (Ivanov et al.
1973, 4). In contrast to what might be called a natural attitude of the cultures insiders, the
semiotic framework is able to envision that the inter-cultural images of our culture and
their non-culture are constituted in the course of repeated mutual breaches of the cultural
sphere into chaos and of chaos into the cultural sphere (1973, 5). That is, both are cultural
constructions; both are the distinctions made within the same semiotic ecology, or the
semiosphere (see Lotman 1990). For instance, the distinction between worthy and unworthy
to remember presumes the memory of the both. This is in the basis of Renans paradox, as
described by Benedict Anderson: Renans readers were being told to have already
forgotten what Renans own words assumed that they naturally remembered! (Anderson
1991, 200).

22

For instance, Lotman frequently operated with Jakob Burckhardt-type portrayal of cultural
evolution as a wave-like change of cultural types like Renaissance and Baroque (see Chernov 1976).
Simultaneously, when he talked about progressive (peredovye) and retrograde actors, he revealed
his liberal progressist common sense.

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In the context of this shift from the natural to semiotic attitude, the Tartu idea of
culture as text acquires new meaning. To conceptualize culture as the text is to view it as a
dynamic space in various codes, voices and standpoints are exchanged, transformed and
generated. According to Lotman, culture is not a unified and homogeneous sign system, as
Soviet or Western structuralists tended to picture it. It is not a well-bounded unit as perceived
by cultural relativists. Rather, the culture of a group is a sum total of languages and each
member [of such group] is a polyglot of sorts (1970, 7). In another piece, Lotman defines
culture as a collective, superindividual intelligence able to process culturally relevant
information in the form of culture texts (1978b, 16).
Defined this way, culture as text and intelligence cannot be singular. For it to exist,
there should be at least two cultures (Lotman 1990). The development of culture, as any act
of creative mind, is an act of exchange and thus constantly presupposes the other, the partner
in this act ([1983] 1992, 117).23 Culture exists in constant transgression and establishment of
inner and outer borders. To rephrase Lotmans dictum slightly,
from the point of view of mechanism, there is no difference between the interaction of
different texts within one culture [originally, national literature] and texts of
different cultures We can only speculatively (umozritelno) divide the interaction
and immanent development of cultures ([1983] 1992, 111).
Cultures frontline outposts are established through negotiations of internal divisions and the
other way around.
An implication is that no culture has a monopoly on its products, from texts to human
agents (which Lotman considers a kind of texts). Due to their intertextuality, any cultural
object can simultaneously be projected on multiple cultural contexts. Similarly, human agents
are entangled in multiple cultural narratives: for instance, Lotman himself can be perceived
against such backgrounds as European civilization, Russian culture, culture of Leningrad
intelligentsia, Russian academic ethos, secularized Jewishness, Russian subculture in Estonia,
and Tartu vaim (the Tartu Spirit). As Mikhail Gasparov likes to say, the personality
(lichnost) is a node in the intersection of social relations (2000b, 86).
Overall, like Mikhail Bakhtin (1986, 170), Lotman might have stated that culture
exists on the borders of different cultures. A homogeneous and single-voiced culture is a
contradiction in terms for him. However, in comparison to the father of dialogism, as well as
Western proponents of hybridity and fluidity of boundaries, Lotman is also interested in how
cultures satisfy another property of texts, to be robust and distinct from the environment.
Indeed, how do cultures manage to avoid falling into complete disarray, or unchecked
increase in entropy? How is a relative continuity of different readings of culture texts is
preserved? How do people manage to find common languages under the conditions of
essential impossibility of translation (see Lotman 1990)? Ultimately, how do cultures
perform their structuring role despite their essential polyglottism?
Lotmans answer is as follows: by means of undertaking periodic acts of
homogenization, primarily through self-descriptions. Self-description, or metamechanism, is an attempt to reduce complexity and unpredictability of any specific cultural
field by increasing the tightness and predictability of links between its various sites. Self23

This paper is one of the main references in this section. Entitled Toward the construction of the
theory of the interactions between cultures: A semiotic aspect, this paper was originally published in
one of the Tartu University Acta volumes, which was not edited by Lotman himself. This may be one
of the reasons why this important paper is les widely cited then his papers published in Smeiotik and
TRSF.

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description is an attempt to increase cultures organization. This is achieved by privileging

one of particular cultures languages, or codes, out of their multiplicity and, by means of
this language, formulating cultures ideal self-portrait (Lotman 1978b, 17). In effect,
some of [cultures] aspects are proclaimed non-structural, that is nonexistent.
Incorrect texts are massively excluded from cultural memory. Other texts are
canonized and put into a rigid hierarchical structure The metamechanism creates
not only a particular canon of the synchronic state of culture but also a version of the
diachronic process. It actively selects texts not only from the present but also from
preceding states of culture and institutes its own, simplified, model of the historical
movement of culture as normative (Lotman 1977, 143).
The need for such master-narratives emerges, according to Lotman, in the times of sudden
social explosions or external interferences. At these points, complexity and unpredictability
of a cultural space threatens to cross the threshold beyond which any sense of continuity and
oneness loses meaning. At these moments, cultural elites produce unifying symbols, origin
myths and nationalistic ideologies which serve as maps of the disintegrating landscape (1992,
35). In effect, the cultural space becomes divided internally into culture and non-culture,
included and excluded, true and existent vs. false and nonexistent.
Thus, where cultures insiders and cultural essentialists tend to see the opposition
between culture and non-culture (i.e. nature or simply nothing important), Lotman
sees the intracultural opposition between center and periphery, the dominant world-image
and the excluded, or subaltern, perspective. 24 In effect, he significantly enlarges the field of
analysis: what seemed to be disorderly and irrational from the point of view of the dominant
actors appears to have its own rationality to be reconstructed by semioticians and historians.
In Lotmans words,
The meta-description of culture is not its skeleton but one of its structural poles; for
researchers, it is not a ready solution but a material for study, one of the mechanisms
of culture in constant struggle with other mechanisms ([1983]1992, 120).
Here, Lotman hits the core point of Tartu culturology. Culture is not a system of rules,
however complex and hierarchical, as Jakobson and Levi-Strauss seemed to argue. Culture
(and cultures) is a repertoire of texts, polyglot, multiply coded and characterized by high
degree of indeterminacy of the ways in which they can be extended in social action. The
image of the system of rules is itself a product of privileging particular texts and presenting
their master reading as canonic. Yet, the excluded cultural objects and practices do not
disappear, they accumulate at the periphery of the official memory as a vast archive of
anomalies (1992, 162). Without this archive, culture would not have resources for selfrenewal and the adaptation to the changing social environment. The periphery is not only an
archive of abandoned paths and voices; it is also a reservoir of future possibilities and
resources.
The relational nature of culture vs. non-culture opposition implies that central and
peripheral loci, actors and texts do not simply coexist statically but interact. Dominant
ideologies invade peripheral communities by sending soldiers and priests along the roads
built around the capital. This is an example of what Lotman calls the homogenizing
aggression of [hegemonic] nomination of the center to the periphery (Lotman 1992, 26).
24

Neither Lotman nor his colleagues cite Maurice Halbwachs (1992) and Edward Shils (1975)
seminal statements on center and periphery. It seems that this categories were in the air.

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Simultaneously, peripheries send their children to work and study to the capitals and thus, at
least, increase internal diversity of the central loci and provide resources for challenging
hegemonic discourses. Furthermore, the interaction between central and peripheral loci can
reach a point when they switch places: for example, Peter the Great moved his capital to the
Western borderland of the empire and the workers moved into prestigious downtown
neighborhoods of Russian cities after 1917 (Lotman 1990, 143-150).
Furthermore, Lotman does not treat the opposition between center and periphery as an
exclusively ideological opposition. The spatial connotations in his works are by no means
just metaphors; they point to the differentiation of actual material sites. The altar is the center
of the church space but church is the center of the village whereas the capital is the center of
the country. The whole cultural space can be pictured as a hierarchy of such distinctions
superimposed upon one another to produce a complex, polyglot and non-binary landscape of
materially inscribed semiotic interactions.
This materialistic and dialectical conception of center and periphery leads Lotman to
conclude that what seems to be an effort to reduce complexity and unpredictability in fact
increases these qualities. Meta-narratives and hegemonic sites may order some relations but
they also produce unexpected consequences which increase the general entropy of culture.
Every new step in cultural development increases, not exhausts, the informational
value of culture and thus it increases, not diminishes, cultures internal indeterminacy,
its set of possibilities which are left unrealized ([1983]1992, 119).
For instance, the development of science and technology [in the fifteenth-seventeenth
centuries] did not diminish but increased the irrational unpredictability of life (1988a, 103).
Lotman further argues that the stress produced by the speeding up of the historical time led to
the mass hysteria of witch-hunts and inquisition, the things virtually unknown during high
Middle Ages (see also Gurevich 1985 and Ginzburg 1980).
These kinds of observations lead Tartu scholars to oppose the nineteenth century
image of history as progress toward more rational, orderly and presumably free existence.
They repeatedly criticize what they call Hegelian [and Marxist] historicism for teleology,
reduction of eventful contingency, multiple possibilities and evolutionary detours (Lotman
1969; 1990; Toporov 1973a). According to Lotman, this teleological vision of history
conceived [of it] as directed toward specific targets known to the researcher. The very
supposition that it could have contained in itself essentially different possibilities has
not been permitted. From this point of view, it was believed that Russian literature,
from its inception, had the only possibility, to reach Tolstoy and Dostoevsky by the
nineteenth century The researcher considers what has actually happened as the only
possible the impact of the researchers metalanguage on the material is perceived as
uncovering the immanent orderliness of the cultural process ([1983]1992, 118-119).
If the Hegelian historiosophy was true, it would mean that the redundancy and predictability
in history is imminently rising. This would be particularly true for those who lag behind
along the highway of progress. Yet, Lotman claims, the opposite is the case: the products of
westernization and modernization are by no means predictable imitations of ready-made
Western models (Lotman [1986] 1993).
In interpreting these observations, Lotman returns to the idea of cultural heterogeneity
but clarifies it with the idea of cultural unevenness. He argues that each culture is a complex
whole composed of layers of different speed so that its synchronic [current] slice reveals coexistence of different stages (1992, 25). Here, Marx meets Jakobson: both interpreted, from
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their different vantage points, the todays structural complexity of society (culture, language)
as a result of the superimposition of different historical epochs. Yet, if Marx still hoped that
previous stages would subsequently die out, Russian Formalists and semioticians insisted,
together with Osip Mandelstam, on the fundamental nature of the simultaneous coexistence
of layers: todays culture is such only as long as all epochs coexist in it (see Levin et al.
1974, 89). Tartu semioticians never got tired of repeating that nothing in culture is
superfluous and every meaning will have its homecoming festival (see Torop 2000b;
Bakhtin 1986, 170).
This understanding of culture as memory and memory as an archive of previous
history was shared by most Tartu scholars as a specification of the larger archaist discourse
overviewed in chapter three. They all shared a sense that remembering is a paramount
cultural mechanism and a moral imperative. However, the theory of artistic text and culture
developed by Lotman leads him along the path significantly different from the one taken by
his colleagues, especially Ivanov and Toporov, the leaders of the Moscow mythopoetic
studies.
As I demonstrated in chapter five, Ivanov and Toporov developed a comprehensive
theory of transformational evolution in which they argued that the whole heterogeneous and
uneven landscape of contemporary culture can be reduced to whatever long chains of
transformations heading back to hypothetical mythical archetypes. Their basic agenda was to
provide an empirically sound proof that any cultural form, whatever redundant or
meaningless it seems to us, has a function if considered in the perennial and diachronic
perspective.
In contrast to this highly teleological vision, Lotmans theory of culture implies a
decidedly neo-historicist picture of cultural history more akin to Tynianovs idea of literary
evolution than to Jakobsons system in diachrony.25 In this picture, evolutionary strata are
not superimposed statically as in fossil bones. They are constantly in feedback relationship.
Not only lower, or more ancient, strata constrain higher and younger ones but also
the other way around. The history of culture is a series of flashbacks which not only
illuminate the past but also create new texts both in the present and in the past. Therefore,
according to Lotman, culture as collective memory is not just a storehouse of the past but also
a generator of meanings. Meanings are not kept but they grow in the memory of culture
([1985]1992, 202). Therefore, the interest of the culturologist is not limited to the reduction
of the heterogeneous to unitary and invariant. He is also concerned about what could have
been but have never been, i.e. unrealized possibilities and unwalked paths.
These essentially neo-historicist stances within Lotmans fundamentally archaist
discourse saturate in his last books (1990; 1992). Inspired by Ilya Prigogines synergetics,
Lotman openly faces concepts of chance, unpredictability, discontinuity and open-endedness
as no longer unthinkable but scientific facts (see Lotmans interview in Torop (2000)).
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1984) synergetic perspective on the far from
equilibrium physical systems and their nonlinear dynamics provides him with scientific
language for addressing cultural unpredictability. In effect, he proposes a model of cultural
evolution in which cultures move through the cycles of relatively predictable development
25

Although there are clear resemblances between Lotmans later conception and Foucaults
archeology and genealogy, it is unlikely that the latter influenced Lotman. Foucault had a
misfortune, in Lotmans eyes, of being a philosopher, a non-scientist, a non-Slavist and a Leftist
intellectual to merit much of Lotmans attention. To be true, unlike other French theorists, Foucault
did not irritate him (Lotman, Mikhail. Interview). This may be because Lotman did not read
Foucaults later works. In any case, Lotman genuinely admired Foucaults analysis of Velasquezs
Las Meninas in The Order of Things. It is not an accident that this painting appears on the cover of the
English edition of Lotmans Universe of the Mind (1990).

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and moments of serendipity, when preceding states of the system do not determine the
outcomes. These moments lead to explosions (vzryvy) and the establishment of new
paths out of the continuum of virtually equiprobable outcomes. In these situations,
history reveals itself as an irreversible (unbalanced) process with chance serving as the
starter mechanism (Lotman 1990, 230, 232). Lotman (1990, 233) further specifies
Prigogines paradigm by claiming that, in human culture, chance often turns into choice made
by historical agents:
The choice which will be realized depends on a complex of chance circumstances, but
even more on the self-awareness of the people involved. This is why at such times
speech, discourse, propaganda has especially great historical significance.
The introduction of chance, choice and agency into the very heart of theorizing on cultural
evolution seems to be a radical departure from both projects of universal typology and
perennial cultural models. Lotman did not explicitly abandon the dream of the universal
typology of culture but he admitted, in Lotman (1992), that the same types of cultures may
proceed along very different paths depending on the contingencies of specific explosions.
To summarize the character of Lotmans mature culturological idiom, let me present
an extended quote in which he portrays the city as a cultural phenomenon and a metaphor of
culture per se. Indeed, the city encompasses all the major features of culture according to
Lotman: its identifiable unity and heterogeneity, its orderliness and discontinuity, the
inseparability of its symbolic and material dimensions, its ability to withstand time and its
indeterminacy and openness:
The city is a complex semiotic mechanism, a culture-generator, but it carries out this
function only because it is a melting-pot of texts and codes, belonging to all kinds of
languages and levels. The essential semiotic polyglottism of every city is what makes
it so productive of semiotic encounters. The city, being the place where different
national, social and stylistic codes and texts confront each other, is the place of
hybridization, recodings, semiotic translations, all of which makes it into a powerful
generator of new information. These confrontations work diachronically as well as
synchronically: architectural ensembles, city rituals and ceremonies, the very plan of
the city, the street names and thousands of other left-over from past ages act as code
programmers constantly renewing the texts of the past. The city is a mechanism,
forever recreating its past, which then can be synchronically juxtaposed with the
present. In this sense the city, like culture, is a mechanism which withstands time
(Lotman 1990, 194-195).
In conclusion, let me summarize what I consider the major tension within Lotmans
culturological framework and the overarching archaist discourse of the Tartu School. This
main tension is between at least two major idioms: broadly structuralist and neo-historicist, or
genealogical (due to its affinity with Foucaults genealogy). Both idioms are in
agreement about the irreducible independence and historical depth of the cultural space (the
semiosphere). They agree that, at any moment of its existence, the cultural whole is an
uneven and unstable assemblage of the traces of the previous development. It is a contingent
outcome of the superimposition of these past layers and their coexistence as if in the same
space. In both cases, despite overt disavowal of any interest in the present, the past serves
primarily as a medium privileged for accessing the present.
Yet, as structuralists of sorts, Ivanov and Toporov as well as Lotman and Uspensky,
in their semiotics of Russian culture, are primarily interested in uncovering deep coherence
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and continuity under the polyglot cultural surface. They are concerned about making sense
of all the odd juxtapositions and hybrids within their own culture, intellectual and national,
by establishing systemic parallelisms and invariants in the large time of the noumenal past.
Yet, for Lotman of the 1980s and 1990s, the classical structuralist perspective does
not seem to be sufficient for understanding culture in time, both macro-time of large
historical shifts and micro-time of everyday existence (byt). The focus on mythical
archetypes, typological oppositions and perennial models falls short of culture-in-action
which requires a distinctive, neo-historicist, perspective. As its practitioner (see his theory
of cultural dynamics), Lotman is interested in unpredictability, difference and ruptures
between different layers of meaning, in their mismatches and conflicts. This is a deeply antiteleological idiom. In Lotmans own words, history is a strange film because if we play it
backwards we will not get back to the first shot. Predetermination and continuity (even just
structural one) is a result of the backward gaze: The choice which was open to chance
before seems predetermined afterwards (Lotman 1990, 230, 233).
Hence, far from being a monolithic and clearly thought through, the framework of
Tartu culturology was a heterogeneous assemblage of different ideological, theoretical and
methodological stances, of which structuralism and neo-historicism constituted the most
interesting pair. The obvious question that arises is how these different stances and agendas
coexisted in the work of the same School and often the same authors. Were the differences
between idioms just omitted or left unnoticed? Or, perhaps, they complimented one another
in some ways, did they not?
In fact, both guesses may be true. At times, different theoretical and methodological
perspectives simply coexisted within Tartu studies without being objects of any serious
reflection. In other cases, however, Lotman and his colleagues proclaimed their
complementarity as the basis for their peaceful coexistence. Borrowed from Niels Bohr, the
concept of complementarity was a popular way among Soviet scholars and Tartu
semioticians, in particular to justify the refusal to take an extreme stance. Lotman (1983;
1990) and Ivanov (1978) even treated this methodological indecisiveness as a case of some
universal law, in one line with such phenomena as the complementarity of two asymmetrical
hemispheres in human brain, two modes of signification (conventional and iconic) and two
poles within the semiotic space (center and periphery).
In effect, by professing the doctrine of complementarity, Lotman managed to avoid
the extremes of contemporary cultural studies with their tendency to overemphasize the
plasticity and manipulability of cultural forms. Simultaneously, as I will demonstrate shortly,
he could go beyond the presuppositions behind typological structuralism, cultural relativism
and Russian nationalistic historiography. Yet, complementarity in practice could also lead to
methodological eclecticism, as well as juggling with different interpretations without much
attempt to clarify their actual relations with one another. In the next chapter, we see how
these different possibilities played out within the body of one of the Schools most interesting
achievements, Lotmans grounded theory and cultural history of theatricality in early modern
Russia.
Tartu Culturology and Imperial Semiotics
In conclusion, I would like to propose one more generalization about the Tartu model of
textuality and culture. In the previous chapter, I contrasted two models of the empire of
signs, the democratic-republican and the aristocratic models. Now, after discussing
Lotmans theories of culture, it is clear that our understanding of his model of the empire of
signs can be enriched by the following statement: Lotmans empire of signs is, well,
empire. This apparent tautology can be interpreted in two ways.
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First, like many other semiotic theories, Tartu semiotics is often accused of semiotic
imperialism (see Chandler 2002; Kevelson 1986). This is, basically, the desire by
semioticians to claim expertise over almost any field of knowledge on the basis of the
assumption that semiotic mechanisms take place everywhere, from animal communication to
social institutions and personal interactions. In its stronger version, semiotic imperialism
means that all fields of scientific knowledge are the provinces of the empire of signs. In its
more moderateand more tenableversion, it means that this empire has its provinces (or
colonies, or at least protectorates) in all disciplines, for instance the semiotics of primate
communication in zoology or the semiotics of fashion, commercials and advertisements in
cultural sociology and cultural studies. As I have tried to show, Soviet and specifically Tartu
semiotics provides examples of both strong and moderate perspectives and, in these respects,
does not differ from most other semiotic and cultural studies paradigms.
Second interpretation of the imperialness of the empire of signs is more specific to
the Tartu School. As portrayed by Tartu scholars, human culture cannot be modeled on the
ethnically based and linguistically homogeneous nation-state or on ethnicity-blind republic.
Rather, the Tartu Empire of Signs is a multinational and multi-lingual realm. This is not
empire as domination of one nation-state over others. This is, emphatically, not cultural
superiority of one culture over another. In the Lotmans conceptual imagery, this empire is
a syncretic and polyglot space where multiple incommensurable discourses enter into a
dialogue with one another in effort of build bridges across the multitude of symbolic and
material borders that constitute the semiosphere.
This imperial imagery is implicit in many Tartu writings but it is practically
nowhere explicitly stated. The closest Tartu scholars come to formulating it is in their
published memoirs and in the interviews that I have collected. For instance, Viacheslav
Ivanov clearly states that such, whatever imperfect, empires as the Holy Roman Empire,
Austro-Hungary, the British Empire, contemporary India and, of course, the Russian
empire/the Soviet Union are not only predecessors of his preferred form of governmentthe
world governmentbut also the prototypes for his concept of culture.26 Not so much in his
academic works as in his 1980s public statements on political and pedagogical issues, Yuri
Lotman makes clear the connection between his imperial experience as a professor of
Russian literature in Soviet-occupied Estonia and his theories of the fundamental
bilingualism of human culture.
Of course, when Lotman argues that the presence and interaction of at least two
semiotic systems, or languages, is a minimal precondition of any specifically cultural practice
or interaction (1978b; 1983; 1990; 1992), he means not only national languages but also
various narrative genres and speech registers, discourses and ideologies, as well as media and
inscription styles. For Lotman, the interplay, or flickering, between, for example, romantic
and realistic conventions, history and fiction, vernacular and poetic speech, visual arts and
cinema is the fundamental mechanism of the construction of not only sophisticated literary
texts but also broadly understood cultural texts. Yet, the term bilingualism is not an
accident. Among other things, it definitely refers to his professional and political
engagements in the controversies about teaching Russian language and literature in Soviet
Estonia (see Waldstein 2007, 583).
In contemporary Estonia, Yuri Lotman is often hailed as a national icon and,
sometimes, even appropriated by the Estonian cultural and political establishment as the
Estonian semiotician Juri Lotman (e.g. Danesi 2000, 99). It is true that he was always very
respectful of the local culture and language. Moreover, he identified himself with Estonia
and Estonians in their tacit and later open opposition to the Soviet rule and Soviet ideology.
26

Ivanov, interview.

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In the late 1980s, Lotman actively supported Estonias right on self-determination. Yet, his
vision of both Estonian society and Russian culture differed significantly from their
nationalistic visions on both sides of the barricades.
In one of his public pronouncements, Lotman (1988, 107) stated, culture is not able
to develop in narrow ethnic boundaries. Here, the bridge between his intellectual and
political strategies is apparent. Culture, according to Lotmans theory, is not language, or
system, but a dialogue between many languages. In accordance with this theory, Estonia he
envisioned was not an ethnically-defined and monolinguistic nation-state but a territorial
community of Estonian citizens who represent different national cultures, Estonian and
Russian in particular, but share a common liberal civic identity. That is, Lotman considered
Estonia a multicultural realm and thus a kind of mini-empire. At the same time, Lotman
considered abnormal and unjust the lop-sided bilingualism which was instituted in Estonia
by Soviet rulers: Estonians were effectively, although not legally, forced to learn Russian
while local Russians were not put in a position to have to learn Estonian. Yet, as his archive
certifies, Lotman equally disagreed with the effective exclusion of most Russian speakers
from the independent Estonian society after 1990. Although he himself was spared of being
treated as a migrant and reduced to the status of a non-citizen, he saw the establishment
of the ethnolinguistic Estonia as a major assault to the polyglot nature of any cultural
organism that aspires to be vibrant, dynamic and creative. Moreover, he considered the very
fact of establishing new national borders within the post-Soviet space as a major tragedy
(Waldstein 2007, 594).
This last concern points to a related social and intellectual stance that underlines
Lotmans cultural theories. It is the idea that, as a multinational empire, the Russian
empirein its pre-Soviet and Soviet incarnationsis an approximation to the kind of supernational, or cosmopolitan, cultural realm which Lotman, Ivanov and many of their colleagues
among Russian and Western intellectuals consider their true home. Another version of the
same attitude would be the identification with Europe or western civilization, which is
also characteristic of Tartu intellectuals. This Western reader of this book should be quite
familiar with this universalistic attitude.27 It is an essential part of the classical ethos of
scientists and literati, who often advocated their right on autonomy and authority by being
citizens of the world and bearers of the universal high culture. Yet, historically, this ethos
has often been associated with the assumptions of the European and imperial supremacy over
Orientals or small nations (see Loomba 1998).
Yuri Lotman was quite aware of the possibility of this kind of slippage and much of
his academic and social preoccupations had to do with preventing this slippage to occur. A
professor of Russian culture in Soviet-occupied Estonia, Lotman for 40 years tried to dispel
any possible suspicion of being an imperialist and a Russifier of Estonia by persistently
distancing between Soviet ideology/policies and Russian culture in his pedagogical
practice, academic research and personal performance (see Waldstein 2007). His image of
Russian culture, build around the classical texts and the texts excluded from the Soviet canon,
was the one of catholic and inclusive culture. In his portrayal, this is the culture, the best
achievements of which are praised for their ability not to epitomize but to transcend the
borders of one ethnic group. This is a culture-translator, culture-mediator between other
cultures, and, as such, a prototype of Lotmans theoretical concept of culture. The distinction
27

I realize, though, that the association of this universalistic ethos with the Russian empire is
somewhat unusual for the Western reader. Yet, this is not a strange move within the Russian context.
I suggest to think about the historical precedents when the process of civilizing the peasants or the
savages was conducted through their incorporation into (or exclusion from) some well-developed
and politically strong national culture (German, French, or Russian).

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between the Soviet political empire and the humanistic realm, the empire of culture, it
covered can also be seen as a social paradigm for the Tartu emphatic distinction between
power and culture.
Here, Lotman appears as not only a cosmopolitan intellectual but also as an heir to the
tradition, which has been particularly popular with the Russian, and Russian-Jewish,
intelligentsia of last two centuries. This tradition is epitomized by Dostoevskys idea of
universal responsiveness: Russian culture is a superior mechanism of universal translation
and summing up of the best of the worlds diverse spiritual heritage (Wachtel 1999, 59).
Andrew Wachtel has provided a concise summary of the logic behind this Russian imperial
project of translation of world culture into and through Russia:
[A]s opposed to the elites of other imperializing nations, whose explicit or implicit
assumption of cultural superiority caused them to view their own values as universal
and as something to be imposed on others, members of the Russian cultural elite
proposed a model that emphasized their nations peculiar sponge-like ability to absorb
the best that other peoples had to offer as the basis for a universal, inclusive national
culture. (52)
Overall, although the Tartu paradigm can be summarized by such concepts as the discourse
of archaism, the aristocratic idiom and the imperial idiom, each and all of these formulas
represent a heterogeneous complex of attitudes to the human condition, contemporary social
life and the role of intellectuals in society. This complex comprises rationalistic
universalism, even cosmopolitism, and the passionate embrace of the national cultural
canon; the spirit of enlightenment and cultural elitism; non-conformist individualism and full
of trepidation attitude towards cultural memory; the idea of ethno-cultural equality and strong
disapproval of narrow ethnic allegiances. Some of this heterogeneity may have to do with
certain sketchiness of the Tartu paradigm. Indeed, its authors have nowhere summarized it as
a coherent doctrine.
Yet, much of this particular complex of attitudes can be simply attributed to the
broader European humanistic tradition. It is this tradition that is torn between rationalistic
universalism and cultural relativism, or between the idea of spreading the light of reason
and keeping it alive as far as possible from vulgar bourgeoisie, plebeians, and
consumers. In this respect, Lotman is a classical humanist, with a good balance of all the
elements of the classical mix. His major colleaguesIvanov, Toporov, Piatigorsky,
Zholkovsky, to name just a fewexemplify different aspects of the humanist type with
various emphases and combinations: some are more conservative, others are more liberal,
still others are more avant-gardeish; some are more worldly and even cynical, while others
are spiritual or principled. The combinations and emphases may vary but, as a whole, the
Tartu paradigm is an outgrowth of the familiar and respectable intellectual tradition of
modern humanism.
Considering the squall of critique the modern humanist tradition has been under in
Western humanities and social sciences over last 30-40 years, my genealogy of the Tartu
paradigm may seem to be a poor advertisement for it in the eyes of many Western colleagues.
Yet, if their critique is reducible to the idea that Tartu or any humanism is anachronistic and
out of sink with time, then this argument cannot be accepted. It is erroneous and selfdefeating. What used to be outdated can, in the words of Bakhtin and Lotman, have its hour
of revival. What used to be trendy appears to be pass, as is the case with postmodernism
and some of its intellectual heirs in the eyes of many academics of the 2000s. In contrast, the

164

Tartu emphasis on the autonomy of cultural mechanisms with respect to their political use or
mass consumption, as well as their implicit critique of nationalism, may become once more
in demand.

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Chapter Seven
PLAYFUL SELF-FASHIONING:
A Neo-Historicist Theory of (Russian) Modernity

As one may conclude from the previous chapter, Tartu culturology is, like Lotmans
culture, full of the splinters of different structures in free motion (Lotman 1992, 177). It
is constituted not by some monolithic structuralist methodology but by the uneasy
coexistence of different conceptual frameworks and research perspectives, of which Ivanov
and Toporovs evolutionary structuralism, Lotman and Uspenskys typological
structuralism, and Lotmans mature neo-historicism are the most developed.
So far, we have seen Lotmans neo-historicist perspective on culture mostly in his
theoretical proclamations, not in his historical research. In this, Lotmans neo-historicist
works differ from Lotman and Uspenskys (1984, 3-70) coauthored papers, in which they
made their name by emphasizing the continuity of Russian history and introducing the
structural basis for such continuity, the so called binary models in the dynamics of culture.
In their works, Lotman and Uspensky explicitly connect theory and history, and this
explicitness adds to the visibility of their statements. Unfortunately, in Lotmans other
historical studies, the connection between his neo-historicist ideas and his historical research
is subject to reconstruction.1 In what follows, I attempt this reconstruction and thus reclaim
an alternative, and so far underestimated, Tartu paradigm of historical research to the
contemporary scholarly use.
In particular, I contend that Lotmans historical research on early Russian modernity
and on what he calls the theatricality of the Russian nobilitys everyday life is strongly
motivated by the neo-historicist idiom, as developed by Lotman in the 1980s and 1990s. 2 I
further demonstrate that Lotmans historical studies implicitly contain a grounded theory of
the emergence of modern personhood and associated institutions in the non-Western world. I
try to demonstrate that this conception is intriguing enough to earn Lotman a place in the
Western scholarly imagination along with Jrgen Habermas, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault
and other prominent theorists and historians of modernity.
Life into Theater: A History of Modern Personhood
Despite relatively local and mixed reception of Tartu cultural semiotics in the West, the
categories of theatricality and the poetics of everyday life (poetika byta) were received
favorably by both Russian historians (e.g. Roosevelt 1991; Wortman 1995) and other cultural
1

Most of these articles have been translated in Lotmans section of Lotman and Uspenskij (1984, 71256).
2
Although the focus of this chapter is the works of Lotman, I occasionally refer to other Tartu and
post-Tartu works that I consider significantly neo-historicist in their approach. While some of these
authors clearly differentiate themselves from the structuralist aspects of the Tartu tradition (e.g.
B.Gasparov 1996a; Zhivov 1996; 2002), others are more hesitant to raise their choices of research
framework to the level of abstract conceptual debates (e.g. Leibov 1996; Pogosjan 2001).

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historians (Burke 1991; Greenblatt 1989). This is not an accident. Unlike many other Tartu
conceptual contributions, the direction indicated by these two categories has been well within
the current trends in Western studies of culture. The microhistorical analysis of human
agency and everyday routines, the emphasis on subjectivity and personal self-fashioning and
on the local genealogies of modern institutions is only a short list of the concerns that Lotman
seems to share with his Western colleagues. In what follows, I will try to demonstrate how,
by means of the categories of theatricality and the poetics of everyday life (poetika byta),
Lotman managed to introduce these, in my terminology, neo-historicist concerns into the
very core of his research. This exposition will lay the foundation for assessing the
achievements and limitations of Lotmans, to a large extent, neo-historicist conception of
early Russian modernity.
Let me start with Lotmans understanding of theatricality. This concept first appeared
in Lotmans writings in the mid 1970s, in a series of articles dedicated to theater and
theatricality in the everyday life of the Russian gentry in the 18th-early 19th century (Lotman
[1973] 1984; [1975] 1984a; [1975] 1984b; [1977] 1984).3 A fruit of Lotman-led seminar on
everyday life held in Tartu University in 1972-74, these papers deal with the phenomenon of
more or less explicit modeling of political and everyday behavior by the Russian and
sometimes European elites on the artistic presentations of reality and history. Lotman argues
that the epochs of Romanticism and Neoclassicism, in their own different ways, brought
together, closer then ever before, the worlds of theatrical performance and fashion, on the one
hand, and the worlds of political ritual and everyday life, on the other.
In short, theater entered life. Theatrical norms invaded everyday behavior: friendship,
love, communing with nature and even solitary existence. Large segments of everyday life
4
eating, conversing, flirting, etc.lost their spontaneity but also their relative
uneventfulness, their automatic and routine character. Instead, the gentleman of the 18th
and especially early 19th century was no longer
a passive participant in the impersonally flowing course of time, for, liberated from
everyday life , he existed as a historical person, himself choosing his type of behavior,
making an active impact on the world around him, and either going under or winning
through. Viewing real life as a performance not only offered a person the possibility
of choosing his type [amplua5] of individual behavior, but also filled it with the
expectation that things were going to happen. Eventfulness [(suzhetnost)], that is, the
possibility that unexpected phenomena and turns of events would happen, became the
norm. It was precisely the model of theatrical behavior that, by turning a person
into a character in a play [(or, actor, acting agent, deistvuiushchee litso)] (underlined
in the originalM.W)], liberated him from the automatic sway of group behavior and
of custom (Lotman [1973] 1984, 160).
Described as such, theatricality of everyday life should not be confused with the medieval
theater state with its graded hierarchy of prestige and sanctity from highly ritualized, or
scenic, life of the court to the practically norm-free social nonbeing of lower classs daily
existence (Geertz 1968, 37-38). The particularity of the historical moment, as described by
Lotman, was in the fact that, for example, the Russian imperial court in the 18th century
3

The titles of these articles are as follows: The Theater and Theatricality as Components of Early
Nineteenth-Century Culture, The Decembrist in Everyday Life, Gogols Chlestakov: The Pragmatics
of a Literary Character, The Poetics of Everyday Life in Russian Eighteenth-Century Culture (see
translations in Lotman and Uspenskij 1984).
4
Bytovaia zhizn, or simply byt, from the verb to be (byt).
5
From French emploi. Amplua means adopted role, or style of behavior, in contrast to ascribed role.

167

became just one of several horizontally juxtaposed life-scenes of the noblemans life, along
with the civil or military service and the ball, the barracks and the estate, the capital(s) and
the province, the company of ladies and that of men (Lotman [1973] 1984, 152). The
Russian gentleman of the time became an actor in a number of plays. He behaved
differently in these plays, according to their distinctive, and often incompatible, plots, genres,
front- and backstage, audiences and criteria of outstanding performance (Lotman [1977]
1984, 236-237). In contrast to the theater state, which symbolized the social hierarchy, the
invasion of theater into life led to the lowering of the hierarchical barriers among, at least,
elite actors. Lotman writes that Napoleon was just a person of his time when he modeled his
imperial court on the norms established in eighteenth-century French theater for
representing the courts of the Roman emperors (1990, 60).
Furthermore, Lotman de facto differentiates two types of theatricality, a more
historically specific phenomenon and a more universal phenomenon, which recurs in history
from time to time. The latter type of theatricality, of simply performativity, can be defined
as a phenomenon of turning unmarked and unremarkable background of what we tend to
consider as notable events into a set of significant events in their own right. These kind of
poetization and mythologization of certain segments of everyday life, for instance rural
life or food, is in the core of some cultural styles like Baroque or Romanticism, as opposed to
Classicism and Realism ([1973] 1984, 159).
In contrast, the former type of theatricality is more historically specific. As the long
passage above suggests, it has to do with modernity and the character and history of modern
subjectivity (cf. Elias 1978; Foucault 1977). Indeed, for Lotman and his colleagues, theater is
both a metaphor for, and an important practice of, the establishment of the conditions for the
peculiarly modern, or mature, in Kants words, sense of personhood. As Maria
Pliukhanova, the Tartu University medieval historian, pointed out, The ability to temporarily
take someones role and name and not lose ones individuality is the basis of the art of acting,
as well as a trait of a self-determining individuality, a result of the ability to see oneself from
the outside (Pliukhanova 1982, 88).
For Lotman, subjectivity (or personality, personhood, lichnost, individualnost),
is not a ready-made substance with fixed attributes. The actual notion of individuality is
not primary or self-evident. It depends on the means of encoding (Lotman 1990, 234). This
statement implies the multiplicity of culturally defined types of personhood. For instance, the
medieval Muscovite concept of personhood was defined by the degree of honor, or the
place on a social ladder and his or her proximity to the tsar (Reyfman 1999, 35; cf.
Kollman 1999; Lotman 1967c). The individuals agency depended on his or her awareness of
her place within the hierarchy of social ranks.
Hence, Lotman allows for multiple historical types of individual agency. Yet, what
sets apart his notion of the modern Russian personhood is its consistently theatrical
relation with oneself, or attitude to ones own body, behavior, emotions and thoughts. It is not
an accident that, like Baudelaire and Foucault (1978), Lotman singles out the dandy as a
exemplar of such a theatrical actor.6 What distinguishes dandyism from other forms of
agency is the very fact of adopting a certain attitude in respect to oneself and the world.
Instead of just accepting ones social definition, the dandy detaches his self and the roles he
plays and thus transforms these roles into ampluas, i.e. objects of awareness, elaboration and
manipulation.
6

Notably, even the wordings of Foucaults and Lotmans accounts are similar. If Foucault (1978)
focuses on the asceticism of the dandy who makes of his body, his behavior, his feelings and
passions, his very existence, a work of art, Lotman defines theatrical life as a life raised to the level
of high art (1987, 26).

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Theatricality, in Lotmans definition, is a change in the degree of conventionality in

behavior (Lotman [1973] 1984, 150). It is precisely in this change, or rather constant
alternation (smena), or reincarnation (perevoploshchenie), that the individuality and
uniqueness of the self comes to the fore and establishes itself. One of Lotmans primary
examples of such self-invention is Nicholas Karamzins narrative persona in his 1790s
travelogue on his trip around Europe. In this novel, Karamzin portrays an image of a young
Russian nobleman who, while encountering various people, milieus and circumstances, tries
on various available masks, like a sentimental young man, a fop (shchegol) or a
pedant. According to Lotmans interpretation, Karamzins main literary achievement is the
naturalness with which his hero manipulates these often incompatible masks. In effect, the
reader gets a clear sense that all these roles and masks are combined in one and the same
personality (Lotman 1987, 24). By this very act of combining and alternating, the
personality of the main hero/author establishes it as its own invention, as a realization of the
Enlightenment project in its Kantian sense. Lotman argues that this success made Karamzins
travelogue not only one of the first widely-read Russian novels but also a pattern for
individual self- fashioning for the upcoming generations of Russian writers and readers. It
played a crucial role in the formation of the modern reading public, an ethos of a modern
writer and, ultimately, in producing the new Russian cultural (or cultured, kulturnaia)
personality (Lotman 1987, 29).
The dandy was not just a product of an aestheticizing reaction to modernity
characterized by the growing speed and superficiality. Lotman describes the dandyish attitude
as a particular case of the larger transformation of the everyday life into the analogue of art.
To be modern was to establish the variety of behaviors and their alternation as a norm of a
distinctive theatricalized lifestyle in which life is a realization of specific poetics, the poetics
of everyday life (poetika byta) (Lotman [1975] 1984a, 80).
To speak of the poetics of everyday behavior amounts to claiming that certain
forms of ordinary daily activity were consciously oriented towards the laws and
norms of literary texts and were lived through as direct aesthetic experiences
(Lotman [1977] 1984, 231).
Poetika byta refers to cases when historical actors deliberately turn their everyday life into a
text arranged according to the laws of specific plots and thus made their lives codes
crackable by means of reconstructing these plots. Yet, this textualization of life also
implies its authoring and deautomatization. We can say that life evolves from the myth to the
novel. Indeed, by putting forward, or foregrounding, the composition of ones life-text, a
historical actor transforms her life from uneventful everymans sequence into an exciting
narrative open to different closures both by readers and the author himself. In this sense,
poetika byta is opposite to the prose of daily life into which a man is frozen like
Dantes sinner into the ice of Caina (Lotman [1973] 1984, 159). Guided by such poetic
attitude, human behavior becomes self-consciously ironic play with codes, conventions,
stereotypes and various cultural references.
In short, poetika byta is a kind of play placed in the center of everyday life. As we
know from previous chapters, play(ing), not a chess-like game, is one of the basic idioms of
Lotmans semiotics and his theory of the text, in particular. Lotmans play consists in the
fact that different meanings of the same (textual) element not just coexist statically but
flicker (Lotman [1970] 1998). To play is to be simultaneously within and outside of the
situation. To play is to translate, i.e. to engage in what Lotman has called the impossible
translation between different codes, texts, cultures, life domains and human persons.

169

Although Lotman works out his conception of play mostly on the material of art
(paintings, film, literature), poetika byta proves to be a vehicle of extending Lotmans ideas
on play toward larger and, presumably, less creative domains of daily life. In effect, it turns
out that the mundane existence is not devoid of unpredictability and openendedness, agency
and choice, individuality and improvisation. An acute awareness of the possibility of other
meanings, the key feature of artistic play, can also be found in daily life (Lotman [1970]
1998). These insights animate Lotmans and his colleagues multiple analyses of selfpresentations and life-constructions of iconic cultural and political figures (Pushkin,
Karamzin, Radishchev, Chaadaev, Alexander I), literary heroes (Khlestakov from Gogols
Inspector General) and mass members of the gentrys salons and revolutionary societies
(including some distinguished women). Furthermore, in his TV lectures delivered in 1986-89,
Lotman provided examples of the poetic analyses of the theatrical aspects of a large
variety of everyday practices and objects, starting with civil service and family life rituals to
parades, fashions, duels, architectural designs and card games (Lotman 1994a; 2003).
Excited about the cases of crossing the boundaries between art and life, Lotman,
however, emphasizes the difference between theatricality and carnival. According to Mikhail
Bakhtin, carnival is accompanied by the reversal of all hierarchies and the dissolution of
social roles and distinctions (Bakhtin 1984). In implicit opposition to contemporary countercultural interpretations of Bakhtin (Kristeva 1969), Lotman argues against collapsing
together life and art, as well as playful (poetic, theatrical) and serious attitude to the world.
His point is that this very opposition gives meaning and semiotic value to the mutual
displacement of these categories (Lotman 1992, 75). It is precisely because the life of
theater differs from everyday existence that the view of life as spectacle gave a man new
possibilities for behavior (Lotman [1973] 1984, 160). That is, the point of any play, artistic
or daily, is not only the transgression of various borders and norms but also, through this
transgression, their actualization as no longer taken-for-granted but conscious norms of my
behavior. In Lotmans view, once the norm loses its power altogether, play withers and the
new norm, often more oppressive than its predecessor, reigns supreme.
Lotman seems to be particularly irritated by his French and Anglo-American
colleagues fascination with Rabelaisian carnivalesque body in the act of becoming
(Bakhtin 1984, 17). He protests against what he considers counter-cultural dissolution of
the modern subjectivity into an empty signifier behind the intertextuality of the traces of
the other. The theatrical behavior of such, in Lotmans view, quintessentially modern
actors as Pushkin or Karamzin is not a sign of them being split or multiple personalities.
The aesthetic, game-playing essence of this kind of behavior lies in the fact that when
he became a Cato, a Brutus, a Pozarskij, a Demon or a Melmoth, and started behaving
in accordance with the part has assumed, the Russian nobleman never stopped being
simultaneously a Russian nobleman of his time, no more and no less (Lotman [1973]
1984, 150)
Without preserving both identity and distinction between the Self and its multiple roles, the
play loses its intrigue and unpredictability, and thus stops being theater. Theatricality, in
Lotmans picture, may be a way of problematizing certain roles precisely by showing them as
just roles. Yet, by foregrounding the production of the self, the theatrical subject did not
just dissolve it into the traces of the other but established itself by distancing from its roles.
Hence, Lotmans implicit debate with French (post)-structuralists and, to a certain
extent, Bakhtin stretches into his conception of everyday theatricality. He is interested in
theatricality as a mechanism of personality-formation, not its dissolution. His point is that
theatricality provides the most revealing case of the self-making characterized by the
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dialectics of unpredictability of the play and the structuredness of the available resources.
Theatricality also provides a field in which this self-making takes place. Overall, it is a case
of what Bakhtin calls the authoring of ones life.
Whatever significant this concept of theatricality may be by itself, I am particularly
concerned about its contribution to our understanding of the inter-cultural contact, especially
the one under the conditions of the civilizing process of modernity. However, here, Lotman
sends conflicting messages. Based on the bricolage of major trends in Lotmans theorizing,
Lotmans studies of early modern Russian culture simultaneously provide a further insight
into the heterogeneity of his thinking and offer an intriguing formwork for approaching
modernity and identity as non-linear, emergent and performative processes.
Playing Modern is Being Modern
The main ideas and findings of the perennialist semiotics of the dual models in Russian
culture, as summarized in chapter six, are based on Lotman and Uspenskys studies of the
medieval, or Muscovite, period of Russian history. Yet, Lotmans own expertise and passion
lied elsewhere, in the first half of so called Petersburg period, between approximately 1700
and 1850. Commonly perceived as a start-up of intensive Westernization and modernization
of Russia, this period is a profoundly contested issue in Russian historiography. The
Slavophil and nationalistic interpretations of this period portray it as a radical break with the
authentic national tradition. On the contrary, the Westernizers saw the Petrine reforms as a
powerful effort to bolster modernization already on the way.
Although Lotman and his colleagues often took stands in these ideological debates,
they did not propose any grand alternative to these traditional explanations. Lotmans
concerns and interpretations were usually middle-range or microhistorical, operating with
close reading and thick description of the sources (cf. Levi 1991). This empirical focus
promoted a bricoleur approach to the perspectives and methodologies employed: whatever
framework seemed to make sense of the sources was an appropriate framework. In effect,
Lotmans studies on early Russian modernity were relatively free from the dominance of the
perennialist models and open to other interpretative strategies. No surprise that these
studies were sites of multiple neo-historicist moves long before corresponding Lotmans
theoretical ideas appeared in print. Furthermore, despite his attempts to smooth over the
contradictions between various frameworks employed, these contradictions are particularly
acute in his studies of modernity. In what follows, I will demonstrate how the same historical
data received quite different and often sharply opposite interpretations depending on the
framework employed.
To demonstrate this point, I focus on various historical interpretations of theatricality
within Lotmans oeuvre. The topic of a particularly pronounced role of symbolic behavior, or
ritualized play-acting, in the life of the Russian court and nobility is not entirely Lotmans
mastermind. On the contrary, it persistently comes up in the ideological and academic
debates on post-Petrine Russia. Before returning to the neo- historicist interpretation of this
topic, let me first outline some of the commonly noted dimensions of this topic.
The lavishness and grandeur of court entertainment, as well as a peculiar phenomenon
of serf theaters in noble estates, are well known and researched manifestations of the role of
display and performance in early modern Russian society (e.g. Roosevelt 1991). Yet, as
Lotman concludes from his close readings of literature, memoirs, correspondence,
architecture and other artifacts of the period, this performativity (marked expressivity,
theatricality) of noble behavior was more than just an excess. It was a characteristic and
even defining feature of the period. Although limited socially to the court and nobility, this
performativity was pervasive with respect to both public and private lives of the historical
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actors. As Priscilla Roosevelt pointed out with respect to the culture of Russian countryside
estates, The theatrical continuum observable on the Russian estate encompassed serf theater
performances, theatrical displays connected with hospitality, theatricality in the material
culture of the estate, and the theatricalization and ritualization of private life (1991, 1).
Although reminiscent of the playfulness of the French aristocratic salons, this
theatricality of Russian nobilitys attitudes and behavior was a result of the peculiar social
transformations initiated by Peter the Greats reforms. In Lotmans account, the Petrine
reforms transformed what used to be a domain of unconscious, or natural into a matter of
explicit instruction and learning (Lotman [1977] 1984, 232). What used to go without
saying turned into lingua incognita, a set of explicit scenarios of particular ways of
speaking, behaving, and dressing. The language of everyday life lost its immediate
transparency and practicality. If, in the eighteenth century France, novels were side products
of the noble salon life, in Russia they acquired the role of behavioral grammars, or
programs for action and communication (Lotman [1985] 1992a). In effect, not only the
pragmatic function of the social action (e.g. entertainment, acquiring knowledge) but also its
relation to the novelistic code as well as its perceived foreignness was crucial criteria of its
appropriateness. To conduct oneself correctly was to behave like a foreigner, that is to act in
an artificial way, according to the norms of an alien life-style ([1977] 1984, 233). No
surprise that, by turning daily life into theater and Western artifacts into sacred objects,
Russian nobility produced customs and artifacts, which appeared strange from the point of
views of both Western observers and the Russian lower class folk. The phenomenon of
theatricality is central to understanding these oddities.
An effort to provide an interpretation and even explanation for this phenomenon
brings Lotman to the old issues of modernization, westernization and Russias cultural
particularity. Yet, he does not propose one coherent way of interpreting his data. Throughout
his studies, he alternates between at least three interpretative strategies without making
significant efforts to choose or even differentiate between them. One strategy, the most
obvious one for a Soviet scholar, is a conventional Marxist social history with its inherent
modernization perspective enriched by the law of uneven and combined development.
Another is Lotman and Uspenskys cultural semiotics outlined in chapter six. Finally, Tartu
neo-historicism in the context of which the category of theatricality acquires its specific
meaning, as discussed in the first section of this chapter. In what follows, I argue that first
two approaches do not capture the interplay in the nature of theatricality between real and
fictitious, serious and playful, local and alien, as well as role and self. As I
show, they reduce theatricality to the imitation of the Western originals and consider this
imitativeness as a sign of inability to actually be Western. On the contrary, the historicist
perspective allows to account for more complex and hybrid identity of the Russian nobility
and modernity at large.
A Step Back: Traditional Perspectives
Despite producing some explicit criticism of the dominant sociologizing Soviet Marxist
approach to culture, Lotman usually takes popular social-historical arguments for granted and
thus refers to them in a casual way. For him, it is common knowledge that Russian relative
backwardness provided conditions for imitative and simulative nature of Russian behavior,
as well as imaginary (mnimyi) nature of many local Westernized institutions like
rational bureaucracy or independent civil society (Lotman [1975] 1984b; Lotman and
Uspensky [1975] 1994). The fact that the only class, which could potentially play the role of
the bearer of the modern ethos, was the nobility, the privileged land- and serf-owning class,
was also an irony of underdevelopment. Lotman argues that, in public (serf theater) and
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private (duel) displays of Europeanness and nobleness, the nobility tried to act out what
it lacked in reality: respect for personal dignity and private property, the independence of
society from the state as well as status equality (at least within the nobility).7 In this
perspective, symbolic behavior was an imaginary way of catching up.
This vision coexists in Lotmans writings with another, more specifically Tartu
perspective which almost invisibly shifts the stress from lack and lagging behind to
local tradition as a mechanism of the Russian urge for performativity. In Richard
Wortmans sympathetic summary of this perspective, Europeans acted like Europeans
because they were Europeans; Russians acted out the roles of Europeans because they were
not Europeans (Wortman 2000, 826). Indeed, because they were Russians. According to
some of Tartu programmatic statements, it is essentially Russian to play somebody elses
roles.8 Russia is a paramount empire of signs and Russians areto borrow Homi Bhabhas
(Bhabha 1997) expressionparadigmatic mimicry men, regardless of whether they are
ultra-conservative Old Believers or utopian tsars-modernizers, idealistic intellectuals or
pragmatic technocrats.
The need for this relativistic reasoning emerged in part due to Lotmans realization of
the shortcomings of the modernization perspective, its Eurocentrism in particular. Indeed, it
is not clear why Russian institutions and cultural artifacts should be judged according to
Western standards, even if Western institutions serve as direct models for Russian practices.
Lotmans interpretation of Russian dueling culture is a good case in point. Dueling was a
clear Western import: this practice was virtually unknown in Russia before Petrine reforms
and it originally got a cold reception (Kollman 1999, 237). Yet, the development of the
individualized honor among the gentry gradually led to the popularity of dueling. The
paradox is that, whereas it spurred considerable enthusiasm among Russians by the late
eighteenth century, dueling (and honor code) was declining in Europe: it was falling under
the enlightened criticism as a feudal relic and, simultaneously, losing its function of a
class distinction marker. In Norbert Eliass interpretation, dueling was increasingly in
contradiction with the dominant tendencies of the civilizing process toward internal
pacification and the monopolization of violence by the state (Elias 1978).
So, why was the popularity of dueling growing among Russian elites? Lotman argues
that this fact cannot be accounted by referring to Russias backwardness. Such explanation
does not account for the distinctively Russian mythology and ritualism associated with
dueling. He demonstrates that, in Russia, duel acquired the features of what was a culturally
marked behavior in traditional pre-Petrine Russia, that is martyrdom and sainthood. Thus,
from primarily an identity ritual delimiting class boundaries, duel evolved into a quasireligious sacrifice for the sake of honor (Lotman 1980, 102), where honor encompassed in
itself everything from valor and virtue to recognition of social eminence, respect, honesty,
and, in later usage, human dignity (Reyfman 1999b, 35). According to Lotman, Russian
honorable behavior and the behavior of the Old Russian saint appeared to be different
reincarnations of the same persistent cultural model. No surprise that duel, with its Russian
connotations of truth-bearing and resistance to authorities, was such a significant identity
ritual for the writers and poets of the golden, or Pushkins, age of Russian literature.
To sum up, in their semiotics of Russian culture, Lotman and Uspensky attempted to
account for the emphasized performative and symbolic nature of the Russian gentrys
7

Irina Reyfman (1999b, 11; 37) points out about dueling in Russia: Russian duelists strove to replace
the hierarchicaland therefore humiliatingviolence of corporal punishment with the equalizing
violence of the duel Ultimately, honor became a powerful instrument in the service nobilitys
construction of their class identity and even a weapon in their conflicts with the tsar.
8
Other-orientation (orientatsiia na drugogo) is supposedly characteristic of both Slavic and
Russian culture (see Ivanov et al. 1973; Lotman and Uspenskij 1984).

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behavior at a certain historical period by tracing some structural, or paradigmatic, continuity

throughout Russian history. This perspective allowed them to avoid looking at Russias early
modernity as just an attempt to catch up with the West by acting out its ready-made
scenarios. Now, Tartu scholars could appreciate Russian performativity as a sign of local
agency rather than of submission to, and distortion of, Western models of behavior. Yet, this
agency was still located not so much on the level of individuals or groups as on the level of
culture as whole. Luckily, this is not the only alternative to modernization theory that can
be found in Lotmans studies of Russian history.
A Neo-Historicist Perspective on Russian Modernity
Although Lotman does not usually reflect openly on the disadvantages of the Marxist version
of the modernization thesis and, especially, his own perennialist framework, it seems that at
least one of their aspects makes them look problematic, or insufficient, in Lotmans eyes:
both perspectives do not account for the Russian noble persons peculiarly theatrical attitude
to reality and the self. By treating this performativity as a result of Russias backwardness or
specificity, these perspectives reduce theatricality to attempts to imitate and simulate what
Russians were not. The assumption is that the very fact of playing Europe is a symptom of
the lack of authenticity and naturality, which are presumed to be the traits of the
European originals. In this context, theatricality is a sign of the failed translation.
Yet, as overviewed above, the concepts of poetika byta, theatricality and play are all
about the possibility of impossible translation between such conceptually separated
domains as art and life, as well as Europe and Russia. Hence, the Russian nobilitys
theatrical attitude to life is not necessarily a result of the failure of translation between
different stages of development or even cultures. It may also be understood as a reaction
to, an environment for, and a product of this creative and open-ended process. Neither
universal, nor Western, nor native developmental patterns are fully responsible for the
outcomes; the outcomes are functions of the process itself.
In the course of this process of cultural translation, the original domains like theater
and daily life, as well as Europe and Russia, were not hard-matter substances and
external criteria of (in)correct play-acting. These were mobile roles within the play. They
served as labels to draw boundaries between players but their actual meanings were emergent
products of specific interactions. For instance, although, at one point, the odd practice of
keeping serf harems might have seemed to be perfectly European, later it had become
absolutely Russian, if only a matter of national shame. In effect, Lotman tends to speak
about different Russias and Wests (e.g. Russian Europe). As we will see, it is also
possible to imagine him thinking about multiple modernities, not differentiated along the axes
of original and imitative.
What made this process of cultural translation a specifically theatricalized
performance is its asymmetrical and unequal nature. Although the danger of Western political
domination was not an issue after Tsar Peters political successes, the cultural inequality of
core vs. periphery type was obvious to most historical actors. If the European sender of
cultural messages was, or could have been, hardly aware of the very act of sending out
something, the Russian receiver was well too conscious of being in a student position.
Hence, the impression that observers had of excessive play-acting on the part of the Russian
elites.
Yet, Lotman continues, this performativity was not just an imitation of the other,
whether because of backwardness or cultural specificity. Of course, early modern Russian
history knows enormous number of cases of the childish fascination with everything
European to the point of abandoning ones own culture. The history is also full of
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attempts of the wholesale rejection of the West. However, what distinguishes the Tartu works
on early Russian culture is the amount of attention paid to Creole cases, or emergent
constellations of various lineages.9 For instance, Lotman traces the genealogy of Russian
nationalism to the nationalization of imported cultural goods, their projection to the local
past and thus the reconstruction of the native tradition polemically opposed to the
country of origin of the imported ideas (Lotman [1986] 1993, 363). In a similar vein, Boris
Gasparov argues that Pushkin was the figure in which the act of the fusion of Russian
literature (and culture as a whole) and European world was realized with the utmost fullness
and might (1992, 23). Thus, it is not surprising that Dostoyevsky and the Russian
intelligentsia elevated Pushkin to the rank of Russias central cultural hero.
Furthermore, the attempt to act European involved a good deal of selectivity. Since
France and Europe at large were not homogeneous entities, they were sources of such
different cultural goods as Enlightenment ideas, noble salons, court rituals, polite manners,
literary genres, duel codes, administrative practices, Catholicism, fashions, revolution and
Napoleon (see Lotman [1975] 1984a). Some of these cultural goods were frequently
classified together and thus identified (such as the figures of a philosopher and a salon fop)
while others were opposed, often across Russia vs. the West conceptual borderline (e.g.
Rousseaus naturality associated with Russianness) ([1965] 1997; 1994a).
Hence, there is nothing intrinsically unauthentic and imitative about the results of
such selective and productive, rather than repetitive and reproductive, translations. Just like
the actor can act badly in a theater, the historical actors performance can give an impression
of pretence, insincerity or simply failure to play the role. One of Lotmans favorite examples
of this failure is Russian Tsar Alexander I (1801-1825). Changing his masks so as to
captivate everyone, Alexander alienated everyone. One of the most talented actors of his
age, he was its least successful (Lotman [1973] 1984, 159).
From this point of view, we can reinterpret Lotmans important idea which, at first,
seems to fit his perennialist argument:
[C]ontrary to the widely held view, Europeanization emphasized the non-European
features of the way of life rather then eliminating them, for in order to be constantly
aware of ones behavior as foreign, it was necessary not to be a foreigner One did
not have to become a foreigner, but to behave like one. It comes as no surprise, then,
that the acquisition of foreign customs, far from eliminating antagonism to foreigners,
occasionally intensified it (Lotman [1977] 1984, 233).
To repeat Richard Wortmans seemingly obvious interpretation of this idea, Russians acted
out the roles of Europeans because they were not Europeans (2000, 826). Yet, Lotman also
realized that, for Russian commoners, who looked at the gentlemens life from the orchestra
(parter), the theater of the nobilitys everyday life appeared to be a foreign, often devilish
or, at best, exotic masquerade (Lotman [1977] 1984, 233). The implication is that the daily
life of the Russian gentry was a constant battle between these different representations often
weaved together into an odd tangle. The Russian noble person was caught between Europe
and people, between his Europeanness and nativeness. If he interpreted Western artifacts in
Russian categories, he did the reverse as well.10 Whenever he tried to pinpoint his position
9

Lotman ([1986] 1993, 365) pays much attention to what he calls internally contradictory
rapprochements (sblizheniia) and odd cultural hybrids.
10
I use he to be consistent with most existing translations of Lotmans texts as well as most
Lotmans specific studies. This, however, does not mean that he ignored women. On the contrary,
Lotman was one of the few Russian historians to pay specific attention to gender difference in cultural
history (e.g. Lotman 1992; 1994a).

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in one or another way, he slipped into its opposite. While his Europeanness could have been
perceived as unauthentic, so had been his Russianness. As Dostoevsky once said, In Europe
we are Tatars but in Asia we too are Europeans (cited in Wachtel 1999, 61).
Ultimately, the theatrical attitude is a high sensitivity of historical actors to the fact of
being in between, in the process of translation. The reduction of this situation to Russian
backwardness or particularity misses the specificity of any play and theatricality in particular.
In Lotmans account, theatricality is an ability to actually be what one pretends to be and,
simultaneously, have an option of exiting the enacted role. That is, not by imitating Western
individualism but by reincarnating from role to role, the Russian gentry established his or
her self as an autonomous agent typologically equivalent to the modern Western bourgeois
subject. This equivalence does not, however, imply the identity of the historical processes
that led to Western European and Russian modern personality. The key to the emergence
of the type of the new Russian personality, as Lotman refers to it, is in the process of
unequal intercultural translation discussed above. To be true, by itself, this process is not
enough to explain the particularly modern character of the resultant personality type and
institutions. So, what was a specific historical process of cultural translation that led to the
formation of a distinctively modern Russian personality? In a word, what was its distinctive
genealogy?
Modern Practices of the Self
Lotman does not offer any holistic meta-narrative on the nature of this process. Yet, he
clearly talks about a number of theatrical practices of the self, or disciplines, to use
Foucaults language (see 1977; 1980). Indeed, this rapprochement between Foucault and
Lotmans vocabularies is relevant here. Lotman often refers to Tsar Peters attempts to
regularize the domains of life removed from the realm of church and court ritual by
enforcing meticulous regulations on language, dress, hygiene, manners, and courting
relationships. However, what made them disciplinesthat is forms of self-regulation, or
domination compatible with choicewere the unexpected consequences of their application.
For instance, the establishment of the new hierarchy of state service, the Table of
Ranks, was intended as a counterweight to the heredity-based hierarchy among nobility. The
purpose of the government was not to forge an independent personality but to circumscribe
its subjects actions by their roles on specific stages, as well as define these roles and stages
in the first place. Indeed, the differences between ranks were highly ritualized. For instance,
Khlestakovan accidental usurper of the status of a much-feared inspector from Gogols
Inspector Generallearns about his expected status in the eyes of mistaken local officials
from the way they address him (Lotman [1975] 1984b). However, one of the unintended
effects of such regularization was the introduction of choice into the lives of the nobility.
Russian noble persons (men, in particular) found themselves surrounded by a number of
actual and, even more so, potential repertoires of action, lifestyles and life-courses. The
binary oppositions of ritual vs. ritual-free as well as right vs. wrong courses of behavior no
longer structured their lives the way they structured the lives of their predecessors and the
commoners. The binding power of expectations and conventions was not automatic but in
each individual instance constituted an act of conscious choice and a free manifestation of
ones will. In each situation, the gentry could choose a specific course of behavior depending
on the behavior code they found appropriate (e.g. the codes of a nobleman or a rank-holder,
an officer or an aristocrat, a European or a Russian). They were engaged in different games
depending on occasion and place (court, office, ball or estate). Moreover, as any conventional
role, the social role presupposed a way of exiting it, as if during intermission. For instance,
the ranked relationship in the army structurally presupposed its breaking in the equalitarian
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atmosphere of drinking officers festivities (piry, zaguly) (Lotman 1994a).11 Hence,

regularizing practices not only widened the outer riches for what the person might have
been but actually introduced this might have been into the structure of the self.12
Furthermore, as projected by Peter the Great, these practices were supposed to
produce a continuum between the nobles of different status. The Table of Ranks implied the
possibility of meritocracy. Yet, Lotman notes, while the prospects for the equality of
opportunities were still foggy for most actors, some sort of continuum still emerged, the
theatrical continuum of the nobility play. Although the relationships within nobility were
far from egalitarian, the nobles could at least, in contrast to the non-nobles, supplement this
lack of equality with playing noble, that is performing their equality in honor. Lotman
emphasizes that this play should by no means be dismissed as mere play.
Dueling is an ultimate example of the practice that supports this point. An obvious
Western import, dueling acquired immense cultural value in Russia by the early nineteenth
century. What made dueling stand out is its ability to symbolically replace the hierarchical
violence, and the tsars role in distribution of honor, by equalizing violence (Reyfman
1999b, 11; 37). By performing extreme sensitivity to the matters of honor, bretteursthe
priests of the dueling ritualput forward (foregrounded) the genre conventions of being a
nobleman in contrast to the everyday fact of social inequality among the nobles (Lotman
1980). Yet, to make sure that this performance was not taken as just a game, they had to
actually risk their lives, even die but also kill. No surprise that the traditional imagery of
sacrifice and martyrdom was enmeshed into the mythology of the duel. However, this was
not just a replica of the traditional imagery in the Western garb. Lotman realized that the
Roman heroic cult of self-sacrifice (in duel or suicide) for the sake of preserving honor was
absolutely foreign to a medieval Russian or the duelists non-noble contemporary (Lotman
1994a). Thus, the resurgence of the medieval imagery was rather a reutilization and
reinterpretation of traditional symbolic resources in a different context and for different
purposes.
To sum up, according to Lotman and his students, in the absence of significant legal
or civil protection of individual rights, duelists employed the theatrical devices of code
switching and foregrounding to create a supportive framework for corresponding modern
values among members of the nobility. As a combination of staged behavior and fateful
seriousness, dueling served to inscribe in participants and viewers souls and bodies the
concepts of personal rights, inviolability of private space, and equality regardless of rank. In a
word, even if limited to nobility, Russian duel was a technique of imagining and practicing
the community of equal individuals (Lotman [1977]1984; 1980; 1994a).
A Genealogy of Modern (Russian) National Identity
Lotman considers theatricality as not only a crucible of personal identity-formation but also
an environment and a mechanism for the construction of collective identities, modern
nationhood in particular. In fact, it is possible to conceive of these processes as different
scales at which the same process took place.
In particular, Lotman shows that macro-scale theatricality presumed a particular sense
of time and space compression. He shows how, in the eighteenth century, in the course of a
11

Relationships with women were another ritualized way of transgressing the system of ranks. Since
there were no female ranks, all noble women deserved a gentlemanly attitude from every nobleman,
including the emperor (Lotman 1994a).
12
To be sure, the language of the last sentence is that of Ian Hacking (1986) but for a good reason:
Hackings idea that we are not what we are but what might have been (1986, 233) would hold true
to Lotmans analysis of modern Russian subjectivity.

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few generations, the whole Western textual tradition befell on the poor minds of the Russian
novices. 13 The cinematic speed with which Russia was synchronizing its clock with
Europe led to the sense of coincidence of various spaces and times (B.Gasparov 1992;
Lotman [1986] 1993). A Russian noble person suddenly became an heir to world history.
His or her culture and everyday life appeared to be a recapitulation of the universal past. In
this perspective, history became the space where all epochs coexist and one could move
between them at ones will (Levin et al. 1974, 49). Ultimately, in addition to the
Enlightenment temporality of rationalization, with its tendency to reject and forget tradition,
the Russian Europeanized elites acquired a habit of perceiving history synchronically and
spatially.
This spatial perception of time had two related consequences. First, it provided local
actors with a repertoire of literary genres that they applied not only to writing but also to their
daily behavior. For a noble person, modern noble Russia appeared to be a stage on which
dramas of past ages and nations were staged and actors moved from one play to another at
ease. The figure of the general (later generalissimos) Suvorov provides an illustrative case:
this great military leader was successful in mystifying his selfs presentation to others
(enemies, officers, soldiers, even his daughter) through alternating the roles of an Ancient
stoic, a Russian folk hero, and a Parisian master of wit (ostroslov) (Lotman [1977] 1984;
1994a). Although the repertoire of this nobleman was limited, his sense of what he might
have been encompassed multiple layers of the world history.
Furthermore, according to Lotman, the sense of compression contributed to a peculiar
sense of national identity. Russian nobility conceived of Russia as simultaneously local and
global, new (young) and old (primordial), Western and non-Western. Lotman and Uspensky
([1975]1994) demonstrate how innovators and archaists, the contending parties in the
early nineteenth century debates on the nature of the national literary language, shared this
sense of simultaneity and compression as a maker of identity and difference. In fact, their
opposition can be summarized as the one between different alignments among
abovementioned dichotomies. For instance, the innovators justified the inclusiveness and
universality of Russian language by its youthfulness and thus excluded older Russian
(Slavonic) literary traditions. In contrast, the archaists substantiated their claim on
exclusiveness by appeals to primordiality and thus included(!) a large number of previous
hybridizations except for most recent French influxes (Lotman and Uspensky [1975] 1994).
Lotman might have concluded that both positions shared a sense of the universal
responsiveness of Russian language and culture, to use a phrase coined by Dostoyevsky.
This perspective on modern Russian national identity offers a substantive
counterweight to traditional interpretations of Russian and other Eastern-European nations as
cultural, ethnic, exclusive and resistant to the West in contrast to civic, territorial and
inclusive Western European nations of citizens (Kohn 1967; Smith 1971). In Lotmans
portrayal, Russian identity was much more hybrid and contradictory than these perspectives
allow.
To be sure, Lotmans genealogy of the Russian national identity is far from being
complete: he focuses only on Russian elites and usually leaves out other national elites, other
social classes and the whole dimension of the Russian empire-building. Moreover, just like
many students of Russia, he may have overemphasized the particularity of Russian national
identity. For one thing, the sense of time and space compression is characteristic for the
modern condition as such (Harvey 1989). Moreover, the acute sense of simultaneity as well
13

There is some controversy over the reasons why, despite Russias Christianity and developed
culture of writing, it did not inherit much of ancient texts and whole genres. Explanations include
Eastern Orthodoxy, relative cultural isolation, or the nature of Church Slavonic.

178

as the interplay between binary categories is characteristic of many other late-comers.

Synchronization and creolization are key characteristics of globalization (Nederveen Pieterse
1995).
Thus, at one level, Lotmans account of modern Russian national identity is a case
study exemplifying a larger case. All it needs is a larger comparative perspective. Yet,
beyond this limitation, Lotmans studies on theatricality allow to go beyond modernization
approaches and perennialist perspectives to the history of Russia and modernity at large.
According to Lotmans neo-historicist line of reasoning, theatricality of the nobilitys daily
life was an emergent product and a specific environment for the asymmetrical cultural
dialogue between Russia and Europe in the eighteenthearly nineteenth century. The
dimensions of this dialogue included compression and spatialization of time, multiplication
of everyday genres, as well as an ambiguity of the gentrys status between Russian and
European as well as artistic and real. Irreducible to some form of mimicking or
reproduction of Western modern or Russian medieval practices, theatricality refers to selfconscious play with multiple historical lineages and possibilities in the peculiar atmosphere
of the Russian noble estates and salons. Such theatrical practices as dueling, writing/reading,
and salon gathering supported and embodied the formation of historically unique but still
modern institutions of individuality, civility and nationality. To use Andrew Pickerings
metaphor, theatricality was a kind of a mangle of various practices and institutions at hand,
a mangle that engendered their unpredictable transformations to produce a specific version of
Russian modernity (Pickering 1995).14
Theatricality and Modernity: The Prospects
In what follows, I analyze Lotmans contributions to the theory of modernity by drawing
more explicit comparisons with existing Western approaches. My point is that Lotman is
responsible for a grounded theory of multiple modernities which, however, due to his
Russian focus, is in need of further explication.
First, let me return to the modern nature of theatricality. Above, I argued that the
theatrical attitude of Russian dandies to themselves and their social world, as examined by
Yuri Lotman, is structurally equivalent to Baudelaires modernist attitude. Now, after
familiarizing ourselves with Lotmans account of Russian modernity, we can introduce
significant distinctions between various perspectives on modernity.
According to Foucault (1978), Baudelaires modernist attitude was actually a reaction
toward the break with tradition engendered by the deep institutional and cultural changes in
the West over last three-four centuries. It was a reaction toward the very fact of
discontinuity of time, to what Baudelaire called the ephemeral, the fleeting, the
contingent aspect of modern life (Foucault 1978, 39). Reaction, here, does not imply
rejection. Neither it is a mindless adaptation to modernity as a fact. It is rather a way of
distancing oneself from the flow of things in order to accept it consciously as an imperative
for self-invention (1978, 42). Similarly, the theatrical attitude of a Russian noble person was
a reaction toward the perceived rupture in the local tradition. Yet, as Lotman argues, not
discontinuity of time but the spatiality of time, the sense of compressed juxtaposition of
different epochs, places and personages, dominated the imagination of the Russian educated
gentleman. The theatrical attitude was an attempt to author the world of interstitial choices
14

The mangle metaphor is inspired by the old-fashioned devise of the same name used to squeeze
the water out of the washing (Pickering 1995, 23). Andrew Pickering uses this metaphor to provide
an image of scientific practice as the dance of agency and the dialectic of resistance and
accommodation (1995, 22).

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opened by the eighteenth century transformations of Russian society. In Lotmans words, this
attitude was an appropriation and transformation of the world (primarily Western) culture
into the repertoire of ones personal self-cultivation and self-invention not only in art but also
in daily life (Lotman [1975] 1984a, 117).
Thus, if Baudelaires modernism was a response to the fact that everything solid
melts into the air (Marx), Russian theatricality was rather an awareness that all epochs
coexist and the world is a stage for the individualitys performance (see Osip Mandelstam in
Levin et al., 1974). That is, a Western modernist artist actually presumed the existence of the
modern, discontinuous with the past, institutions like market and civil society. In contrast, a
Russian dandy found himself torn apart between western and Russian, new and old
artifacts and customs. In this oppositions, new did not necessarily stand for modern: even
Petrine regular state soon started to be perceived a result of the perennial national history
of state-building (see Karamzins classical History of the Russian State). The modern
personality, nation, literaturewas to be invented out of these oppositions in the course of the
everyday efforts at performing and alternating various scenarios. Modernity was not
presumed; in the absence of market, bourgeoisie and civil society, the theatricality of the
nobilitys daily life was, at the period discussed, the only context in which a peculiar Russian
modernity could emerge as a set of social representations and realities.
As discussed above, dueling is one of the exemplary practices of such theatrical
modernity-construction. Similarly, in Lotmans studies, aristocratic salons as well as all-male
friendly literary circles are primary instances of modern associations and exemplary sites
of theatrical self-fashioning. What features of these salons and circles made them deserve
such a characterization?15 Primarily, it was the attitude to language and self cultivated by the
members of these gatherings. Playful and witty, the language of salons was based on
accentuated inversions, displacements and extensions of accepted meanings as well as on
constant alternations between various genres, from the highest to the lowest. By
assuming new names, often borrowed from ancient mythology or history, the members of
salons acquired the aura of theatrical ambiguity essential for salon communication. Yet, this
was not a carnivalesque ambiguity. Bakhtins (1984) carnival is all-inclusive while salon is
elitist: it excluded everyone who lacked social or cultural capital to participate in the hinted,
elusive and allusive salon chitchat. In this respect, salons only reproduced existing social
hierarchy. However, by subsuming all participants, often people of varied rank, degree of
nobility (znatnost) or age, to the same rules of the game and criteria of taste, salons
contributed to the democratization of the cultural life (cf. Coser 1970). In Lotmans view,
salons were the forms of pure sociality, or social experimentation labs, in which linguistic,
communicative and scientific innovations could have been tried out. They also produced a
certain stability to the hectic theatricality of life by ritualizing it and establishing a linguistic
tradition (Lotman [1979] 1993, 436). Ultimately, as Lotman put it in his 1982 lectures, salons
were circles of people who, while having fun, created the world of culture. The world of
distinctively modern culture, one might add.
Thus, such practices as dueling and salon gathering were crucial disciplines of the
modern self as well as major environments for modernity-construction at large. This
conclusion, however, does not sit easily with most classical and contemporary theories and
histories of modernity. They usually share what might be called an anti-aristocratic bias and
presume that the real modernity is always a bourgeois modernity. In his renowned theory
of the public sphere, Habermas clearly indicates that his normative concept of the space for
rational and uncoerced discourse finds its most adequate realization in the eighteenth15

The following discussion is based on a number of papers (Lotman ([1975] 1984a; 1992) and Yuri
Lotmans lectures at Tartu University during 1982 Spring Term (LC, F136, s.45).

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nineteenth century bourgeois civil society (Habermas 1991). Only mutually independent and
legally equal propertied individuals, separated from their traditional roots and connected by
the generalized market exchange, can engage in what Kant saw as a free (autonomous and
self-oriented), universal, and public use of reason (Foucault 1978, 35). Similarly, Norbert
Elias, in his studies of German culture, emphasizes the crucial opposition between the figures
of the university-educated German Brger and the aristocrat, the bearers of distinctive kinds
of ethos (Elias 1996). Egalitarianism vs. elitism, (universalistic ) virtue vs. (class) honor, talk
vs. duel (as comparable ways of resolving conflicts), negotiation vs. violence and personal
self-cultivation (Bildung) vs. external embellishment are some of distinctive features of two
opposite cultural types and social groups. No surprise that Elias traces the breakdown of the
standard of civilization under Nazi regime to the adoption of the honor code and dueling
rituals by the middle classes. Finally, just to finish this list of anti-aristocratic biases,
Benedict Anderson establishes a direct lineage between nobility and racism by suggesting the
continuity of the discourse of pure blood (Anderson 1991).
Lotmans portrayal of distinctively noble modernity implies a number of criticisms
of this bias. Not unlike Nancy Fraser (1992), he challenges the singularity of the bourgeois
public sphere and the educated bourgeoisie as the agent of modernity. In contrast to
Habermas and Elias, he does not idealize the Russian nobility by emphasizing its
universality, egalitarianism and inclusiveness. On the contrary, he shows how theatrical
practices of the self encompassed these values along with the introduction of more systematic
class distinctions. According to Lotman, dueling expresses both class (soslovnaia) idea of
corporate honor and all-human idea of protecting human dignity (Lotman 1980, 95). Such a
site of everyday theatricality as the salon is a great example of the co-existence and
compatibility of these vectors in the same practice. Moreover, according to Lotman, the very
fact that salons are by no means inclusive social forms makes them perfect laboratories for
social innovation and personal self-invention.
Lotmans implicit critique of the anti-aristocratic bias characteristic for most
significant perspectives on modernity points to the essential weakness of these conceptions.
They often tend to presume the essential uniqueness of the Western personality, its
bourgeois character and its replicability to other cultural and social contexts. However,
Lotmans studies on theatricality imply alternative conclusions. One conclusion is that there
may be multiple sites of the self-generation, both across cultures and, perhaps, within
single culture, as Habermas critics argue (see Frazer 1992). These sites are not necessarily
bourgeoisie- or market-based. They may be aristocracy- and friendship-based. Bourgeois
subjectivity and public sphere are not the only forms of modern subjectivity and publicity.
Other forms are not necessarily results of replication of the bourgeois prototypes across
nation-state or the world. Although typologically equivalent, these forms may be outcomes of
distinctively different historical paths. For instance, if, according to most Marxist conceptions
of modernity, modern subjectivity was a result of the development of capitalism and
industrialism in Western Europe, in Russia, according to Lotman, it was a product of a
particular process of intercultural translation. Theatricality of the nobilitys everyday lifeat
once a product and an environment for such translationwas the most distinctive aspect of
this process. It served as a crucible for various incoming historical traditions of both native
and alien origin. Its legacy should be taken into account when we try to understand the fate of
modern institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth century Russia.
To sum up, Lotmans thinking on Russian modernity undoubtedly very uneven. It
might definitely dissatisfy the one who is looking for some explicit and comprehensive metanarrative on modern Russian culture and modernity as a whole. Much of Lotmans thinking is
to be extracted from the body of his specific historical analyses. Furthermore, it is also true
that Lotmans focus on the educated gentry is to the detriment to considering other possible
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agents of Russian modernity, including lower and middle classes as well as non-Russian
nationalities. If these actors appear in the Tartu research, their presence is usually refracted
through the texts created by the gentry. This textocentrism and gentry-centrism, both in
theory and methodology, is both a particularity and a limitation of Lotmans culturology. By
narrowing down the scope of modernizing publics to the nobility, Lotman neglects the
whole layers of Russian history, perhaps even other possible Russian modernities.
This being said, we should not disregard the fact that Lotman laid a number of
cornerstones to the foundation of the contemporary genealogy of modernity as a performative
and multi-local process. Here, I intentionally use the term genealogy in Foucauldian sense.
Like Foucault, Lotman contributed to the reorientation of historical and social research from
detecting transhistorical analogies and hereditary lineages to the confluence of encounters
and chances, to the course of precarious and fragile history (Foucault 1990, 37). Despite
certain conceptual incoherence and empirical narrowness of Lotmans studies on early
Russian modernity, he has in fact proposed a viable alternative to his own and other existing
conceptions which rely on the Eurocentric notions of progress and modernization as well
as on cultural-relativistic concepts of perennial national culture. Moreover, the peculiarity of
his material makes his studies relevant to the genealogies of modernity in non-Western
world. It may well be that the critical reading of his concept of theatricality with respect to
Russian and other Western and non-Western histories will still bring unanticipated fruits.
Ultimately, it is not an accident that some of the most interesting recent work on Russian
history is done in Russia and in the West by people somehow indebted to Lotman as well as
in his favorite field of expertise (e.g. Pogosjan 2001; Wortman 1995; Zhivov 1996; 2002;
Zorin 2001).

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Conclusion

LotMAN
,
1
In one of the August 2003 issues of the popular Russian tabloid, Moskovskii Komsomolets
(MK), one could find a television schedule with four large advertisements of the upcoming
shows. In the manner of postmodern eclecticism, four distant images are juxtaposed above
one another on the same page: a portrait of Napoleon, an iconic image of Marilyn Monroe, a
dull face of a former chief coach of the national soccer team and a photo of Yuri Lotman
lecturing. This odd juxtaposition brings to mind Lotmans insistence on the fragmented and
polyglot character of human culture. As splinters of various discourses, these images are
decontextualized and malleable objects for commercial manipulation. Turned into
advertisements, they are fleeting signs of diversity and choice: the next day will bring utterly
different images. Here, high culture and history peacefully coexist with popular culture and
entertainment. Culture with capital C is a commodity brought to the masses by the
Tartu professor. His Conversations on Russian Culture lecture series (Lotman 2003) are
advertised as the minimum amount of knowledge necessary for a civilized (intelligentnyi)
human being.
The most obvious lesson of these MK advertisements is that the work of the School by
no means disappeared together with the disappearance of its social context. On the contrary,
it expanded its network in a number of unpredictable and not always desired directions. In
fact, Lotmans lectures were recorded in 1986-89 during the perestroika when interest in
national cultural history was on the rise. This program disappeared from the screen in the
1990s only to reappear after 2000 to be shown every year before the beginning of the school
year. Overall, Lotmans public appearance has definitely surpassed that of any other Russian
humanist scholar and his name is one of the few names of the intellectual celebrities of the
Soviet period who have increased their presence beyond the fall of Communism. I would
even say that, at present, Lotman has become, however unwillingly, one of those patron
saints of popular culture who stand for specific domains as their icons. If Einstein stands for
science, Lotman seems to stand for culture in contemporary Russia.2

Lotman is also an illusion but it draws you in. This is the opening line of Alexander Bergelson's
poetic experiment The Lotman Game.
2
Lotmans works appear to be inexhaustible resources for commercial exploitation. One of the most
famous TV commercials of the 1990s (ordered by now defunct Imperial Bank) came straight from his
lectures on Russian culture. It is also known that one of the posh restaurants in Moscow, The
Pushkins House, employed the idea of Lotmans last project called The High Society Dinners
(Lotman and Pogosjan 1996). In this project, Lotman and his assistant reconstructed one epoch in the
history of early modern Russia by compiling a bricolage of old menus, newspaper excerpts and other
printed matter year by year.

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There is irony in this situation. As I demonstrated in previous chapters, the work of

Lotman and the Tartu School has been, to a large extent, a rather academic and even esoteric
enterprise motivated by what I have called the archaist agenda and discourse. This agenda
consisted in preserving the conditions under which cultural resources would be able to
reproduce themselves. It was to ascertain the autonomy of the classical culture of the past and
its immunity to the attempts to appropriate it by political powers and market forces. In
contrast to their Western colleagues, especially French (post-) structuralists, Lotman and his
colleagues were interested not so much in uncovering the relations of power hidden within
cultural artifacts but in unbinding their inherent creative power, the power of the word. In
contrast to contemporary cultural studies with their overtly political desire to give voice to
various publics (readers, women, or subalterns) and to debase existing cultural
hegemonies, the School was concerned about protecting the autonomy and authority of the
cultural elites against political elites as well as against the increasing democratization of the
intellectual professions (cf. Marx-Scouras 1996, 109). It is not surprising that, within
contemporary Russian academia, the names of Lotman and Tartu are often used to protect the
entrenched positions of both the new and the old academic establishment against the attacks
of local postmodernists, neo-Marxists and nationalists contending for the redistribution
of academic power.
Yet, it has been my point throughout this work that the legacy of the Tartu School
and Lotman, in particular, is very heterogeneous and diverse. It is by no means a system; it
is rather, in Lotmans terms, a multivocal text open for multiple projections and
interpretations. In particular, the culturalist emphasis on depth and continuity as well as a
somewhat essentialistic usage of typological categories coexists, often peacefully, with the
neo-historicist emphasis on unpredictability and emergence. Static binary typologies coexist
with the dialectics of the center and periphery within polyglot cultures. The calls for culture
preservation alternate with the emphasis on cultures power of spontaneous rebirth
(Lotman, quoted in Torop 2000b, 15).
In effect, the output of Tartu scholarship is not susceptible to easy and allencompassing characterization and evaluation. Undoubtedly, some of the studies did not lead
very far, as in case of most of the attempts to marshal the uniform and formalized typological
description of culture. Other Tartu perspectives might have been heavily burdened by the
assumptions of authenticity and ancestry but produced interesting results in adjacent
fields, as is the case with the mythopoetic studies in modern art and technology. Finally,
there are a number of perspectives which deserve attentive exploration against the
background of contemporary Western cultural theory.
In my research, I pay particular attention to Yuri Lotman and his colleagues studies
on the artistic text and culture as text and memory. Although by no means devoid of
theoretical and empirical problems, these studies offered a much needed alternative to the
efforts of the representatives of Anglo-American cultural studies and French
poststructuralism to dissolve culture and identity in the power relations. Although Tartu
scholars provided sophisticated theories of textual dynamism, complexity and creative
ambiguity, they did not overemphasize the plasticity and/or instrumentality of texts, as many
contemporary theorists do. By defining cultural processes as processes of remembering and
reenacting ones past, Tartu scholars justified the autonomy of cultural texts and their ability
to actively resist any attempts to appropriate them for other (political, economic, etc.) uses.
Far from advocating the ethereality and ideality of the cultural, Lotman embeds its autonomy
in what might be called multimateriality, or ability to be projected onto multiple material
media and experiential horizons. This is a source of cultures unique power and resilience:
Lotman often quoted the writer Mikhail Bulgakovs famous phrase, manuscripts do not
burn, and expanded on it by saying that they [manuscripts, texts] are remarkably resistant
184

to damage. If such power was applied for demolishing a tank, it would immediate turn into
sand (see Koshelev 1994, 450).
The overall ambiguity of the Tartu paradigm leads to both problematic choices and
significant achievements. For instance, some of the most famous Tartu studies in the
semiotics of Russian culture suffer from cutting short their promising critique of the
Eurocentric assumptions of progress and modernization. Lotman and Uspenskij (1984) unveil
the complex texture of the semiotic wars in late medieval Russian culture only to reduce
the complexity of the transnational dialogue to sets of binary oppositions and essentialistic
portrayals of continuous and bounded cultures.
Simultaneously, by keeping closer to what I have called neo-historicist agenda,
Lotman creates a powerful picture of the series of non-linear, unpredictable and socially
situated cultural translations constitutive of Russian early modernity. His studies on the
theatricality of the Russian gentrys behavior and experience contain a grounded theory of
modern personhood and a not fully explicit theory of human agency as performance.
Furthermore, by analyzing the early nineteenth century aristocratic milieu, Lotman
challenges the assumptions of the bourgeois nature of modernity and modern subjectivity.
In this way, he develops a research framework which is sensitive to the multiplicity of
modernities.
While exploring and evaluating the Schools contributions to contemporary cultural
analysis, I do not only introduce not very well-known ideas to the wider audience of the
humanists and social scientists but also participate in a number of related conversations in the
fields of history and sociology of knowledge and (Soviet) science. Specifically, in an effort to
introduce the Tartu Schools language, references, preoccupations and ideas, I explore the
context of the structuralist and semiotic movements in a transnational perspective. I
demonstrate that, far from being just a sideway route with respect to the highway of from
structuralism to poststructuralism, the history of the Tartu School allows us to challenge the
existing master-narratives of global structuralism and cultural sciences.
The study on the Schools international background is an aspect of a larger effort to
provide a symmetrical account of the interactions between science and society in the history
of Soviet human sciences. In this book, I have tried to demonstrate that only such a
perspective allows us to avoid the arbitrary reduction of knowledge in question to its purely
intellectual content, as opposed to products of social externalities. By considering science
and society symmetrically, I have considered every aspect of the work of the School as
simultaneously intellectual and social (cf. Bloor 1976; Bourdieu 1991; Latour 1988;
1993).
By developing a symmetrical perspective on the Tartu School, this book critiques the
myth that Soviet science cannot be productively subjected to such an analysis (see Graham
1998). On the contrary, I have demonstrated that Soviet science can be studied according to
basically the same methodology as Western science. The difference may be the one of
emphases. If Western students of science have been more concerned about problematizing
the presumption of sciences autonomy, the students of Soviet science may contribute with
their emphasis on understanding how scholars negotiate for higher autonomy of their
endeavors under the conditions of more direct involvement of the state with practice,
discourse and internal differentiation within academic fields. Since power and knowledge
directly imply each other (Foucault 1977, 27), Soviet science is no longer an exotic case of
the exceptional transparency of science to power structures; it may rather serve as a
laboratory case where these mutual implications between power and knowledge are more
open for detection. Thus my study provides methodological guidelines and substantive data
for further comparative analyses of Russian/Soviet and Western sciences and societies.

185

In accordance with the methodological maxims of the symmetrical perspective, I have

traced the links and translations between intellectual conversations and the groups
involvement in the power games in a number of overlapping academic and intellectual and
even political settings within Soviet society. In some detail, I have analyzed the significance
of the discourse of archaism as a set of both intellectual assumptions and social strategies
which span the borders of academic, political and intellectual fields. Although by no means
unique to the School or the late Soviet intelligentsia, the archaist emphasis on persistent
aging of contemporary practices proved to be resonant with the Schools social position
and its members dispositions as Soviet intellectuals and academics. I further suggest that this
discourse endows the work of the School with the coherence of a distinctive thought style
(Fleck 1979). The internal ambiguities within this style make thinkable what otherwise
might have looked like unconnected and contradictory set of frameworks and research
strategies within the oeuvre of the School.
As a student of Soviet science and academia, I have encountered a number of myths
that still haunt the field. One set of myths comes to us from both Soviet dissidents and
Western Cold War warriors, who tend to indulge in simplistic binary mappings of socialist
societies in terms of, for example, state vs. intelligentsia or ideology vs. science. The history
of the Tartu School provides an opportunity for drawing a different picture. Specifically, by
tracing various conflicts in Soviet academia, analyzing their stakes, resources employed and
actors involved, I have shown that, although these rivalries may have been represented by
actors in binary oppositions, these rivalries were by no means fully structured by these
oppositions. In fact, to present your group, class or cultural identity and your distinction from
non-members (them) in the form of the rhetorically powerful oppositions like science vs.
ideology, or decency vs. selling out, was one of the most effective strategies of gaining
competitive advantage in the Soviet academic wars. Overall, the picture of Soviet academia
that I have drawn in this book is the one of the competition between different academic
publics, the competition that was structured by multiple axes of contention, which rarely
fitted together neatly. For instance, Soviet structuralists were confronted not only by some
party hacks and ideologists but also disciplinary scholars who felt threatened in their
established academic positions by the interdisciplinary expansion of structuralism and
semiotics.
This portrayal of Soviet academia leads me to the key substantive contributions of this
book, the analysis of informal parallel science and its role in the struggles for academic
autonomy. The main benefit of the concept of parallel science is that it does not presume
the binary picture of the Soviet reality but allows us to analyze it. I have argued that, despite
and even due to the emphatic distancing from official procedures, discourses and symbols,
parallel science coexisted symbiotically with the formal institutions and official discourses.
Precisely because its members and outsiders perceived parallel science to be a form of
resistance to and avoidance of the Soviet realities, parallel science served as a particularly
advantageous position within Soviet academia, a site from which Soviet academics engaged
in negotiating their place in society and established their effective control over knowledge,
culture and languages as valuable social resources.
This conclusion develops and applies to the case in question the contemporary
interpretations of the social role of the intelligentsia in Soviet society (Faraday 2000; King
and Szelenyi 2004; Lovell 2000; Verdery 1991). I am talking specifically about the idea that
the Soviet intellectual elite was not merely a victim of the Communist regime but also a
privileged status group within Soviet society. This privilege was based on the intellectuals
access to such social resources as culture, knowledge, education and language. Because they
were valued highly by the Soviet regime, the control over these resources was a crucial
concern for both intellectuals and authorities. My analysis of parallel sciences discourse of
186

anti-politics and the Tartu intellectual paradigm gives credence to Katherine Verderys point
that, under the socialist conditions, because cultural and knowledge claims are intellectuals
only justification, the currency of the competition will be a defense of culture, of
authentic values, of standards of professionalism and knowledge (1991, 94). This
observation is particularly relevant for understanding the intellectual and public stances of the
Soviet intellectuals of the 1960s-70s, as opposed to the stances of their Western counterparts,
the representatives of the 1968 generation. Whereas the Russians were engaged in the
struggle for strengthening their privileged access to knowledge and culture, the Westerners
waged a countercultural critique of the intellectuals monopolistic claims on these
resources. I suggest that the distinctive character of the intellectuals involvement in politics
and broader social life in this period in Soviet Russia and in the West is relevant for
understanding some of the contrastive foci of Tartu and French (post) structuralist cultural
theories.
In conclusion, I want to repeat that the account of the history of Soviet structuralism
and the Tartu School provided here by no means claims to be comprehensive. I have omitted
many ideas and aspects of the Schools social existence which are undoubtedly worth
studying. I have touched other ideas and aspects in passing. One of such topicsthe Tartu
School as an illuminating site for understating the politics of language and culture in Soviet
Estonia, that is in the Soviet imperial contextI developed in one of my recent
publications (Waldstein 2007). A few other topicsfor instance, the relevance of Lotmans
ideas on theatricality of everyday behavior for understanding the cultures of the Soviet
intelligentsia of his time, or a more detailed account of the Schools reception in the West
are still on my to do list. In addition to studying the social context of the School further, it
is important to continue to bring the ideas of Lotman and his colleagues in dialogue with
Western scholarship. Along with some other authors (e.g. Schnle 2006), I have started a
series of bridge building operations in this book and in my other publication (Waldstein,
forthcoming). Yet, this should only be the start of the whole genre of studies, in which I hope
other scholars will participate, too.
Furthermore, the research in the history and ideas of the Tartu School provides a
promising vantage point for approaching the context of the post-Soviet transformation of
science and academia in Russia and other Soviet republics. The Tartu School and culturology
at large play a pivotal role in these processes and thus are crucial for understanding how the
meanings and power hierarchies of Soviet science change and persist. As one of the fathers of
culturologythe field which partially inherited the status of Marxist philosophy in Russian
humanities academia, Lotman is becoming a highly contested figure, which is appropriated
by various fractions within academia and, as we have seem, even by popular culture. The
negotiations over the memory of the School are highly suggestive if we wish to understand
the current role of the educated middle classes, intellectual elites, academia and culture in
the post-Soviet realm.
Whereas Yuri Lotman seems to be in vogue in Russia at the moment, Western
humanities and social sciences may soon be hard-pressed to reconsider the significance of
one more Russian. Whatever will be the ultimate decisionalthough we know that it is not
going to be final, I hope this book will play its role in boosting the global intellectual
dialogue across disciplinary and national borders.

187

Appendix A
MEMBERS AND ASSOCIATES OF THE TARTU SCHOOL1

Name

Graduation
date

Yuri M. LOTMAN
(1922-1993)

Imprisonment,
emigration

Major places
of work

Fields of academic
expertise

Leningrad U.
(1950)

Tartu U.

Russian literature and

culture

Vladimir N.
TOPOROV
(1928-2005)

Moscow U.
(1951)

ISB

Indo-European
Linguistics, Myth,
Russian Literature

Boris A.
USPENSKY
(b. 1935)

Moscow U.
(1960)

Moscow U.,
U. Naples
(since 1992)

Russian Literature and

Culture

Viacheslav V.
IVANOV
(b. 1929)

Moscow U.
(1951)

Moscow U.,
ISB, UCLA

Indo-European
Linguistics, Myth,
Russian Literature

Dmitri M. SEGAL
(b. 1938)

Moscow U.
(1960)

Israel (1973)

Folklore, Myth

Alexander M.
PIATIGORSKY
(b.1929)

Moscow U.
(1952)

Israel (1972),
Great Britain
(1974)

Yuri I. LEVIN
(b. 1935)

Moscow U.
(1958)

Isaak I. REVZIN
(1923-74)

Moscow U.
(ni)

Zara G. MINTS
(1927-90)

Leningrad U.
(1949)

Moscow U.,
Hebrew U.
Jerusalem
AN Institute of
Oriental
Studies,
U. London
Moscow
Construction
Institute
Moscow
Institute of
Foreign
Languages
Tartu U.

Philosophy, Religion,
Buddhism
Mathematical Logic,
Literature
Linguistics

Russian Literature

This list is compiled based on the frequency of the academic contributions to Tartu semiotic
publications during Kriku summer schools (1964-1974). The formal criterion of inclusion is
three or more publications in Smeiotik during this period (see Isakov 1991).

188

Tatiana V.
TSIVIAN
(b. 1937)

Moscow U.
(1959)

ISB

Folklore, Myth

Alexander Ia.
SYRKIN (ni)

Moscow U.

Israel (1970s)

AN Institute of
Oriental
Studies
AN Institute of
Oriental
Studies,
U. Strasbourg
AN Institute of
Oriental
Studies

Linguistics, Myth

Boris L.
OGIBENIN (ni)

Moscow U.

France (1974)

Yuri K.
LEKOMTSEV
(1929-84)

Moscow U.
(1955)

Sergei Iu.
NEKLIUDOV
(b.1941)

Moscow U.
(1965)

IMLI,
Russian U. of
the Humanities

Folklore, Myth, Mongol

Studies

Lennart MLL
(b.1938)

Tartu U.
(1962)

Tartu U.

Language, Literature,
Buddhism

Petr G.
BOGATYREV
(1893-1971)

Moscow U.
(1918)

Charles U. of
Prague,
Moscow U.

Folklore, Theater

Boris M.
GASPAROV
(b. 1940)
Eliazar M.
MELETINSKY
(1918-2005)

Rostov U.
(1961)

USA (1980)

Tartu U.

Gulag (194346, 1949-54)

IMLI,
Russian
University of
the Humanities

Folklore, Myth,
Literature

Olga G. REVZINA
(b. 1939)

Moscow
Institute of
History,
Philosophy
and
Literature
(1940)
Moscow U.
(1961)

Moscow U.

Literature

Jaak PLDME
(1942-79)

Tartu U.
(1967)

Tartu U.

Literature

Igor A. CHERNOV
(b. 1943)

Tartu U.
(1966)

Tartu U.

Literature

Tatiana Ia.
ELIZARENKOVA
(1929-2007)

Moscow U.
(1951)

Moscow U.,
AN Institute of
Oriental
Studies

Literature, Ritual, Indian

culture

Margarita I.
LEKOMTSEVA
(b. 1935)

Moscow U.
(1960)

ISB

Language, Literature,
Folklore

189

Linguistics, Myth

Language

Tatiana M.
NIKOLAEVA
(b. 1933)

Moscow U.
(1956)

Lev ZHEGIN
(1892-1969)
Elena SEMEKA
(b. 1931)

Moscow
School of
Fine Arts
(1919)
Moscow U.
(1954)

Grigory A.
LEVINTON (ni)

Leningrad U.
(1970)

Mikhail L.
GASPAROV
(1935-2005)

Moscow U.
(1957)

Elena V.
PADUCHEVA
(b. 1935)

Moscow U.
(1957)

Elena S. NOVIK
(ni)

Moscow U.
(1965)

ISB

Language, Literature,
Folklore
Artist, painter, illustrator

USA (1970s)

190

AN Institute of
Oriental
Studies,
MIT
Leningrad U.,
European U.St. Petersburg
IMLI,
RAN Institute
of Russian
Language
AN Institute of
Scientific and
Technical
Information
Russian U. of
the Humanities

Ritual, Myth

Literature, Folklore
Literature

Language

Folklore, Ritual

Appendix B
PERSONAL INTERVIEWS

Irina Avramets, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia; email communication

in Russian, March 2002.
Igor Chernov, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia; taped interview in
Russian, October 2001.
Alexander Danilevsky, Department of Russian Literature, University of Tartu; taped
interview in Russian, October 2001.
Boris Dubin and Lev Gudkov, VTsIOM/ Levada Center; taped interview in Russian, July
2002.
Boris Gasparov, Columbia University; conversations, 2002, 2003, 2004.
Mikhail Gasparov, academician (RAN); email communication in Russian, September 2002.
Jelena Grigorjeva, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu; taped interview in Russian,
October 2001.
Viacheslav V. Ivanov, academician (RAN), Moscow University /UCLA; taped interview in
Russian, July 2002.
Sergei Isakov, Department of Russian Literature, University of Tartu; taped interview in
Russian, October 2001.
Lyubov Kiseleva, Department of Russian Literature, University of Tartu; taped interview in
Russian, October 2001.
Yuri Levin, retired; taped interview in Russian, September 2001.
Margarita Lekomtseva, RAN; taped interview in Russian, July 2001.
Mikhail Lotman, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu; taped interviews in Russian,
October-November 2001.
Sergei Nekliudov, Russian University of the Humanities; taped interviews in Russian,
December 2001.
Tatiana Nikolaeva, RAN; taped interview in Russian, July 2002.
Alexander Ospovat, UCLA; taped interview in Russian, September 2001.
Jelena Pogosjan, University of Tartu/ University of Alberta, Canada; taped interview in
Russian, October 2001; conversations, Boston, December 2004.
Pavel Reifman and Larisa Volpert, Department of Russian Literature, University of Tartu;
taped interview in Russian, October 2001.
Olga Revzina, Department of Russian Literature, Moscow University; taped interview in
Russian, July 2002.
Mikhail Ryklin, RAN; taped interview in Russian, July 2002.
Leonid Stolovich, University of Tartu, retired; taped interviews in Russian, OctoberNovember 2001.
Vladimir Toporov, academician (RAN); taped interview in Russian, July 2002.
Peeter Torop, Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu; taped interviews in Russian,
October-November 2001.
191

Tatiana Tsivian, RAN; taped interviews in Russian, December 2001.

Viktor Zhivov, RAN/UC Berkley; taped interviews in Russian, September and December
2001.
Alexander Zholkovsky, University of South California; taped interviews in Russian, July
2002.
OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMANTS
Albert Baiburin, European University at St Petersburg;
Henryk Baran, SUNY-Albany;
Robert Belknap, Columbia University;
Svetlana Boym, Harvard University;
Tatiana Chernigovskaya, European University at St Petersburg;
Marina Grishakova, University of Tartu;
Tatiana Kuzovkina, University of Tartu;
Yuri Levada, VTsIOM;
Andrei Nemzer, NLO; Segodnia newspaper;
Valery Podoroga, RAN Institute of Philosophy;
Irina Reyfman, Columbia University;
Vladimir Romanov, Moscow University;
Boris Uspensky, Moscow University/University of Naples, Italy;
Richard Wortman, Columbia University;
Liudmila Zaionts, Moscow University;
Andrei Zorin, Russian University of the Humanities, Moscow/Oxford University;
and many others.

192

Appendix C
THE UNIVERSITY OF TARTU:
A Historical Note

1632-1710: Academica Gustaviana Dorpatensis

1802-1893: Kaiserliche Universitt zu Dorpat
1893-1918: Imperatorskii Iur'evskii Universitet (Imperial University of Iurev)
1919-1940: Tartu likool (University of Tartu)
1942-44: Ostland-Universitt in Dorpat
1940-1941, 1944-1989: Tartuskii gosudarstvennyi universitet (Tartu State University)
Since 1989: Tartu likool (University of Tartu)
As one can see from this timeline, the history of the University of Tartu reflected the history
of the small country of Estonia which served as a borderland between great powers for
centuries. Founded by a Swedish king, the university changed its jurisdiction and language of
instruction a number of times. Despite these perturbations, it has been an important
international center of higher learning able to attract scholars like Karl Ernst von Baer, the
founder of embryology, and Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, the predecessor of linguistic
structuralism and phonology. Since the nineteenth century, it was also a center of Estonian
national culture: the present national flag was originally a flag of the Estonian Students
Society (Source: http://www.ut.ee)

193

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Index

This book mentions many people and concepts. I have limited the index to concepts and
people who make a substantial appearance and play central role in my discussion.
Abaev, V. I., 27
Academy of Sciences, Soviet/Russian, 16, 17,
22, 23, 33-35, 40, 68, 70, 75
Adams, Mark, x, 11, 40-41
Althusser, Louis, 102, 128, 133
anti-politics, 8, 42-44, 46, 80, 186
archaism, Tartu discourse of, 7, 40, 59-64,
63n.47, 154
aristocratic idiom, 135-137, 164
Bakhtin, M. M., 4n.10, 57, 67, 70n.68;
reception in the West, 98-103; and
Lotman, 120, 127, 129-133, carnival and
theatricality, 170, 171
Barthes, Roland, 8, 61; and structuralism, 8589, 104; and Jakobson, 91-94; and
Lotman, 120, 127, 128, 135
Berg, A. I., 22, 24
blat, 11, 82, 83
Bloor, David, 5
Bogatyrev. P.G., x, 32, 47, 54, 56, 61, 95, 108,
109, 189
Bondi, A.M., 27, 28
Bourdieu, Pierre, 6, 11, 28, 50, 73, 103, 131,
138-140, 185; definition of capital,
11n.16; symbolic power, 28, 78
Brezhnev, L.I., 41, 44, 51n.18, 64, 74
Brodsky, Joseph, 53, 33n.38
Chernov, I. A., 32, 34, 144, 148, 189, 191
Collins, Randall, x, 6, 20, 50
communication theory, 90-93
culture, 1-3, 10; and the discourse of
archaism, 59-64; cultural turn and
culturology, 138-144; Lotmans
definitions of, 144-148; universal
typologies of, 148-150; Russian culture
and binary models, 150-155; and cultural
dynamics, 155-161; and counter-culture,
100, 132, 133, 170; and modernity, 59,
166-182

cultural studies, 13, 19, 28, 57, 70, 85, 102,

161, 162, 184
cultural turn, 57, 137-140
culturology, 2, 32, 69, 140n.4, 75-79, 106,
137, 140-165. See also kulturologiia
Dubin, B. V., 72-73
Eco, Umberto, 12, 99, 100, 127, 147
Eikhenbaum, B.M., 21, 33, 50, 94-96, 121
Egorov, B. F., 5, 33
Eliade, Mircea, 117
Elias, Norbert, 138, 166, 173, 181
Eliot, T. S., 59
Elizarenkova, T. Ia., 50, 56, 189
empire of signs, 104, 135, 136, 161-165
Estonia, 1, 32-36, 64-66, 75, 137, 162-164,
193
Evolution, literary, 93-98; cultural, 111-120,
155-161, 166-182
Florensky, P.A., 57
Fomenko, A.T., 70-72
Foucault, Michel, 73, 102, 121, 127-129, 138,
160, 166, 168, 176, 180-182, 187
Freidenberg, O. M., 16, 17, 57, 68, 113
Gasparov, B. M., ix, 34, 56, 66n.55, 131, 153,
175, 191; on the Tartu School, 39
Gasparov, M. L., ix, 27, 56, 155, 156, 191; on
the art of niche-making, 30; critique of
mythopoetic studies, 119
Geertz, Clifford, 13, 111, 128, 138, 145
Gerovitch, Slava, 11, 18, 145
Giddens, Anthony, 84
Ginzburg, Carlo, 99, 117
Ginzburg, L. Ia., 68
Gorbachev, M. S., 74-76, 81
Graham, Loren, 9, 23, 41, 186
Grigorjeva, J., 58n.36, 191
Grishunin, A. L., 74
Gudkov, L. D., 72, 73
Gukovsky, G.A., 33, 21n.71

217

Gumilev, L. N., 140, 140n.4

Gurevich, A. Ia., 68, 69, 142, 158
Habermas, Jrgen, 82, 83, 166, 181
Hamburg Test, 41, 42, 47, 53, 41n.2
Harvey, David, 59
Heidegger, Martin, 117
Hesse, Hermann, 47, 48
Holquist, Michael, 128
Hymes, Dell, 5, 84, 118
Iampolski, Mikhail, 70n.67, 73, 79n.85
Illich, Ivan, 134
Ilyenkov, E. V, 9, 9n.14
imperial idiom, 7, 16, 19, 161-165,
institutions, academic, 12, 22, 28, 40-46, 7783
Ivanov, V. V., 1-4, 148, 162; his life and
personality, 22, 49n.14, 188; on culture
and time, 61; and the structuralist
movement, 17-32; and summer schools,
46-59; and mythopoetic studies 111-120;
and imperial idiom, 162
Jakobson, Roman, 4, 12, 18-24, 33, 47, 56,
112, 114, 126, 148; and structuralism 8487; and phonology, 87-90; and poetics, 9093; and communication theory, 91; on
literary and cultural evolution, 93-98; and
Western poststructuralism, 96-98
Jameson, Fredric, 4, 84, 86, 93, 94, 131, 148
Kriku/Tartu summer schools, 2, 13, 25, 32,
36-38, 47-52, 144
Karamzin, Nikolai, 59, 73, 74, 169, 170, 180
Khrapchenko, M. B., 27, 37, 67
Khrushchev, N. S., 19, 25, 35, 41, 51n.41
Kiseleva, Lyubov, x, 191
Klement, Fedor, 35, 65
Kojevnikov, Alexei, x, 9, 16, 20, 26, 40, 67
Kolmogorov, A. N., 9, 18-23, 29, 30, 33, 37,
105, 121-123, 126
Konrad, George, 8, 10, 42, 75
Kontekst, 67, 120
Kozhinov, V. V., 27, 67, 143
Kristeva, Julia, 4, 99, 100, 120, 122, 127, 131,
170
kulturologiia, 32, 76, 140. See also
culturology
Latour, Bruno, 5, 13, 20, 85, 120, 185
Leibov, Roman, x, 191
Lekomtsev, Y. K., 50, 189
Lekomtseva, Margarita I., 50, 109-110
Lesskis, Grigory, 36, 47, 109
Levada, Y. A., 32, 72, 72n.75, 192
Levin, Y. I., 56, 126, 191
Levinton, G. A., 56, 73, 190

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 12, 56, 88, 93, 94, 98,

104, 121; and Propp, 112; and Lotmans
definition of culture, 145, 155
Likhachev, D. S., 10n.68, 75, 75n.80
Lotman, Y. M., 1-4; life and personality, 3236; and summer schools, 46-59; and
Smeiotik, 55, 68-73; semiotic theory of
the text, 120-133; and Bakhtin, 129-133;
and Western (post)structuralists, 127, 128,
135; definitions of culture, 144-148; and
Uspenskys semiotics of Russian culture,
150-155; neo-historicist cultural theory,
155-161; on theatricality and Russian
modernity, 161-182
Luria, A. R., 9, 117
Lysenko, T. D., 8, 9, 16, 40, 71
Machine Translation, 19, 24, 18, 103-107
Mll, Lennart, 119, 120, 189
Mamardashvili, M.K., 118n.14
Mandelstam, Osip, 62-64, 76, 117, 130, 129,
148, 180
Markov, A. A. Jr., 23, 29
Marr, N. Ia., Marrism, 16, 17, 20, 57, 113
Marxism, 1, 17, 18, 27, 57, 159, 165,
Meilakh, B. S., 29, 30
Melchuk, I. A., 31n.34, 37, 106
Meletinsky, E. M., 3, 32, 56, 69, 75, 111, 189
Mints, Z. G., 34, 50, 56, 65
Moscow-Tartu School. See Tartu-Moscow
School
Moscow State University, 13, 22, 23, 67, 72,
75, 76
mythopoetic studies, 111-120
Nekliudov, S. Iu.,55, 56, 75, 112, 189
Neo-historicism, Lotmans, 155-161, 166-182
networks, 5, 40-46, 49-55, 78, 78-80, 82, 87,
97, 102
Nikolaeva, T. M., 52, 122, 190
Novik, E. S., 190
Ogibenin, B. L., 37, 66n.55, 106, 189
Opoyaz, 15n.1, 21n.10, 59n.39, 104n.1
Ospovat, Alexander, 42, 52, 70n.67, 191
Oushakine, Sergei, 42-46, 82
Paducheva, E. V., 190, 191
parallel science, 7, 31, 39-46, 77-83, 186
Pasternak, Boris, 17, 22, 23, 51, 54, 62
Peirce, Charles, 65
perestroika, 74-77
Pickering, Andrew, x, 179
Piatigorsky, A. M., 52, 63n.47, 118n.14, 119,
126, 142, 144, 154, 164, 188
Pldme, Jaak, 55n/33, 189
poetics, 3, 18, 21, 22, 30, 56, 90-104, 106,
108, 113, 121, 131, 167, 169
poetika byta, 4, 167-174

218

Pogosjan, Jelena, ix, 58n.36, 166n.2, 182,

183n.2, 191
poststructuralism, 2, 5, 7, 8, 84-86, 92, 98-102,
127-133, 184, 185
public sphere, 75-77, 186
Propp, V. Ia., 21, 28, 33, 36, 54, 56107, 110112, 118
Reyfman, Irina, 168, 173n/7, 174, 177, 192
Revzin, I. I., 18, 27, 50, 56, 104-110, 125,
132, 142, 188
Revzina, O. G., 54n.28, 189
Rule Idiom, 7, 10, 103. See also Text Idiom;
Text
Russian culture, semiotics of, 3, 63, 69, 79,
100, 150, 160, 174, 185
Russian Formalism, 36, 61, 62, 77, 85, 90-98,
99, 104, 121
Ryklin, M. K., 24, 191
Russian culture, 34, 45n.6, 63, 69, 79, 100,
binary models of, 149-155; and imperial
paradigm, 163; and the West, 171-182
salons, kitchen salons, 31, 32, 42-44, 47, 50,
82, 170; salons in Russian history, 175181
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 15, 84-89, 93-95, 105,
112, 135, 145
Shcheglov, Y., 54, 106-108
secondary modeling systems, 20, 25, 67, 144
Segal, D. M., 37, 56, 61, 63, 66n.55, 100, 104,
115, 147, 148, 188
Smeiotik, 3, 48, 55, 68, 76, 120
Semeka, Elena, 190
seminars, home or evening, 31, 41, 69, 82
semiosphere, 146, 146-148, 155, 160, 162
semiotics, 1-3, 85-90, 103-111, 144-165;
Soviet and Western semiotic idioms, 127136
Shaumian, S. K., 18-20, 105
Shchedrovitsky, G. P., 32, 37
Shklovsky, V. B., 28, 47-49, 54, 57, 90, 97,
107, 121
Shlapentokh, Vladimir, 10, 25, 53, 64, 74
Slezkine, Yuri, x, 16, 49, 51
socialism (Soviet, state), 7-10, 14, 40, 44, 76,
81-83, 102
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 35, 58n.37,
Soviet Union, 2, 9-13, 15, 21, 67n.59
Stalin, Joseph, 8, 9, and Marrism, 17-19; and
Stalinist science, 16-17, 40-41
Stolovich, L. N., 7, 32n. 36, 134, 191
strategy, social and intellectual, 7n.13, 19, 21
structuralism, 2; Soviet structuralism, 17-32,
103-111; Western structuralism, 84-93
Strugatsky, brothers, 17, 21
symmetry, principle of, 5, 6, 8, 186, 193

Syrkin, A. Ia., 37n.49, 52n.21, 66n.55

Szelenyi, Ivan, 10, 75, 186
Tartu School of Semiotics, 2, 99;
establishment of, 32-38; and summer
schools, 46-59; as Lotmans School, 6474; during the perestroika, 74-77;
reception in the West, 98-102; as an
institution of parallel science, 39-46, 7783; and Western (post)structuralism, 100102, 127-133
Tartu-Moscow School, 2n.2, 13, 15, 32, 36-39,
46-49, 53, 64, 65, 68, 74, 99, 106, 118,
134
Tartu State University. See Tartu, University
of
Tartu, University of, 3, 32-36, 39, 48-51, 55
text, semiotics of the, 10, 34, 73, 74, 90, 91,
93, 103, 120-136, 145-147, 152, 160, 170
text, structure of the. See text, semiotics of the
Text Idiom, 7, 10, 103, 120-136. See also Rule
Idiom
textocentrism, Tartu, 133-136
theatricality, 4, 132, 167-182
Timofeev, L. I., 29
Tolstoi, N.I., 68
Tomashevsky B. V., 21, 33, 57
Toporov, V. N., ix, 3, 25, 29, 37, 63, 73, 149,
188, 191; mythopoetic studies, 111-120
Torop, Peeter, 84, 106, 159, 184, 191
totalitarianism, theory of, 9, 25, 27, 82
TRSF (The Works on Russian and Slavic
Philology), 36, 55, 69, 150
Tsivian, T. V., 56, 104, 191
Tynianov, Y. N., 49, 59, 68, 93-98
TZS. See Smeiotik
Uspensky, B. A., 1-3, 48, 56, 71, 76, 144, 188,
192; and elementary semiotic systems,
109-110; and Lotmans semiotics of
Russian culture, 150-155
Uspensky, V. A., 37, 71
Vernadsky, V. I., 146n.9
Vinogradov, V. V., 21, 27, 40
Vygotsky, L. S., 4, 18, 49, 101, 104, 117
Wortman, Richard, 100, 167, 173, 182
Yurchak, Alexei, 9, 12, 42-46, 82
Zhegin, L. F., 56, 190
Zhirmunsky, V.M., 21n.9
Zhivov, Viktor 58, 71, 155, 182, 191
Zholkovsky, Alexander, 29, 37, 42, 43, 44n.4,
49n.14, 54, 63n.47, 69; and machine
translation, 105-106; and structural
poetics, 106-108
Zorin, Andrei, ix, 3, 68, 70n.67, 137, 182

219